ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns grounds for belief in the God of theism. Such a God has to be understood as an individual whose agency 'makes a world of difference'. For arguments from particular characteristics need get no further than an agency responsible for those characteristics, but arguments from there being a world rather than nothing point, if valid, to an all-powerful creator. For D. Z. Phillips and others regard such arguments as incoherent not only because of their objections to talk of God's individuality and existence but also because in their view attempts to treat the world as one big thing in need of explanation fail. One premise of the Cosmological Argument, then, is that the set of material or physical objects has particular members, but could have had others, or none at all.
