The Twilight of Atheism
The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World is a book by Christian theologian and apologist Alister McGrath which traces the perceived decline of secular thought over the last two centuries. McGrath states that the book is an expanded form of a speech he gave at a debate in February 2002 at the Oxford Union. Reception John Gray in The Independent said "The decline of secular thought is the subject of Alister McGrath's provocative and timely The Twilight of Atheism. (...) His aim is not so much to analyse atheism as demolish its intellectual credentials, and in this he is largely successful. (...) At the same time, his zeal as a Christian apologist gives his argument a strident and parochial tone. McGrath's difficulties begin when he tries to define atheism." Julian Baggini considers that "A book like Alister McGrath’s The Twilight of Atheism no longer looks perversely contrarian, but a fair reflection of social reality". Dan J. Bye in The Freethinker discussed McGrath's treatment of the historical dispute about whether or not Calvin condemned Copernicus. Describing himself as "infuriated by McGrath’s distortions of atheism and its history, and by the generally dreadful quality of the scholarship on display in Twilight of Atheism", Bye comments that "a writer who criticises others for failing to check their facts and their sources needs to take particular care over their own material", yet "I have put just two pages of Twilight of Atheism under the magnifying glass, and revealed more flawed scholarship than I have space to discuss in detail." In a subsequent article, Bye discussed McGrath's use of recycled material in Twilight. Jane Leapmann in the Christian Science Monitor commented that: "Time magazine spurred public debate 40 years ago with a startling question on its cover: "Is God Dead?" Some estimate that half the world's population was then nominally atheist. And many in the West were predicting that scientific progress would eliminate religious belief altogether by the next century...In this accessible intellectual history, McGrath explores how atheism came to capture a wide swath of the public imagination as the road to human liberation and progress, and why, in a postmodern world, its appeal has faded. Yet he also makes clear that, despite the resurgence in faith, Western Christianity has not fully recovered from the crisis of the '60s." Claire Berlinski in the Hoover Institution's Policy Review suggests that "one wishes McGrath had made his case with greater precision and care. He offers scant sociological data and few statistics about rates of religious belief over this period." She doubts whether "post-modernism will provide a nurturing climate for theists.... If he is still prepared to make this case after a weekend spent sharing the Good News at the annual Modern Language Association Convention, I am prepared to listen." She comments that "The object of his historic inquiry is not atheism per se but one particular and influential strand of it: a conjunction of so-called hard atheism — the explicit