Robin Le Poidevin

Robin Le Poidevin is Professor of Metaphysics at the University of Leeds, where he has taught since 1989. Trained at Oxford and Cambridge, with a doctorate from Cambridge under Hugh Mellor, he works principally in metaphysics—especially the philosophy of time and space—and in the philosophy of religion. His Arguing for Atheism (Routledge, 1996) became a widely used undergraduate textbook presenting a case against theism through analysis of cosmological and design arguments, the problem of evil, and the coherence of divine attributes; he defends fictionalist and instrumentalist readings of religious discourse as alternatives to realist theism. The book has been criticised by theist philosophers such as William Lane Craig and Richard Swinburne for underestimating Bayesian and cumulative-case arguments. In Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2010) he offers a more nuanced defence of suspended judgement, distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic considerations. He co-edited Agnosticism: Explorations in Philosophy and Religious Thought (OUP, 2021) with Francis Fallon, broadening the topic across analytic and historical perspectives. Le Poidevin has also written on time (Travels in Four Dimensions), the metaphysics of the Incarnation, and religious fictionalism—an approach that has prompted debate with theological realists and with naturalist critics who reject any non-cognitivist rescue of religious language. His work occupies a distinctive position between New Atheist polemic and apologetic theism.