They think, therefore they air

Perry: "Hooey."

Taylor: "Yeah."

Though "hooey," of course, is a technical term, one saving grace about Taylor and Perry's Sunday morning synthesis is that there aren't too many of those.

"Philosophy Talk" is generally as accessible as it is thoughtful, save for the occasional dense episode like "The Strange World of Quantum Reality."

That accessibility is what drew Isabella from Berkeley -- a.k.a. Isabella La Rocca -- to the program from the get-go. A multimedia art instructor at Berkeley City College, the 48-year-old says she doesn't have "the discipline to actually read much philosophy."

But she's curious, she said, and the two philosophers "break things down. They make it understandable. I've tried to slog through Nietzsche, and I have a hard time."

La Rocca is the kind of person Taylor and Perry have in mind when they describe their audience, and philosophers in general: people who, as sixth-graders, sat in the classroom pondering pint-size versions of Life's Big Questions. Does my teacher have a mind? What's it like to be a doorknob?

"In sixth grade, I remember asking my teacher what holds everything together," La Rocca recounted. "Why don't all the molecules of the desk fall apart? She couldn't answer. Everything was blown for me."

It was La Rocca's query about animals and the evil they endure that led to the most spirited exchange among Taylor, Perry and their guest this day, University of Colorado philosophy professor Michael Tooley.

Tooley: "If [God] created a being that's capable of suffering and then put it in a sort of hellish world where it would suffer almost all the time, it would seem to me to be morally wrong . . . "

Perry: "Maybe God created us to be the kings and queens of creation, but do we really want to worship a God who created so much suffering among animals? . . . "

Taylor: "There's two different possible conclusions: One is, there isn't a God. At least there isn't a benevolent, all-knowing, all-perfect God. And one is, even if there is a God, it is not worth our worshiping him . . . So Michael, which is it?"

The short answer? There is no short answer.

Taylor, 53, is chairman of Stanford's philosophy department. But with his round face and tan windbreaker, he looks more like the engineer he thought he'd be when he entered college, before he became one of the first members of his working-class black family to actually finish.