WBWeb of Belief

22 statements | about 5 minutes

Check whether your beliefs fit together.

Choose statements about God, morality, meaning, right action, freedom, consciousness, and animals. See direct conflicts, the implications you are committed to, serious tensions, and combinations that are coherent after all.

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Choose what you believe.

Answer only the questions you want to examine. Skip any statement; unselected answers count as Not sure when you check.

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3. Read reasons and sources.

Topic 1 of 5

God and evidence

Theism, atheism, suffering, hiddenness, foreknowledge, and evidence.

A personal God exists who is omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good, and perfectly loving.

There is a single, all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good and loving God.

Precisely: A personal God exists who is omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good, and perfectly loving.

Meaning, arguments, and sources

What it means

This is classical personal theism, not merely a first cause, spirit, or impersonal ground of reality.

Reason to believe it

Arguments from contingency, moral reality, religious experience, and other evidence are taken by theists to support such a being.

Reason not to believe it

Atheists and agnostics challenge the inferences and point to suffering, hiddenness, and competing explanations.

Sources

Cosmological ArgumentMoral Arguments for the Existence of GodThe Problem of EvilHiddenness of God
No god or deity exists.

No gods of any kind exist.

Precisely: No god or deity exists.

Meaning, arguments, and sources

What it means

This is the positive philosophical claim of atheism, stronger than merely lacking belief.

Reason to believe it

Arguments may appeal to the absence of adequate evidence, evil, hiddenness, or low prior plausibility for particular gods.

Reason not to believe it

Agnosticism withholds the claim, while theism invokes cosmological, moral, experiential, or revealed grounds.

Sources

Atheism and AgnosticismCosmological ArgumentThe Problem of EvilHiddenness of God
Some suffering exists that no omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good being could have morally sufficient reason to permit.

Some suffering is so pointless that no all-good, all-powerful God could have a good reason to allow it.

Precisely: Some suffering exists that no omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good being could have morally sufficient reason to permit.

Meaning, arguments, and sources

What it means

The key term is gratuitous: not merely terrible suffering, but suffering unjustifiable for a perfectly good all-powerful being.

Reason to believe it

Evidential arguments from evil maintain that the scale or distribution of suffering supports this judgment.

Reason not to believe it

Defenses and theodicies propose reasons involving freedom, soul-making, natural laws, or limits on human judgment.

Sources

The Problem of Evil
Some people capable of relating to God honestly seek that relationship, do not resist it, and still cannot believe God exists.

Some people sincerely want to believe in God and aren't resisting, yet still can't.

Precisely: Some people capable of relating to God honestly seek that relationship, do not resist it, and still cannot believe God exists.

Meaning, arguments, and sources

What it means

This concerns nonresistant nonbelief, not indifference or deliberate rejection.

Reason to believe it

The hiddenness argument treats apparently sincere nonbelief as evidence against a perfectly loving personal God.

Reason not to believe it

Responses dispute whether such nonbelief exists or whether perfect love would always supply unmistakable belief.

Sources

Hiddenness of God
Before a human choice occurs, an infallible divine belief already correctly specifies that exact choice.

God already knows exactly what you will choose before you choose it, and cannot be mistaken.

Precisely: Before a human choice occurs, an infallible divine belief already correctly specifies that exact choice.

Meaning, arguments, and sources

What it means

The statement deliberately concerns prior, error-proof knowledge of a concrete future act.

Reason to believe it

Many conceptions of divine omniscience include complete knowledge of future human actions.

Reason not to believe it

Open-theist and other accounts restrict or differently interpret knowledge of future free choices.

Sources

Foreknowledge and Free WillFree Will
It is wrong to accept a claim as true unless it is adequately supported by evidence.

You should not accept a claim as true unless there is good evidence for it.

Precisely: It is wrong to accept a claim as true unless it is adequately supported by evidence.

Meaning, arguments, and sources

What it means

This is evidentialism about belief, applied to any claim, including religious and anti-religious ones.

Reason to believe it

Evidentialists such as Locke and W. K. Clifford argue that believing beyond the evidence is intellectually and morally irresponsible.

Reason not to believe it

Reformed epistemologists hold some beliefs can be properly basic, and pragmatists allow non-evidential grounds; the principle may also struggle to support itself.

Sources

Epistemology of Religion

Why these questions?

Chosen from major philosophical debates, checked against public relevance.

Topic selection uses the PhilPapers 2020 survey of philosophers and Pew Research Center's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study. Explanations link directly to scholarly reference entries.

View method and sources