Description

What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope?

National Book Award-longlisted author Christopher Beha recounts his struggle with these questions while making an earnest appeal for readers to seek out answers of their own

Twenty-five years ago, celebrated author (and cradle Catholic) Christopher Beha gave up on God. Helped along by a reading of Bertrand Russells classic text Why I Am Not a Christian, he became a committed atheist, certain that his days of belief were behind him. A youthful brush with mortality soon set Beha on a decades-long quest for meaning in a godless world.

Why I Am Not an Atheist tells the story of this search for secular answers to what Immanuel Kant called the most urgent human questions: What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope? Along the way, Beha traces the development of what he understands to be the two major atheist worldviews: scientific materialism and romantic idealism.

Behas passage through these rival forms of atheism leads him to the surprising conclusion that faithparticularly faith in a created order in which each human life has a meaningful partpreserves the best of both traditions while offering a complete and coherent picture of reality.

This magisterial investigation of the heights of human intellectual achievement is at once deeply personal and universalgrounded in decades of reading and thinking about the problems of suffering, mortality, and ultimate meaning. Why I Am Not an Atheist is not a polemic on behalf of belief but a record of Behas long engagement with the enduring human questions, and a call for readers to take up these questions for themselves.

Author: Christopher Beha
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: 02/17/2026
Pages: 432
Weight: 1.25lbs
ISBN: 9780593490471
Language: English