This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

front-line theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Moler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Alec Riary is professor of the history of Christianity in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University in Durham, Durham University in the United Kingdom.

Professor Riary began his studies at Trinity Hall Cambridge, followed by a year at the University of St Andrews in their

Department of Reformation studies. He then earned his doctor philosophy from

Oxford University under the tutelage of renowned historian Darmaid McCulloch.

In addition to his teaching,

Professor Rirey's academic publishing

focuses on the English Reformation

and the emotional history of religion.

His newest book, Unbelievers,

an emotional history of doubt, chronicles the history of atheism

from the Middle Ages to the modern times and is the topic of our conversation today.

Professor Rari, if I were to think of the standard account of the rise of doubt in the English-speaking world and the modern age generously defined, then I think I would have to start with the Enlightenment and the standard

account and follow through various forms of skepticism and doubt from Hume to well Matthew Arnold and Leonard Wolf and the

Victorian doubt that exploded into a form of agnosticism by the 19th century

and more formalized atheism in the 20th century you don't so much dismiss that as

tell us there's an entirely different story is that right?

That's right. The reason I wrote the book I've written is that I wasn't persuaded by that story which it seemed to me to kind of miss the really crucial episode in this which is what happens before that.

Where did these first instincts for doubt come from?

And one of the reasons I don't buy it is that that's too intellectual that I think falls for the idea

...