God is No Thing

"God is no thing, but not nothing." These words from the renowned thinker Herbert McCabe point to a fallacy at the heart of New Atheist polemics against religion: the deity rejected by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and their followers is not God as taught in classical tradition, but merely a blown-up thing. From this basic error flow many more misunderstandings about Christianity and other creeds. As a result, debate on life's biggest questions has grown vitriolic as well as confused.

The problem is all the more acute because religion refuses to fade away. Even though parts of the Western world now appear almost totally secularized, Christianity remains the most potent worldview on earth alongside Islam. Globalization and democratization have only strengthened the two faiths still further. In this hard-hitting but constructive book, Rupert Shortt argues that Christianity is a much more coherent, progressive body of belief -- philosophically, scientifically and culturally -- than often supposed by its critics. Alert to the menace posed by religious fundamentalism, as well as to secularist blind spots, he shows how a self-critical faith is of huge consequence to wider human flourishing.

Rupert Shortt is a research associate at the Von H?gel Institute, University of Cambridge. He was religion editor of The Times Literary Supplement from 2000 to 2020, and has written for publications including the Financial Times, The Guardian and The Spectator. His books include Benedict XVI; Rowan's Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop; Outgrowing Dawkins: God for Grown-Ups; The Hardest Problem: God, Evil and Suffering; and Faltering Faith: Christianity's Eclipse and Why It Matters (forthcoming).Rupert Shortt is Religion editor of the Times Literary Supplement and a former Visiting Fellow at Oxford University. His books include Benedict XVI (2005), Christianophobia: A Faith under Attack (2012) and Rowan's Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop (2014).