NOT PROVEN: A Dialogue on Knowing God

Two thousand years of arguing about God - and almost nobody stops to ask the question that comes first. Not does God exist. But can the matter be known at all? In the combination room of an old college, two formidable minds sit down to find out. Aldous Crane, Doctor of Divinity, speaks for belief - learned, generous, and unafraid of a hard question. Mara Vance, Doctor of Laws, cross-examines him as she would any witness, holding the existence of God to the standard a courtroom demands of everything else we claim to know: not sincerity, not feeling, but evidence that survives scrutiny. What follows is not a shouting match. It is a trial - rigorous, civil, and merciless to weak arguments on both sides. Across eighteen chapters they test every great move in the case: who carries the burden of proof, the problem of evil, the "projected God" of Feuerbach and Freud, religious experience as testimony, Pascal's wager, and the uncomfortable accident of being born into one faith and not another. Each argument is given its strongest form. Every blow lands. Neither voice is ever a straw figure. And the verdict, when it comes, is the one Scottish juries alone were once allowed to return: not proven. Not false. Not forbidden. Simply - the case has not been made, by either side. Because "you cannot know it" is one sentence; "it is untrue" is a different sentence; and "you may not believe it" is a third, more different still. Not Proven is for the believer who wants the strongest possible case for doubt, the skeptic who wants the strongest possible case for faith, and every honest reader who has suspected that the truth about the largest question we have is harder - and far more interesting - than either camp will admit. A book that does not tell you what to think. It shows you, at last, exactly where the question stands - and leaves the verdict, as every trial must, to you. Cornelis van Houte, Doctor of Laws.