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Our selection of books and associated reviews. Each cover is an affiliate link to Amazon for purchase.
The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup
Can you create life with just a taser and a bowl of soup? Most likely not, unless you give yourself a few hundred million years to experiment. Biologist Christopher Wills and marine chemist Jeffrey Bada show off the fruits of research looking for signs of life elsewhere and clues to the origin of terrestrial organisms […]
The Universe in a Nutshell
Lavishly illustrated and easy-to-understand sequel to A Brief History of Time.
Thomas Jefferson’s Freethought Legacy
This delightful collection of quotes from Jefferson establishes beyond dispute his enormous contributions to rationalism, freethought, and science. Often, what historians (and especially politicians) have done is to select those quotes that reflect conventional religiosity and beliefs. Here great care has been taken to exclude those quotes and to present, instead, Jefferson’s freethought legacy.
Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder
Did Newton “unweave the rainbow” by reducing it to its prismatic colors, as Keats contended? Did he, in other words, diminish beauty? Far from it, says Dawkins–Newton’s unweaving is the key too much of modern astronomy and to the breathtaking poetry of modern cosmology. Mysteries don’t lose their poetry because they are solved: the solution […]
What is God?
Twenty-two critical essays raise serious questions about traditional claims of God’s omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, simplicity, ability to do the logically impossible, and omnipresence. LaCroix’s introductory article on metatheism explains his unique approach to issues in the philosophy of religion, providing a useful, up-front orientation for the reader.
Why Evolution Is True
Book Description Among the wonders that science has uncovered about the universe, no subject has sparked more fascination and fury than evolution. In all the current highly publicized debates about creationism and its descendant “intelligent design,” there is an element of the controversy that is rarely mentioned–the evidence, the empirical truth of evolution by natural […]
Without a Prayer: Religious Expression in the Public Schools
An alarming number of school districts are bending to pressure by those on the religious right to allow prayer, Bible readings, and other religious activities in classrooms, while directly infringing upon the rights of many students, believers and nonbelievers alike. Now, for the first time, noted author Robert S. Alley thoroughly examines school prayer, bringing […]
2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People With the Courage to Doubt
The English speaking world rarely acknowledges the many and varied gifts that “disbelievers” have bestowed upon humanity. Churchmen generally contend that great figures in history, such as America’s founders, were conventional believers. But author James A. Haught demonstrates that this just isn’t true. In 2000 Years Of Disbelief: Famous People With The Courage To Doubt, […]
A History of God
Armstrong, a British journalist and former nun, guides us along one of the most elusive and fascinating quests of all time — the search for God. Like all beloved historians, Armstrong entertains us with deft storytelling, astounding research, and makes us feel a greater appreciation for the present because we better understand our past. Be […]
African-American Humanism: An Anthology
This book offers biographical sketches, essays, and interviews with prominent African-American humanists.
Appointment Denied: The Inquisition of Bertrand Russell
In the spring of 1940 amidst the Great Depression and the threat of world war a tempest in a teapot was brewing on the island of Manhattan, where the board of the City College of New York had just appointed the renowned philosopher Bertrand Russell to teach. with the appointment of this most celebrated of […]
Atheism, Morality, and Meaning
Despite the pluralism of contemporary American culture, the Judeo-Christian legacy still has a great deal of influence on the popular imagination. Thus it is not surprising that in this context atheism has a slightly scandalous ring, and unbelief is often associated with lack of morality and a meaningless existence. Distinguished philosopher and committed atheist Michael […]
Belief’s Own Ethics
The fundamental question of the ethics of belief is “What ought one to believe?” According to the traditional view of evidentialism, the strength of one’s beliefs should be proportionate to the evidence. Conventional ways of defending and challenging evidentialism rely on the idea that what one ought to believe is a matter of what it […]
Black Holes and Time Warps
In this masterfully written and brilliantly informed work, Dr. Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, leads readers through an elegant, always human, tapestry of interlocking themes, answering the great question: what principles control our universe and why do physicists think they know what they know? Subtitled “Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy,” and featuring an […]
Childhood’s End
The Overlords appeared suddenly over every city–intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior to humankind. Benevolent, they made few demands–unify Earth, eliminate poverty and end war. With little rebellion, mankind agreed, and a golden age began. But at what cost? To those who resisted the benign new alien rule, it became evident that the Overlords had an […]
Contemporary Materialism: A Reader
Contemporary Materialism presents an important collection of recent work on materialism in connection with metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and theories of value. This anthology charts the contemporary problems, positions and themes on the topic of materialism. It illuminates materialism’s complex intersection with related subjects such as cognition and psychology. By gathering a […]
Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature
The author argues that Darwinian biology supports an Aristotelian view of ethics as rooted in human nature. Defending a conception of “Darwinian natural right” based on the claim that the good is the desirable, the author documents at least twenty natural desires that are universal to all human societies because they are based in human […]
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion / Natural History of Religion
David Hume is the greatest and one of the most provocative philosophers in the English language. His sceptical accounts of the causes and consequences of religious belief, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion, are the most formidable attack upon the rationality of religious faith ever mounted by a philosopher. The Dialogues […]
Dreams of a Final Theory
Weinberg, the 1979 Nobel Prize-winner in physics, imagines the shape of a final theory and the effect its discovery would have on the human spirit. He gives a defense of reductionism–the impulse to trace explanations of natural phenomena to deeper and deeper levels–and examines the curious relevance of beauty and symmetry in scientific theories. Weinberg […]
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion
Book Description In the new mega-anthology from best-selling editor Russ Kick, more than fifty writers, reporters, and researchers–some of them freethinkers or nonbelievers who reveal a decidedly atheistic perspective, and some of them believers seeking reform, justice, or a better understanding of various negative aspects of different religions–invade the inner sanctum for an unrestrained look […]
Fantastic Voyage
Four men and a woman are reduced to a microscopic fraction of their original size, sent in a miniaturized atomic sub through a dying man’s carotid artery. Passing through the heart, entering the inner ear where even the slightest sound would destroy them, battling relentlessly into the cranium. Their objective… to reach a blood clot […]
Freethought on the American Frontier
A collection of memoirs, essays, political cartoons, songs, and poetry of the freethought movement during the 19th century. Essays by such social critics as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes are included. Populist, Socialist, and labor-related issues are also presented. The book has good illustrations and political cartoons.
God Matters: Readings in the Philosophy of Religion
God Matters is a state-of-the-art, accessible anthology of the major issues in philosophy of religion. Its accessibility is due to its mix of classic readings and brand new readings about contemporary issues, commissioned specifically with an undergraduate student in mind. These commissioned readings make the difficult concepts of contemporary philosophy of religion easy to understand, […]
Harlan Ellison’s the City on the Edge of Forever
The controversy has raged for almost 30 years–now readers can judge for themselves. Harlan Ellison wrote the original award-winning teleplay for “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which was rewritten and became the most-loved Star Trek episode of all time. Ellison sued Paramount in protest and won. This book contains the teleplay and afterwords […]
How We Got to Be Human: Subjective Minds with Objective Bodies
Although the objective evidence of evolution has received considerable attention in many books over the years, very little has been written about the subjective experienced (mental) side of the lives of the creatures involved. This book is about how we evolved from four-legged mammals with simple minds, through semi-upright apes who are occasionally thoughtful, to […]
In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace
Virtually unknown today, Alfred Russel Wallace was the codiscoverer of natural selection with Charles Darwin and an eminent scientist who stood out among his Victorian peers as a man of formidable mind and equally outsized personality. Now Michael Shermer rescues Wallace from the shadow of Darwin in this landmark biography. Here we see Wallace as […]
Invisible Man
First published in 1952, Invisible Man revealed the pain of a black man’s existence in a white world. It was shocking then, but remains important literature today. It is the story of a young man’s journey — through the Deep South to the streets of Harlem, through events and experiences that range from tortured to […]
Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 years
Description The Fifth-Century Political Battles That Forever Changed the Church. In this fascinating account of the surprisingly violent fifth-century church, Jenkins describes in bloody detail the battles over “right belief” that had a far greater impact on the future of Christianity than the much-touted Council of Nicea convened by Constantine a century earlier. Jenkins argues […]
Letter to a Christian Nation
Book Description In response to The End of Faith, Sam Harris received thousands of letters from Christians excoriating him for not believing in God. Letter to A Christian Nation is his reply. Using rational argument, Harris offers a measured refutation of the beliefs that form the core of fundamentalist Christianity. In the course of his […]
Maybe Right, Maybe Wrong
A marvelous children’s book that discusses learning right from wrong, stressing such aspects as the difference between rules and principles and the importance of an individual’s rights.
