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Preface | |
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Acknowledgements | |
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Introduction | |
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The Limits of Theistic Explanation | |
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Must the Universe Have a Cause? | |
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The mysteries of existence | |
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A first cause | |
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The temporal and modal cosmological arguments | |
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Problems with the first premise | |
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Summary Further reading | |
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Is God Necessary? | |
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Possible worlds | |
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The ontological argument | |
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The modal ontological argument | |
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God and modal realism | |
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Summary Further reading | |
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Could the Universe Have an Explanation? | |
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A trivial explanation | |
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Causes and casual explanations | |
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Personal explanation | |
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A necessary cause? | |
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Summary Further reading | |
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Are We the Outcome of Chance or Design? | |
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Analogy and the teleological argument | |
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Probability and the teleological argument | |
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The concept of chance | |
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The weak anthropic principle | |
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Summary Further reading | |
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Does the Universe Have a Purpose? | |
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The strong anthropic principle | |
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Teleology and casual reductionism: the selfish gene hypothesis | |
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Teleology without casual reductionism | |
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Summary Further reading | |
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Moral Arguments for Atheism | |
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Are God and Ethics Inseparable or Incompatible? | |
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Plato's dilemma | |
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Descriptive versus prescriptive morality | |
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Moral realism and moral subjectivism | |
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Pluralism and autonomy | |
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Summary Further reading | |
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Is there a Problem of Evil? | |
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Disaster, depravity, deity and design | |
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Determinism and human nature | |
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Human freedom from the divine perspective | |
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Can the theist refuse to answer the problem of evil? | |
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Summary Further reading | |
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Religion without God | |
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Is God a Fiction? | |
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Realism, positivism and instrumentalism | |
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Radical theology | |
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Fiction and the emotions | |
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Atheism and religious practice | |
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Summary Further reading | |
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Is 'Does God Exist?' a real Question? | |
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The deflationist argument | |
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The argument applied to theism | |
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Deflationism deflated? | |
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Summary Further reading | |
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Should the Atheist Fear Death? | |
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Riddles of morality | |
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The river of time and the sea of ice | |
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Death in the mirror | |
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Immortality: real and vicarious | |
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Summary | |
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Further reading Glossary | |
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Bibliography | |
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Index | |