‘…scintillating…this brilliantly illuminating account of the history and meanings of atheism will be indispensable to anyone who really wants to understand what is at stake in contemporary debates’ John Gray, author of The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
Atheists: The Origin of the Species by Nick Spencer
Monday 12th May, 6 for 6.30pm. 77 Great Peter Street, London, SW1P 2EZ
Join Nick Spencer and the Theos team for an evening of discussion around Nick's forthcoming book: Atheists: The Origin of the Species. The book is published by Bloomsbury and available for pre-order here.
RSVP: events@theosthinktank.co.uk Places are limited and will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.
Atheism has become increasingly visible in recent years but, despite high-profile books both promoting and attacking it, little has been written on its origins or history.
Atheists: The Origin of the Species tells that story – from Machiavelli and Marlowe to Dennett and Dawkins – but goes beyond the usual godless suspects. It also tells the story of Thomas Aikenhead hung for blasphemous atheism, Percy Shelley expelled for adolescent atheism, and the Marquis de Sade imprisoned for libertine atheism. It is the story of the French Revolutionary Terror and the Soviet League of the Militant Godless; of working class British secularists and upper-class French Positivists; religious fundamentalists and their Darwinian opponents. Even the Nazis make a brief appearance.
This is not a single story. Atheists: The Origin of the Species argues that, rather than being a straightforward philosophical or scientific position about the non-existence of God, atheism was, and remains, a cluster of different social and political phenomena each with its subtly different hopes and hatreds. Just as Marxist atheism collapsed, to be replaced by an angry, Darwinian rejection of God, so New Atheism is dying and atheist churches are (re-)emerging. In this way, Nick Spencer argues, atheisms will define and even dominate the 21st century – but only, ironically, because God is back.
