This essay presents a most nuanced case against militant atheism. The primary reason for its existence is what Crane perceives as a stalemate in the debate between friends and foes of religion. While he sides with atheism, Crane rejects central positions advanced by militant atheists. The essay does not outline the reasons for Crane to accept atheism. Instead it presents powerful objections to the claims that have become characteristic of militant atheism. The two main contentions that Crane defends are that militant atheists greatly misunderstand the nature of religion and that their intolerance towards religion is poorly justified. It is to be noted from the outset that Crane's essay is “intended as a contribution to a public debate about an important issue. It is not supposed to be an academic work, or a piece of theology or anthropology.” (xii) Accordingly, “no new theories or empirical discoveries” are presented in the essay. Crane basically offers his philosophical views about the nature of religion and some advice to fellow atheists as to how to respond to religion. The essay is divided into five chapters.

The first chapter carefully introduces the two aforementioned main contentions that the essay defends. It further develops a normative notion of religion that informs the discussion that is unfolding in the chapters that follow. Religion, argues Crane, means much more than an affirmation of empirical propositions, contrary to what militant atheists assume in their attack on religion. Religion rests on two pillars, as it were, namely an inclination to accept the existence of an all‐pervasive unseen order in everything there is (“religious impulse”), and the very human need to belong (“identification”). Accordingly, religion relates to everything that characterizes a person, including his ideas, desires, wishes, and actions. Thereby religion gives meaning to life. And in all this there is the indispensable moment of transcendence: “Without the transcendent, there is no religion” (27).

The second chapter elaborates on the nature of religious impulse. Noteworthy is the conceptual distinction this chapter introduces between religious impulse and religious temperament. The latter characterizes all those who “have the urge to believe, to look for an unseen order, even if they are not actually believers” (51). This urge, argues Crane, is not enough to be religious; nor is religious impulse without identification. This chapter provides also further clarifications with respect to Crane's own atheism: “I am a pessimistic atheist. I think the religious impulse is intelligible, but” (46) doomed to be frustrated today. Crane provides excellent arguments to support his claim that the religious impulse is a very legitimate response to the mystery that our universe actually amounts to. He rejects the idea that God functions as a hypothesis in religion, and objects to the equation of all factual and empirical matters with scientific matters, as well as to the reduction of cognition to propositional processing. Accordingly, conflict between science and religion is not a matter of conceptual necessity: “Religion is an attempt to make sense of the world, but it does not try to do this in the way science does.…Of all the kinds of things that we count as explanations, modern scientific explanation is only one” (72–73).

The third chapter specifies the nature of religious practice and thereby sheds light on the intimate relationship between religious impulse and identification. The concise analysis that Crane offers brings to light that religion is a social phenomenon like many others that breathe life into human society; nothing anomalous here. The idea that religion is something extraordinary with no place in an enlightened human society is, therefore, deeply misguided. And yet, religious practice, such as the observance of Sabbath, is something unique: “These activities are absolutely fundamental to anything that we recognize as a religion, but they are neither matters of morality nor simply the straightforward expression of some cosmological belief. This is why the cosmology‐plus‐morality picture of religion is so inadequate. It does not account for religious practice” (87–88). Important to understand about religious practice is that the practitioners usually inherited the practices they practice, and that the practices are deeply embedded in the life of a community. And the idea that membership in such a community should be the result of a rational decision in light of all available facts greatly misunderstands the nature of social existence in general—historically (the impact of traditional religions on our views of the nature of society), empirically (in analogy to science as a community effort, citizenship in a state, and membership in a family), and philosophically (“we are ‘thrown’ into a world that is not of our own making” [96]). The chapter also leads to a discussion of the sacred: “sacred objects play two roles in religious practice, what I will call their ‘internal’ role and their ‘external’ role. The internal role is to be the bearers of religious meaning inside and outside religious ritual” (111). Crane uses the philosophical notion of intentionality to explicate this role. The external role of sacred objects “is to unify the members of a religion” (115). The discussion of the sacred is central in Crane's essay because it is the sacred “that connects the two elements of religious belief that are the core themes of this book—the religious impulse and identification” (116).

The fourth chapter addresses the claim of militant atheists that religion is to be deeply linked with violence. Crane's multifaceted response to this line of reasoning is widely shared by theists: (a) there is also much nonreligious violence, (b) religious violence is not the worst kind of violence, and (c) conflicts are often too complex to say that it is religion only that drives the conflict; moreover, (d) if we happen to be in a position to blame religious elements for a conflict, then closer analysis shows that the conflict has nothing to do with explicitly theological beliefs. Most often religion enters the picture insofar as moral rules, the nature of worship, matters of identification, general psychological aspects, and social relationships are concerned. Thus, we should be “very careful about giving any role to ‘beliefs about God’ in explaining religious conflict” (133). There is another way to link religion and violence that finds promotion in the work of militant atheists. Insofar as religion is said to rest on faith alone, where faith is understood as an attitude of acceptance of propositions without any supportive evidence, religion is presented as outright irrational; and given the assumption that irrationality can lead to the worst kind of violence, religion and violence are linked by conceptual necessity. Crane responds to this line of reasoning that it can happen, indeed, that religious propositions are accepted without evidence in place. Yet, it is not essential to religion that propositions be accepted without evidence in place. This is a misunderstanding of the nature of religious faith. And the generalization that religion is irrational is difficult to substantiate because a theory of rationality can never legislate what to believe in order to be rational, but only specifies “what it is for something to be a reason, or what it is to be a process of good reasoning” (155). It does not seem possible to demonstrate that religion “can never be based on good reasoning or on good reasons” (156). But the link between the alleged irrationality of religion and violence turns out to be problematic also for the simple empirical fact that very rational people are capable of very violent acts and that irrational people can be very kind.

The final fifth chapter addresses some questions concerning the toleration of religion. Crane wishes to see bad effects of religion combated, but not religion as such. Given the failure of the secularism thesis, it is important that efforts are made to understand religion, to accept the human face of religion, and to live with the irreducible reality of religion. As an atheist Crane insists that tolerance of religion does not require acceptance of religious belief as possibly true. The very idea of tolerance is to live with disagreement: “So toleration of something implies disapproval of it: you can only tolerate those things of which you disapprove or submit to some other kind of negative assessment” (176). The chapter carefully distinguishes tolerance, relativism, and a global respect of all views. The foundation of tolerance is respect for each and every person—whatever their views are. This is presented as a much more “realistic (and therefore pessimistic) response to the reality of religion, and of human nature” (193) than the pursuit of a quest for educating religious people in the hope that they will ultimately give up their wrong views. “The optimistic view that religion will wither away in the face of science and reason does not have the facts on its side” (192).

From the perspective of the field of science and religion—or religion and science for that matter—this essay is to be greatly welcomed. It can be seen as valuable support for recent efforts to communicate more effectively the results of academic discussions to non‐experts. Noteworthy in this context is Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, a collection of essays edited by the eminent historian of science, Ronald L. Numbers (). The volume eloquently brings to light, for instance, the high degree of simplicity that allows militant atheists to utilize the history of science in their attack on religion. Crane's essay beautifully directs our attention to the extremely problematic nature of many of the philosophical assumptions on which militant atheism rests. The other side of the coin is that the position of religious apologetics seems equally simplistic and problematic when they urge a consonance between science and religion—historically and philosophically. If there is any significant common ground between religious apologetics and militant atheists, then it is probably a lack of appreciation of the complexity of the relationship between science and religion from past to present, and a narrow focus on propositions in their analysis of religion. This is no trivial finding because religious apologetics are actually at risk “to reinforce the very conditions that make conflict possible” (Harrison , 198). Anyone interested in overcoming the confines of conflict when thinking about the relationship between science and religion will greatly benefit from Crane's essay, and one can only hope that of those there are plenty.