36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

Recommended by Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology

Pinker admits that he’s hardly unbiased in loving “36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction” by philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. After all, he is married to the author. But he believes it is “the best example” of a literary genre popular in the Harvard community: the campus novel. The protagonist is a professor of psychology whose atheist manifesto becomes a surprise best-seller. Unfortunately, he can’t seem to escape secular manifestations of the religious impulse in his personal and professional life. 

Pinker says the novel is not a roman à clef, but “readers will recognize wicked satires of several academic types, including an impossibly erudite literary lion and a belligerent neoconservative economist.” One bonus is the mock appendix in which the eponymous arguments are laid out and systematically rebutted. If readers choose to listen to the audiobook, they’ll hear Pinker presenting the arguments, with the author responding.