One can get as confused about the widening spectrum of types of atheism as one does over the mélange of Christian churches or the contents of the stew of the American evangelical movement. The present state of atheists' interaction is no help, for they are forever arguing over whether atheists are necessarily metaphysical materialists or humanists; feminist or antifeminist; militant or friendly; scientifically grounded or philosophically so; “churchy” or individualist; religious or antireligious; and so on. Many of the questions have no currently agreed-upon answers, and it appears that the arguments will continue ad infinitum if indeed there is an infinitum. The quarrels disturb atheists as the ongoing argument about the “nature” of Roman Catholicism disturbs Catholics, and the atheists have no pope or bishops to keep them in line. If one is to trust the books and blogs, the one thing they agree on is that none of them want to talk about human life and the cosmos in religious terms. Uniformly, they do not approve of the “supernatural.” We need a guide, a handbook, an accessible history of atheists, a book that doesn't amount to an argument for or against, but one that provides a map. Nick Spencer has supplied that with a generous and objective historical picture of the last four hundred years of atheism. The “modern world” is the matrix of atheism, for it came to the surface in the receding tide of the age of faith.

Spencer tells the tale in four chapters. The first, “Possibilities,” takes us from the Reformation and the Renaissance to the end of the seventeenth century, when the first modern atheists find their voice. The second chapter, “Pioneers,” covers the antitheist arguments formulated in the eighteenth century for the first time since the classical world (i.e., Lucretius). Atheism was a dangerous profession then and not at all lucrative. The third chapter, “Promises,” discusses the great atheist systematicians such as Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, and a dozen other deep thinkers. And, finally, in chapter 4, “Problems,” we encounter the twentieth century, when atheism and atheists faced unexpected problems in their own house, not just with theory but also with practice (e.g., the collapse of the European Marxist states, the resurgence of the old religions, and the birth of some new ones).

Spencer argues that in reality atheism was not about science or philosophy, but instead was and is a political and social cause: “To deny God was not simply to deny God. It was to deny the emperor or the king, the social structures that ordered your life, the ethical ties that regulated it, the hopes that inspired it and the judgment that reassured it” (xv–xvi).

This is comforting, for the origin and progress of atheism are not found in some basic clash of science and religion. Spencer also makes it clear that atheism and atheists, though they often appear to religious thinkers to be purely parasitic, negative, and destructive, in fact articulate a visionary alternative to inherited religion. Ludwig Feuerbach, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Hobbes, and Ludwig Wittgenstein protest against conventional thought and practice, a protest that religion badly needs. It may be somewhat more difficult to find that constructive edge in the frenetic work of the “four horsemen” of the New Atheism, but Spencer has shown us how to do so.

The book is characterized by sharp prose, an interesting-enough narrative to carry us over the stream of names of once prominent atheists, and excellent coverage of the past four hundred years, all in less than three hundred pages. I did miss mention of American intellectual atheists such as John Dewey and George Santayana, who established atheism as a respectable academic stance in American universities.

The book should be in every college library. It can be profitably read by bright undergraduates and should be read by graduate students in theology, philosophy, and religious studies. It neatly complements the theologically critical books of Alistair McGrath (2006) and Michael Buckley (1990 and 2004) on the subject. Spencer, research director at Theos, a British institute concentrating on religion in the public forum, has also published a fine study entitled Darwin and God.