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Since the beginning of philosophical speculation, there has been controversy over the existence of God or gods. Among the Pre-Socratics, Democritus denied all deity and affirmed a materialist philosophy of atoms in the void, and nothing more. Other early metaphysicians discerned traces of the divine in the natural world. For Heraclitus, beyond the perpetual flux lay the mysterious Logos, which provided order and a kind of moral ecosystem for the world. Anaxagorus attributed the order of nature to something immaterial, Nous (Mind). Although the Pre-Socratic philosophies were inchoate and their theologies (or a-theologies) were metaphysically minimal, we find in them the first philosophical debate over whether anything transcends the natural world.[1]
The debates have continued ever since. Atheism gained ground philosophically and culturally in the West, especially after the Enlightenment. However, atheism has been losing ground in recent decades due to the rise of academically rigorous philosophical defenses of theism and critiques of atheism from luminaries such as Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, William Alston, William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, and others. The publication in 2004 of Sam Harris' pugnacious and polemical The End of Faith catalyzed a brand of atheism that didn't so much refute theism at its philosophical best but rather condemned religion in toto.
The Twilight of Atheism was written by the prolific Oxford theologian Alister McGrath, just before the rise of the New Atheism. Instead of looking at the intellectual reasons that atheism might be in decline, McGrath focuses on cultural and historical forces. McGrath writes in a graceful and knowledgeable manner, but he is unphilosophical in his approach to the debates between atheism and Christianity. While we should not expect a historical theologian to glean every nuance from technical philosophical debates, McGrath fails to explain or assess any of the pertinent philosophical issues regarding the existence or nonexistence of the deity. Instead he surveys the intellectual and cultural climates that led to the rise of atheism, from the Enlightenment until its recent twilight. (The book lacks footnotes or endnotes. Instead there is a long list of "works consulted" at the end of the volume.)
McGrath claims that much of the atheism of the Enlightenment was more a rejection of corruption in the church than anything else. He argues that Enlightenment rationalism and secularism seem to be in crisis for various sociological and historical reasons; the pluralistic conditions of postmodernity are breaking down the hegemony of unbelief as the only rational approach to life. However, many readers, especially those with more than a passing interest in philosophy, will be left wondering whether these trends away from atheism and toward theism are intellectually justifiable. That is, what are the best arguments for and against God's existence both today and in Western history?
On this, The Twilight of Atheism has next to nothing to say. Indeed, McGrath injudiciously asserts that philosophical argument for and against God's existence has "ground to a halt." If he means that philosophers have reached no consensus as to the rational status of arguments for God's existence, he is surely right. But then philosophers seldom reach consensus on anything, especially the great matters of metaphysics. This is no reason to conclude that these debates are dead.
If McGrath means that new lines of inquiry on the existence of God have failed to emerge in recent decades, he is also mistaken. In a long and distinguished line of books defending natural theology, Richard Swinburne has shifted theistic arguments from deductive forms to inductive forms using sophisticated probability reasoning not previously employed in metaphysical arguments. Alvin Plantinga's modal version of the ontological argument (using the semantics of possible worlds) has breathed new life into an ancient and alluring argument first invented by Anselm and subsequently advanced by a who's who of philosophers. In the last thirty years, William Lane Craig has revived and repeatedly defended—both in popular and academic settings—an even older theistic argument, based on the impossibility of the universe having an infinite past (as I will discuss below).
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