Bibliography

Evolution & Creation-Science

Fossils and transitional series, ape-human ancestry, the age of the earth, flood geology, irreducible complexity, and the rest of the creationist toolkit.

• On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin (1859)

  The book that started it, and still the clearest statement of how descent with modification accounts for the diversity of life without a designer.

• The Blind Watchmaker – Richard Dawkins (1986)

  Explains evolution as an undirected process with no foresight, and dismantles the watchmaker analogy that creationists still lean on.

• Climbing Mount Improbable – Richard Dawkins (1996)

  Shows how structures that look impossible in one leap, the eye above all, are reached by small cumulative steps up the gentle slope.

• The Greatest Show on Earth – Richard Dawkins (2009)

  The evidence for evolution assembled in one place, written specifically to answer people who call it just a theory.

• Why Evolution Is True – Jerry A. Coyne (2009)

  A short, patient walk through the evidence from fossils, embryology, biogeography and observed speciation. The best single starting point.

• Your Inner Fish – Neil Shubin (2008)

  The palaeontologist who found Tiktaalik explains how your wrist, jaw and hiccups are inherited from fish and reptiles.

• Some Assembly Required – Neil Shubin (2020)

  How major evolutionary transitions actually happen, drawing on DNA evidence that did not exist when the old creationist objections were written.

• Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters – Donald R. Prothero (2007)

  A working palaeontologist walks through transitional series lineage by lineage, then takes creationist claims about the fossil record apart one at a time.

• Finding Darwin’s God – Kenneth R. Miller (1999)

  A biologist who testified against intelligent design at Dover shows why the science is settled, and why creationism damages the religion it claims to defend.

• Only a Theory – Kenneth R. Miller (2008)

  Written straight out of the Dover trial, on what intelligent design actually proposed and why it collapsed under cross-examination.

• Darwin’s Dangerous Idea – Daniel C. Dennett (1995)

  Argues that natural selection is a universal acid that dissolves the need for design anywhere it is applied, including to minds and morals.

• The Panda’s Thumb – Stephen Jay Gould (1980)

  Essays on the jury-rigged and the imperfect in nature, on the grounds that bad design is the strongest evidence against a designer.

• Wonderful Life – Stephen Jay Gould (1989)

  The Burgess Shale fossils and the case that evolution has no destination and no privileged endpoint, humans included.

• Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction – Eugenie C. Scott (2004)

  A field guide to the whole dispute, its history, its legal battles and its rhetorical moves, by the person who spent a career on the front line of it.

• Creationism’s Trojan Horse – Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross (2004)

  The documentary record of how intelligent design was built as a political project to get creationism back into classrooms.

• Tower of Babel – Robert T. Pennock (1999)

  A philosopher takes the new anti-evolutionism seriously enough to answer it properly, using the evolution of languages as the parallel case.

• Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism – Philip Kitcher (1982)

  Forty years old and still unanswered, on why creationism fails as science rather than merely being unpopular among scientists.

• At the Water’s Edge – Carl Zimmer (1998)

  Two of the largest transitions in the fossil record, fish onto land and mammals back into the sea, told through the evidence.

• Endless Forms Most Beautiful – Sean B. Carroll (2005)

  How evolutionary developmental biology explains the building of complex bodies from ancient shared genetic switches.

• Monkey Girl – Edward Humes (2007)

  The full account of Kitzmiller v. Dover, the trial in which intelligent design was put on the stand and failed.

Origins, Cosmology and ‘Who Made God’

First cause and contingency, the cosmological and ontological arguments, fine-tuning, natural theology, and Pascal’s Wager.

• A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking (1988)

  Black holes, the Big Bang and the shape of spacetime, introduced to a general audience without any religious framing at all.

• The Grand Design – Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (2010)

  Argues that the laws of physics are sufficient to account for the origin of the universe, with no creator required at the start.

• A Universe from Nothing – Lawrence M. Krauss (2012)

  On why nothing is a far less stable and far more interesting state than the first-cause argument assumes.

• God: The Failed Hypothesis – Victor J. Stenger (2007)

  Treats God as a scientific hypothesis and argues the universe looks nothing like one that was designed.

• The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning – Victor J. Stenger (2011)

  A physicist’s book-length answer to the fine-tuning argument, and the most detailed one available.

• The Big Picture – Sean Carroll (2016)

  How the known laws of physics already rule out the sort of intervention most religions require, and what follows from that.

• The Elegant Universe – Brian Greene (1999)

  String theory for the general reader, and a demonstration of how far physics gets on mathematics and evidence alone.

• The Hidden Reality – Brian Greene (2011)

  The serious multiverse proposals, which matter because fine-tuning arguments depend on this universe being the only one.

• The First Three Minutes – Steven Weinberg (1977)

  The early universe reconstructed from physics, by a Nobel laureate who was blunt about what it did not leave room for.

• Dreams of a Final Theory – Steven Weinberg (1992)

  Contains the clearest short statement anywhere of why a physicist finds the design argument unpersuasive.

• Just Six Numbers – Martin Rees (1999)

  The constants the fine-tuning argument is built on, explained by an astronomer who does not think they point at a designer.

• The Inflationary Universe – Alan Guth (1997)

  Inflation explained by the man who proposed it, including how a universe can arise without a first push.

• Many Worlds in One – Alex Vilenkin (2006)

  Eternal inflation and its consequences, from a cosmologist whose work is routinely misquoted by apologists.

• The Cosmic Landscape – Leonard Susskind (2005)

  The physics case that our constants are one draw from an enormous range, which is the direct rival to design.

• Cosmos – Carl Sagan (1980)

  A sweeping account of the universe and our place in it, and the standing proof that awe needs no religion.

• Pale Blue Dot – Carl Sagan (1994)

  On the fragility of Earth and the case for taking responsibility for it ourselves, since nobody else is going to.

• The System of Nature – Baron d’Holbach (1770)

  The Enlightenment’s most uncompromising statement that matter in motion is all there is, and the supernatural explains nothing.

• Atheism: The Case Against God – George H. Smith (1974)

  A systematic dismantling of the classical arguments for God, and still one of the tidiest.

• Arguing About Gods – Graham Oppy (2006)

  The most rigorous survey of the arguments for God and why each fails. Heavy going, and worth it if you want the strongest version of the case.

• Why There Is No God – Armin Navabi (2014)

  Twenty common arguments for God, each answered briefly and without jargon.

• The Improbability of God – edited by Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier (2006)

  A collection of the probabilistic arguments against God’s existence, assembled in one volume.

Morality, Suffering and the Goodness of God

Whether we can be good without God, and whether a good God squares with a world like this one. Two halves of a single argument: the moral argument, meaning and nihilism, the problem of evil, the free-will and soul-making defences, hell, and divine hiddenness.

• Good Without God – Greg Epstein (2009)

  How the billion or so nonreligious people on earth build ethical, meaningful lives without belief in God.

• Living Without God – Ronald Aronson (2008)

  Secular alternatives to religion for community, gratitude and mortality, aimed at people who have already left.

• Humanism: A Very Short Introduction – Stephen Law (2011)

  A concise account of humanist philosophy and ethics, and how it differs from the religious version.

• Ethics Without God – Kai Nielsen (1973)

  The philosophical case that morality is coherent and binding with no religious foundation underneath it.

• Morality Without God? – Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (2009)

  A direct answer to the claim that atheists have no grounds for morality, written to be readable rather than technical.

• The Moral Landscape – Sam Harris (2010)

  Argues that moral questions have factual answers about wellbeing, and that science can in principle reach them. Contested, and worth arguing with.

• The Science of Good and Evil – Michael Shermer (2004)

  Where our moral instincts came from, and why they long predate any of the religions claiming credit for them.

• The Moral Arc – Michael Shermer (2015)

  The case that moral progress has tracked reason and secular institutions rather than religious revival.

• The Moral Animal – Robert Wright (1994)

  The evolutionary origins of conscience, guilt and reciprocity, and what that leaves for divine command theory.

• The Bonobo and the Atheist – Frans de Waal (2013)

  A primatologist’s evidence that fairness, empathy and consolation are older than humans, let alone scripture.

• Primates and Philosophers – Frans de Waal (2006)

  On whether morality is a thin veneer over a selfish animal, with philosophers pushing back in the same volume.

• The Origins of Virtue – Matt Ridley (1996)

  How cooperation evolves among self-interested creatures, which is the question the moral argument assumes has no answer.

• The Expanding Circle – Peter Singer (1981)

  How the boundary of moral concern has widened over history, driven by reason rather than revelation.

• Being Good – Simon Blackburn (2001)

  A short introduction to ethics that takes the threat of nihilism seriously and then answers it.

• The Ethical Project – Philip Kitcher (2011)

  Ethics reconstructed as a human social technology with a history, rather than a set of commands handed down.

• Braintrust – Patricia Churchland (2011)

  The neuroscience of moral behaviour, tracing conscience to mammalian attachment rather than to anything transcendent.

• Moral Tribes – Joshua Greene (2013)

  Why our moral intuitions work within groups and fail between them, which explains a great deal about religion.

• Thus Spoke Zarathustra – Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)

  Philosophy as poetry, rejecting inherited divine morality and insisting we create our own values or have none.

• The Myth of Sisyphus – Albert Camus (1942)

  Refuses both suicide and religious consolation as answers to a silent universe, and argues for living anyway.

• God’s Problem – Bart D. Ehrman (2008)

  A New Testament scholar shows that the Bible gives several incompatible answers to why we suffer, and that none of them work. The loss of his own faith is the subtext.

• Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion – David Hume (1779)

  Published after his death for good reason. Still the sharpest treatment of design and of suffering in the same book.

• Candide – Voltaire (1759)

  Written in fury after the Lisbon earthquake, and still the most efficient demolition of the claim that this is the best of all possible worlds.

• The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)

  Ivan’s rebellion is the problem of evil stated better than most philosophers manage, by a believer who could not answer it.

• The Plague – Albert Camus (1947)

  A novel about indiscriminate suffering and the people who fight it without expecting any cosmic help.

• Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason – J. L. Schellenberg (1993)

  The book that made divine hiddenness a serious argument: a loving God who wants to be known would not be this hard to find.

• The Hiddenness Argument – J. L. Schellenberg (2015)

  The same argument restated for general readers, twenty years of objections later.

• The Miracle of Theism – J. L. Mackie (1982)

  A philosopher works through every argument for God in turn. His treatment of the problem of evil is the standard reference.

• The Non-Existence of God – Nicholas Everitt (2003)

  A careful survey of the arguments, including hiddenness and the incoherence of the divine attributes.

Prayer, Miracles and the Supernatural

Petitionary and intercessory prayer, faith healing, claimed miracles, and near-death experiences.

• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – David Hume (1748)

  Contains Of Miracles, the argument that testimony can never establish a miracle because the falsehood of the testimony is always the lesser wonder. Nothing since has improved on it.

• Flim-Flam! – James Randi (1980)

  The stage magician who spent decades exposing psychics, dowsers and faith healers, on how the trick is done.

• The Faith Healers – James Randi (1987)

  A methodical investigation of the healing ministries, including the radio earpiece that fed one preacher his revelations.

• Why People Believe Weird Things – Michael Shermer (1997)

  Why intelligent people believe unsupported claims, and why intelligence makes them better at defending those claims rather than worse.

• Looking for a Miracle – Joe Nickell (1993)

  Weeping statues, stigmata, relics and healing shrines, investigated one by one by someone who actually goes and looks.

• Pseudoscience and the Paranormal – Terence Hines (1988)

  A psychologist’s systematic review of the evidence for paranormal claims, and of why the evidence keeps evaporating.

• Paranormality – Richard Wiseman (2011)

  The psychology behind ghosts, mediums and premonitions, explaining why normal minds produce these experiences reliably.

• Dying to Live – Susan Blackmore (1993)

  Near-death experiences taken seriously and explained naturalistically, by a researcher who started out believing.

• Seeing Myself – Susan Blackmore (2017)

  Out-of-body experiences and what the last two decades of neuroscience have made of them.

• Voodoo Science – Robert L. Park (2000)

  The road from self-deception to fraud, and how to tell where on it a given claim sits.

• Superstition – Robert L. Park (2008)

  On belief in the age of science, including a physicist’s look at the intercessory prayer trials and what they found.

• Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science – Martin Gardner (1957)

  The founding text of modern scepticism, expanded from his In the Name of Science of 1952. Most of the nonsense it catalogues is still in circulation.

• The Transcendental Temptation – Paul Kurtz (1986)

  A sustained account of why humans keep reaching for the supernatural, covering religion and the paranormal as one phenomenon.

• Blind Faith – Richard P. Sloan (2006)

  Takes apart the research that supposedly shows religion improves health outcomes, study by study.

• The Skeptic’s Dictionary – Robert Todd Carroll (2003)

  A reference volume of supernatural and pseudoscientific claims with the evidence against each. Useful to keep to hand.

Scripture: Claims, Contradictions, History

Biblical inerrancy, internal contradictions, failed prophecy, the historicity of scriptural claims, and the challenge to actually read the thing.

• Misquoting Jesus – Bart D. Ehrman (2005)

  How the New Testament text was copied, altered and corrupted over centuries, by scribes with motives. The single most useful book on the subject.

• Jesus, Interrupted – Bart D. Ehrman (2009)

  The contradictions between the gospels laid out plainly, and the awkward fact that seminaries teach this while pulpits do not.

• Forged – Bart D. Ehrman (2011)

  On the New Testament books written under false names, and why forgery is the accurate word for it.

• Who Wrote the Bible? – Richard Elliott Friedman (1987)

  The documentary hypothesis explained for general readers: who assembled the Torah, when, and with what agenda.

• The Bible Unearthed – Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (2001)

  Archaeology against scripture: the Exodus, the conquest of Canaan and the united monarchy did not happen as described.

• David and Solomon – Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (2006)

  What the archaeological record actually supports about Israel’s founding kings, which is very little.

• Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? – William G. Dever (2003)

  An archaeologist, and no atheist polemicist, on the gap between the biblical origin story and the evidence in the ground.

• The End of Biblical Studies – Hector Avalos (2007)

  A biblical scholar argues his own field exists mainly to protect the text’s relevance rather than to assess it.

• The Age of Reason – Thomas Paine (1794)

  Paine goes through scripture book by book and finds it incoherent and immoral. It cost him his reputation and most of his friends.

• Proving History – Richard Carrier (2012)

  On method: what historians can and cannot establish about the gospels, and why the usual criteria fail.

• On the Historicity of Jesus – Richard Carrier (2014)

  The most rigorous statement of the mythicist case. A minority position among scholars, and the version worth engaging with.

• The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man – Robert M. Price (2003)

  Strips the gospel accounts back layer by layer to ask how much historical residue is left.

• Nailed – David Fitzgerald (2010)

  Ten claims about the historical Jesus that the evidence does not support, written for readers rather than scholars.

• Zealot – Reza Aslan (2013)

  Reconstructs Jesus as a political figure of first-century Palestine, which is a long way from the one in the creed.

• The Gnostic Gospels – Elaine Pagels (1979)

  The Christianities that lost, and how orthodoxy was decided by politics rather than revelation.

• Why I Became an Atheist – John W. Loftus (2008)

  A former evangelical minister, trained under William Lane Craig, sets out the case against the faith he preached.

• Godless – Dan Barker (2008)

  A preacher’s account of losing his faith by reading his own source material too carefully.

Faith vs Evidence: How We Know Things

Burden of proof, what counts as evidence, scepticism as a method, and the reasoning errors that keep belief in business.

• The Demon-Haunted World – Carl Sagan (1995)

  Scepticism taught as a civic skill, with the baloney detection kit that still does more work than any other short guide.

• Unweaving the Rainbow – Richard Dawkins (1998)

  An answer to the charge that explaining something destroys the wonder of it.

• The Magic of Reality – Richard Dawkins (2011)

  Written for younger readers, and the clearest thing he has done on how we tell what is real from what we would like to be real.

• Faith vs. Fact – Jerry A. Coyne (2015)

  Argues that science and religion are incompatible methods of seeking truth, and that the accommodation between them is a polite fiction.

• Believing Bullshit – Stephen Law (2011)

  A field guide to the reasoning traps that make bad ideas feel unassailable from the inside.

• A Manual for Creating Atheists – Peter Boghossian (2013)

  On talking people out of faith by examining how they know rather than what they believe. Contested in method, useful in practice.

• The Outsider Test for Faith – John W. Loftus (2013)

  Proposes examining your own religion with the same scepticism you already apply to everyone else’s.

• Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman (2011)

  The standard account of how human reasoning actually works, which explains why arguments alone rarely shift belief.

• How We Know What Isn’t So – Thomas Gilovich (1991)

  How people construct confident false beliefs out of ordinary cognitive machinery, with no deception required.

• Nonsense on Stilts – Massimo Pigliucci (2010)

  Where the line between science and pseudoscience actually falls, and why the question is harder than it looks.

• The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe – Steven Novella (2018)

  A modern, thorough toolkit for assessing claims, from the long-running podcast of the same name.

• Conjectures and Refutations – Karl Popper (1963)

  Where falsifiability comes from, and why an explanation that fits every possible observation explains nothing.

• Irrationality – Stuart Sutherland (1992)

  A blunt catalogue of the ways human judgement fails, written without flattering the reader.

• You Are Not So Smart – David McRaney (2011)

  Self-delusion explained cheerfully and briefly, one bias per chapter.

• Don’t Believe Everything You Think – Thomas Kida (2006)

  Six basic mistakes in reasoning, including the preference for stories over statistics that religion exploits so well.

• How to Think About Weird Things – Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn (1995)

  A textbook on evaluating extraordinary claims, and one of the few that is genuinely readable.

• Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays – Bertrand Russell (1957)

  The 1927 lecture that gives the collection its name works through the first-cause, design and moral arguments in about twenty pages, then turns to what the churches have actually done. Still the best short introduction to the whole case.

• Atheism: A Very Short Introduction – Julian Baggini (2003)

  A brief, fair-minded overview of what atheism claims, what it does not, and the history behind it.

• Atheism Explained – David Ramsay Steele (2008)

  A patient walk through the standard arguments on both sides, ending where the evidence points.

• The Portable Atheist – edited by Christopher Hitchens (2007)

  An anthology running from Lucretius to the present, with Hitchens introducing each piece. The best single-volume tour of the tradition.

Religion and Human Harm

What religion costs in practice: doctrine against women and gay people, blasphemy and apostasy, clerical power, money, and the atheism-caused-atrocities charge.

• God Is Not Great – Christopher Hitchens (2007)

  The case that religion poisons everything, argued across politics, culture, sex and medicine with more evidence than its reputation suggests.

• The Missionary Position – Christopher Hitchens (1995)

  Mother Teresa examined as an institution rather than a saint: where the money went, and what the dying actually received.

• Letters to a Young Contrarian – Christopher Hitchens (2001)

  On dissent as a habit, and why deference to authority is the reflex that makes the rest of it possible.

• The End of Faith – Sam Harris (2004)

  Argues that religious moderation shelters the extremes by making faith itself immune from criticism.

• Letter to a Christian Nation – Sam Harris (2006)

  A short, unsparing letter to believers on the moral cost of the doctrines they hold quietly.

• Infidel – Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2006)

  A memoir of leaving Islam, from Somalia to the Dutch parliament, including what apostasy costs a woman in practice.

• Why I Am Not a Muslim – Ibn Warraq (1995)

  A systematic critique of Islamic doctrine and history, written under a pseudonym for reasons the book itself explains.

• Joseph Anton – Salman Rushdie (2012)

  Ten years in hiding under a death sentence for writing a novel. The definitive account of what blasphemy law means when it has teeth.

• Radical – Maajid Nawaz (2012)

  Recruitment into Islamist extremism and the long route out, told from inside it.

• Under the Banner of Heaven – Jon Krakauer (2003)

  A murder committed on instruction from God, and the fundamentalist Mormon world that produced it.

• Atheist Manifesto – Michel Onfray (2005)

  A French philosopher’s assault on all three monotheisms and their shared contempt for the body.

• Christianity Is Not Great – edited by John W. Loftus (2014)

  Essays on the historical record of Christian practice, assembled as a direct answer to claims about the faith’s civilising influence.

• Leaving the Fold – Marlene Winell (1993)

  A psychologist on recovering from authoritarian religion, and the first serious treatment of the damage it leaves behind.

• The New Religious Intolerance – Martha Nussbaum (2012)

  On fear of religious minorities and the liberties it erodes, which matters if criticism of religion is to stay honest.

• The Antichrist – Friedrich Nietzsche (1895)

  A furious attack on Christianity as a life-denying morality built by the weak. Not fair, and not easily dismissed either.

• The Rebel – Albert Camus (1951)

  On rebellion against dogma and the murderous certainties that replace it, including the secular ones.

Secularism and State Neutrality

Church and state, faith schools, bishops in legislatures, religious exemptions, blasphemy law, and what a neutral public square requires.

• Secularism: A Very Short Introduction – Andrew Copson (2019)

  What secularism is and is not, from the chief executive of Humanists UK. The briefest correct answer to the claim that it means hostility to religion.

• Secularism: Politics, Religion, and Freedom – Andrew Copson (2017)

  The longer treatment, tracing how the separation of religion and state developed and where it is currently under pressure.

• The God Argument – A. C. Grayling (2013)

  Two books in one: the case against religion, and the humanist account of what should replace its role in public life.

• Towards the Light – A. C. Grayling (2007)

  The history of how liberties were taken from religious and state authority, one fight at a time. A useful antidote to complacency.

• A Letter Concerning Toleration – John Locke (1689)

  The founding argument that the state has no business enforcing belief, and that coerced faith is worthless even on religion’s own terms.

• On Liberty – John Stuart Mill (1859)

  The case for free expression and against the tyranny of the majority, which is what established religion looks like in practice.

• Rights of Man – Thomas Paine (1791)

  Government by consent rather than by divine sanction, argued by the man who did most to popularise the idea in English.

• English Secularism – George Jacob Holyoake (1896)

  By the man who coined the word secularism, and the last person jailed for blasphemy in England for a public lecture.

• Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism – Susan Jacoby (2004)

  The secular tradition recovered from a history that has been steadily rewritten as a religious one.

• The Godless Constitution – Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore (1996)

  The documentary case that the American founders built a secular state deliberately, not by oversight.

• Liberty of Conscience – Martha Nussbaum (2008)

  On religious liberty as a right that only survives when the state takes no side at all.

• Society Without God – Phil Zuckerman (2008)

  Fieldwork in Denmark and Sweden, the least religious societies on earth, which are also among the healthiest and safest.

• Living the Secular Life – Phil Zuckerman (2014)

  How the nonreligious actually handle ritual, community, death and raising children, based on interviews rather than theory.

• God Is Dead: Secularization in the West – Steve Bruce (2002)

  The sociological evidence for religious decline, from the scholar who has defended the thesis most stubbornly.

• Sacred and Secular – Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (2004)

  Global survey data on why religiosity tracks existential insecurity, which predicts where belief holds and where it fades.

• The Secular Outlook – Paul Cliteur (2010)

  A defence of moral autonomy and state neutrality against both religious privilege and multicultural deference to it.

• How to Be Secular – Jacques Berlinerblau (2012)

  Argues that secularism has been badly defended by its friends and needs a better case than mockery.

• Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction – Nigel Warburton (2009)

  Where the limits of expression fall, which is the ground every blasphemy dispute is actually fought on.

The Psychology of Belief

Why belief is easy and disbelief is work: agency detection, indoctrination, the accident of birthplace, and why faith revives in a crisis.

• Breaking the Spell – Daniel C. Dennett (2006)

  Religion examined as a natural phenomenon with an evolutionary history, and an argument that it should not be exempt from study.

• The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins (2006)

  The book that made public atheism loud again. Its best chapters are on why the God hypothesis is a scientific claim and why children inherit religion rather than choose it.

• Outgrowing God – Richard Dawkins (2019)

  A shorter, plainer restatement aimed at readers who were raised in a faith and have started to wonder.

• The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins (1976)

  Introduced the meme, and with it the idea that beliefs spread according to their own transmissibility rather than their truth.

• Religion Explained – Pascal Boyer (2001)

  The cognitive science of why religious concepts are memorable and transmissible, and why the same kinds of gods keep recurring.

• In Gods We Trust – Scott Atran (2002)

  Religion as a by-product of ordinary mental machinery, argued against the view that it is an adaptation in its own right.

• Faces in the Clouds – Stewart Guthrie (1993)

  The anthropological case that religion is systematised anthropomorphism: we see agents everywhere because the error is cheap and missing one is not.

• Darwin’s Cathedral – David Sloan Wilson (2002)

  Argues religion is a group-level adaptation that made cooperation possible. The strongest version of a case worth taking seriously.

• Big Gods – Ara Norenzayan (2013)

  How watchful, punishing gods scaled human societies beyond the size trust alone could manage.

• The Belief Instinct – Jesse Bering (2011)

  Why the mind cannot easily imagine its own extinction, and how that single limitation manufactures an afterlife.

• Supersense – Bruce Hood (2009)

  Why supernatural intuitions arise in children without instruction, and why they persist in adults who know better.

• The Believing Brain – Michael Shermer (2011)

  How brains form beliefs first and assemble reasons afterwards, which explains the shape of most arguments about God.

• How We Believe – Michael Shermer (2000)

  Survey work on why people say they believe, and the gap between that and why they say others believe.

• The Evolution of God – Robert Wright (2009)

  How gods changed as the societies holding them changed, from tribal deities to a single universal one.

• Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not – Robert N. McCauley (2011)

  Religion fits human cognition; science fights it. Explains why one needs institutions and training and the other does not.

• Minds and Gods – Todd Tremlin (2006)

  A compact introduction to the cognitive science of religion for readers coming to it new.

• The Future of an Illusion – Sigmund Freud (1927)

  Religion as wish-fulfilment and inherited helplessness. The psychology has aged badly; the central intuition has not.

• The Essence of Christianity – Ludwig Feuerbach (1841)

  The original argument that God is humanity projected outward and worshipped back. Everything in this section is a footnote to it.

• A History of God – Karen Armstrong (1993)

  Four thousand years of the idea of God being rebuilt to suit each era. Written sympathetically, which makes the point harder to dodge.

• Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari (2011)

  On shared fictions as the technology that lets strangers cooperate, with religion as the oldest and most successful example.

• Faith No More – Phil Zuckerman (2011)

  Interviews with people who left religion, on what actually moved them. Rarely a single argument.