Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor. Graham Oppi is an Australian professor of philosophy at Monash University.

He's one of the best known atheists in contemporary academia and is the author of a number of books including ontological arguments and belief in God,

the best argument against God, and atheism the basics.

He joins me today to discuss atheism, what it is, whether it has a burden of proof,

and whether people can think that they believe certain things, but be mistaken and not actually believe those things at all.

With that said I hope you enjoy the following conversation with Graham Oppi.

Graham Oppi, thanks for being here.

It's a pleasure. Graham Oppi, thanks for being here.

It's a pleasure. You have been described by some as at least one of the most formidable atheist philosophers

currently in the academy. You're well known for your defense of philosophical

atheism. Why do you think it is important to talk about the philosophy of the existence of a

God that you don't think is actually real.

Why do you spend so much of your life, so much of your professional career talking about it?

Okay, so I mean I guess the first thing is it's not just one God. I don't think there are any gods, right?

And so the target here isn't just some particular version of the Christian God, it's God's in general.

And the reason why it's important is because on the first of all most people are religious and most of the people who are

religious believe in at least one God and on the other hand at least historically the position of

atheism has not been regarded favorably by many people who are religious and in particular by religious authorities

and the struggles there continue in many parts of the world. So as you know for example there have been atheist bloggers

in various countries who've been hacked to death and so on in the last decade. So it's not

like the kind of struggles that happened way in the past in places like the UK have disappeared altogether from the planet.

Yeah, I mean your your work is mostly sort of academic philosophy. You're talking about arguments and syllogisms and this kind of thing, but am I interpreting you correctly and saying that although that's the area that you work in, the motivation for doing so isn't just a sort of love of, you know, academic philosophy, but something a bit more real world?

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