With the controversial topic du jour being the ‘battle’ between religion and atheism, here’s a wonderful resource for educating yourself a little, in order to help elevate this important debate beyond a mere caricature: the Investigating Atheism website. The project has been put together by a group of academics and researchers at the faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, and at the University of Oxford, with a goal of aiming to give “a fully independent, but informed statement about this important subject.”
The current polarised nature of the ‘new atheism’ debate often discourages serious discussion of the very issues that the ‘new atheists’ have brought so forcibly to the attention of the public. Behind some of their more vociferous assertions, there are complex debates going on, and here we will seek to understand how and why these debates have arisen, and what is at stake.
This website is a great resource for getting more background on the history and philosophical arguments underpinning atheism, in its various forms. There are also contributed articles commenting on the divide between atheism and religion, from various authors including Daniel Dennett, Rupert Sheldrake and Steven Weinberg. Perhaps the most interesting I found was John Gray’s “The Atheist Delusion“, which takes pretty much everyone involved in the debate to task for oversimplifying their arguments (probably why I enjoyed it so much).
