How to Believe

In Why Believe? (Continuum) Professor John Cottingham argued that every human being possesses impulses and aspirations for which religious belief offers a home.

His new book, How to Believe is concerned not so much with why we should believe as with what leads a person to become a believer. Cottingham challenges believers and non-believers alike to think afresh about the need to change their lives and about what such change might involve.

Many people are deeply interested in the spiritual aspects of human existence but hold back from religious commitment because of doubts about the evidence for God. In this lucid and emotionally engaged study, John Cottingham charts a rational pathway towards religious belief by showing how it requires all the responses of the human mind.

Intellectual analysis has its place, but to grasp all the relevant evidence we also need emotional openness and imaginative sensitivity. Drawing on a rich array of literary, scriptural and poetic resources, the author locates religious belief in a transformative framework of meaning and value.