ABSTRACT
The first of the atheist arguments which we considered (the argument from scale) took for granted that the concept of God was internally coherent, and that it was offered in a quasi-scientific (albeit supernatural) way as part of a hypothesis which explained a range of phenomena which were otherwise inexplicable (why there is a universe at all, why it is as orderly as it is, why certain violations of the laws of nature appear to occur from time and time, why people report so-called religious experiences, and so on). And the argument from scale objected that even if the God-hypothesis had once provided a reasonable explanation of these phenomena, the universe as it is being revealed to us by modern science makes the theistic hypothesis decreasingly credible. The second atheist argument (the argument from evil) claimed that irrespective of any extension of our scientific knowledge, common sense and reason alone would tell us that the God of traditional theism was ruled out by what the world is like. In the deductive form, the problem of evil said that God and the evil which we find are logically incompatible; while in the evidential form, the argument was that the evil which we find makes the existence of God highly unlikely.
