Episode 29, Stephen Law and 'The Evil-God Challenge' (Part I)

This episode is proudly supported by New College of the Humanities. To find out more about the college and their philosophy programmes, please visit www.nchlondon.ac.uk/panpsycast. Everything you could need is on www.thepanpsycast.com! Please tweet us your thoughts at www.twitter.com/thepanpsycast. Dr Stephen Law is a Reader in philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London, and editor of the Royal Institute of Philosophy journal THINK. Amongst many other books, Stephen Law is the author of A Very Short Introduction to Humanism, The War for Children's Minds, The Philosophy Gym, and Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole. Stephen Law has debated many Christian philosophers, including William Lane Craig, John Lennox and Alvin Plantinga. Our central focus today is Law's main argument against the existence of God – 'The Evil-God Challenge'. The evil-god challenge can be stated as follows: why should we consider the hypothesis that there exists a good-god, significantly more reasonable than the hypothesis that there exists an evil-god? Part I. The Evil-God Challenge (start of Part I), Part II. Further Analysis and Discussion (start of Part II).