Product Description

What went wrong with the Atheists' dream.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63384 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-06
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
Alister McGrath invariably combines enormous scholarship with an accessible and engaging style.

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

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.

Unconvincing
Just as much religion is wishful thinking projected large, so the 'fall of disbelief' is wishful thinking on the part of this convert to superstition. The fantasy is here propped up with poor research, flaky arguments and a liberal sprinkling of falsehoods. Very poor work.