William Lane Craig is a research professor in philosophy at Biola University in La Mirada, Calif. He lives in Atlanta, Ga. Craig wrote a chapter, “Theistic Critiques of Atheism,” for the Cambridge Companion to Atheism.

Susan Jacoby is the New York-based author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.

The Rev. Edward T. Oakes is a Jesuit priest who teaches theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Ill. Oakes wrote a Jan. 22, 2007, essay, “Reason and Pop Atheism,” posted on the blog of the conservative religious journal First Things.

Daniel C. Dennett is a professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. He is the author of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. A summary of his arguments can be found in this Jan. 20, 2006, essay, “Common-Sense Religion,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Dennett is a […]

Dr. Francis Collins is director of the National Institutes of Health and former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Collins has explained his belief in God in many press interviews and in his book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

Samuel Oliner is emeritus professor of sociology and director of the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif. Oliner co-founded the institute in 1982 to study altruism and seek ways to enhance altruism and prosocial behavior in society. A native of Poland, Oliner was rescued by a non-Jewish family at age […]

University of California at Los Angeles anthropology professor Joan Silk published a study of chimpanzees in the Oct. 27, 2005, Nature that showed that the chimps were motivated to obtain rewards for themselves but not to provide rewards for other group members. In other words, they did not show altruistic behavior, contrary to expectations raised […]

Ruben Habito is a professor of world religions and spirituality at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He is co-editor of The Practice of Altruism: Caring and Religion in a Global Perspective. He specializes in Buddhism and wrote a chapter in Altruism in World Religions.

Dan Batson is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He has studied empathy as a possible source of altruistic motivation and the psychological implications of the egoism-altruism relationship. He has also researched other sources of positive social motivation, such as collectivism and principalism. He wrote The Altruism Question: Toward a […]