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IT COST more than $13 billion and took 14 years, but eventually, as expected, God showed up. The joy and relief were immense. That was in 2012, and the evidence has only become stronger. Disbelief is no longer an option. God is real. Not the God of course, but Her particle, aka the Higgs boson.

If only proving the existence of God were that simple. Gallons of ink and blood have been spilled over this question but have largely got us nowhere. Belief in a god or several gods is a leap of faith. So is disbelief. The only coherent and rational position is agnosticism.

On the surface, the prospects for changing that seem remote. Demonstrating the existence of the Higgs boson – a material entity whose properties were established by particle physics – was one thing. How can you do the same for a supernatural being that is, among other things, everywhere and nowhere, immanent and transcendent, knowable and incomprehensible?

That has not stopped scientists and philosophers on both sides from having a go. For theists, one argument has been the intricate complexity of the natural world. Surely something as beautiful and functional as an eye or butterfly is irrefutable evidence of a creator? The superficially persuasive argument, later resurrected as intelligent design and its idea of irreducible complexity, turned out to be very refutable indeed. Evolution by natural selection, working over vast lengths of time, is all you need.

As science has progressed, such “evidential theism” has crumbled and some modern religious philosophers have retreated to a position known as reformed epistemology. They hold that God’s existence requires no justification or evidence. God just is, period.

To the scientifically minded that looks like a hopeless cop-out, and so evidential atheism has gained momentum. One avenue is the cognitive by-product hypothesis, which says that human brains are primed for religious belief because of, among others, the “hyperactive agency detection device” – a hair-trigger assumption that everything in our environment is caused by an often-invisible agent. The evolved system would have given our ancestors an edge: divining the presence of an animal in the rustling branches of a bush meant they were better prepared to pounce or flee. Today, though, it means we are inclined to see an invisible hand in most if not all phenomena we can’t immediately explain.

Physicist Victor Stenger was one of evidential atheism’s greatest exponents. In 2007, he published God: The Failed Hypothesis, in which he pointed out that the Abrahamic God worshipped by billions of people either exists, or does not. If it does, there ought to be observable consequences.

Evidence of absence

Stenger (who died in 2015 and may now be repenting at leisure) went on to spell out a number of those consequences. For example, if God is the source of morality, non-religious people should be more immoral than religious ones. If God created the universe, we should see supernatural signatures in the laws of physics and cosmology. If God answers our prayers, prayers for the sick should work like medicine and clinical trials should show them to do so. None of these has ever been observed, said Stenger, and so we should revert to the null hypothesis: God does not exist.

According to Scott Aikin, a philosopher of religion at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, Stenger’s conclusion still stands. “The evidence points to the fact that God doesn’t exist,” he says. “I’m of the view that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.”

There are other reasons to reject the God hypothesis, he says, not least the many logical paradoxes it creates. Could an omniscient and omnipotent God create a secret that she doesn’t know or a stone that she could not lift? And then there is the paradox of worship: it requires complete submission to God’s will, yet we are said to be autonomous beings.

There are many ways to wriggle out of evidential atheism’s arguments. One is “divine hiddenness”, which says that God will only reveal herself to people who really, really want to have a relationship with God, and then only after a struggle. If true, it is no wonder that atheists don’t see any evidence.

It doesn’t take much to see that there’s no arguing with this: like a conspiracy theory, it insulates itself from refutation. That places it outside the realm of science, which is where many believers locate God anyway. And probably for the best: if God belongs anywhere, that is where.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Can we ever know if God exists?”