Why I am not an atheist : the confessions of a skeptical believer / Christopher Beha.
| Author/creator | Beha, Christopher author. |
| Format | Book |
| Publication | New York : Penguin Press, 2026. |
| Copyright Date | ©2026 |
| Description | 417 pages ; 25 cm |
| Subjects |
| Portion of title | Confessions of a skeptical believer |
| Contents | Prelude: Looking the world frankly in the face -- Part I: A universal science. Strange prisoners ; From generalities to particulars ; The bounds of human empire ; The restless desire of power ; The empty cabinet ; Passion's slave ; Experiments of living ; Embryo Englands ; Robbing the gods ; Some hard problems ; A satisfied pig ; How little has been done -- Interlude: The refuge of art -- Part II: Absolute reality. The intellectual love of God ; Consult the inner light ; Denying knowledge to make room for faith ; The artist forming the work ; Man is something that should be overcome ; In the face of nothing ; A total absence of hope ; Among the ironists ; The way out of the bottle -- Postlude: The man who needs infinite help. |
| Abstract | "Twenty-five years ago, celebrated author (and cradle Catholic) Christopher Beha gave up on God. Helped along by a reading of Bertrand Russell's classic text Why I Am Not a Christian, he became a committed atheist, certain that his days of belief were behind him. A youthful brush with mortality soon set Beha on a decades-long quest for meaning in a godless world. Why I Am Not an Atheist tells the story of this search for secular answers to what Immanuel Kant called the most urgent human questions: What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope? Along the way, Beha traces the development of what he understands to be the two major atheist worldviews: scientific materialism and romantic idealism. Beha's passage through these rival forms of atheism leads him to the surprising conclusion that faith--particularly faith in a created order in which each human life has a meaningful part--preserves the best of both traditions while offering a complete and coherent picture of reality. This magisterial investigation of the heights of human intellectual achievement is at once deeply personal and universal--grounded in decades of reading and thinking about the problems of suffering, mortality, and ultimate meaning. Why I Am Not an Atheist is not a polemic on behalf of belief but a record of Beha's long engagement with the enduring human questions, and a call for readers to take up these questions for themselves"-- Publisher's website. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 397-405) and index. |
| Issued in other form | Online version http://id.loc.gov/entities/relationships/onlineversion Beha, Christopher Why I am not an atheist New York : Penguin Press, 2026 9780593490488 |
| Genre/form | Autobiographies. |
| Genre/form | Autobiographies. |
| Genre/form | Autobiographies. |
| LCCN | 2025023528 |
| ISBN | 9780593490471 (hardback) |
| ISBN | 0593490479 (hardback) |
| ISBN | (ebook) |