Reddit reviews The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy)

There is a lot of discussion here about what ‘teaching Atheism’ might look like, and since there a few of us who actually do that I thought it might be interesting for people to see what we do.

A good friend of mine teaches at the University of Edinburgh on the subject of non-religion, and in the UK there is also the Non-religion and Secularzation Research Network, the Understanding Unbelief research program at the University of Kent, the International Society of Historians of Atheism Secularism and Humanism, and the International Society for Heresy Studies:

As well, many of us have recently published books on Atheism and non-religion, and there is a growing number of people researching Atheism at the academic level.

Here’s a good short bibliography.

History of Atheism

Atheism and the US Supreme Court

New Atheism

Cambridge Companion

Oxford Handbook

Definitions

Nonreligion

David Hume - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, "Of Miracles".

Anthony Flew - The Presumption of Atheism (Link goes to a layman review of the argument. There's a real Philosophy Journal entry somewhere, sorry I couldn't find a link for it.)

Michael Martin - The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, "Keith Parsons: Some Contemporary Theistic Arguments; The Evidentialist Challenge".

Oxford Handbook of Atheism

Cambridge Companion to Atheism

Any decent textbook about philosophy of religion should provide counter-points to the arguments for God. There is also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; here's the article on Aquinas.

You can be atheist, but it helps if you realize that richard dawkins' work is considered extremely lowbrow. He's popular with random teenagers, not academics, because he misunderstands quite a bit of what he tries talking about. If you want something academic, this is a bit more up to speed.

I would recommend The Cambridge Companion to Atheism.

Go with the Cambridge Companion to Atheism, it is a good starting point, covers a variety of angles, has multiple authors each writing about subjects they know well. I find it to be far more rigorous than much of the pop atheism, this however means that there are parts that can be difficult to follow if you don't know modal logic or ethical theory. It comes down to how much you want the work to challenge you.

I would also highly recommend Atheism and Theism (Great Debates in Philosophy) as a good critical overview of the arguments involved. It is better at remaining neutral and dispassionate than the pop atheism books since it seeks to present both sides, it is well written and the author on the atheist side is imo much better at structuring arguments than someone like Dawkins.

The Cambridge Companion to Atheism is an interesting introduction to Atheism. This review summarizes the book well.

You might be familiar with some of this already, but I'm going to explain it as though you have no familiarity with this subject.

Philosophy of religion explores topics such as the existence of God, concepts of God, religious language, religious belief, miracles, and so on. Philosophyofreligion.info presents a good primer for the subject.

It seems like your primary interest is in the existence of God. Natural theology, although the approach of doing theology without the assistance of special, divine revelation, in philosophical circles is basically synonymous with arguments for the existence of God. Natural atheological arguments, as some have put it (i.e. Plantinga), are arguments for atheism.

Popular arguments for the existence of God would be the various cosmological, teleological, ontological, and axiological arguments. There's almost too many of them to keep track. Popular arguments against the existence of God would be the various kinds of the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, and attacks on the coherence of theism.

"The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology" is perhaps the best single resource on arguments for and against the existence of God, although it is highly advanced. "The Cambridge Companion to Atheism" is also a very solid resource. "The Existence of God" by Swinburne is classic, as is his "Coherence of Theism." Again, all of those are fairly advanced. Swinburne has a shorter, more popular level version of "The Existence of God" titled "Is There a God?" Stephen Davis also has a similar book titled "God, Reason and Theistic Proofs." If you're going to be reading Oppy and Sobel, I recommend reading their counterparts in any of these books above (barring the "Cambridge Companion to Atheism," of course), that way you have a good balance of perspectives.

With regards to the philosophy of religion a bit more broadly, William Rowe, C. Stephen Evans, and Brian Davies each have solid, brief introduction books. Michael Murray and Eleonore Stump have a more thorough introduction; Louis Pojman and Michael Rea have a great anthology; and William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, and Michael Rea have perhaps the greatest single resource on this subject.

Moreover, William Lane Craig has dozens of debates on topics concerning the existence of God (and other topics) available on YouTube. Here is a fantastic list of his debates with links available in the table. You'll see some popular figures in the list that aren't good philosophers (i.e. Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Lawrence Krauss, etc.), but there are quite a few very high caliber philosophers on that list too (i.e. Michael Tooley, Quentin Smith, Peter Millican, Stephen Law, etc.).

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Good luck!

Why don't you just read up a bit on what philosophers of religion actually have to say on this matter?

You might want to start here, but, if you want to find a philosopher of religion that actually basically agrees with your distinction (and lays it out more rigorously) you might want to look up Michael Martin's introduction in the Cambridge Companion to Atheism.