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Michael Martin (ed.), the Cambridge Companion to Atheism.

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Michael Martin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), xix + 331 pp.

This timely volume appears in the midst of what many see as a resurgence of interest in and enthusiasm for atheism, a resurgence that may well result from a reaction to resurgent religious fundamentalism at home and abroad. In the words of its editor, this wide-ranging collection of eighteen original essays aims "to provide general readers and advanced students with an introduction to atheism: its history, present social context, legal implications, supporting arguments, implications for morality, and relation to other perspectives" (1). As one might infer from such an ambitious list of topics, the coverage is indeed usually at the introductory level. Nevertheless, the book does contain some resources that scholars will find valuable, and its introductory-level approach is appropriate given the book's aims.

The editor has included a brief General Introduction as well as a glossary of many of the less familiar or technical terms used in the various essays. Although generally helpful, the Introduction does contain here and there a passage whose less than careful use of language detracts from its value in making the crucial terminology precise at the start. For instance, the editor describes agnosticism as "the position of neither believing nor disbelieving that God exists" (2), thus implying that agnosticism is not a proposition so much as a condition in which one might find oneself. Fair enough as definitions go, but two sentences later the editor treats agnosticism as a proposition: "Agnosticism and positive atheism are indeed incompatible: if atheism is true, agnosticism is false and conversely" (2). If agnosticism and positive atheism are, as the editor most often suggests, not propositions but conditions in which one might find oneself, then they are neither true nor false. It makes our discourse more precise, then, if we instead define these various views as propositions that enjoy the usual logical relations of entailment, consistency, inconsistency, and so on. The Introduction also contains at least one misleading characterization of an atheistic argument that the editor notes isn't covered by any of the volume's contributors: J.L. Schellenberg's argument from the existence of a plurality of nontheistic religions in our world. Schellenberg is described as having "attempted to demonstrate that the belief in the existence of nontheistic religions makes a theistic God's existence improbable" (4), when of course it is not our belief in the existence of nontheistic religions, but the existence of those religions themselves, that arguments of this sort see as disconfirming the existence of God.

The collection begins with two essays that provide overviews of atheism in the ancient Greco-Roman world and in post-Renaissance Europe. In an effort, perhaps, to keep the size of such a wide-ranging volume manageable, very strict word-limits seem to have been imposed on each of the contributors. In some cases these...

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