Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer

Former editor of Harper's and National Book Award long-listed author Christopher Beha's own struggle with these questions, and an earnest appeal for readers to arrive at answers of their own

Twenty-five years ago, celebrated author (and cradle Catholic) Christopher Beha gave up on God. Helped along by a reading of Bertrand Russell's classic text Why I Am Not a Christian, he became a committed atheist, certain that his days of belief were behind him. A youthful brush with mortality soon set Beha on a decades-long quest for meaning in a Godless world.

Why I Am Not an Atheist tells the story of this search for secular answers to what Immanuel Kant called the most urgent human questions: What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope? Along the way, Beha traces the development of what he understands to be the two major atheist worldviews: "scientific materialism" and "romantic idealism."

Beha's passage through these rival forms of atheism leads him to the surprising conclusion that faith--particularly faith in a created order in which each human life has a meaningful part--preserves the best of both traditions while offering a complete and coherent picture of reality.

This magisterial investigation of the heights of human intellectual achievement is at once deeply personal and universal--grounded in decades of reading and thinking about various atheist efforts to address the problems of human suffering, mortality, and ultimate meaning. Why I Am Not an Atheist is not a polemic on behalf of belief but a record of Beha's own working out of these questions, and a call for readers to arrive at answers of their own.