The atheists Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell and Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion talk down to believers. Sam Harris in The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation insults believers outright. All three assume that believers are not very bright. Their approach is not productive of much understanding. In The Philosopher's Enigma, Richard Watson explains to believers in temperate and readable prose why he and many others are not believers. His discussion is based on strict Augustinianism, the foundation of seriously argued Christianity. God is hidden - that is, the concept of God is unintelligible - as discussed at length by Leszek Kolakowski in his Religion If There Is No God (St. Augustine's Press) - in the sense that there are no known rational arguments for God's existence. Moreover, Augustine argues that finite human beings cannot understand God's infinite perfections. Augustine concludes that God has omniscient knowledge of every human being's behavior, which after all, is predetermined by God prior to His creation of the world. Most difficult to accept, as Calvin later stresses, is the inference that because humans do not determine their own behavior, God predetermines who is saved and who is damned with no reference to this behavior. A foundation of Christianity is that because of the Fall of Man, we are all sinners, and thus there is no reason why God should pick this person for salvation and that one for damnation. But most Christians believe that faith, God's grace, Jesus' sacrifice, being born again, and in particular, good works, can earn one salvation. But Augustine and later Calvin see no evidence for these views. Even if, or perhaps even because, God gives a sinner the grace to be good - a person's good works do not assure salvation. After all, even before God created the world, God predetermined the behavior of every human being. Thus because humans cannot determine their own behavior, they cannot be saved or damned with reference to this behavior.A major difficulty in understanding and accepting the story of the Creation, then, is that even though God determines Adam's behavior, God punishes Adam for disobedience by decreeing that all Adam's progeny will be born sinners. Watson begins his book with the steel-trap objections made by his daughter, when she was seven years old, as he read the Bible to her. To the story of the Garden, she objected: "But God made Adam! God made Adam sin! God is not fair!" She slid off his lap, and he had to bribe her to return.In The Philosopher's Enigma, Watson also discusses in detail the concepts of the soul, angels, ghosts, mind, and body. He argues that the classic Cartesian mind/body problem of how an immaterial mind or soul and a material body can interact will eventually be superseded by a concept of a human being according to which, even though a person's body/mind is bound by physical laws, it still makes its own considered decisions, and to that extent a human being is free. And because the mind/body is one entity, there is no problem about two different things - a mind and a body-interacting.Watson concludes that this means there is no such thing as a disembodied mind or soul, and so no such things as angels and ghosts that could help or harm you. Basing this discussion in the context of contemporary neurophilosophy, his conclusions about the relationships of mind/soul follow those of Kolakowski in being reminiscent of Spinoza.

Frank Schaeffer has a problem with the New Atheists. He also has a problem with the religious fundamentalists. The problem is that he doesn't see much of a difference between the two camps. Sparing no one and nothing, including himself and his fiery evangelical past, and invoking subtleties too easily ignored by the pontificators, Schaeffer adds much-needed nuance to the existing religious conversation as he challenges atheists and fundamentalists alike.

A militant Marxist atheist and a "Radical Orthodox" Christian theologian square off on everything from the meaning of theology and Christ to the war machine of corporate mafia. "What matters is not so much that Zizek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a heterodox version of Christian belief."-John Milbank "To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank."-Slavoj Zizek In this corner, philosopher Slavoj Zizek, a militant atheist who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion's illusions; in the other corner, "Radical Orthodox" theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Zizek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have not only proven themselves worthy adversaries, they have shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed. Zizek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century's greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in The Monstrosity of Christ concerns the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event-God becoming human. For the first time since Zizek's turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, Universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. Zizek begins, and Milbank answers, countering dialectics with "paradox." The debate centers on the nature of and relation between paradox and parallax, between analogy and dialectics, between transcendent glory and liberation. Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher and cultural critic. He has published over thirty books, including Looking Awry, The Puppet and the Dwarf, and The Parallax View (these three published by the MIT Press). John Milbank is an influential Christian theologian and the author of Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason and other books. Creston Davis, who conceived of this encounter, studied under both Zizek and Milbank.

What if notorious atheist Christopher Hitchens, bestselling author of God Is Not Great, had a Christian brother? He does. Peter Hitchens details a very personal story of how he left the faith but dramatically returned. And like many of the Old Testament saints whose personal lives were intertwined with the life of their nation, so Peter s story is also the story of modern England and its sad spiritual decline. Peter brings his work as an international journalist to bear as he documents firsthand accounts of atheistic societies, specifically in Communist Russia, where he lived in Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union. He shows that the world s bloodiest century, the 20th, entailed nothing short of atheism s own version of the Crusades and the Inquisition. The path to a secular utopia, pursued by numerous modern tyrants, is truly paved with more violence than has been witnessed in any era in history. Hitchens provides hope for all believers whose friends or family members have left Christianity or who are enchanted by the arguments of the anti-religious intellects of our age."

The New Atheist Novel is the first study of a major new genre of contemporary fiction. It examines how Richard Dawkins's so-called New Atheism' movement has caught the imagination of four eminent modern novelists: Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Philip Pullman. For McEwan and his contemporaries, the contemporary novel represents a new front in the ideological war against religion, religious fundamentalism and, after 9/11, religious terror: the novel apparently stands for everything freedom, individuality, rationality and even a secular experience of the transcendental that religion seeks to overthrow. In this book, Bradley and Tate offer a genealogy of the New Atheist Novel: where it comes from, what needs it serves and, most importantly, where it may go in the future. What is it? How does it dramatise the war between belief and non-belief? To what extent does it represent a genuine ideological alternative to the religious imaginary or does it merely repeat it in secularised form? This fascinating study offers an incisive critique of this contemporary testament of literary belief and unbelief.

Kenny writes By profession I am a philosopher: and in the present century philosophers in this country have been keen to emphasise not only the difficulty of stating God's will on particular issues but the difficulty for human beings of saying anything intelligible at all about the nature of God. It is probably true to say that the majority of philosophers in this country in the last fifty years have been atheists of one kind or another. In his masterly introduction, Kenny explains the autobiographical background to this important new book. For some years, Kenny was a Roman Catholic priest, he lost his faith and resigned from the priesthood. This was something of a cause celebre and Kenny gave a full account of this development in his book The Path From Rome. But, as this book demonstrates, he has never been able to let go of God and he continues to struggle with the intellectual problems of theism and the possibility of believing in God, especially in an intellectual climate dominated by Logical Positivism. In this book Kenny revisits the Five Ways of Aquinas and argues that they are not so much proofs as definitions of God.; He is also in constant dialogue with Wittgenstein for, K

Islam is often treated as an inextricable part of Arab culture, and in the minds of many in both the west and the Arab world, to be an Arab is to be a Muslim by default. While many religious minorities, notably the Druze, Jews and Christians, have found ways of reconciling their Arab identity with their beliefs, a far greater challenge faces the growing number of Arabs who identify as atheists, agnostics, or sceptics. Emboldened by the political upheavals of the Arab spring and facilitated by the growth of social media, these predominantly young men and women are becoming an increasingly vocal and assertive presence in Arab societies, despite facing the risk of imprisonment, ostracism, and death. Arabs Without God explores the roots and consequences of this phenomenon, as well as the experiences of those living as 'non-believers' in Muslim countries. Beginning with an examination of the history of atheism in the Arab world, it goes on to consider the circumstances which led these Arab Muslims to question their faith. It also examines the pressures they face in attempting to assert and defend their stance, both in Muslim countries and in the west, where they often find themselves caught between political Islamists who deride them as 'westernised' apostates, and a far right which regards all people from Muslim backgrounds as potential extremists. Arabs Without God argues passionately that these developments, previously ignored by western observers, are of vital importance to the future of Arab societies. For as the author says it is only 'when an atheist can be accepted and respected as a normal human being' that liberty will truly have arrived.

Islam is often treated as an inextricable part of Arab culture, and in the minds of many in both the west and the Arab world, to be an Arab is to be a Muslim by default. While many religious minorities, notably the Druze, Jews and Christians, have found ways of reconciling their Arab identity with their beliefs, a far greater challenge faces the growing number of Arabs who identify as atheists, agnostics, or sceptics. Emboldened by the political upheavals of the Arab spring and facilitated by the growth of social media, these predominantly young men and women are becoming an increasingly vocal and assertive presence in Arab societies, despite facing the risk of imprisonment, ostracism, and death. Arabs Without God explores the roots and consequences of this phenomenon, as well as the experiences of those living as 'non-believers' in Muslim countries. Beginning with an examination of the history of atheism in the Arab world, it goes on to consider the circumstances which led these Arab Muslims to question their faith. It also examines the pressures they face in attempting to assert and defend their stance, both in Muslim countries and in the west, where they often find themselves caught between political Islamists who deride them as 'westernised' apostates, and a far right which regards all people from Muslim backgrounds as potential extremists. Arabs Without God argues passionately that these developments, previously ignored by western observers, are of vital importance to the future of Arab societies. For as the author says it is only 'when an atheist can be accepted and respected as a normal human being' that liberty will truly have arrived.