I have been writing this book all my life and intend to keep on writing it, but it would have been

impossible to produce this version without the extraordinary collaboration between agent and

publisher—I mean to say Steve Wasserman and Jonathan Karp—that enabled me. All authors

ought to have such careful and literate friends and allies. All authors ought also to have book

finders as astute and determined as Windsor Mann.

My old schoolfriend Michael Prest was the first person to make it plain to me that while the

authorities could compel us to attend prayers, they could not force us to pray. I shall always

remember his upright posture while others hypocritically knelt or inclined themselves, and also

the day that I decided to join him. All postures of submission and surrender should be part of

our prehistory.

I have been fortunate in having many moral tutors, formal and informal, many of whom had

to undergo considerable intellectual trial, and evince notable courage, in order to break with the

faith of their tribes. Some of these would still be in some danger if I were to name them, but I

must admit my debt to the late Dr. Israel Shahak, who introduced me to Spinoza; to Salman

Rushdie, who bravely witnessed for reason and humor and language in a very dark time; to Ibn

Warraq and Irfan Khawaja, who also know something about the price of the ticket; and to Dr.

Michael Shermer, the very model of the reformed and recovered Christian fundamentalist.

Among the many others who have shown that life and wit and inquiry begin just at the point

where faith ends, I ought to salute Penn and Teller, that other amazing myth-and fraud-buster

James Randi (Houdini of our time), and Tom Flynn, Andrea Szalanski and all the other staffers

at Free Inquiry magazine. My friend Joy Bergmann shrewdly drew my attention to the scandal

of the peri’ah metsitsah. Jennifer Michael Hecht put me immensely in her debt when she sent

me a copy of her extraordinary Doubt: A History.

To all those who I do not know, and who live in the worlds where superstition and barbarism

are still dominant, and into whose hands I hope this little book may fall, I offer the modest

encouragement of an older wisdom. It is in fact this, and not any arrogant preaching, that

comes to us out of the whirlwind: Die Stimme der Vernunft ist leise. Yes, “The voice of Reason is

soft.” But it is very persistent. In this, and in the lives and minds of combatants known and

unknown, we repose our chief hope.

Over many years I have pursued these questions with Ian McEwan, whose body of fiction

shows an extraordinary ability to elucidate the numinous without conceding anything to the

supernatural. He has subtly demonstrated that the natural is wondrous enough for anyone. It

was in some discussions with Ian, first on that remote Uruguayan coast where Darwin so boldly

put ashore and took samples, and later in Manhattan, that I felt this essay beginning to

germinate. I am very proud to have sought and received his permission to dedicate these pages

to him.