Jack Symes, a philosophy lecturer at Durham University, had written between 40,000 and 50,000 words of a book intended to defend atheism. The backbone of the project was what he considered the most potent objection to religion. However, as he wrote, small arguments began to accumulate that weakened that core objection, eventually leading him to abandon the draft.1

The book he wrote in its place was published by Bloomsbury in 2024: Defeating the Evil-God Challenge. In it, Symes argues in the opposite direction, asserting that belief in a good God is significantly more reasonable than belief in an evil one.2

Key takeaways
  • A popular atheist argument involves replacing God with an evil entity to reconstruct familiar theological arguments.
  • After refuting this challenge, Symes did not immediately adopt theism, spending four to five years in an agnostic space.
  • Einstein alluded to a similar third path in his 1929 reply to a rabbi's telegram.
  • The most rigorous critique of this third path was written in 1851, and Symes continues to take it seriously.

Why not believe in an evil God?

In 2010, British philosopher Stephen Law published an article in Religious Studies titled "The evil-god challenge." His question was concise: why should belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God be considered more reasonable than belief in an equally powerful but perfectly evil God?3

Most believers immediately reject the idea of an evil God, citing the abundance of good in the world that such an entity would not tolerate. Law labeled this the "problem of good" and inverted it: if the presence of evil in the world is insufficient to reject a good God, why should the presence of goodness be sufficient to reject an evil one? In his paper, he constructed counter-arguments on behalf of the evil God, suggesting such a being might give humans children because parents worry about them for a lifetime, or fill nature with beauty because ugliness is felt most acutely alongside beauty.3

Law proposed that these two assumptions are roughly equal in their reasonableness, a concept he called the "symmetry thesis." If belief in an evil God is absurd, he argued, then belief in a good God must be equally so. The idea had earlier roots; Law noted that the problem of good was first discussed in three pages of a 1968 book by Edward Madden and Peter Hare.3 Symes notes that Law’s article remains one of the most downloaded in the journal's history.1

Why does the balance tip toward a good God?

Symes's book argues that the symmetry is broken in three ways. The weightiest justification involves the concept of a maximally perfect being, derived from Anselm and Thomas Aquinas: the greatest conceivable being must possess all valued attributes to the highest degree, and goodness is one of these. His work complements this with observations of the goodness in the created world and the revelation tradition. According to a review in The Heythrop Journal, this debate had previously been confined to journal pages, and Symes’s work is the first academic book dedicated to the subject.4

Refuting the challenge did not make Symes a believer. Finding no other compelling basis for atheism, he moved into what he calls "radical agnosticism," where he remained for several years. In his view, neither traditional religion nor materialist atheism provides a convincing answer to the three fundamental questions of philosophy: why there is something rather than nothing, why the laws of nature are so finely tuned for life, and the origin of consciousness.1

Most of his colleagues hold different views on this question. In the PhilPapers survey conducted between October and November 2020, 66.9 percent of the 1,770 participating philosophers identified as atheists or leaners toward atheism. Those leaning toward theism remained at 18.9 percent. However, among those who specialize in the philosophy of religion, the ratios invert: according to researchers David Bourget and David Chalmers, 78 percent of this group believe in God, compared to 17 percent of those who are not specialists in the field. The authors note that their data does not reveal whether specialization shapes viewpoints or if existing viewpoints lead to the choice of specialization.5

Notes and Sources

  1. Symes, J. (2026). Beyond religion and atheism: The secret third answer to big questions. Big Think, video interview.
  2. Symes, J. (2024). Defeating the Evil-God Challenge: In Defence of God’s Goodness. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
  3. Law, S. (2010). The evil-god challenge. Religious Studies, 46(3), 353-373.
  4. Defeating the Evil-God Challenge: In Defence of God’s Goodness, by Jack Symes (book review). The Heythrop Journal, 2025.
  5. Bourget, D., Chalmers, D. J. (2023). Philosophers on Philosophy: The 2020 PhilPapers Survey. Philosophers’ Imprint, 23(11).
  6. Spinoza, B. (1677). Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata. In Opera Posthuma, Amsterdam.
  7. Einstein believes in "Spinoza’s God". The New York Times, April 25, 1929.
  8. Viereck, G. S. (1930). Glimpses of the Great. New York: Macaulay; cited in Jammer, M. (1999). Einstein and Religion. Princeton University Press.
  9. Nagasawa, Y. (2015). Multiverse Pantheism. In K. J. Kraay (ed.), God and the Multiverse: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Perspectives, Routledge, 177-191.
  10. Schopenhauer, A. (1851). Parerga und Paralipomena, Vol. II, §69 "A Few Words on Pantheism". English edition: Del Caro, A., Janaway, C. (trans., 2015), Cambridge University Press.