Welcome to the fifth episode of the Portugal Street Philosophy Podcast, the official podcast of the LSE Philosophy Society. In each episode, we take an important philosophical question and explore our best current attempts to answer it. For this episode, our question is “Are there any successful arguments for or against the existence of God?” and our guide to the topic is Professor Graham Oppy.

In this episode we discuss:

• What makes a successful argument?


• What makes an agent rational?


• Bounded, ideal and minimal rationality


• Why there aren’t any successful arguments for and against the existence of God


• The relationship between argument and theory


• Theories and theoretical virtues


• Trading-off simplicity and explanation


• The future of this debate

About our guest:

Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and the foundation editor of the Australasian Philosophical Review. Professor Oppy is a leading thinker on the philosophy of religion, but he has also published on a broad range of topics within metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and epistemology. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including ‘Arguing about Gods’, ‘The Best Argument Against God’ and more recently, ‘A Blackwell Companion to Atheism and Philosophy’. Check out Graham's website here: https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/graham-oppy

About your host:

Eric Chen is an undergraduate studying Philosophy and Economics at the London School of Economics.