Thursday, June 25, 2009

Philosophical Atheism Bibliography

Despite the lack of activity recently here on the blog, I have been quite busy with atheism projects. One of them is compiling an up to date, comprehensive bibliography of the most important works on atheism in philosophy in the last 50 years for Oxford Univ. Press. Here's a draft of my list of a hundred or so sources. If you want to understand the state of the discussion in the 21st century, you need to know these works.


Adams, Marilyn McCord and Adams, Robert Merrihew, eds.,1990. The Problem of Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Adams, Robert Merrihew, 1972. “Must God Create the Best?” Philosophical Review, 81: 3, pp. 317-32.

Alston, William, 1991. "The Inductive Problem of Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition." Philosophical Perspectives 5: 29-67.

Anselm, 2007. Anselm: Basic Writings. Thomas Williams, trans. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2007.

Aquinas, Thomas, 1963. Summa Theologiae, London: Blackfriars and Eyre and Spottiswoode.

Atran, Scott, 2002. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.

Barrow, J., and F. Tipler, 1986. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford: Blackwell.

Behe, Michael, 1996. Darwin’s Black Box, New York: Touchstone.

Blumenfeld, David, 2003. “On the Compossibility of the Divine Attributes,” In The Impossibility of God. eds, Martin and Monnier. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Press.

Boyer, Pascal 2001. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Clifford, W.K., 1999, “The Ethics of Belief,” in The Ethics of Belief and other Essays. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Cowan, J. L., 2003. “The Paradox of Omnipotence,” In The Impossibility of God. eds, Martin and Monnier. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Press.

Craig, William L. and Quentin Smith 1995. Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology. N.Y.: Oxford University Press.

Darwin, Charles, 1871. The Descent of Man, and the Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray.

--------, 1859. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. London: John Murray.

Dawkins, Richard, 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

--------, 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. Harlow: Longman.

--------, 2006. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Dembski, William, 1998. The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Dennett, Daniel, 2006. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking Penguin.

Diamond, Malcolm L. and Lizenbury, Thomas V. Jr. (eds) The Logic of God, Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975.

Drange, Theodore, 1998a. Nonbelief and Evil. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

---------------,” 1998b. “Incompatible Properties Arguments: A Survey.” Philo 1: 2. pp. 49-60.

--------------, 2006. “Is “God Exists” Cognitive?” Philo 8:2.

Draper, Paul, 1989. “Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists.” Nous 23. pp. 331-50.

Everitt, Nicholas, 2004. The Non-Existence of God. London: Routledge.

Findlay, J.N., 1948. “Can God’s Existence be Disproved?” Mind 54, pp. 176-83.

Flew, A. and MacIntyre, A. eds., 1955, New Essays in Philosophical Theology, London: S.C.M. Press.

Flew, Anthony. 1955. "Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom." in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, Anthony

Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (eds.). New York: Macmillan.

--------, 1984. “The Presumption of Atheism.” in God, Freedom, and Immortality. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, pp. 13-30.

Flint and Freddoso, 1983. “Maximal Power.” in The Existence and Nature of God, Alfred J. Freddoso, ed. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.

Gale, Richard and Pruss, A. 1999. “A New Cosmological Argument,” Religious Studies 35: 461-76.

Gale, Richard, 1991. On the Nature and Existence of God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Grim, Patrick, 1984. “There is No Set of All Truths,” Analysis, 44. pp. 206-208.

----------, 1985. “Against Omniscience: The Case from Essential Indexicals,” Nous, 19. pp. 151-180.

---------, 1988. “Logic and Limits of Knowledge and Truth,” Nous 22. pp. 341-67.

---------, 2007. "Impossibility Arguments." in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, Michael Martin (ed). N.Y.:
Cambridge University Press.

Gutting, Gary, 1982. Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.

Harris, Sam, 2005. The End of Faith. N.Y.: Norton.

Hick, John. 1977. Evil and the God of Love, revised ed. New York: Harper & Row.

Hoffman, Joshua and Rosenkrantz, 1988. “Omnipotence Redux,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 43. pp. 283-301.

----------, 2006. “Omnipotence,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/omnipotence/

Howard-Snyder, Daniel and Moser, Paul, eds. 2001. Divine Hiddenness: New Essays. Cambridge University Press.

Howard-Snyder, Daniel, ed. 1996. The Evidential Argument from Evil. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press.

---------, 1996. “The Argument from Divine Hiddenness.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26. 433-53.

Hume, David, 1935. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Kitcher, Philip, 1982. Abusing Science Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Kretzmann, Norman, 1966. “Omniscience and Immutability,” Journal of Philosophy 63. pp. 409-21.

Leslie, John, 1996. Universes, London: Routledge.

Mackie, J. L. 1955. "Evil and Omnipotence." Mind 64. pp. 200-212.

--------, 1982. The Miracle of Theism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Madden, Edward and Peter Hare, eds., 1968. Evil and the Concept of God. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.

Manson, Neil A., ed., 2003, God and Design, London: Routledge

Martin, Michael, 1990. Atheism: A Philosophical Justification. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Martin, Michael and Ricki Monnier, eds. 2003. The Impossibility of God. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Press.

Martin, Michael and Ricki Monnier, eds. 2006. The Improbability of God. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Press.

Matson, Wallace I., 1965. The Existence of God. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Mavrodes, George, 1977. “Defining Omnipotence,” Philosophical Studies, 32. pp. 191-202.

McCormick, Matthew, 2000. “Why God Cannot Think: Kant, Omnipresence, and Consciousness,” Philo 3: 1. pp. 5-19.

--------, 2003. “The Paradox of Divine Agency,” in The Impossibility of God, Martin, Michael and Ricki Monnier, eds.
Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Press.

Morris, Thomas, ed. 1987. The Concept of God, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nielsen, Kai, 1985. Philosophy and Atheism. New York: Prometheus.

---------, 2001. Naturalism and Religion. New York: Prometheus.

O’Connor, David, 1998. God and Inscrutable Evil: In Defense of Theism and Atheism. Lanham, MD.: Rowman and Littlefield.

Oppy, Graham, 1995. Ontological Arguments and Belief in God, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

---------, 2006. Arguing About Gods. N.Y.: Cambridge University Press.

Paley, William, 2006. Natural Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Papineau, David. Naturalism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/

Plantinga, Alvin, 1974. The Nature of Necessary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

----------, 1977. God, Freedom, and Evil. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

----------, 1993. Warrant and Proper Function. Oxford University Press, New York & Oxford.

----------, 2000. Warranted Christian Belie. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Pucetti, Roland, 1963. “Is Omniscience Possible?” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 41. pp. 92-93.

Ramsey, I.T., 1956. “The Paradox of Omnipotence,” Mind, 65: 258. pp. 263-266.

Reichenbach, Bruce, 1980. “The Inductive Argument from Evil,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 17. pp. 221-227.

---------------, 1982. Evil and a Good God. New York: Fordham University Press.

Rowe, William, ed., 2001. God and the Problem of Evil. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Rowe, William, 1979. "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism," American Philosophical Quarterly 16. pp. 335-41.

---------, 1984. “Evil and the Theistic Hypothesis: A Response to Wykstra,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 16. pp. 95-100.

---------, 1998. The Cosmological Argument. N.Y.: Fordham University Press.

---------, 2004. Can God Be Free? Oxford: Oxford University Press.

---------, 2006. "Friendly Atheism, Skeptical Theism, and the Problem of Evil," International Journal for Philosophy of
Religion 59. pp. 79–92

Salmon, Wesley, 1978. "Religion and Science: A New Look at Hume's Dialogues," Philosophical Studies 33 (1978): 143-176.

Savage, Wade, 1967. “The Paradox of the Stone,” Philosophical Review, 76:1. pp. 74-79.

Schellenberg, J.L., 1993. Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

-----------, 2006. "Divine Hiddenness justifies atheism," Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Religion, ed.
Peterson and VanArragon. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. pp. 30-41.

Shalkowski, Scott, 1989. "Atheological Apologetics," American Philosophical Quarterly, 26. 1-17.

Smart, J.J.C. and Haldane, John, 2003. Atheism and Theism. Oxford: Blackwell.

Smith, Quentin, 1991. “An Atheological Argument From Evil Natural Laws.” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 29. pp.159-174.

--------, 1993. "Atheism, Theism, and Big Bang Cosmology," in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology. eds. William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 195-217

--------, 1997. “A Sound Logical Argument from Evil,” Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. pp. 148-56.

Sobel, Jordan Howard, 2004. Logic and Theism, Arguments for and Against Beliefs in God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sober, Elliot, 2002. “Intelligent Design and Probability Reasoning,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 52. pp. 65-80.

--------, 2003. “The Design Argument,” In God and Design, Neil Manson (ed). London: Routledge.

--------, 2007. “What’s Wrong with Intelligent Design?” The Quarterly Review of Biology 82: 1, pp. 3-8.

Stenger, Victor. 2007. God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist. Prometheus Books.

Stump, Eleonore, 1987. "The Problem of Evil." Faith and Philosophy 2: 392-423.

Stump, Eleonore and Kretzmann, Norman, 1981. “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy 78. pp.429-58. .

Swinburne, Richard, 1977. The Coherence of Theism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

------------, 1979. The Existence of God. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

------------, 1996. Is There a God? Oxford: Oxford University Press.

van Inwagen, Peter, 1996. “The Problem of Evil, the Problem of Air, and the Problem of Silence,” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, Howard-Snyder.

Weisberger, A.M. 1999. Suffering Belief: Evil and the Anglo-American Defense of Theism. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Wierenga, Edward, 1989. The Nature of God: An Inquiry Into Divine Attributes. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press

Wykstra, Stephen, 1984. “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: Avoiding the Evils of ‘Appearance”” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 16. pp. 73-93.

3 comments:

Reginald Selkirk said...

I am surprised by some of those entries. I would have thought works by Dawkins and Harris were more on the popular level, not at the serious philosophical level. And I am gobsmacked that anything by Behe and Dembski is on the list. If serious philosophy can't make better arguments than that for theism, then theistic philosophy is in serious trouble.

Matt McCormick said...

That's a fair point, RS. Of course, none of these four are serious philosophical works. And the serious philosophical works out number them in the bib. by 20 to 1. Plantinga, Hick, Wierenga, Swinburne are all there. I'll think about it. Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene have to be there. Thanks very much for looking at it closely. I'm making a list for revisions of the bib and the encyclopedia entry.

MM

Josh May said...

Nice bibliography! This sort of thing would be great for that PhilPapers.org site. It looks like all the editor positions for the atheism categories are open too:

http://philpapers.org/browse/all

(It's often best to use ctrl+F to find things in this massive list of categories.)

You should check it out. I don't have any vested interest in this site. I just think it's a great resource, and they need people to populate it with bibliographies as well as editors to manage the categories.