36 Arguments for the Existence of God
by Rebecca Goldstein · 2010
Buy on AmazonAfter Cass Seltzer's book becomes a surprise best seller, he's dubbed "the atheist with a soul" and becomes a celebrity. He wins over the stunning Lucinda Mandelbaum, "the goddess of game theory," and loses himself in a spiritually expansive infatuation. A former girlfriend appears: an anthropologist who invites him to join in her quest for immortality through biochemistry. And he is haunted by reminders of the two people who ignited his passion to understand religion: his mentor and professor--a renowned literary scholar with a suspicious obsession with messianism--and an angelic six-year-old mathematical genius who is heir to the leadership of a Hasidic sect.…
Recommended by
"A moving, hilarious, and intellectually deep novel about religion and atheism."
Steven Pinker's Top Ten Favorite Books · onegrandbooks.com
"This is a novel. It’s about a professor who has written a book about atheism, and how religion and atheism play out in everyday life. It shows the thought processes of atheism and religion, what they do and don’t have in common. One of the things that’s interesting about it is that the author, Rebecca Goldstein, was raised in a highly orthodox, Jewish Hasidic household and this background makes its appearance in this book in ways that I won’t give away. But it’s a very fun book and there are very few novels with atheist characters who are presented in any of a kind of a positive or interesting way, so I think anyone who picks it up will enjoy it. Rebecca Goldstein is absolutely brilliant and, I might add, one of the few women writers on atheism, which is a whole other problem we can talk about some other time. Yes, but they’re wound around a story. The philosophical arguments for and against atheism are all in this book, but they’re not presented as philosophy, they’re presented as part of a novel and a romance. It’s also a romance novel ."
Atheism · fivebooks.com