Against Atheism PDF Download

Author: Ian S. Markham
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444358006
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 177

View

Book Description
In this new book, Ian Markham analyzes the atheistic world view, opposing the arguments given by renowned authors of books on atheism, such as Richard Dawkins. Unlike other responses to the new atheism, Markham challenges these authors on their own ground by questioning their understanding of belief and of atheism itself. The result is a transforming introduction to Christianity that will appeal to anyone interested in this debate. A fascinating challenge to the recent spate of successful books written by high-profile atheist authors such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris Tackles these authors on their own ground, arguing that they do not understand the nature of atheism, let alone theology and ethics Draws on ideas from Nietzsche, cosmology, and art to construct a powerful response that allows for a faith that is grounded, yet one that recognizes the reality of uncertainty Succinct, engaging, but robustly argued, this new book by a leading academic and writer contains a wealth of profound insights that show religious belief in a new light

Author: George H. Smith
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615929959
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 368

View

Book Description
"Does a god exist? This question has undoubtedly been asked, in one form or another, since man has had the ability to communicate. . . Thousands of volumes have been written on the subject of a god, and the vast majority have answered the questions with a resounding 'Yes!' " "You are about to read a minority viewpoint." With this intriguing introduction, George H. Smith sets out to demolish what he considers the most widespread and destructive of all the myths devised by man - the concept of a supreme being. With painstaking scholarship and rigorous arguments, Mr. Smith examines, dissects, and refutes the myriad "proofs" offered by theists - the defenses of sophisticated, professional theologians, as well as the average religious layman. He explores the historical and psychological havoc wrought by religion in general - and concludes that religious belief cannot have any place in the life of modern, rational man. "It is not my purpose to convert people to atheism . . . (but to) demonstrate that the belief in God is irrational to the point of absurdity. If a person wishes to continue believing in a god, that is his prerogative, but he can no longer excuse his belief in the name of reason and moral necessity."

Author: Phillip E. Johnson
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830879455
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 120

View

Book Description
In this book Phillip E. Johnson and John Mark Reynolds welcome the debate the New Atheists are stirring up and castigates our universities for squashing public debate about the place of faith in all knowing in the name of a false science. They argue for the reasonableness of Christian claims to take a place at the table of public debate and evaluate the strengths of arguments for atheism or naturalism. Ultimately they encourage us to ask the right questions and follow the evidence where it leads.

Author: Peter Hitchens
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310320313
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

View

Book Description
Partly autobiographical, partly historical, "The Rage Against God," written by the brother of prominent atheist Christopher Hitchens, assails several of the favorite arguments of the anti-God battalions and makes the case against fashionable atheism.

Author: W. Mark Lanier
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 1514002272
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 196

View

Book Description
In the courtroom, lawyers establish certain facts to prove their cases. But can the legal mind discern the validity of one's belief or unbelief? With an even-handed approach, nationally recognized trial lawyer Mark Lanier explores whether atheistic frameworks give satisfactory answers for understanding human existence and considers the questions of agnostics as to whether God is knowable.

Author: Trent Horn
Publisher: Catholic Answers
ISBN: 9781938983436
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 335

View

Book Description
Today's New Atheists don't just deny God's existence (as the old atheists did) - they consider it their duty to scorn and ridicule religious belief. We don't need new answers for this aggressive modern strain of unbelief: We need a new approach. In Answering Atheism, Trent Horn responds with a fresh and useful resource for the God debate, based on reason, common sense, and more importantly, a charitable approach that respects atheists' sincerity and good will, making this book suitable not just for believers but for skeptics and seekers too. Meticulously researched, and street-tested in Horn's work as a pro-God apologist, it tackles all the major issues of the debate, including: -Reconciling human evil and suffering with the existence of a loving, all-powerful God -Whether the empirical sciences have eliminated the need for God, or in fact point to him -How atheists usually deny moral laws (and thus a moral lawgiver) in theory

Author: Robin Le Poidevin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134871112
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 192

View

Book Description
First Published in 2004. In Arguing for Atheism, Robin Le Poidevin addresses the question of whether theism-the view that there is a personal, transcendent creator of the universe - solves the deepest mysteries of existence. Philosophical defences of theism have often been based on the idea that it explains things which atheistic approaches cannot: for example, why the universe exists, and how there can be objective moral values. The main contention of Arguing for Atheism is that the reverse is true: that in fact theism fails to explain many things it claims to, while atheism can explain some of the things it supposedly leaves mysterious. It is also argued that religion need not depend on belief in God. Designed as a text for university courses in the philosophy of religion and metaphysics, this book’s accessible style and numerous explanations of important philosophical concepts and positions will also make it attractive to the general reader.

Author: John R. Shook
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135162637X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 292

View

Book Description
Atheology is the intellectual effort to understand atheism, defend the reasonableness of unbelief, and support nonbelievers in their encounters with religion. This book presents a historical overview of the development of atheology from ancient thought to the present day. It offers in-depth examinations of four distinctive schools of atheological thought: rationalist atheology, scientific atheology, moral atheology, and civic atheology. John R. Shook shows how a familiarity with atheology’s complex histories, forms, and strategies illuminates the contentious features of today’s atheist and secularist movements, which are just as capable of contesting each other as opposing religion. The result is a book that provides a disciplined and philosophically rigorous examination of atheism’s intellectual strategies for reasoning with theology. Systematic Atheology is an important contribution to the philosophy of religion, religious studies, secular studies, and the sociology and psychology of nonreligion.

Author: Peter Boghossian
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA)
ISBN: 1939578159
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 267

View

Book Description
For thousands of years, the faithful have honed proselytizing strategies and talked people into believing the truth of one holy book or another. Indeed, the faithful often view converting others as an obligation of their faith—and are trained from an early age to spread their unique brand of religion. The result is a world broken in large part by unquestioned faith. As an urgently needed counter to this tried-and-true tradition of religious evangelism, A Manual for Creating Atheists offers the first-ever guide not for talking people into faith—but for talking them out of it. Peter Boghossian draws on the tools he has developed and used for more than 20 years as a philosopher and educator to teach how to engage the faithful in conversations that will help them value reason and rationality, cast doubt on their religious beliefs, mistrust their faith, abandon superstition and irrationality, and ultimately embrace reason.

Author: Tim Whitmarsh
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307958337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

View

Book Description
How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.