Customer Reviews

Varieties of Unbelief: From Epicurus to Sartre

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Believers as well as skeptics would profit from a reading of this fine anthology. Besides reprinting hard-to-find shorter items such as Shelley's essay "A Refutation of Deism", the editor has skillfully excerpted passages from longer works. Each selection is introduced by a brief essay providing biographical information about its' author, and a deft summary of the ideas expressed. Besides the necessary inclusion of representative works from Greek and Roman Epicurians, 18th century 'philosophes', and such philosophers as Hume, Nietzsche, Russell, and Sartre; the editor also adds works from now-obscure but important early figures such as Anthony Collins and Elihu Palmer.

My only disappointment was the absence of Antony Flew's famous (and much anthologized) essay, "Theology and Falsification", but this is only a cavil. There is always room for one more custard pie, as Orwell wrote. Oh, and it would be nice if this book were printed instead of photocopied.

The term "atheism" tends to be used too globally. As more than one critic has pointed out, there is no single atheism, but rather a variety that parallel the kinds of theisms to which they're responding. And, several additional distinctions can be made as well: for example, Antony Flew's famous "negative" and "positive" atheisms (the first is unbelief, the second disbelief) or William Rowe's "broad" and "narrow" (unbelief or disbelief in all gods and unbelief or disbelief in the theistic god).

One of the merits of J.C.A. Gaskin's anthology Varieties of Belief is that he tries to take seriously the diverse nature of atheism in both his excellent introduction to the collection and the works he excerpts. Opting not to use the word "atheism" at all, Gaskin argues that there are three general classes of "unbelief": in god or gods, in the supernatural (e.g., miracles), and in an afterlife. If one embraces the first, one necessarily embraces the second too (but not necessarily the third). As such, "unbelief" stretches to include "religions" such as deism, Jainism, or Buddhism (although Gaskin doesn't discuss the latter two).

Gaskin's tripartite taxonomy somewhat resembles Rowe's "broad" and "narrow" distinction, and it fails to distinguish between disbelief and unbelief. But Gaskin makes up for these deficiencies in two ways. First, he makes a good case for the claim that unbelief in antiquity is different in kind from later unbelief. The former tended to be a positive defense of naturalistic worldviews; the latter, responding to totalizing monotheisms, is primarily reactive. (This, it should be noted, spells out an exception to the claim that atheisms always parallel theisms.) Second, Gaskin does a superb job of spelling out five lines of argumentation in defense of unbelief: an alternative (naturalistic) worldview, arguments against specific faith claims, philosophical arguments against existence of God claims, criticisms of social and moral status of religion, and naturalistic accounts of religious belief. The selections he offers speak to these five lines.

Four and one-half stars.