Why I Am Not an Atheist

The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer

De: Christopher Beha

Narrado por: Christopher Beha

Named One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2026
One of The New York Times’s anticipated books of February!

What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope?

National Book Award–longlisted author Christopher Beha recounts his struggle with these questions while making an earnest appeal for readers to seek out answers of their own

Twenty-five years ago, celebrated author (and cradle Catholic) Christopher Beha gave up on God. Helped along by a reading of Bertrand Russell’s classic text Why I Am Not a Christian, he became a committed atheist, certain that his days of belief were behind him. A youthful brush with mortality soon set Beha on a decades-long quest for meaning in a godless world.

Why I Am Not an Atheist tells the story of this search for secular answers to what Immanuel Kant called the most urgent human questions: What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope? Along the way, Beha traces the development of what he understands to be the two major atheist worldviews: scientific materialism and romantic idealism.

Beha’s passage through these rival forms of atheism leads him to the surprising conclusion that faith—particularly faith in a created order in which each human life has a meaningful part—preserves the best of both traditions while offering a complete and coherent picture of reality.

This magisterial investigation of the heights of human intellectual achievement is at once deeply personal and universal—grounded in decades of reading and thinking about the problems of suffering, mortality, and ultimate meaning. Why I Am Not an Atheist is not a polemic on behalf of belief but a record of Beha’s long engagement with the enduring human questions, and a call for readers to take up these questions for themselves.

How to figure out how to live; One man’s voyage into the soul.

That there’s someone can read and for the most part understand the Western Philosophers then digest it for laymen is worth the price alone. To then feel the pain and eventual joy of Beha’s investigation, I can’t find a better word, into this abyss is enthralling.

That I wish it included a bit of Eastern philosophy is really too much to ask but I wish it were there anyway.

connections between philosophy and faith and strong science based case for belief.

Im halfway through and I’m really enjoying it especially since, like the author, Bertrand Russell shook my faith too when I was younger!! I normally listen to books on 1.5 speed but I wasn’t able to do this with this book because each sentence must be chewed on a bit before moving on. I have had to pause a lot and ask chat GPT what certain philosophical concepts mean but I’m not college educated so maybe other people will glide through it faster. This is not a criticism, I LOVE reading things that stretch my brain. so far this book has taught me how most ancient philosophy ultimately points to God.

Reignites fire ...

Brilliant review of what it is like to be conscious in a beautiful and uncertain universe

Boring

Too intellectual. He takes forever to make his point and explain why he's not an atheist but by then I no longer cared. His voice just droned on and on inducing yawns and a much needed nap