Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know®
Michael Ruse
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0199334587
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Over the last decade, "New Atheists" such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens have pushed the issue of atheism to the forefront of public discussion. Yet very few of the ensuing debates and discussions have managed to provide a full and objective treatment of the subject.
Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know provides a balanced look at the topic, considering atheism historically, philosophically, theologically, sociologically and psychologically. Written in an easily accessible style, the book uses a question and answer format to examine the history of atheism, arguments for and against atheism, the relationship between religion and science, and the issue of the meaning of life-and whether or not one can be a happy and satisfied atheist. Above all, the author stresses that the atheism controversy is not just a matter of the facts, but a matter of burning moral concern, both about the stand one should take on the issues and the consequences of one's commitment.
homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully” (Dawkins 2006, 31). Dawkins quotes the novelist Evelyn Waugh’s report of the reaction of Winston Churchill’s son Randolph on first reading the Bible: “God, isn’t God a shit!” Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) also wades into the subject, although he does have more fun, especially with the “demented pronouncements” of Moses: “He that is wounded in the stones, or has
mode of existence that is entire unto himself, to which they give the name aseity (Hick 1961). Perhaps it is no surprise that Anselm gives one of the clearest characterizations: “The supreme Substance, then, does not exist through any efficient agent, and does not derive existence from any matter, and was not aided in being brought into existence by any external causes. Nevertheless, it by no means exists through nothing, or derives existence from nothing; since, through itself and from itself,
palls beside the big problem, namely, the pain and suffering caused by humans themselves. Auschwitz. We’ve already worried about whether a good and loving God would suffer because of this, but we ask now whether a good and loving God would allow this in the first place. The usual response is that this is a function of free will and that it was better that God create free creatures, in his image, than make everyone a robot behaving impeccably. “God therefore neither wills evil to be done, nor
this is apart from the fact that an influential strain of Protestantism doesn’t want to get into natural theology at all. At such a point, and for all that he is into natural theology Plantinga endorses this, you simply have to fall back on the conviction that your faith—your sensus divinitatis—is reliable and those who disagree with you are not. Original sin has corrupted their God-given powers. The best response to Plantinga and his fellows is directing them to Descartes’s Meditations.
the same for terrestrial motion and giving its laws; and that sees Isaac Newton bringing everything together in one unifying theory, with his force of gravitational attraction at the explanatory heart. There is much else, of course, including William Harvey (1578–1657) working on the mechanism of the heart, William Gilbert’s (1544–1603) seminal inquiries into magnetism, and the growth of chemistry from alchemy, as represented by the labors of the Irish aristocrat Robert Boyle (1627–1691). The