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Hey, I'm going on a tour of the United Kingdom.

If you've ever been interested in that big question of God's existence, or try make sense of religion in the 21st century or consciousness or anything philosophical, then join me on stage as I try to work out some of these topics with you.

I'll be in conversation with a good friend, but also bring questions because there will be an extensive Q&A and maybe even an opportunity to hear and rate some of your philosophical hot takes. The tour dates are on screen. The link to buy tickets is in the description and I hope to see you there. Graham Opie, welcome to the show. Thanks for inviting me. Welcome back to the show. We have had you on before a few years ago where we talked about atheism and whether it's a

view that needs justification, which was interesting. However, of course, atheism is a view that

positions itself contra another position. You've got theism and the atheist is the person that says,

I don't believe that that's true. And so a lot of the discussion around atheism is not so much positive cases

for why God doesn't exist, but rather the reasons that people give for believing in God

don't really suffice or don't really sort of do it for us. And to that effect, I thought that I'd

bring you back today as one of the most respected academic philosophers who is an atheist and writes about atheism to talk about some of the most popular and respected arguments for the existence of God and see why we think that they might fail if that sounds good with you.

Yep, that sounds fun.

So I think a good place to start. And you wrote a book about this a few years ago,

a number of years ago called Arguing About Gods. And you started with ontological arguments,

but I think maybe a sort of softer way in and a more familiar way in for most people listening

might be to start with the so-called cosmological family of arguments,

which involves causation, it involves the idea that there must be some kind of first cause or

explanation or necessary foundation for things which exist. Cosmology sort of looks backwards to the

beginning of the universe or downwards to the foundation of the universe. How would you best

characterize this family of arguments and what are some of its different forms? Okay, so I think

you did a pretty good job there. Lots of these arguments appeal to some kind of principle of causation

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