Fifty Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists presents a collection of original essays drawn from an international group of prominent voices in the fields of academia, science, literature, media and politics who offer carefully considered statements of why they are atheists. Features a truly international cast of contributors, ranging from public intellectuals such as Peter Singer, Susan Blackmore, and A.C. Grayling, novelists, such as Joe Haldeman, and heavyweight philosophers of religion, including Graham Oppy and Michael Tooley. Contributions range from rigorous philosophical arguments to highly personal, even whimsical, accounts of how each of these notable thinkers have come to reject religion in their lives. Likely to have broad appeal given the current public fascination with religious issues and the reception of such books as The God Delusion and The End of Faith. ~ Product Description
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Now More Important than Ever – Voices of Reason Russell Blackford Udo Schüklenk 1
Unbelievable! Russell Blackford 5
My "Bye Bull" Story Margaret Downey 10
How Benevolent Is God? – An Argument from Suffering to Atheism Nicholas Everitt 16
A Deal-Breaker Ophelia Benson 23
Why Am I a Nonbeliever? – I Wonder … J. L. Schellenberg 28
Wicked or Dead? Reflections on the Moral Character and Existential Status of God John Harris 33
Religious Belief and Self-Deception Adèle Mercier 41
The Coming of Disbelief J. J. C. Smart 48
What I Believe Graham Oppy 50
Too Good to Be True, Too Obscure to Explain: The Cognitive Shortcomings of Belief in God Thomas W. Clark 57
How to Think About God: Theism, Atheism, and Science Michael Shermer 65
A Magician Looks at Religion James Randi 78
Confessions of a Kindergarten Leper Emma Tom 82
Beyond Disbelief Philip Kitcher 86
An Ambivalent Nonbelief Tarter Edis 97
Why Not? Sean M. Carroll 105
Godless Cosmology Victor J. Stenger 112
Unanswered Prayers Christine Overall 118
Beyond Faith and Opinion Damien Broderick 123
Could It Be Pretty Obvious There’s No God? Stephen Law 129
Atheist, Obviously Julian Baggini 139
Why I am Not a Believer A. C. Grayling 145
Evil and Me Gregory Benford 157
Who’s Unhappy? Lori Lipman Brown 161
Reasons to be Faithless Sheila A. M. McLean 165
Three Stages of Disbelief Julian Savulescu 168
Born Again, Briefly Greg Egan 172
Cold Comfort Ross Upshur 177
The Accidental Exorcist Austin Dacey 182
Atheist Out of the Foxhole Joe Haldewan 187
The Unconditional Love of Reality Dale McGowan 191
Antinomies Jack Darin 197
GivingUp Ghosts and Gods Susan Blackmore 200
Some Thoughts on Why I Am an Atheist Tamas Pataki 204
No Gods, Please! Laura Purdy 214
Welcome Me Back to the World of the Thinking Kelly O’Connor 220
Kicking Religion Goodbye… Peter Adegoke 226
On Credenda Miguel Kottow 230
"Not Even Start to Ignore Those Questions!" A Voice of Disbelief in a Different Key Frieder Otto Wolf 236
Imagine No Religion Edgar Dahl 252
Humanism as Religion: An Indian Alternative Sumitra Padmanabhan 259
Why I Am NOT a Theist Prabir Ghosh 263
When the Hezbollah Came to My School Maryam Namazie 270
Evolutionary Noise, not Signal from Above Athena Andreadis 274
Gods Inside Michael R. Rose John P. Phelan 279
Why Morality Doesn’t Need Religion Peter Singer Marc Hauser 288
Doctor Who and the Legacy of Rationalism Sean Williams 294
My Nonreligious Life: A Journey From Superstition to Rationalism Peter Tatchell 300
Helping People to Think Critically About Their Religious Beliefs Michael Tooley 310
Human Self-Determination, Biomedical Progress, and God Udo Schüklenk 323
In the providence of God, why are there other religions? Was the God of the Bible wise in allowing for them? Can they serve any purpose? Gerald R. McDermott explores teaching from the Old and New Testaments and reflections from a number of key theologians from the early church to suggest an answer to this intriguing but perplexing question. In the end McDermott provides considerable insight into the troubling clash of the world religions and offers a helpful Christian response. "Dr. McDermott has written extensively on the world religions from the orthodox Christian perspective. God’s Rivals sets forth to answer the questions of whether or not there are other gods, and more importantly Why? Past that the questions really flow, and I personally love his style of giving enough facts from the Bible and historical writings to let the reader begin to form his or her own opinion. The "continuous red thread" is a helpful concept guiding this reader through a difficult forest." ~ William A. Fintel at Amazon.com
From Abelard to Zwingli, the history of Christian biblical interpretation has been shaped by great thinkers who delved deeply into the structure and meaning of Christianity’s sacred texts. With over two hundred in-depth articles, the Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters introduces readers to the principal players in that history: their historical and intellectual contexts, their primary works, their interpretive principles and their broader historical significance. In addition, six major essays offer an overview of the history of biblical interpretation from the second century to the present. This one-volume reference by Donald K. McKim, a revised and vastly expanded edition of IVP Academic’s Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters, will serve as an invaluable tool for any serious student of the Bible and the history of biblical interpretation. "The articles are full enough to be informative but not so detailed or technical as to be beyond the reach of the undergraduate reader. Together with the survey articles on specific periods, this collection of over two hundred articles on individual scholars offers an unrivaled overview of the history of biblical scholarship in all of its developments and vicissitudes. It is not only a valuable resource for the student; it is also intensely interesting." ~ I. Howard Marshall
The shadow of David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, has loomed large against all efforts to prove the existence of God from evidence in the natural world. Indeed from Hume’s day to ours, the vast majority of philosophical attacks against the rationality of theism have borne an unmistakable Humean aroma. The last forty years, however, have been marked by a resurgence in Christian theism among philosophers, and the time has come for a thorough reassessment of the case for natural theology. James F. Sennett and Douglas Groothuis have assembled a distinguished team of philosophers to engage the task: Terence Penelhum, Todd M. Furman, Keith Yandell, Garrett J. DeWeese, Joshua Rasmussen, James D. Madden, Robin Collins, Paul Copan, Victor Reppert, J. P. Moreland and R. Douglas Geivett. Together this team makes vigorous individual and cumulative arguments that set Hume’s attacks in fresh perspective and that offer new insights into the value of teleological, cosmological and ontological arguments for God’s existence. ~ Product Description
Alister McGrath’s The Open Secret provides nothing less than the foundations of a vigorous renewal of natural theology for our time. Theologians and others who have considered natural theology an exhausted topic will have second thoughts after reading this richly nuanced, scholarly, creative, and enjoyable book." ~ John F. Haught, Georgetown University • "This is vintage McGrath: confident, capacious in scope, brisk in exposition, decisive in argument. Noone is better placed to make a case for a revisionary theology of nature; this book is sure to command a wide audience and to generate profitable debate." John Webster, King’s College, Aberdeen • "For much of the twentieth century natural theology was regarded as intellectually moribund and theologically suspect. In this splendid new book, best-selling author and distinguished theologian Alister McGrath issues a vigorous challenge to the old prejudices. Building on the foundation of the classical triad of truth, beauty and goodness, he constructs an impressive case for a new and revitalized natural theology. This is a well-conceived, timely, and thought-provoking volume." Peter Harrison, Harris Manchester College, Oxford "The book is learned, covering a great deal of historical ground. ~ First Things
The biologist Edward O. Wilson is a rare scientist: having over a long career made signal contributions to population genetics, evolutionary biology, entomology, and ethology, he has also steeped himself in philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences. The result of his lifelong, wide-ranging investigations is Consilience (the word means “a jumping together,” in this case of the many branches of human knowledge), a wonderfully broad study that encourages scholars to bridge the many gaps that yawn between and within the cultures of science and the arts. No such gaps should exist, Wilson maintains, for the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give understanding a purpose, to lend to us all “a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws.” In making his synthetic argument, Wilson examines the ways (rightly and wrongly) in which science is done, puzzles over the postmodernist debates now sweeping academia, and proposes thought-provoking ideas about religion and human nature. He turns to the great evolutionary biologists and the scholars of the Enlightenment for case studies of science properly conducted, considers the life cycles of ants and mountain lions, and presses, again and again, for rigor and vigor to be brought to bear on our search for meaning. The time is right, he suggests, for us to understand more fully that quest for knowledge, for “Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us…. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.” Wilson’s wisdom, eloquently expressed in the pages of this grand and lively summing-up, will be of much help in that search. ~ Amazon.com
We live in a culture that doubts everything as a matter of principle. In such an environment, how can even faith be immune to doubt? Can I really trust in the gospel? Does God really love me? Can I really be of any use to God? We are taught to doubt but commanded to believe. Somehow we think that
admitting to doubt is tantamount to insulting God. But doubt is not a
sign of spiritual weakness — rather it’s an indication of spiritual
growing pains. Alister McGrath, no stranger to a faith born of
doubt, here offers good news to doubters: your faith can grow, and
strengthen as it grows. It needs to take root in your experience of
God, it needs to take in the nourishment of instruction in the words
and ways of God, it needs to be stretched into greater obedience to the
commands and calling of God — but it can grow beyond doubt into a
thriving relationship. ~ Product Description
There have been many histories of Christian art and architecture, and many that have paid attention to the various cultural, social, and economic contexts in which the architecture and art appeared. Most of these accounts have been written by art historians. Kevin Seasoltz writes as a theologian, whose aim is to relate theological and liturgical developments throughout the course of Christian history to developments in sacred architecture and art. Believing that sacred buildings and artifacts have often been more constitutive of theological developments than constitutive of them, Seasoltz wants to help people discover architecture and art as theological loci — places of revelation. Following a chapter on culture as the context for theology, liturgy, and art, Seasoltz surveys developments from the early church up through the conventional artistic styles and periods. He pays particular attention to the conflicts that emerged between religion and art since the Enlightenment and to the significant advances made since the middle of the twentieth century to reconciling a wide range of competent architects, artists, and craft persons to the ministry of the Protestant, Anglican, and Catholic churches. Comprehensive, illuminating, ecumenical.
From the earliest period of its existence, Christianity has been recognized as the "religion of the cross." Some of the great monuments of Western art are representations of the brutal torture and execution of Christ. Despite the horror of crucifixion, we often find such images beautiful. The beauty of the cross expresses the central paradox of Christian faith: the cross of Christ’s execution is the symbol of God’s victory over death and sin. The cross as an aesthetic object and as a means of devotion corresponds to the mystery of God’s wisdom and power manifest in suffering and apparent failure. In this volume, Richard Viladesau seeks to understand the beauty of the cross as it developed in both theology and art from their beginnings until the eve of the renaissance. He argues that art and symbolism functioned as an alternative strand of theological expression — sometimes parallel to, sometimes interwoven with, and sometimes in tension with formal theological reflection on the meaning of the Crucifixion and its role insalvation history. Using specific works of art to epitomize particular artistic and theological paradigms, Viladesau then explores the contours of each paradigm through the works of representative theologians as well as liturgical, poetic, artistic, and musical sources. The beauty of the cross is examined from Patristic theology and the earliest representations of the Logos on the cross, to the monastic theology of victory and the Romanesque crucified "majesty," to the Anselmian "revolution" that centered theological and artistic attention on the suffering humanity of Jesus, and finally to the breakdown of the high scholastic theology of the redemption inempirically concentrated nominalism and the beginnings of naturalism in art. By examining the relationship between aesthetic and conceptual theology, Viladesau deepens our understanding of the foremost symbol of Christianity. This volume makes an important contribution to an emerging field, breaking new ground in theological aesthetics. The Beauty of the Cross is a valuable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the passion of Christ and its representation.
