Philosophy

Philosophy of religion is the branch of philosophy that examines religious claims through the tools of logic, conceptual analysis, and argumentation, evaluating whether premises are well-supported and whether conclusions follow from them with deductive or inductive force.

Natural theology is the enterprise of reasoning about the existence and attributes of God using the natural cognitive faculties available to all human beings — sense perception, introspection, and rational inference — without appeal to special revelation, sacred texts, or mystical experience.

Philosophy of science investigates the foundations, methods, and implications of scientific inquiry — including the demarcation problem (what distinguishes science from non-science), the logic of confirmation and falsification, the structure of scientific revolutions, and the epistemic status of scientific theories as descriptions of an unobservable reality.

Methodological naturalism (MN) is the working principle that science restricts its explanations to natural causes and natural processes — not because it assumes God does not exist, but because supernatural explanations are untestable, unfalsifiable, and incapable of guiding further inquiry; it is a procedural commitment, not a metaphysical one.

Metaphysical naturalism holds that only natural entities, processes, and forces exist — that the physical universe is causally closed and self-contained, with no room for gods, spirits, or forces beyond nature — while supernaturalism holds that at least some phenomena require explanation by entities or causal powers that transcend the natural order.

Christian apologetics divides into several methodological families — classical, evidential, presuppositional, Reformed epistemological, and cumulative case — each of which makes fundamentally different claims about the role of evidence, the capacities of human reason after the Fall, and whether a shared rational starting point between believers and unbelievers is possible or even desirable.

In debates about God's existence, the burden of proof is widely held to fall on the party making a positive existential claim — the theist — rather than on the one who withholds belief, following the epistemic principle that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that rational inquiry begins from a presumption of agnosticism toward undemonstrated propositions.

“God of the gaps” refers to the argumentative pattern of invoking divine action to explain phenomena not yet understood by science, treating gaps in scientific knowledge as positive evidence for God’s existence or intervention — a pattern recognised as a form of the argument from ignorance.

Religious apologetics frequently employs identifiable logical fallacies—including circular reasoning, special pleading, equivocation, and argument from ignorance—that undermine the formal validity of arguments for theistic claims, though the presence of a fallacy does not necessarily mean the conclusion is false.

The genetic fallacy is the error of evaluating the truth or falsity of a claim based on its origin, history, or the manner in which it was acquired rather than on the evidence and reasoning that currently support or undermine it — a confusion between the context of discovery and the context of justification that has been recognized as a distinct informal fallacy since at least Morris Cohen and Ernest Nagel’s 1934 textbook.

The argument from personal incredulity is the informal fallacy of concluding that something is false, impossible, or must have a supernatural cause because one cannot personally imagine or understand how it could occur naturally — a logical error that confuses the limits of an individual’s imagination with the limits of what is possible.

Special pleading is the informal fallacy of applying a general rule to all cases while exempting one’s own preferred case without independent justification for the exemption — and it appears as a structural feature of several major theistic arguments, most conspicuously when cosmological reasoning demands a cause for everything and then grants God immunity from that very demand.

The Courtier’s Reply, named by biologist PZ Myers in a 2006 blog post, describes the objection that critics of religion — particularly the New Atheists — must first master sophisticated academic theology before their criticisms can be considered valid; the name derives from a parody of the Emperor’s New Clothes, in which courtiers insist that the only adequate response to the emperor’s nakedness is a thorough study of haute couture.

Parsimony (Occam’s razor) is a principle of theory selection that favours simpler explanations over more complex ones, and its application to the theism-naturalism debate has generated sustained disagreement over whether God is a simple or complex postulate

The relationship between science and religion has been framed through several models — most influentially Ian Barbour’s fourfold typology of conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration — and the once-dominant “conflict thesis” of Draper and White is now largely rejected by historians of science as a distortion of the actual historical record.

Religious epistemology investigates the conditions under which religious beliefs — particularly belief in God — can be rationally justified, warranted, or known, with major positions ranging from strict evidentialism (which demands propositional evidence for every belief) to reformed epistemology (which holds that theistic belief can be properly basic and warranted without inferential support).

Creationism as an organized movement arose in response to Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species, but its intellectual roots lie in the natural theology of William Paley and the tradition of reading Genesis as literal history — a reading that was already contested among Christians well before evolutionary theory appeared.

A sequence of federal court rulings — from Epperson v. Arkansas (1968) through Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005) — progressively closed every legal avenue for teaching creationism and its successor doctrines in American public schools, consistently finding that such instruction violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Cosmological arguments reason from general features of the world — its existence, its beginning, or its contingency — to the existence of a cause or explanation that transcends the natural order, and they constitute one of the oldest and most extensively debated families of arguments in the philosophy of religion.

The cosmological argument is a family of arguments that reason from general features of the observed world — the existence of change, causation, or contingent beings — to the existence of a necessary being or first cause, with major versions developed by Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, and William Lane Craig.

The kalam cosmological argument, rooted in medieval Islamic theology and revived by William Lane Craig, reasons from two premises — that everything which begins to exist has a cause, and that the universe began to exist — to the conclusion that the universe has a cause that is timeless, spaceless, immaterial, and enormously powerful.

The argument from contingency reasons from the existence of contingent beings — things that could have failed to exist — to the existence of a necessary being whose non-existence is impossible, and whose existence explains why there is something rather than nothing.

The Five Ways are five arguments for the existence of God presented by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica (1265–1274), each reasoning from an observable feature of the natural world — change, efficient causation, contingency, gradation of perfection, and goal-directed activity — to the existence of a being that serves as the ultimate explanation for that feature.

Leibniz’s cosmological argument reasons from the contingency of the universe to the existence of a necessary being, grounding the inference on the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) — the claim that every contingent fact has an explanation — which Leibniz regarded as a fundamental principle of rational thought

Teleological arguments infer the existence of a designer from perceived order, purpose, or fine-tuning in the natural world, and they constitute one of the oldest and most persistent families of arguments in the philosophy of religion.

The fine-tuning argument contends that certain physical constants and initial conditions of the universe are set within extraordinarily narrow ranges necessary for the existence of complex life, and that this precision is best explained by intentional design rather than by chance alone.

Intelligent design (ID) holds that certain features of the natural world — particularly biological systems exhibiting what proponents call irreducible complexity and specified complexity — are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than unguided natural processes, and its principal formulations were developed by Michael Behe and William Dembski in the 1990s.

The biological design argument reasons from the complex, functional organization of living organisms to the existence of an intelligent designer — a tradition extending from Plato and Galen through William Paley’s watchmaker analogy (1802) to the contemporary intelligent design movement, which identifies ‘irreducible complexity’ and ‘specified complexity’ as features that natural selection cannot produce

The argument from beauty reasons from the existence of natural beauty and the human capacity for aesthetic experience to the existence of God, contending that a universe produced by blind physical processes has no reason to be beautiful, whereas a universe created by a rational and good being would plausibly exhibit the kind of elegance, order, and aesthetic richness that we observe

The argument from simplicity contends that theism provides the simplest ultimate explanation of the universe because a single, infinitely powerful, omniscient being is an inherently simpler postulate than a brute collection of unexplained physical laws, constants, and initial conditions, and since simpler explanations are more likely to be true, theism has a higher prior probability than naturalism

The argument from mathematics contends that the remarkable applicability of mathematics to the physical world — Eugene Wigner’s ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences’ — is better explained by theism than by naturalism, reasoning that a rational creator would design the universe according to mathematically elegant principles, whereas on naturalism there is no reason why abstract mathematical structures should describe physical reality with such extraordinary precision

The argument from poor design (dysteleological argument) contends that numerous biological structures — the recurrent laryngeal nerve, the human vertebral column, the retinal blind spot, the pharynx serving both respiration and swallowing — exhibit features that would not be expected from an intelligent designer but are precisely what natural selection acting on inherited variation would produce.

The observable universe spans 93 billion light-years, contains roughly 2 trillion galaxies and 200 billion trillion stars, and is approximately 13.8 billion years old — yet on the standard theistic picture, its purpose centers on human beings who appeared in the last 300,000 years on a single planet orbiting one of those stars.

The moral argument for God's existence is a family of arguments contending that objective moral facts — binding values, duties, or moral knowledge — require a transcendent ground, and that theism provides the best or only adequate explanation for the normativity of ethics.

Divine command theory holds that moral obligations are constituted by the commands of God, such that an action is morally required, forbidden, or permitted because God commands, forbids, or permits it — a metaethical position with roots in medieval voluntarism and contemporary formulations by Robert Adams, C. Stephen Evans, and Philip Quinn.

Natural law theory, rooted in the work of Thomas Aquinas, holds that objective moral norms are grounded in human nature and discoverable through rational reflection on basic human goods — including life, knowledge, sociality, procreation, and reasonable conduct — making morality neither arbitrary divine command nor mere social convention but a rational apprehension of what fulfills the human person

Moral realism holds that moral facts are objective and mind-independent, and the theistic moral realist contends that the best ontological foundation for such facts is the existence of God — whose nature grounds moral values and whose commands constitute moral obligations.

The argument from moral knowledge contends that the human capacity to apprehend objective moral truths — to know that gratuitous cruelty is wrong, that justice matters, that persons have dignity — is better explained by theism than by naturalism, because a purposeless evolutionary process aimed at reproductive fitness has no reason to produce reliable moral insight

The Euthyphro dilemma, originating in Plato's dialogue of the same name (c. 399–395 BCE), asks whether something is good because God commands it, or whether God commands it because it is good — presenting two options that each pose difficulties for the claim that morality depends on God.

Secular ethics encompasses a family of philosophical frameworks — including utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, virtue ethics, contractualism, and moral naturalism — that ground moral judgement in reason, empathy, and human welfare rather than divine authority or religious revelation.

For centuries, Christians on both sides of the slavery debate claimed biblical support for their positions—pro-slavery advocates cited the Curse of Ham, Pauline household codes, and the letter to Philemon, while abolitionists appealed to the imago Dei, Galatians 3:28, and the Exodus liberation narrative.

The claim that evolution undermines objective morality commits the genetic fallacy: explaining the causal origin of moral intuitions is logically independent of the question of whether those intuitions track moral truth, just as explaining the evolutionary origin of mathematical cognition does not show that arithmetic is false.

Ontological arguments attempt to demonstrate God's existence through a priori reasoning alone, arguing from the very concept of God — a being than which nothing greater can be conceived — to the conclusion that such a being must exist in reality.

The ontological argument attempts to prove God’s existence purely through reason, arguing that the very concept of a maximally great or perfect being entails that such a being must exist — a line of reasoning first advanced by Anselm of Canterbury in 1078 and subsequently reformulated by Descartes, Leibniz, Gödel, Hartshorne, and Plantinga.

Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument, first presented in the Proslogion (1077-1078), defines God as 'that than which nothing greater can be conceived' and argues by reductio ad absurdum that such a being must exist in reality, since a being existing only in the understanding would be surpassable by one that also exists in reality.

The modal ontological argument, developed primarily by Alvin Plantinga in 1974, reformulates the classical ontological argument using S5 modal logic to argue that if it is even possible that a maximally great being exists, then such a being exists necessarily and therefore actually.

The logical problem of evil argues that the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God is logically incompatible with the existence of evil — a formulation most influentially presented by J. L. Mackie in 1955, who contended that theists hold an internally contradictory set of beliefs

The logical problem of evil argues that the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God is logically incompatible with the existence of evil — that the theist holds a formally contradictory set of beliefs, not merely an improbable one.

The evidential problem of evil, unlike the logical problem, does not claim that God and evil are logically incompatible but argues that the amount, distribution, and types of suffering in the world make God's existence improbable — with William Rowe's 1979 formulation and Paul Draper's 1989 likelihood argument constituting the two most influential versions.

Natural evil refers to suffering caused by impersonal natural processes rather than by the free choices of moral agents, encompassing earthquakes, diseases, predation, parasitism, and genetic disorders, and it poses a distinct philosophical challenge to theism because the free will defense, which addresses moral evil by appealing to creaturely freedom, does not straightforwardly explain suffering that arises from the operation of natural laws.

The problem of divine inaction sharpens the classic problem of evil into a specific charge: if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good, the apparent failure to intervene during episodes of catastrophic and preventable suffering — the Holocaust, childhood cancer, natural disasters — is not merely puzzling but constitutes evidence against the existence of a God who acts in history.

The problem of evil has a continuous intellectual history spanning more than two millennia, from Epicurus’s trilemma and the Stoic response through Augustine’s privation theory, Aquinas’s greater-good framework, and Leibniz’s optimism, to the modern analytic formulations of Hume, Mackie, Plantinga, and Rowe.

Alvin Plantinga’s free will defense (1974) argues that it is logically possible for an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good God to coexist with evil — if creatures possess libertarian free will, God cannot guarantee they always choose rightly without eliminating the freedom that makes moral goodness possible

The soul-making theodicy, developed by John Hick in Evil and the God of Love (1966) and rooted in the thought of the second-century church father Irenaeus, argues that God created an imperfect world not as a finished paradise but as an environment designed to facilitate the moral and spiritual development of immature creatures into mature moral agents.

Skeptical theism holds that human cognitive limitations are too severe to warrant the inference from ‘we cannot see a reason God would permit this evil’ to ‘there is no reason God would permit this evil’ — an inference central to William Rowe’s evidential argument from suffering.

J. L. Schellenberg’s argument from divine hiddenness (1993) contends that if a perfectly loving God exists, every person capable of and not resistant to a relationship with God would possess evidence sufficient for belief — yet the existence of sincere seekers and culturally isolated persons who lack such evidence constitutes a distinct philosophical challenge to theism, independent of the problem of evil.

The argument from nonbelief, developed primarily by Theodore Drange (1998) and related to but distinct from Schellenberg’s hiddenness argument, contends that the sheer prevalence of nonbelief in the God of orthodox theism — billions of people across history who have never held theistic belief — is strong evidence against the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient God who wants all humans to believe.

Hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering preceded the existence of human beings — predation, parasitism, disease, starvation, and death on a vast scale have been features of the biological world since the Cambrian explosion approximately 540 million years ago — and this suffering cannot be accommodated by theodicies that appeal to human free will, moral development, or punishment for sin.

The problem of hell argues that the doctrine of eternal conscious torment is incompatible with divine justice and omnibenevolence — infinite punishment for finite sins appears to violate any recognizable principle of proportionality, making the traditional doctrine a significant challenge to classical theism.

Omniscience is the property of possessing complete and perfect knowledge, standardly defined as knowing every true proposition and believing no falsehoods, and it has been regarded alongside omnipotence and perfect goodness as one of the three central attributes of God in classical theism across the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic philosophical traditions.

The doctrine of divine simplicity holds that God is absolutely without composition of any kind — God has no spatial parts, no temporal parts, no matter-form composition, no essence-existence distinction, and no real distinction between any of the divine attributes, such that God does not merely possess goodness, power, or knowledge but rather is identical with each of them.

The omnipotence paradox asks whether an omnipotent being can create a stone so heavy that the being cannot lift it, generating an apparent dilemma in which either answer seems to entail a limitation on the being's power and therefore a denial of omnipotence.

The problem of divine foreknowledge and free will asks whether God's infallible knowledge of all future events is compatible with the existence of genuinely free human choices, a question that has generated sustained philosophical inquiry from Aristotle's discussion of future contingents through contemporary modal logic and analytic philosophy of religion.

Middle knowledge (scientia media) is the doctrine, first articulated by the sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, that God possesses prevolitional knowledge of all true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom — that is, God knows what every possible free creature would freely choose to do in every possible set of circumstances, even before deciding which creatures and circumstances to create.

The problem of religious language asks whether statements about God — such as 'God is good' or 'God exists' — are meaningful, and if so, in what sense they can be understood, given that God is typically held to transcend the categories of ordinary human experience and empirical investigation.

Incompatible-properties arguments contend that the traditional attributes of God — omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, immutability, aseity, timelessness, perfect freedom, and others — are internally contradictory, so that the God of classical theism is a logically impossible being in the same way that a married bachelor or a round square is logically impossible.

Theological noncognitivism holds that religious statements such as “God exists” are cognitively meaningless — not false, but literally without truth-value, because the term “God” has not been given sufficient empirical or logical content to function as a genuine proposition.

Antony Flew's parable of the invisible gardener — adapted from John Wisdom — illustrates the concern that theistic claims are progressively qualified in the face of counter-evidence until they become compatible with any possible state of affairs, at which point they may lack meaningful empirical content.

The hard problem of consciousness — why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective, qualitative experience — has generated a family of theistic arguments holding that consciousness is more probable on theism than on naturalism, since a conscious God provides a natural explanation for the existence of minds while a purely physical universe provides no obvious reason for subjective experience to exist at all.

The hard problem of consciousness, formulated by David Chalmers in 1995, asks why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience — the felt quality of seeing red, tasting chocolate, or hearing a melody — as distinguished from the “easy problems” of explaining cognitive functions such as discrimination, integration, attention, and behavioral control.

Substance dualism holds that mind and body are two fundamentally distinct kinds of substance — Descartes’s res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa (extended substance) — making consciousness ontologically irreducible to physical matter and providing a philosophical framework for the existence of an immaterial soul that survives bodily death

The argument from consciousness reasons from the existence of subjective, qualitative experience — phenomenal consciousness — to the existence of God, holding that the emergence of minds from a purely physical universe is deeply puzzling on naturalism but expected on theism, where ultimate reality is itself mental

The argument from reason contends that if naturalism is true, then all human thoughts — including the thought that naturalism is true — are the products of non-rational causes (physical laws, chemical reactions, neural firings), and therefore no thought can be regarded as rationally justified, rendering naturalism self-defeating

The argument from religious experience reasons from the occurrence of experiences perceived as encounters with God or a transcendent reality to the probable existence of that reality, contending that the best explanation for the global prevalence, phenomenological consistency, and life-transforming effects of such experiences is that they are at least sometimes veridical.

The argument from miracles contends that the occurrence of genuine miracles — events that cannot be explained by natural causes — constitutes evidence for the existence of God, with the resurrection of Jesus serving as the central case in the Christian tradition and the focus of most philosophical discussion

The philosophical analysis of miracles centres on three interrelated questions — what a miracle is (with definitions ranging from Hume’s ‘violation of a law of nature’ to Swinburne’s ‘non-repeatable counter-instance’ to Larmer’s ‘divine intervention’), whether miracle claims can ever be rationally justified, and what role background beliefs about God play in evaluating miracle testimony.

The argument from desire contends that the human experience of a deep, inconsolable longing for something beyond the natural world — what C. S. Lewis called Sehnsucht or ‘joy’ — is evidence that a transcendent reality exists to satisfy it, reasoning by analogy from the fact that every other innate desire (hunger, thirst, sexual desire) corresponds to a real object capable of its satisfaction

The argument from prophecy contends that the fulfilment of specific predictions recorded in sacred texts — predictions whose accuracy could not plausibly be attributed to human foresight, inference, or retrospective fabrication — constitutes evidence of a divine source of knowledge, since no naturalistic mechanism accounts for detailed foreknowledge of contingent future events

The argument from providence contends that the orderly governance of the natural world, the course of human history, and the occurrence of events that answer to human needs — what theologians call general and special providence — constitute evidence of a purposive intelligence directing the world toward ends that reflect benevolence, wisdom, and foresight beyond what unguided natural processes would produce

The argument from religious diversity contends that the existence of many incompatible religious traditions, each claiming access to ultimate truth, poses a challenge to the epistemic justification of any particular religious belief, since adherents of different faiths hold their convictions with comparable sincerity, intensity, and evidential support, yet their core doctrines contradict one another

The argument from inconsistent revelations holds that the existence of multiple, mutually exclusive religious revelations undermines the evidential value of any single revelation — since at most one can be correct, the same types of evidence (sacred texts, religious experience, testimony) that produce belief across traditions must be unreliable indicators of truth.

Religious belief correlates strongly with geography and birth culture — a person born in Saudi Arabia is overwhelmingly likely to be Muslim, a person born in Thailand Buddhist, and a person born in rural Mississippi Protestant Christian — suggesting that the primary determinant of religious affiliation is not independent rational inquiry or divine revelation but cultural transmission from parents and community.

The demographic argument holds that because religious belief correlates far more strongly with birthplace, ethnicity, and family than with any process of independent investigation, the probability that a given believer arrived at the ‘true’ religion through evidence rather than cultural accident is very low — making birthplace, not inquiry, the overwhelmingly dominant predictor of which god a person worships.

Pascal’s Wager, formulated by Blaise Pascal in the Pensées (published posthumously in 1670), argues that rational self-interest requires wagering on God’s existence: if God exists and one believes, the reward is infinite; if God exists and one does not believe, the loss is infinite; and if God does not exist, the costs and benefits of belief and unbelief are finite — making belief the uniquely rational choice under conditions of uncertainty.

The cognitive science of religion (CSR) identifies specific cognitive mechanisms — hyperactive agency detection, theory of mind applied to invisible agents, minimally counterintuitive concepts, promiscuous teleology, and dual-process reasoning — that together explain why religious belief arises naturally and recurrently across human cultures without appealing to the truth or falsity of religious claims.

Confirmation bias — the tendency to seek, notice, and remember evidence that supports existing beliefs while discounting or reinterpreting disconfirming evidence — operates with particular force in religious contexts, where believers systematically remember answered prayers and forget unanswered ones, interpret ambiguous events as divine signs, and find prophetic fulfillment in texts through a pattern logicians call the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

The largest and most rigorous clinical trial of intercessory prayer—the 2006 STEP study—found no measurable benefit from third-party prayer for cardiac surgery patients, and those who knew they were being prayed for actually fared slightly worse, suggesting a possible nocebo effect.

The Outsider Test for Faith, formulated by John Loftus, argues that because religious belief is overwhelmingly determined by the accident of birthplace and cultural upbringing, believers should evaluate their own faith with the same skepticism they already apply to every other religion — a standard that, Loftus contends, no religion can survive.

Religious indoctrination exploits specific features of childhood cognition — credulity bias, hyperactive agency detection, promiscuous teleology, and deference to authority — to transmit beliefs during a developmental window when children lack the critical reasoning skills to evaluate them, making early religious training qualitatively different from education that encourages independent evaluation of evidence.

Religious trauma syndrome, a concept developed by psychologist Marlene Winell, describes a recognizable cluster of psychological symptoms — anxiety, depression, identity dissolution, grief, and impaired critical thinking — that emerge in individuals who leave high-control religious environments, arising not merely from losing beliefs but from the comprehensive dismantling of a worldview that structured identity, community, morality, and daily life.

The World Christian Encyclopedia counts over 45,000 distinct Christian denominations as of 2020, a figure that continues to grow, and the existence of this fragmentation poses a direct epistemological challenge: if the Holy Spirit guides sincere believers into all truth, why do equally sincere believers reading the same scriptures arrive at irreconcilably contradictory conclusions on salvation, baptism, predestination, and dozens of other doctrines?

The cumulative case for theism argues that while no single argument conclusively proves God’s existence, multiple independent lines of evidence — cosmological, teleological, moral, experiential, and others — converge to make theism more probable than any naturalistic alternative, much as circumstantial evidence in a trial can establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt even when no single piece is decisive

The transcendental argument for the existence of God (TAG) contends that the preconditions of intelligible experience — the laws of logic, the uniformity of nature, and the possibility of moral reasoning — can only be accounted for if God exists, making God’s existence a necessary precondition of rational thought itself

Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN) contends that if both naturalism and evolution are true, then the probability that human cognitive faculties are reliable is low or inscrutable, because natural selection shapes behavior for survival rather than belief for truth — generating a self-defeating situation in which the naturalist has a defeater for the reliability of all her beliefs, including her belief in naturalism

Bayesian arguments for God apply the formal apparatus of probability theory — specifically Bayes’s theorem — to the question of God’s existence, treating theism and naturalism as competing hypotheses and evaluating them against the evidence, with proponents arguing that the cumulative evidence (cosmic fine-tuning, consciousness, moral awareness, religious experience) renders theism more probable than not

Reformed epistemology holds that belief in God can be 'properly basic' — a foundational belief that does not require inferential support from arguments or evidence to be rationally warranted, in the same way that belief in the external world, the reality of the past, or the existence of other minds is properly basic.