The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy)
Michael Martin
Language: English
Pages: 354
ISBN: 0521603676
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this 2007 volume, eighteen of the world's leading scholars present original essays on various aspects of atheism: its history, both ancient and modern, defense and implications. The topic is examined in terms of its implications for a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, religion, feminism, postmodernism, sociology and psychology. In its defense, both classical and contemporary theistic arguments are criticized, and, the argument from evil, and impossibility arguments, along with a non religious basis for morality are defended. These essays give a broad understanding of atheism and a lucid introduction to this controversial topic.
rational proofs for God’s existence. These feminists give a number of reasons both to explain and to justify what they take to be the lack of importance of philosophical arguments with respect to God. Femi- nist theists such as Amy Hollywood and Grace Jantzen are critical of perspectives on God that treat religion as if it primarily or even exclu- sively consists of a set of beliefs, as if belief were the foundation of all religious practice, and that ignore other aspects of religious life
Plato. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 169–85. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. [1981] 1992. “The Feminist Critique in Religious Studies.” In Janet A. Kourany, James P. Sterba, and Rosemarie Tong (eds.), Feminist Philosophies. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, pp. 244–53. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1983. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon Press. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1993. “The Female Nature of God.” In Burton F. Porter (ed.), Religion and Reason: An Anthology.
religion by legally mandating deference to religious ideas to which a nonbeliever strenuously objects. The proliferation of speech regulations that encompass religious speech indicates that the religious exercise protections in most mod- ern constitutions may be less important in protecting the liberty of atheists than the generic free speech and free expression protections of the same constitutions. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge
from cognitive science. Horton, an anthropologist of the Kalabari people of Niger and of reli- gion and its relation to other thought, gives a careful intellectualist account of religion (1960, 1967, 1973, 1982, 1993), emphasizing its sim- ilarities to, and continuities with, science. An early publication (1960: 211), following Tylor’s suggestion that deities resemble humans, defines religion as the “extension of the field of people’s social relationships beyond the confines of purely
clearly a “thin-line theism,” and although some still hail Kant as a “savior” of Christianity for the modern world, it has to be said that this is a very precarious salvation. It is therefore hardly surprising that Kant’s philosophical successors should have veered toward atheism, whether real or virtual. The “reality” of atheism, in the work of the so-called left Hegelians in the nineteenth century, could not be doubted. Drawing out what they perceived to be the implications of Hegel’s