Some Issues in Theism and Atheism: Setting the Context

This chapter divides into two principal sections: ‘Perspectives of the Debaters’ and ‘Roadmap to Issues in the Commentaries’. It starts by noting some differences in Antony Flew’s and William Craig’s philosophical perspectives, mentioning some varieties of atheism and theism, and emphasizing the debaters’ agreement on whose existence they are debating. While both atheism and theism come in various sizes and shapes, there is a broad range of agreement between the debaters concerning the being whose existence they are debating. Craig offers, and Flew critiques, a version of the cosmological argument that runs as follows: the universe has a beginning, whatever has a beginning must have a cause, so the universe has a cause. The fine-tuning argument begins with the claim that the odds of intelligent life arising out of what our best science tells us was the early state of the universe were preposterously low.