Why I Am Not an Atheist

About this book

Named One of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2026One 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.