The Devil's Advocate faith series

The Devil's Advocate needs persuading that there is a God

In 2006 the legendary presenter and journalist John Humphreys went on a journey to find God.

He set up a series of interviews with the country's leading religious figures in the hope the doubting Humphreys could be persuaded that God existed.

But despite his inability to find solace in a divine creator John wasn't able to fully embrace atheism either.

His book "In God We Doubt", written after the radio series, sees him take a hazily defined agnostic position.

Whilst he never actually states where he would lie on Dawkins' belief scale, most of the chapters read like he would be a firm 5.9.

Though it ultimately failed to help John come to any conclusion the series was a brilliant insight into the foundations of the beliefs of his interviewees. The justifications for their personal belief in God were laid bare, so we thought it might be interesting to repeat the experiment with some of Oxfordshire's most influential theologians.

In this series I took a slightly different approach in order to tease out the answers to the big questions. Instead of hoping to be persuaded that there was a God I actively tried to persuade my interviewees that there was no God.

Whichever way you come down on the issues at the heart of the debate, each discussion was an interesting insight into the faith that defines the lives of our participants.