ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a new defence of anti-theism and briefly summarises the arguments against the coherence of anti-theism. It begins to offer a new defence of anti-theism, one that attempts to capture the point that was missed in the previous arguments. The chapter argues via analogy, and attempts to show that our rational preferences are often not aligned with our judgements about which worlds are ‘better’ or ‘worse’. The conclusion is that it can be perfectly reasonable to recognise that something ‘makes the world better’, recognise that such a judgement in some way rationally compels to prefer to have that thing, and yet still reasonably prefer that the world be different. Likes and dislikes almost always align with judgements about whether the world is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ given certain circumstances. Previous arguments against anti-theism work to show that this necessary condition is not satisfied, since God’s existence does not make the world worse than it would otherwise be.
