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angel, define dance, and define the size of the head of the pin. All these distinctions are useful for medieval theologians and modern academic philosophers seeking semantic precision and clarification for the many nuances of human thought, but I still find my own distinction between atheism (there is no God) and nontheism (no belief in God) as statements about personal beliefs to be adequate. How many deists, pantheists, or polytheists do you know? None I would guess. For our purposes at the beginning of a new millennium in the Western world, it is safe to assume that when we are discussing “God” we all know what we mean by this term: an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good higher being who created the universe and us and grants ever-lasting life. If you believe this, you are a theist. If you do not believe this, you are a nontheist. If you believe God is unknowable through science or reason, you are an agnostic.

So much of this book deals with the history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology of religion that the Notes itself is the place to turn. But I especially want to mention a number of influential texts in this field that attempt to get at the answer to the question of why people believe in God and need religion. These include first and foremost David Wulff’s Psychology of Religion and Ralph Hood, Bernard Spilka, Bruce Hunsberger, and Richard Gorsuch’s The Psychology of Religion. On the anthropology of religion see Daniel Pals’ Seven Theories of Religion, Brian Morris’s Anthropological Studies of Religion, Arthur Lehmann and James Myers’s Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion, Gerald Larue’s Ancient Myth and Modern Man, Adolf Jensen’s Myrth and Cult Among Primitive Peoples, E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Theories of Primitive Religion, and Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane and Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries . On the sociology of religion one must begin with the founder’s text, Max Weber’s The Sociology of Religion; and two excellent reviews of the philosophy of religion are Basil Mitchell’s The Philosophy of Religion and Michael Peterson, William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach, and David Basinger’s Reason and Religious Relief.

The body of literature associated with the God Question is Brobdingnagian. Visit any decent size library and look under God, theology, religion, philosophy, philosophy of religion, sociology of religion, anthropology of religion, morality, ethics, the Bible, biblical studies, biblical criticism, and other subjects and you will see what I mean. It is overwhelming. There are scholars who select one specialty and spend their entire careers in the narrow minutiae of that field. What I am aiming for here is clear communication about the God Question with virtually anyone interested in the subject, without sacrificing scholarly integrity.

To that end I also recommend the following edited volumes of readings that will provide a wide range of perspectives on the God Question: John Hick’s The Existence of God: From Plato to A. J. Ayer on the Question “Does God Exist?” presents in depth all the major arguments for God’s existence as well as the critiques of these arguments in a very balanced treatment; Peter Angeles’s Critiques of God: A Major Statement of the Case Against Belief in God has an obvious skeptical slant but presents essays by major thinkers such as Bertrand Russell, Antony Flew, and Sidney Hook; and Gordon Stein’s An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism, which is exactly what it says it is. Peter Angeles’s The Problem of God provides an easy to read, succinct introduction to the debate, and Keith Parsons’s God and the Burden of Proof provides responses to Alvin Plantinga’s and Richard Swinburne’s analytic defense of theism. Many of C. S. Lewis’s books deal with these arguments from a Christian perspective, particularly Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain. The most famous arguments for God’s existence were laid down by St. Anselm in his eleventh-century book, Proslogion, and by St. Thomas Aquinas in his thirteenth-century book, Summa Theologica, the arguments