An Intelligent Person's Guide to Religion

We live, allegedly, in a postmodern age in which we have cast aside the narrative fantasies of the pre-modern era. If postmodernism represents the final abandonment of all grand theories, where does religion stand? If religion is a particularly unbelievable form of explanation, why does it power still affect social and political change? Here, like the skeptics of our age, the author asks, What has theology ever had to say that was of the slightest use to anyone? He argues that religion without God is like a car without an engine, and draws on many aspects of human culture to offer a defense of religion that is not only credible but necessary in an age when postmodernism itself has been exposed as a cruel illusion.

John Haldane is Professor of Philosophy, Head of the School of Philosophical and Anthropological Studies at the University of St Andrews, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is one of the editors of the International Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Routledge) and reviews frequently for the Times.