Person

Graham Oppy

Graham Oppy (born 1960) is an Australian philosopher at Monash University and the most technically formidable atheist philosopher of religion currently writing. He is the opposite of the popular atheist author in almost every respect that matters for apologetics, and the codex treats him accordingly: polemical on the position, tender on the person.

Where the Four Horsemen argue that religious belief is irrational, Oppy explicitly denies it. He holds that theists can be, and often are, entirely reasonable; that no argument in philosophy of religion succeeds in the demanding sense he thinks success requires; and that the real disagreement is not about who is thinking badly but about which total theory of everything is better supported. That concession makes him harder to argue with, not easier, because every cheap move an apologist has practised against Dawkins is useless against him.

Why he matters more than his public profile suggests

Oppy is the author of the standard contemporary critical treatment of ontological arguments, a book-length study of the philosophy of infinity that bears directly on the Kalam, and the most systematic atheist survey of theistic arguments in print. When a codex page says "the strongest opposing case," on cosmological, ontological, or cumulative-case arguments, it is usually his.

He is cited across roughly forty pages of this codex, which is more than any other living atheist philosopher, and until now had no page of his own.

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Principal works

• Ontological Arguments and Belief in God (Cambridge, 1995), the standard contemporary critical survey; the reference point for any serious discussion of the Modal Ontological Argument.
• Arguing about Gods (Cambridge, 2006), his systematic examination of the major theistic arguments.
• Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity (Cambridge, 2006), the technical background to his rejection of the Kalam Cosmological Argument's finitist premises.
• The Best Argument Against God (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), the compact statement of his positive case: naturalism beats theism on theoretical virtue.
• Describing Gods (Cambridge, 2014), on whether the divine attributes can be coherently specified.
• Reinventing Philosophy of Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
• Naturalism and Religion (Routledge, 2018).
• Atheism and Agnosticism (Cambridge Elements, 2018) and Atheism: The Basics (Routledge, 2018).
• Co-editor, with N.N. Trakakis, of The History of Western Philosophy of Religion, five volumes (2009).

His three load-bearing commitments

1. Theory-choice naturalism. Naturalism and theism are competing big-picture theories and should be judged by theoretical virtues: simplicity, explanatory scope, fit with data. He argues naturalism carries less theoretical commitment at no cost in explanatory power. This is the argument everything else of his rests on.
2. Symmetry of brute termini. Both views stop somewhere unexplained. Theism stops at God; naturalism stops at the initial state of natural reality. Since both bottom out, theism adds an entity without buying an explanation.
3. No successful arguments, on either side. A successful argument would have to compel any reasonable person who does not already hold the conclusion. He judges that no theistic argument clears that bar, and says the same of atheistic arguments, including arguments from evil.

The third commitment is what makes him unusual. He is not claiming to have disproved God. He is claiming that when two reasonable people compare total theories, naturalism is the better buy.

How to engage him

The mistake is to fight him argument by argument, which is the terrain he has prepared for thirty years. The productive move is to press the one premise the whole system rests on, which is that naturalism explains as much as theism does. Concede the parsimony point and contest the explanatory-power point, because a theory is only simpler than a rival if it is doing the same work.

The full engagement is at Graham Oppy Arguments and Their Defeaters.

See also

• Graham Oppy Arguments and Their Defeaters, the dedicated engagement with his top arguments
• J.L. Mackie, the previous generation's most rigorous atheist philosopher of religion
• Erik Wielenberg, the leading defender of non-theistic moral realism
• Naturalism, the position Oppy defends
• Occam's Razor, the principle his central argument turns on
• Cumulative Case for Christian Theism, the method he rejects
• Modal Ontological Argument, where his 1995 book is the standard critique
• Kalam Cosmological Argument, where his work on infinity is the standard critique
• Atheism, the master hub