Abstract

The challenge was originally put nearly twenty years ago in the concluding sentences of my initial contribution to a discussion in the now defunct journal University ; a contribution reprinted in 1955 in New Essays in Philosophical Theology , and in several other places since then. Those sentences read: ‘We are reassured again. But then perhaps we ask: what is this assurance of God's love worth, what is this apparent guarantee really a guarantee against? Just what would have to happen not merely to tempt but also to entitle us to say “God does not love us” or even “God does not exist”? I therefore put to the succeeding symposiasts the simple central questions, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?”’