Is There a God? A Debate

Abstract

This book is a debate about the existence of God in the form of a worldview comparison, meaning that it sets two worldviews—comprehensive pictures of what there is—side by side in order to assess which is philosophically better. The worldviews in this debate are Pearce's classical theism and Oppy's naturalism—representative choices since the average theist defends classical theism and the average atheist, naturalism. Their views are each a little atypical, though. Pearce's classical theism makes no mention of the standard perfections but instead reads: ‘(CT): Spacetime and all of its contents exist because of the free and rational choice of a necessary being’ (p. 23). He thus rests his notion of God on God's role in cosmology. Oppy's naturalism is ontological but surprisingly not also methodological. Its essence is that ‘natural reality exhausts causal reality’ (pp. 102–3, 260), while adding that, though the natural sciences are the right tools for the study of causal reality, they ‘do not provide correct methods for the study of ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics’ and other real features of the world (pp. 260–1).