Keith Ward: The God Conclusion

God and the Western Philosophical Tradition

Darton, Longman and Todd, 2009     Amazon.co.uk

Back Cover:

Discover why…

…Plato was not a world-hating totalitarian

…Aquinas’s Five Ways are not so bad after all

…Kicking stones cannot refute Bishop Berkeley

…Schopenhauer was not quite an atheist

…and other refreshing new perspectives on spiritual thinking in western philosophy

This entertaining book posits the theory that philosophy, far from being the enemy of religion, has more often than not supported a non-materialist view of the universe. Keith Ward re-examines the works of western philosophy’s greatest thinkers – from Plato to Aquinas to Kant and Hegel – and suggests that the majority accepted “the God conclusion”: that there is a supreme spiritual reality which is the cause or underlying nature of the physical universe.

Keith Ward was Professor of the History and Philosophy of Religion in the University of London, and Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. The God Conclusion is a revised and expanded version of his 2008 Sarum Lectures and 2007-8 Gresham College Lectures.