Download or read book The History of Scientific Atheism written by Jan Tesař and published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book analyses under what conditions was it possible to develop scientific atheism which was by the contemporaries in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia understood not only as a branch of propaganda but as a specific scholarly discipline. It maps out not only the state of affairs before the organizational changes allowed the emergence of research but also analyses the motivation which led the historical actors to make such decision in both national contexts. One of the key findings is undoubtedly the fact that scientific atheism developed as a new type of thinking about religious phenomena within the context of Marxist-Leninist epistemological doctrine. Moreover, if the socio-political conditions were favorable, it also contributed to the rethinking of the key aspects of Marxist doctrine. The comparative analysis allows to draw conclusions about the existence of specifically Soviet and Czechoslovakian scientific atheism and questions the level of sovietization in this context.

Download or read book The History of Scientific Atheism written by Jan Tesař and published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book analyses under what conditions was it possible to develop scientific atheism which was by the contemporaries in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia understood not only as a branch of propaganda but as a specific scholarly discipline. It maps out not only the state of affairs before the organizational changes allowed the emergence of research but also analyses the motivation which led the historical actors to make such decision in both national contexts. One of the key findings is undoubtedly the fact that scientific atheism developed as a new type of thinking about religious phenomena within the context of Marxist-Leninist epistemological doctrine. Moreover, if the socio-political conditions were favorable, it also contributed to the rethinking of the key aspects of Marxist doctrine. The comparative analysis allows to draw conclusions about the existence of specifically Soviet and Czechoslovakian scientific atheism and questions the level of sovietization in this context.

Download or read book Atheists written by Nick Spencer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The clash between atheism and religion has become the defining battle of the 21st century. Books on and about atheism retain high profile and popularity, and atheist movements on both sides of the Atlantic capture headlines with high-profile campaigns and adverts. However, very little has been written on the history of atheism, and this book fills that conspicuous gap. Instead of treating atheism just as a philosophical or scientific idea about the non-existence of God, Atheists: The Origin of the Species places the movement in its proper social and political context. Because atheism in Europe developed in reaction to the Christianity that dominated the continent's intellectual, social and political life, it adopted, adapted and reacted against its institutions as well as its ideas. Accordingly, the history of atheism is as much about social and political movements as it is scientific or philosophical ideas. This is the story not only of Hobbes, Hume, and Darwin, but also of Thomas Aitkenhead hung for blasphemous atheism, Percy Shelley expelled for adolescent atheism, and the Marquis de Sade imprisoned for libertine atheism; of the French revolutionary Terror and the Soviet League of the Militant Godless; of the rise of the US Religious Right and of Islamic terrorism. Looking at atheism in its full sociopolitical context helps explain why it has looked so very different in different countries. It also explains why there has been a recent upsurge in atheism, particularly in Britain and the US, where religion has unexpectedly come to play such a significant role in political affairs. This leads us to a somewhat paradoxical conclusion: we should expect to hear more about atheism in the future for the simple reason that God is back.

Download or read book Marxist Leninist Scientific Atheism and the Study of Religion and Atheism in the USSR written by James Thrower and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.

Download or read book The History of Scientific Atheism written by Jan Tesař and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book analyses under what conditions was it possible to develop scientific atheism which was by the contemporaries in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia understood not only as a branch of propaganda but as a specific scholarly discipline. It maps out not only the state of affairs before the organizational changes allowed the emergence of research but also analyses the motivation which led the historical actors to make such decision in both national contexts. One of the key findings is undoubtedly the fact that scientific atheism developed as a new type of thinking about religious phenomena within the context of Marxist-Leninist epistemological doctrine. Moreover, if the socio-political conditions were favorable, it also contributed to the rethinking of the key aspects of Marxist doctrine. The comparative analysis allows to draw conclusions about the existence of specifically Soviet and Czechoslovakian scientific atheism and questions the level of sovietization in this context. ...

Download or read book The Cambridge History of Atheism written by Michael Ruse and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-16 with total page 1307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two-volume Cambridge History of Atheism offers an authoritative and up to date account of a subject of contemporary interest. Comprised of sixty essays by an international team of scholars, this History is comprehensive in scope. The essays are written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including religious studies, philosophy, sociology, and classics. Offering a global overview of the subject, from antiquity to the present, the volumes examine the phenomenon of unbelief in the context of Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish societies. They explore atheism and the early modern Scientific Revolution, as well as the development of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and its continuing implications. The History also includes general survey essays on the impact of scepticism, agnosticism and atheism, as well as contemporary assessments of thinking. Providing essential information on the nature and history of atheism, The Cambridge History of Atheism will be indispensable for both scholarship and teaching, at all levels.

Download or read book A Sacred Space Is Never Empty written by Victoria Smolkin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

Download or read book Battling the Gods written by Tim Whitmarsh and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.

Download or read book Varieties of Atheism in Science written by Elaine Howard Ecklund and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why study atheism among scientists? -- "Tried and found wanting" : how atheist scientists explain religious transitions -- "I am not like Richard:" modernist atheist scientists -- Ties that bind : culturally religious atheists -- Spiritual atheist scientists -- What atheist scientists think about science -- How atheist scientists approach meaning and morality -- From rhetoric to reality : why religious believers should give atheist scientists a chance.

Download or read book The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition written by Gary B. Ferngren and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Download or read book The Evolution of Atheism written by Stephen LeDrew and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Evolution of Atheism, Stephen LeDrew argues that militant atheists have more in common with religious fundamentalists than they would care to admit, advancing what LeDrew calls secular fundamentalism. LeDrew draws on public relations campaigns, publications, podcasts, and in-depth interviews to explore the belief systems, internal logics, and self-contradictions of atheists. He argues that evolving understandings of what atheism means, and how it should be put into action, are threatening to irrevocably fragment the movement.

Download or read book The New Atheism written by Victor J. Stenger and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2009-12-04 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years a number of bestselling books have forcefully argued that belief in God can no longer be defended on rational or empirical grounds, and that the scientific worldview has rendered obsolete the traditional beliefs held by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The authors of these books—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Victor J. Stenger—have come to be known as the "New Atheists." Predictably, their works have been controversial and attracted a good deal of critical reaction. In this new book, Victor J. Stenger, whose God: The Failed Hypothesis was on the New York Times bestseller list in 2007, reviews and expands upon the principles of New Atheism and answers many of its critics. He demonstrates in detail that naturalism—the view that all of reality is reducible to matter and nothing else—is sufficient to explain everything we observe in the universe, from the most distant galaxies to the inner workings of the brain that result in the phenomenon of mind. Stenger disputes the claim of many critics that the question of whether God exists is beyond the ken of science. On the contrary, he argues that absence of evidence for God is, indeed, evidence of absence when the evidence should be there and is not. Turning from scientific to historical evidence, Stenger then points out the many examples of evil perpetrated in the name of religion. He also notes that the Bible, which is still taken to be divine revelation by millions, fails as a basis for morality and is unable to account for the problem of unnecessary suffering throughout the world. Finally, he discusses the teachings of ancient nontheist sages such as Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Confucius, whose guidelines for coping with the problems of life and death did not depend upon a supernatural metaphysics. Stenger argues that this "way of nature" is far superior to the traditional supernatural monotheisms, which history shows can lead to a host of evils. The New Atheism is a well-argued defense of the atheist position and a strong rebuttal of its critics.

Download or read book Science written by Steve Fuller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this challenging and provocative book, Steve Fuller contends that our continuing faith in science in the face of its actual history is best understood as the secular residue of a religiously inspired belief in divine providence. Our faith in science is the promise of a life as it shall be, as science will make it one day. Just as men once put their faith in God's activity in the world, so we now travel to a land promised by science. In "Science", Fuller suggests that the two destinations might be the same one. Fuller sympathetically explores what it might mean to live scientifically. Can science give a sense of completeness to one's life? Can it account for the entirety of what it is to be human? And what does our continuing belief in scientific progress say about us as a species? In answering these questions, Fuller ranges widely over the history of science and religion - from Aristotle and the atomists to Dawkins and the neo-Darwinists - and takes a close look at what science is, how its purpose has changed over the years, and what role religion and in more recent years atheism have played in its progression. Science, argues Fuller, is now undergoing its own version of secularization. We are ceasing to trust science in its institutional forms, formulated by an anointed class of science priests, and instead we are witnessing the emergence of what Fuller calls Protscience' - all sorts of people, from the New Age movement to anti-evolutionists, claiming scientific authority as their own. Fuller shows that these groups are no more anti-scientific than Protestant sects were atheistic. Fearless and thought-provoking, Science questions some of our most fundamental beliefs about the nature and role of science, and is a distinct and important contribution to debates about evolution, intelligent design, atheism, humanism, the notion of scientific progress, and the public understanding of science.

Download or read book A Short History of Atheism written by Gavin Hyman and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The last few years have seen a remarkable surge of popular interest in the topic of atheism. Books about atheism by writers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have figured prominently in bestseller lists and have attracted widespread discussion in the media. The ubiquity of public debates about atheism, especially in conscious opposition to the perceived social threat posed by faith and religion, has been startling. However, as Gavin Hyman points out, despite their prevalence and popularity, what often characterises these debates is a lack of nuance and sophistication. They can be shrill, ignorant of the historical complexity of debates about belief, and tend to lapse into caricature. What is needed is a clear and well informed presentation of how atheistic ideas originated and developed, in order to illuminate their contemporary relevance and application. That task is what the author undertakes here. Exploring the rise of atheism as an explicit philosophical position (notably in the work of Denis Diderot), Hyman traces its development in the later ideas of Descartes, Locke and Berkeley. Drawing also on the work of contemporary scholars like Amos Funkenstein and Michael J Buckley, the author shows that, since in recent theology the concept of God which atheists negate is changing, the triumph of its advocates may not be quite as unequivocal as Hitchens and Dawkins would have us believe."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Download or read book Outgrowing God written by Richard Dawkins and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should we believe in God? In this brisk introduction to modern atheism, one of the world’s greatest science writers tells us why we shouldn’t. Richard Dawkins was fifteen when he stopped believing in God. Deeply impressed by the beauty and complexity of living things, he’d felt certain they must have had a designer. Learning about evolution changed his mind. Now one of the world’s best and bestselling science communicators, Dawkins has given readers, young and old, the same opportunity to rethink the big questions. In twelve fiercely funny, mind-expanding chapters, Dawkins explains how the natural world arose without a designer—the improbability and beauty of the “bottom-up programming” that engineers an embryo or a flock of starlings—and challenges head-on some of the most basic assumptions made by the world’s religions: Do you believe in God? Which one? Is the Bible a “Good Book”? Is adhering to a religion necessary, or even likely, to make people good to one another? Dissecting everything from Abraham’s abuse of Isaac to the construction of a snowflake, Outgrowing God is a concise, provocative guide to thinking for yourself. Praise for Outgrowing God “My son came home from his first day in the sixth grade with arms outstretched plaintively demanding to know: ‘Have you ever heard of Jesus?’ We burst out laughing. Maybe not our finest parenting moment, given that he was genuinely distraught. He felt that he had woken up one day to a world in which his peers were expressing beliefs he found frighteningly unreasonable. He began devouring books like The God Delusion, books that helped him formulate his own arguments and helped him stand his ground. Dawkins’s new book is special in the terrain of atheists’ pleas for humanism and rationalism precisely since it speaks to those most vulnerable to the coercive tactics of religion. As Dawkins himself says in the dedication, this book is for ‘all young people when they’re old enough to decide for themselves.’ It is also, I must add, for their parents.”—Janna Levin, author of Black Hole Blues “When someone is considering atheism I tell them to read the Bible first and then Dawkins. Outgrowing God—second only to the Bible!”—Penn Jillette, author of God, No!

Download or read book The Absurdity of Atheism written by Gerald Tilley and published by . This book was released on 2019-01-16 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Atheists claim that science and reason destroy the credibility of belief in God and the Christian Faith. However, if one can temporarily lay aside one's biases and assumptions in regard to these issues that person may be surprised at the actual evidence. Honestly examining the evidence indicates there is a Creator, as even Einstein came to recognize. We find that that it is atheism that lacks the support of scientific facts. Many atheists attempt to hide this evidence through censorship of what is published in science journals and what is allowed to be taught in the colleges and universities. They also seek to removes scientists who doubt Darwinism from positions of influence. Other tactics of atheists are also exposed. In addition the book contrasts the assumed outcome of a nation or culture embracing atheism with the repeated historical realities. When the truth receives a fair hearing(seldom done in this country) the evidence supports not only the existence of God, but of a God who has communicated to humanity and desires us to relate to Him. The premise of the book is that when the evidence is actually consulted, atheism will prove to be absurd.

Download or read book A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom written by Andrew Dickson White and published by . This book was released on 1896 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: