About this item
Through interviews with twelve distinguished philosophers -- including atheists, agnostics, and believers -- Talking God works toward a philosophical understanding and evaluation of religion. Along the way, Gary Gutting and his interviewees challenge many common assumptions about religious beliefs.As tensions simmer, and often explode, between the secular and the religious forces in modern life, the big questions about human belief press ever more urgently. Where does belief, or its lack, originate? How can we understand and appreciate religious traditions different from our own? Featuring conversations with twelve skeptics, atheists, agnostics, and believers -- including Alvin Plantinga, Philip Kitcher, Michael Ruse, and John Caputo -- Talking God offers new perspectives on religion, including the challenge to believers from evolution, cutting-edge physics and cosmology; arguments both for and against atheism; and meditations on the value of secular humanism and faith in the modern world. Experts offer insights on Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as Judaism and Christianity. Topical and illuminating, Talking God gives readers a deeper understanding of faith today and how philosophers understand it.From Talking God:"[Some say] Buddhism is not a religion because Buddhists dont believe in a supreme being. This simply ignores the fact that many religions are not theistic in this sense. Chess is a game, despite the fact that it is not played with a ball, after all." -- Jay Garfield, from chapter 10, "Buddhism: Religion Without Divinity""Why think that the creator was all-knowing and omnipotent? -- Maybe the creator was a student god, and only got a B minus on this project?" -- Louise Antony, from chapter 2, "A Case for Atheism""There are a large number -- maybe a couple of dozen -- of pretty good theistic arguments. None is conclusive, but each, or at any rate the whole bunch taken together, is about as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get." -- Alvin Plantinga, from chapter 1, "A Case for Theism""If you cease to believe in a particular religious creed, like Calvinism or Catholicism, you have changed your mind and adopted a new position -- But if you lose faith, -- everything is lost. You have lost your faith in life, lost hope in the future, lost heart, and you cannot go on." -- John Caputo, from chapter 3, "Religion and Deconstruction"
About the Author
Gary Gutting is a distinguished academic philosopher and a major contributor to public discussions of philosophical questions.He has taught for many years at the University of Notre Dame, where he holds the John A. O'Brien Chair in Philosophy. He is the author of seven academic books and editor of five others, and has published over forty articles. His main areas of research are philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and twentieth-century French philosophy. For a wider audience, he is the author of Foucault: A Very Short Introduction, a volume that has been translated into 7 languages. Since June, 2011, he has been a regular contributor to the New York Times philosophy blog, The Stone, publishing over 100 columns and interviews. Other work for the Times includes analyses of the 2012 Presidential Debates for "Campaign Stops" and essays in the Sunday Review. His recent book, What Philosophy Can Do, contains essays on politics, science, religion, education, and art that expand on his Stone columns.He has been interviewed on a number of radio and television broadcasts, including National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" (with Richard Harris on climate policy) , Canadian Broadcasting Television's "Lang & O'Leary Exchange" (gun control) , Sirius Radio's "StandUp with Peter Dominick" (gun control) , Cyberstation USA (religion and politics) , and Al-Jazeera English TV (with Bob Reynolds on extraterrestrial life) .
