Given the view of arguments that I have developed in chapter 1, it is not surprising that I have arrived at the conclusion that there are no successful arguments that have as their conclusion that there are – or that there are not – orthodoxly conceived monotheistic gods. After all, it is a plausible hypothesis that, wherever there is substantial perennial disagreement about matters of philosophy or religion, there is no prospect that there are successful arguments that settle the matter. It is a plain matter of fact that there are sincere, thoughtful, intelligent, well-informed, and reflective theists, sincere, thoughtful, intelligent, well-informed, and reflective atheists, and sincere, thoughtful, intelligent, well-informed, and reflective agnostics; but this would not be the case if there were successful simple arguments of the kind that have been examined in this book.

Perhaps it is worth emphasising again how I conceive of the position that a theorist faces. Before we turn to consider the arguments, we know that if A is a randomly chosen, sincere, thoughtful, intelligent, well-informed, and reflective believer in an orthodoxly conceived monotheistic god, and B is a randomly chosen, sincere, thoughtful, intelligent, well-informed, and reflective rejector of the supernatural, then there are many propositions that pi for which it is true that A believes that pi and that B does not believe that pi, and there are many propositions that qi for which it is true that B believes that qi and that A does not believe that qi, where the pi and qi are not both logically and probabilistically independent of the claim that there is an orthodoxly conceived monotheistic god.