The Devils’ Gospels: Finding God in Four Great Atheist Books

Can we find religious inspiration in great atheist writing? It is a paradoxical challenge but an urgent one. The gap between secular and religious understandings of the world has become impossibly wide. It is damaging Christianity and cutting young people off from the possibility of faith. Yet if God exists, everything we learn about the world should tell us more about God. The Devils’ Gospels started in a youth discussion group at Oxford’s University Church. Each month the author would introduce a different atheist book to the teenagers to see where the discussion would lead. Four of the best are given the status of ’gospels’ here: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Jacques Derrida’s Writing and Difference, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. These books each have, in their own way, shaped the world we live in today. The Devils’ Gospels captures the energy of their ideas in language simple enough for a bright 11-year-old to understand, and uses it to shed greater light on the nature of God. But it is not just written for intelligent teenagers trying to find their way towards belief. It is aimed at two other important groups: Christians who feel that they aren’t getting the answers that matter from the Church, and non-believers who want to explore the possibility that there may be more to life than physics and biology.

Christopher Gasson is a journalist, publisher, and amateur theologian. He studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University and subsequently took responsibility for running the University Church’s Sunday school and youth discussion group. In his day job he publishes a successful specialist magazine covering the water industry and is an occasional contributor to the New Statesman magazine. He lives in Oxford, UK.