Softback. Cream and brown cover with title and images of people.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

Leading theologian Matthew Levering presents a thoroughgoing critical survey of the proofs of God’s existence for readers interested in traditional Christian responses to the problem of atheism. Beginning with Tertullian and ending with Karl Barth, Levering covers twenty-one theologians and philosophers from the early church to the modern period, examining how they answered the critics of their day. He also shows the relevance of the classical arguments to contemporary debates and challenges to Christianity. In addition to students, this book will appeal to readers of apologetics.

From the Back Cover – “This is the best kind of book: intellectually serious, lucid, and covering a topic of great importance and perennial interest. Levering’s interlocutors range in date from the second century to the twentieth, and he is a judicious and lively interpreter of them. For a reliable depiction of the Christian enterprise of thinking about reason and the question of God’s existence, this is the book to read.”

–Paul J. Griffiths, author of Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar

“A splendid survey; ideal for students and for the intellectually curious of every vocation. Levering fits an enormous range of information in a small space without any sacrifice of detail or clarity.” –David Bentley Hart, author of The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“Levering’s work is a careful, scholarly treatment of the history of attempts to argue for and against the existence of God. Levering recognizes the limits of such arguments and understands that they do not provide the kind of knowledge of God that Christian faith considers necessary for true relation to God. Nevertheless, he defends the value of such arguments as pointing to a mystery and majesty that requires Christian revelation to fully understand. The book is especially good in retrieving the contributions of patristic and medieval thinkers and gives a helpful account of the work of more recent thinkers, such as Maurice Blondel, Pierre Rousselot, and Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, who are often ignored in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy.” –C. Stephen Evans, Baylor University

“Matthew Levering’s panoramic, well-documented Proofs of God is a wonderfully insightful and wisely argued defense of theistic proofs. Whether or not one fully embraces the arguments for classical theism, this philosophical and theological survey of the natural theological terrain from antiquity to the present is a truly impressive work on the most important topic of all–the existence of the God in whom we live, and move, and have our being and the One with whom we have to do.” –Paul Copan, Palm Beach Atlantic University

Review: Thanks to excellent former atheist thinkers like Ed Feser and perhaps more particularly to college programs like St. Michaels’s at U of Toronto, I am already fairly well armed or perhaps even at a significant advantage when it comes to the inchoate ramblings of everyone when it comes to the nature of existence, God, final causation and meaning. Most folks are even blissfully unaware that they are gravely asserting the self-refuting nonsense of Hume’s conjunctive association which Hume apparently didn’t notice undermined everything that caused him to arrive at his incoherent opinion.

In short; the world, in a truly stunned manner , groans along within the intellectual prison that the modern rejection of sanity and reasoning on value and meaning leaves us with, precisely because of the centuries of stupid imposed by the ignorance and indifference of and to reality so nicely outlined and named in this book. This is the way out. When confronted with the ontological relativist for instance… the “who knows?” , or “other people say otherwise” types and there is religious dogmatism here are the ways through. So nice to have at hand a book that treats descriptively of the implications of the great errors and frankly resultant profound ignorance of what one ‘wag’ described as our idiot-savant culture where we can technologize our way to the moon, but have no idea why it or we exist and how we are to live. Thank God for the church , Aristotle and Aquinas who exactly have the way home in her wisdom and sanity.

Matthew Levering (PhD, Boston College) is the James N. and Mary D. Perry Jr. Chair of Theology at Mundelein Seminary, University of Saint Mary of the Lake, in Mundelein, Illinois. He previously taught at the University of Dayton. Levering is the author of numerous books, including The Theology of Augustine, Engaging the Doctrine of Revelation, and Ezra & Nehemiah in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series.