Table of Contents
Preface VIII
Acknowledgments IX
1 Outside Boston: God, Value, and Meaning 1
Searching for Meaning
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Theism
The Argument from Morality
The Euthyphro Question
Limits on God's Power
Good as Part of the Divine Nature
Angels, Devils, and Knowing Which is Which
The Meaning of What?
2 Niagara, New York: Design and Evolution 17
The Grandeur of the Falls
Paley's Argument from Analogy
The Argument from Design
Creation vs. Chance
Creation vs. Evolution
Natural Selection and Chance
The Support for Evolution
The Challenge of Irreducible Complexity
Assessing Probabilities
The Panda's Thumb
3 From Niagara to Chicago: Life and Fine-Tuning 37
The Argument from Life
Arguing from Ignorance
Scientific Progress on the Origins of Life
The Argument from Consciousness
The Probability of Life's Emergence
The Limits of Science
The Fine-Tuning Argument
Selection Bias
The Multiple-Universes Hypothesis
The Belief in Our Own Specialness
The Problem of Prior Probabilities
A Finely-Tuned God
4 Chicago, Illinois, outside the Adler Planetarium: The Cosmological Argument 59
The Provocative Planetarium
The Cosmological Argument, First Pass
The Big Bang
A Contradiction in the Premises
Another Pass
The Principle of Sufficient Reason
Quantum Indeterminacy
Infinite Pasts and Infinite Beings
The Double Standard
The Argument from Contingency
Divine Freedom
More Double Standards
The Burden of Proof and the Missing Keys
5 Chicago, Illinois, in the Hotel: The Ontological Argument 77
The Ontological Argument
Anselm and the Fool
Places of the Mind
God and the Representation of God
Dreaming of Elvis
Gaunilo's Perfect Island
Kant's Diagnosis
Possible Worlds and the Necessity of God
The Impossibility of God
Imagination and Possibility
6 Somewhere in Iowa: Religious Experience, Testimony, and Miracles 97
The Ghost of Shoeless Joe
Testimony and Miracles
The Bible as Authority
Other Authorities
Religious Experience
Experience and Evidence
The Psychology of Religious Experience
Explaining Experience
Hume on Miracles
7 Holcomb, Kansas: The Problem of Evil 119
Murder, from Kansas to Kitty Genovese
The Problem of Evil
Omniomniomni
The Free Will Response
Circumventing Freedom
The Problem of Natural Disasters
Dark Clouds and Silver Linings
The Dependence of Good on Evil
The World as a Moral Proving Ground
Evil in the Big Picture
The Ship, The Captain, and the Grounds of Reasonable Belief
8 Las Vegas, Nevada: Pascal's Wager 143
Pascal's Wager
Prudential vs. Evidential Reasons
The Possibility and Legitimacy of Prudential Belief
Dominance and the Case for Gun Ownership
The Many-Gods Objection
9 California: Faith and the Rationality of Belief in God 155
The Weight of Combined Arguments
Kierkegaard and Heroic Leaps of Faith
The Dangers of Faith
Alternative Conceptions of God
Religion as Metaphor
The Dangers of Metaphor
Faith and Moral Disagreement
The Golden Gate
Reading Suggestions 173
Sources of Quotations 179
Index 180
