Recommended Reading and Viewing
Books
This page will grow over time. These are books I have read and recommend, most for positive value, a few as influential, some as evidence of false or disputed claims (*).
If you know of a book that belongs on this list, please send me a reference. Better still, submit a review to help me evaluate.
((to be done: break into categories & link))
® = Recommended first reading for all.
* = Books to read to help understand what is wrong in them, not to recommend what they state or advise.
A Brief Guide to Islam, Paul Grieve
A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Steven Kotler, Peter H. Diamandis
A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, Thomas Sowell
An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, Dan O’Brien
® Assembling Life: How Can Life Begin on Earth and Other Habitable Planets?, David W. Deamer
A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing, Lawrence Krauss
Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, Marc J. Hetherington, Jonathan D. Weiler
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert M. Sapolsky
Being Wrong: Adventures on the Margin of Error, Kathryn Schulz
® Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity, David Christian
Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality (The Great Courses), Robert Sapolsky
® Biology: The Science of Life (The Great Courses), Stephen Nowicki
® Braintrust, What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality, Patricia S. Churchland
Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett
Caeser’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us, Sam Kean
Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America, Cass R. Sunstein
Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman
Cognitive Science, Religion and Theology: From Human Minds to Divine Minds, Justin L. Barrett
Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults, Steven Hassan
Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, Susan Blackmore
Conservatives Without Conscience, John Dean
Crazy For God, Frank Schaeffer
Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe, Lisa Randall
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Daniel Dennett
® Deconverted, Seth Andrews
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War, Joe Bageant
Dianetics*, L. Ron Hubbard
® Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson, Jennifer Michael Hecht
Economics In One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt
Einstein’s Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists, Richard Wolfson
Evidence Considered: A Response To Evidence for God, Glenton Jelbert
Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, Donald R. Prothero
Exploring Metaphysics, David Kyle Johnson
Fantastic Fallacies and Where to Find Them, David Worley
Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, Kurt Anderson
® Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism, Aron Ra
Freethinkers, Susan Jacoby
Free to Choose: A Personal Statement, Milton Friedman
Free Will, Sam Harris
® God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens
Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists, Dan Barker
Going Clear, Lawrence Wright
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond
Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
® How Jesus Became God, Bart D. Ehrman
How God Changes You Brain, Andrew Newberg
® How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker
® How We Believe, Michael Shermer
How We Learn (The Great Courses), Monica Pasupathi
Incognito, The Secret Lives of Brains, David Eagleman
Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel C. Dennett
Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan, Kim Phillips-Fein
® Irrationality, Stuart Sutherland
Interfaith Leadership: A Primer, Eboo Patel
Introducing Anthropology of Religion, Jack David Eller
Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, Michael J. Sandel
Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion, Marlene Windell
® Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris
® Letting Go of God, Julia Sweeney (multiple formats including video and audio)
Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions, Phil Zuckerman
Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
® Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor, Layla Saad
Metaphysics, W. H. Walsh
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, Richard H. Thaler
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, Bart D. Ehrman
Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson
® Moral Origins, Christopher Boehm
Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, Joshua D. Greene
On Being Certain, Robert A. Burton
On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, Richard C. Carrier
On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
® On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Timothy Snyder
® Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, Neil deGrasse Tyson
® Origins of Life (The Great Courses), Robert M. Hazen
Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are, Frans De Waal
Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us, Avi Tuschman
® = Recommended first reading for all.
* = Books to read to help understand what is wrong in them, not to recommend what they state or advise.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Carl Sagan
Power over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory, Dennis Dalton
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
® Predisposed, John R Hibbing, et al.
Prophet’s Prey, Sam Brower, Jon Krakauer
Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten Our Future, Donald Prothero
Reason, Robert Reich
Right Turns, Michael Medved
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari
Science and Religion (The Great Courses), Lawrence M. Principe
® Seeing Through Christianity, Bill Zuersher
SuperSense, Bruce Hood
The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams and God, David J. Linden
The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn, Louisa Gilder
The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine
® The Authoritarians (find as a free pdf), Bob Altemeyer
The Belief Instinct, Jesse Bering
® The Believing Brain, Michael Shermer
The Bible*, various
The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself, Sean Carroll
® The Big Three in Economics, Mark Skousen
The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought, Gary F. Marcus
® The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, Richard Dawkins
The Book of Mormon*, Joseph Smith
The Christian Delusion, John W. Loftus
The Clockwork Universe, Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World, Edward Dolnick
The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater
The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, Russell Kirk
The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
The Demon Under the Microscope, Thomas Hager
The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, James D. Watson
® The End of Faith, Sam Harris
® The Faith Instinct, Nicholas Wade
The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Unamerican, Andrew L. Seidel
® The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins
The God Virus, Darrel Ray
The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, Richard Dawkins
The History of the Bible: The Making of the New Testament Canon (The Great Courses), Bart D. Ehrman
The Language of God*, Francis S Collins
The Magic of Reality, Richard Dawkins
The Moral Animal, Robert Wright
The Moral Arc, Michael Shermer
The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris
® The Nonreligious: Understanding Secular People and Societies, Phil Zuckerman, et al.
The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, Matt Ridley
Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Peter Godfrey-Smith
The Philosophy of Science, Jeffrey L. Kasser
The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, Drew Westen
The Portable Atheist, Christopher Hitchens
The Qur’an*
® The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, Stephen Brusatte
® The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood, David R. Montgomery
® The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Ray Kurzweil
The Spiritual Brain: Science and Religious Experience (The Great Courses), Andrew Newberg
The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers, Will Durant
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt
® The United States Constitution
The Universe in a Nutshell, Stephen Hawking
Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
Travels, Michael Crichton (non-fiction)
Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, Bill Nye
® Understanding the Misconceptions of Science (The Great Courses), Don Lincoln
Understanding the Mysteries of Human Behavior (The Great Courses), Stephen P. Hinshaw
Whose Bible Is It?, Jaroslav Pelikan
Who’s In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain, Michael S. Gazzaniga
Why Atheists Are So Angry?, Greta Christina
® Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne
Why I Am Not a Christian, Bertrand Russell
® Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer
® Why There Is No God, Armin Navabi
® Why We Believe in Gods, J. Anderson Thomson, Clare Aukofer
® Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills, Steven Novella
® Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion Year History of the Human Body, Neil Shubin
® = Recommended first reading for all.
* = Books to read to help understand what is wrong in them, not to recommend what they state or advise.
If you are a religious believer you may have noticed that there are no books on theology or apologetics listed, perhaps thinking I am not presenting a fair representation of diverse positions. I would love to discuss this in another format, perhaps on Skeptic Haven’s Let’s Talk call-in show, but the fact is that the god hypothesis (any god) is no longer a likely concept. Current knowledge indicates natural phenomena, currently apologetics are fallacious (a surprising find) and current understanding of human psychology shows how prone we are to false belief (some more than others).
That is not an opinion position, it is the current fact given the collective status of human knowledge. As such it would be misleading information to place on a site dedicated largely to truth and education.
I realize many will take that as an affront but it is not, it is just the current status of human knowledge. I have made and will make content explaining elements of this huge topic in posts, Believer/Nonbeliever discussions and videos to come. My goal is to help all understand.
It is not an understatement that humanity is going through a long, difficult, often unintuitive transition, where knowledge of the most likely truths has outpaced our population-level ability to accept them but it will happen in time. Nobody knows how long this will take but it will happen eventually, unless we kill ourselves first fighting wars over it. We’ve been at this for 300+ years with progress being made in starts, fits and backsteps. I would love to get back together with you all in 1000 years to see how things are going. Maybe they will have us all uploaded by then and we will have endless time to talk!
a kinder world.
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