Sharon D. Welch is provost and professor of religion and society at Chicago’s Meadville Lombard Theological School, which educates students in the Unitarian Universalist tradition. She is also a senior fellow at the Institute for Humanist Studies.

Edwin Curley is an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has argued that the commands and permissions that the Jewish and Christian Scriptures attribute to God make it incredible that the morally perfect being of Christian theology […]

Elizabeth S. Anderson is a professor of philosophy and women’s studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She contributed the essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” to Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life (2007).

Dr. J. Anderson Thomson Jr. is a psychiatrist in Charlottesville, Va., and a trustee of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. He is interested in the new cognitive neuroscience of religious belief — why human minds generate, accept and spread religious ideas — and spoke on the subject at the American Atheists’ 2009 convention. He has also […]

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is the Chauncey Stillman Professor in Practical Ethics in the philosophy department and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University in Durham, N.C. His essay “Overcoming Christianity” is included in Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life (2007). His books include Morality Without God? (2009) and (as co-author) God?: A Debate Between a Christian and […]

Austin Dacey is a writer and human rights activist in New York City who serves as a representative to the United Nations for the International Humanist and Ethical Union. He is the author of The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life (2008).

Louise M. Antony is a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has written various essays about atheism and is editor of the book Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life (2007), to which she also contributed one of the chapters, titled “For the Love of Reason.” She once debated Christian apologist/philosopher William […]

Sam Harris is a leading figure in the New Atheism movement. His 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, was a New York Times best-seller and was followed by his Letter to a Christian Nation. Harris also wrote The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, which rejects the argument that religion plays a necessary […]

The Institute for Science and Human Values is committed to scientific inquiry and the enhancement of human values and seeks to combine reason and compassion to achieve ethical wisdom. Toni Van Pelt is director of public policy.