It is often said … that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of a God, nor is there evidence against His existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At fi rst...

It is often said … that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of a God, nor is there evidence against His existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At fi rst sight that seems an unassailable position … But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence of it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any, so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies? The trouble with the agnostic argument is that it can be applied to anything. There is an infi nite number of hypothetical beliefs we could hold which we can’t positively disprove. On the whole, people don’t believe in most of them, such as fairies, unicorns, dragons, Father Christmas, and so on. But on the whole they do believe in a creator God. (See Questions appendix, passage 57 [Dawkins])