God - Keith Ward

At the beginning of the 21st century, God has become boring and irrelevant, states Keith Ward in this thought-provoking text. Ward presents an investigation of the history of ideas about God that is marked by radical views, erudition and wit. He provides a journey through the philosophical and cultural heritage of the last 2000 years, drawing on such rich and diverse sources as the myths of the Greek gods on Mount Olympus, through the philosophy of St Augustine and Sartre, to wet Sunday afternoons and the movie Alien. The intellectual and theological legacies of almost every renowned thinker - believers and non-believers alike - are considered, from Aristotle to Ayer, Hegel to Heidegger, Al Ghazali to Sankara.;Ward is neither a God-knocker, nor a trendy theologian. He claims that most people who reject God are simply rejecting the wrong God. His belief is that reflecting on the history of ideas about God is both a good way of seeing what philosophy has really been about for most of its history, and a means of rediscovering the poetic richness that lies within many ancient and orthodox religious traditions. Freed from the constraints of literalist thinking, he asserts, we can move towards a new, deeper, inter-religious understanding, an understanding for which we should all be striving in the current global political climate.