Talking God: Philosophers on Belief
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Publisher Description
Through interviews with twelve distinguished philosophers—including atheists, agnostics, and believers—Talking God works toward a philosophical understanding and evaluation of religion. Along the way, Gary Gutting and his interviewees challenge many common assumptions about religious beliefs.
As tensions simmer, and often explode, between the secular and the religious forces in modern life, the big questions about human belief press ever more urgently. Where does belief, or its lack, originate? How can we understand and appreciate religious traditions different from our own? Featuring conversations with twelve skeptics, atheists, agnostics, and believers—including Alvin Plantinga, Philip Kitcher, Michael Ruse, and John Caputo—Talking God offers new perspectives on religion, including the challenge to believers from evolution, cutting-edge physics and cosmology; arguments both for and against atheism; and meditations on the value of secular humanism and faith in the modern world. Experts offer insights on Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as Judaism and Christianity. Topical and illuminating, Talking God gives readers a deeper understanding of faith today and how philosophers understand it.
From Talking God:
“[Some say] Buddhism is not a religion because Buddhists don’t believe in a supreme being. This simply ignores the fact that many religions are not theistic in this sense. Chess is a game, despite the fact that it is not played with a ball, after all.”
—Jay Garfield, from chapter 10, “Buddhism: Religion Without Divinity”
“Why think that the creator was all-knowing and omnipotent?— Maybe the creator was a student god, and only got a B minus on this project?”
—Louise Antony, from chapter 2, “A Case for Atheism”
“There are a large number—maybe a couple of dozen—of pretty good theistic arguments. None is conclusive, but each, or at any rate the whole bunch taken together, is about as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get.”
—Alvin Plantinga, from chapter 1, “A Case for Theism”
“If you cease to ‘believe’ in a particular religious creed, like Calvinism or Catholicism, you have changed your mind and adopted a new position— But if you lose ‘faith,’—everything is lost. You have lost your faith in life, lost hope in the future, lost heart, and you cannot go on.”
—John Caputo, from chapter 3, “Religion and Deconstruction”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this collection of 12 interviews that first appeared in 2014 in The Stone, the philosophy blog of the New York Times, Notre Dame philosophy professor Gutting (What Philosophy Can Do) poses a series of questions to contemporary philosophers about age-old questions: Does God exist? How can an all-powerful and all-good god exist in a world filled with evil and suffering? What's the relationship between science and religion? Gutting prefaces each interview with a brief introduction and follows it with a brief set of "further thoughts" about the issues raised in the interview. Calvin College professor Alvin Plantinga argues against atheism because "assuming a lack of evidence either for or against God's existence, agnosticism is a more rational position than atheism." Louise Anthony is certain that God doesn't exist both because she denies that supernatural beings exist outside of natural law and because she finds the argument from evil overwhelmingly persuasive. Gutting also discusses religion and deconstruction with John Caputo, soft atheism with Philip Kitcher, religion and evolution with Michael Ruse, and Hinduism with Jonardon Ganeri, among others. Gutting doesn't cover new ground here, and adds little to the material already available online, but this book nevertheless provides a helpful introduction to anyone interested in the intersection of philosophy and religion.
