Product Description

Atheism is one of the most important movements in modern Western culture. For the last two hundred years, it seemed to be on the verge of eliminating religion as an outmoded and dangerous superstition. Recent years, however, have witnessed the decline of disbelief and a rise in religious/spiritual devotion throughout the world. In this highly readable book, the distinguished historian and theologian, Alister McGrath examines what went wrong with the atheist dream and explains why religion and faith are destined to play a central role in the twenty-first century. A former atheist who is now one of Christianity's foremost scholars, McGrath traces the history of atheism from its emergence in eighteenth-century Europe as a revolutionary worldview that offered liberation from the rigidity of traditional Christianity and the oppression of tyrannical monarchs, to its golden age in the first half of the twentieth century. Blending thoughtful, authoritative historical analysis with incisive portraits of such leading and influential atheists as Sigmund Freud, Marx and Richard Dawkins, McGrath exposes the flaws at the heart of atheism and argues that the renewal of faith is a natural, inevitable and necessary response to its failures. 'Readable and memorable, this is intellectual history at its best' - "Publishers Weekly".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #148569 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
"'Readable and memorable, this is intellectual history at its best'. Publishers Weekly"

Church Times
A sympathetic and interesting guide to the intellectural and social landscape of the past 200 years or so.

The New York Times
Gripping...impressive intellectual range

Customer Reviews

Convincing, readable and highly recommended.
This is a splendid book. Drawing effortlessly on McGrath's erudition, it presents, with compelling style, the history of modern intellectual development. Well chosen and carefully researched examples are marshalled in support of the hypothesis that both theism and atheism rise and fall in grand cycles in reaction to whichever worldview is being exploited by the oppressive regime of the day. Convincing, readable and highly recommended. (Prof Gwilym Pryce, University of Glasgow)

Very poor scholarship
McGrath takes the prize for expecting his readers to simply take his word for things. He repeatedly asserts that atheism is declining worldwide. Is he right? No way to tell. Not once does he quote a statistic or survey to that effect. Similarly, he decries current atheist philosophy as 'bankrupt' - without bothering to quote, let alone critique, such philosophy. Aside from a few easily-dismissed pot-shots at Richard Dawkins, he doesn't engage with late-20th or 21st-century atheist thinking at all. He'd much rather talk about the Soviet Union. No surprise that he can't seem to produce a single present-day atheist who doesn't deplore such brutal suppression of religion.

He does also mention Philip Pullman's 'Dark Materials' trilogy - but I hardly think a brief critique of a work of fiction can count towards an engagement with current atheist thought.

Adding insult to the injury of this omission, he spends ten pages telling us in great detail - and sometimes with a gloating sarcasm that is very out of place in a work of scholarship - what a terrible person Madalyn Murray O'Hair was. He does this in order to knock down the straw man he has set up - that religion is the root of all that's wrong in the world, and without it everybody would be nice to everybody else.

He's fond of his straw men. Furthermore - despite his protestations to the contrary - it appears that his ideas about why people reject theism are firmly rooted in his own period of atheism, which by his own admission was essentially an adolescent rebellion. Thus, the monolithic 'atheism' he decries is a cardboard cut-out next to the diversity within the real atheist community; and so most of his criticisms, again, knock down straw men.

Theists seeking reassurance that atheism is a spent force will find plenty here. Those who would rather know the facts - or atheists in search of a challenging critique of their views - should look elsewhere.

Religion, atheism and the battle for imagination's soul
This is a bravely-titled `history of an idea', which makes the claim - contra Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris et al - that atheism as an intellectually credible worldview has had its day. The 20th century (McGrath argues) has to an extent seen, as the 21st will see even more clearly, a resurgence of religion as repository of, and springboard for, the moral and spiritual imagination. And religion, the author claims, offers the best hope of doing justice to human aspirations in this sphere. But McGrath's work is far from being a mere polemical counterblast to Dawkins and writers like him. He has serious and pointed criticisms to make of some of the traditional forms of religion - in particular Reformation Protestantism's own spectacular failure of imagination (`God ceased to be a living reality in the popular Protestant imagination' (211)). Though one feels that at times McGrath's celebration of postmodernity is a bit over-optimistic, there's no doubt his analysis of the growth of movements like Pentecostalism offers a serious challenge to the received wisdom that holds the smooth and uninterrupted rise of the atheist worldview to be completely assured. One minor critique: I could have done without the analysis of leading American atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair's decline and fall, which felt like an unnecessary intrusion on a private grief or freak show. Otherwise highly absorbing.