Acknowledgments

One thing I regret in relation to my book is that there was no “acknowledgments page” at the start. The effect of this is that some of those towards whom I am most indebted were not mentioned in the book. And so, I want to post my acknowledgments page here.

First, I would like to thank my wife, Tanya, who became something of an author’s widow during the months when I was most intensely engaged in writing, and who gamely took up the parenting slack on weekends so that I could go into the office to work. On game days when OSU football fans took over the university, including every available parking space within miles of the campus, Tanya would drive me within hailing distance of campus, our children in the back, so that I could hike through the throngs of fans to my office. And, when it was time for me to come home, she’d cruise up and down the major street just outside campus until I could make my way back through the orange revelry.

I would like to thank my department head, Doren Recker, for taking action to relieve me of my undergraduate advising duties so that I could devote my attention to writing. More broadly, I want to thank the members of my department for providing an atmosphere of intellectual encouragement and support.

I would like to thank my children for providing the emotional grounding that keeps me asking how my academic pursuits are relevant to the business of life. I would also like to thank my son for a particularly memorable exchange. One afternoon, while I was sitting at the kitchen table with the entire manuscript in front of me, proof reading, Evan sat down next to me and asked me what that HUGE pile of papers was (he was not quite five at the time).

“It’s the book I’m working on,” I said. And then, in a moment of pride: “One day soon, when you go to the bookstore, you might see Daddy’s book there.” My intent was to impress him, but he didn’t look impressed. Instead, he fingered one of the pages of the manuscript and asked, “Can I draw on these?”

Since then, of course, I’ve had some of the more extreme critics of my book all but say that its greatest value is as scrap paper. They might be pleased to know that my son agrees with them. Every writer should have an Evan around to jar them out of their pretensions of grandeur.

Finally, I would like to thank my intellectual mentors. I am, of course, indebted to my professors in college and graduate school who oversaw my early intellectual development, most notably Newton Garver who directed my dissertation on violence and Christian love, and who first introduced me to Simone Weil as well as to the essay on ideological violence by John Ladd which has so influenced my thinking over the years. I must also say that my understanding of science and its methods—which comes out in my book—was largely shaped during the semester Garver and I team-taught an epistemology course.

On a deeper and more abstract level, it is Garver who first introduced me to the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), which was born out of the collaboration of Quakers and prison inmates, and which offers experiential nonviolence/conflict resolution/community-building workshops in prisons as well as in various community settings. I cannot begin to understand how my involvement with AVP has shaped my personal and intellectual life, but I have no doubt that where I have succeeded in avoiding stridency in my philosophical arguments, I have AVP to thank. Where I have succeeded in being fair to my intellectual opponents, I have the listening skills taught in AVP to thank. And the spiritual impulse that lies at the heart of my book—to resist the urge to insist that all reasonable people must ascribe to the same worldview, to seek an intellectual space in which divergent perspectives can co-exist without insisting that those who disagree are either idiots or moral monsters—this is a spiritual impulse that has been nurtured in me through years of facilitating conversations about the meaning of life in prisons, addiction recovery groups, church youth groups, and other settings.

I am also indebted to a faculty member from the philosophy department at Ithaca College whose name, unfortunately, I cannot recall (nor can I recall what he looks like). What I do recall is that when I went to Ithaca College for a job interview during my final year in graduate school (a one-year position that I didn’t get), this philosopher was giving me a walking tour of campus—and said something about being interested in religious hope. We proceeded to have a conversation about the concept of hope (he rejected the idea that it involved expectation, since we can hope for things that we don’t expect to happen), as well as about what role hope played in religious faith and religious life. I remember sitting with him on a grassy hillside and talking about Martin Luther King, Jr., whose thought at the time was a central focus of my research.

Beyond that, I don’t remember much about the conversation. What I do remember is coming out of it convinced (in a way I hadn’t been before) that hope was really central to understanding religion—a conviction that eventually evolved (through my engagement with other thinkers, most notably William James) both into my functional definition of God as that whose existence would fulfill the “ethico-religious hope” and into my pragmatic understanding of religious faith as the decision to live as if a hoped-for possibility is true.

But my most significant intellectual mentor is a friend I first met in graduate school, who has done more to shape the course of my intellectual life than any other individual. John Kronen was the other “God guy” among the graduate students in a very secular philosophy department. He was a few years ahead of me in the program and so defended his dissertation after my second year at SUNY Buffalo, but we continued to maintain a close friendship over the years, one characterized by intense and lively philosophical conversations which have often culminated in collaborative articles.

While my professors in graduate school introduced me to the most recognized figures in the history of philosophy, it was John who first introduced me to Schleiermacher and Hermann Lotze. It was John who first suggested that I read Plutarch’s essay, “On Superstition,” which he called “very wise.” I think that it was John who, more than a decade ago when I was putting together a course on ideological justifications for violence, suggested Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew as an ideal text to include in such a course. It was John who bought me Zaehner’s The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism and encouraged me to read it. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if up to a third of my theological library is comprised of books that John bought for me as birthday or Christmas presents.

I’ve learned that if John says, “Read this,” I will find it worth reading. Unfortunately, being a very slow reader, I cannot keep up with the list of works he recommends. But his track record of guiding me towards works that have influenced and inspired me is so remarkable that his recommendations (and gifts) consistently end up higher in the queue than do others.

John is one of the few individuals who read the entire manuscript of Is God a Delusion? as it was being produced. And while he (good-naturedly) bemoans the fact that I did not change the book in light of his criticisms, the reason for this is clear: So much of who I am intellectually is already shaped by John’s influence that, where we disagree (on such matters as intelligent design, for example), the disagreement represents one of those places where years of arguments and reading recommendations have failed to convince me.

Every scholar should, I think, have a friend like that.