The Problem of God's Existence: In Defence of Skepticism

Abstract

There are four main positions in the argument about whether God exists: atheism (God does not exist), theism (God exists), agnosticism (it is impossible to know whether God exists or not), and scepticism (at the moment we do not know whether God exists or not). From an epistemological standpoint, scepticism is the most rational; even if a decisive argument which would settle the debate has not been discovered yet, one cannot exclude the possibility of finding it eventually. Agnosticism is too radical (and even incoherent), but theism and atheism exceed the available data. However, from a practical standpoint, choosing theism or atheism seems to be more rational than scepticism (not to mention agnosticism); one of them is bound to be right, because there are only two possibilities, one of which has to be true: either God exists or not.