A Reasonable God

Calmly engaging the philosophical arguments posed by best-selling authors Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, and to a lesser extent, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, Gregory Ganssle’sA Reasonable Godis a nuanced, charitable, and philosophically well-informed defense of the existence of God. Eschewing the rhetoric and provocative purposes of the New Atheists, Ganssle instead lucidly and objectively analyzes each argument on its own philosophical merits, to see how persuasive they prove to be. Surveying topics including the relationship between faith and reason, moral arguments for the existence of God, the Darwinian theories of the origin of religion, he pays particular attention to, and ultimately rejects, what he determines is the strongest logical argument against the existence of god posed by the new atheists, put forth by Dawkins: that our universe resembles more of what an atheistic universe would be like than it does with what a theistic universe would be like.

Gregory E. Ganssle is a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Senior Fellow of the Rivendell Institute at Yale University. He is the author of Thinking about God: First Steps in Philosophy and editor of God and Time: Essays on the Divine Nature (with David M. Woodruff).