Tag: existence of God
-
Beautiful Dreamers
Today at Religion Dispatches, I’ve got a review of the forthcoming documentary Oh My God. Filmmaker Peter Rodger goes on a sophomoric quest to talk with actors and other people all over the world about what God means to them. But the images are just wonderful. If Oh My God is propaganda of some kind,…
-
God Has Died Before
I only just now realized that today the Guardian published a piece I did for them on the “death of God” theological controversy in the 1960s. It is geared, especially, as a reflection on the New Atheist debates that have been going on lately: Unlike some of the prominent atheists of today, these thinkers knew…
-
Religion for Radicals
Today at The Immanent Frame, I talk with literary critic Terry Eagleton about his new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Arguments about God and religion, he insists, are more than just tiffs about lofty ideas; they are deeply political and should be understood as such. Dawkins and I were recently…
-
The Pleasure of Proof
I’m really pleased to report that the excellent New York Times blog Happy Days—a series of reflections on “the pursuit of what matters in troubled times”—has just posted an essay of mine: “The Self-Thinking Thought.” It’s a reflection on my experience spending part of a summer with St. Anselm, the 11th-century monk-turned-archbishop who introduced the…
-
The Proof Industry
Today at The Guardian, a bit of a glimpse into my ongoing obsessions about proofs for the existence of God. Just last night, sifting through a novella I wrote as a freshman in college, I discovered a whole forgotten chapter about the proofs—for some reason, they have been following me so doggedly all these years.…
-
Non-zero-sum God
Recently I had the pleasure to talk with journalist and bloggingheads.tv founder Robert Wright about his new book, The Evolution of God. Hear our conversation today at Killing the Buddha, in addition to a short essay of mine on the subject: It’s easy to focus, as many reviews have, on Wright’s theology of nonexistent god…
-
Revolution by Religion
I’ve got a new review in The American Prospect of two books published by Yale University Press on the same day last month, both rejoinders to the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, etc.): Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution and David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions. Only Nixon could go to China, so perhaps it…
-
The Multiverse Problem
I’ve got a new article out in Seed about how religious physicists, in particular, are thinking their way around the theological problems posed by multiverse theory. It’s good, mind-bending stuff. Scientists now recognize that if space were expanding at a slightly different speed, or if the strong nuclear force were just a little off, our…
-
The Diaries of the Late God
Last week a dear friend blessed me with a 1968 first edition paperback copy of a sleeping classic: Excerpts from the Diaries of the Late God by Anthony Towne. I love this. The dedication page sends a tingle down my spine. The poet Anthony Towne was, if you didn’t know, the extraordinary partner of the…