Nicholas Everitt

Nicholas Everitt is a British analytic philosopher long associated with the University of East Anglia, where he taught philosophy for many years. His work focuses on philosophy of religion, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, approached from a broadly atheistic and naturalistic standpoint. He is best known for The Non-Existence of God (Routledge, 2004), a systematic critical examination of the principal arguments for theism — ontological, cosmological, teleological, moral, and experiential — together with constructive arguments against God's existence, including his much-discussed argument from scale, which contends that the vast spatial and temporal dimensions of the universe revealed by modern cosmology are not what one would expect on the hypothesis of a God concerned primarily with human beings. Everitt also co-authored Modern Epistemology: A New Introduction (with Alec Fisher, 1995), a widely used textbook. His writing is characterised by careful conceptual analysis, attention to the logical structure of arguments, and engagement with contemporary analytic theists such as Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, and William Lane Craig. The argument from scale, in particular, has been debated by philosophers including Jason Megill and Joshua Mugg, who question whether scale carries the probabilistic weight Everitt assigns it. Everitt's work is generally regarded within analytic philosophy of religion as a clear and rigorous statement of the case for atheism, contrasting with the more polemical tone of the so-called New Atheists.