Reviewing A Book Against God

"I have not believed in God since I was fifteen, and now, at forty, I suspect that I am too late to change." Thus begins James Wood's review of atheist Sam Harris' Letters to a Christian Nation. It's perhaps the most personal review Wood has written, exploring themes and arguments that he tried to fictionalise in his own The Book Against God. As an unbeliever searching for answers, he disapproves of the "jauntily unphilosophical way" in which questions of spirituality are treated by Harris and Dawkins (in his The God Delusion). And he ends on a decidedly agnostic note: "...about the very moment before this first expansion [the Big Bang] , and the conditions that made it possible, there is only speculation. About this moment, we are all in the dark, and silence calls to silence. " Necessary reading.