Imagine There's No Heaven
How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The historical achievements of religious belief have been large and well chronicled. But what about the accomplishments of those who have challenged religion? Traveling from classical Greece to twenty-first century America, Imagine There's No Heaven explores the role of disbelief in shaping Western civilization. At each juncture common themes emerge: by questioning the role of gods in the heavens or the role of a God in creating man on earth, nonbelievers help move science forward. By challenging the divine right of monarchs and the strictures of holy books, nonbelievers, including Jean- Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, help expand human liberties, and influence the early founding of the United States. Revolutions in science, in politics, in philosophy, in art, and in psychology have been led, on multiple occasions, by those who are free of the constraints of religious life. Mitchell Stephens tells the often-courageous tales of history's most important atheists— like Denis Diderot and Salman Rushdie. Stephens makes a strong and original case for their importance not only to today's New Atheist movement but to the way many of us—believers and nonbelievers—now think and live.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stephens (A History of News), a historian and professor of journalism at New York University, proposes that some major advancements in science, politics, and mathematics were enabled by disbelief in gods. Drawing on evidence which includes tablet writings dating as far back as 415 B.C.E., as well as documents suggesting that the denouncement of gods, doubt in the supernatural, and denial of an afterlife were not uncommon, Stephens points out that atheism whether skepticism, cynicism, or anacreonism is not a recent development. Many great minds of the modern era, such as Newton, Mill, and Darwin, among others, shared doubts and denials about god. Fueled by irreligious dis- and non-belief, rationalism, natural explanations, and common sense, these thinkers chipped away at the faiths of many, causing questioning and prompting changes and increased learning first in Athens, then Europe, and eventually worldwide. Unclear, though, is the connection of their disbelief in god to the uncovering of the laws of physics, the writing of On Liberty, and the theory of evolution. Though surely not providing any definite answers, Stephens provides an intriguing take on a topic that has sparked much discussion and will surely spark more to come.
