Proofs of God

"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