Nathan Schneider reviews 36 Arguments for the Existence of God:
What is it like to be a New Atheist — one of those irascible preachers of reason, those “militant” purveyors of populist non-belief like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens? Most people don’t bother to ask, because they think they already know. Either it’s a depraved and pathetic existence, buoyed (especially in the notorious case of Hitchens) only by excessive drink or else suffused in a nearly mystical state that frees one (as it seemingly does Dawkins) enough from dogmatic noise to revel fully in the grandeur of the scientific imagination. Either way, it’s an inhuman caricature.
Few are better placed to set the record straight than Princeton-trained philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, whose new novel tells the story of a suddenly rich and famous “atheist with a soul,” a psychologist of religion named Cass Seltzer.
