Critiques of God: Making the Case Against Belief in God
Peter Angeles sets out to assemble an anthology--"of value to undergraduate philosophy classes as well as to the general public" --that presents the case against God. For both audiences, the decision to concentrate on authors "of known stature" was a wise one, because of the ease with which less well known writers could be dismissed by popular audiences (including audiences of undergraduates). The list of authors is a veritable who's who of twentieth-century philosophy, and the selections (as Angeles promises in the preface) are not snippets. Readers who work their way through the 17 selections in the anthology will get a substantial sampling of both the style and the substance of philosophical argument as practiced by a range of thinkers. One quirk of the collection is its concentration on material from 1950 to 1970 (13 of the 17 selections). This does not lessen its value as an anthology, but it may spur some readers to look closely at the context those decades provided for philosophical reflection on God's existence.Steve Schroeder