Eric Steinhart - Believing in Dawkins: The New Spiritual Atheism

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I thank Yujin Nagasawa for his persistent support, and for his vision of a better future for philosophical thought about religion. I thank Donald Crosby for encouraging me in my studies of religious naturalism. Thanks also to John Schellenberg and Paul Draper for their efforts to expand the philosophy of religion. Thanks go to Nancy Frankenberry for her early encouragement of this project. Thanks are due to Helen de Cruz and Stefani Ruper for their interviews which helped me to sharpen my ideas. I am very grateful to Stephanie Rivera Berruz for constantly challenging me to think in new ways. Brendan George, at Palgrave, continues to be a wonderful editor. My wife Kathleen Wallace deserves extraordinary credit for her support through all my projects. I gratefully appreciate the support of Dartmouth College and William Paterson University.

Eric Steinhart is one of the most original and exciting philosophers today. In Believing in Dawkins, he rigorously elaborates and defends Richard Dawkins work as a unique rational enterprise that explores questions not only about the material universe but also about value and meaning. The form of spiritual atheism which Steinhart develops here should be welcomed as an attractive new option for a rapidly growing population of people who identify themselves as spiritual but not religious. I wholeheartedly recommend this extraordinary book for its extraordinary contributions to philosophy, science, and spirituality.

Yujin Nagasawa, H.G. Wood Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, University of Birmingham, UK

Eric Steinhart provides an intriguing and imaginative systematic development of philosophical and spiritual themes that he finds in the writings and sayings of Richard Dawkins. Steinhart is careful not to attribute the elaborated system to Dawkins: the work is Steinharts attempt to show one way in which Dawkins work can be reconceived as a judiciously constructed philosophical theory of everything. Apart from anything else, the work serves as a provocation to those who do not care for spiritual naturalism to wonder whether there are other ways in which they might similarly believe in Dawkins.

Graham Oppy, Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, Australia, and Chief Editor of the Australasian Philosophical Review