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This book offers a new challenge to belief in God. If God did exist, we should expect it to be a lot easier to know that he exists. But it's not a clear fact, and this is reason to suppose it's not a fact at all. J. L. Schellenberg presents a lucid, vigorous presentation of the argument that he himself pioneered.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1: Some Basic Tools
- 2: A Conceptual Map
- 3: Why So Late to the Show?
- 4: The Main Premise
- 5: Add Insight and Stir
- 6: Nonresistant Nonbelief
- 7: Must a God Be Loving?
- 8: The Challenge
- Coda: After Personal Gods
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
J. L. Schellenberg (DPhil, Oxford) is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University. He is the author of Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason and of a recent trilogy on the philosophy of religion: Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion, The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism, and The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion. The ideas of the trilogy are placed into an evolutionary context and made generally accessible in his recent short work from Oxford called Evolutionary Religion.
Summary
This book offers a new challenge to belief in God. If God did exist, we should expect it to be a lot easier to know that he exists. But it's not a clear fact, and this is reason to suppose it's not a fact at all. J. L. Schellenberg presents a lucid, vigorous presentation of the argument that he himself pioneered.
Additional text
I wonder what the implications would be if we took Schellenberg's optimism about human reasoning and applied it more broadly...one of the things that has struck me the most about the development of Schellenberg's thought is precisely his optimism about human reason and its prospects. The spirit of Schellenberg's work is never one of pessimistic judgment about the errors and superstitions of religious folk. He is not a mocker. Rather, his writing seems to flow from a conviction that there's so much out there to explore.
