The Atheism Tapes (2004)

A brief ‘supplementary series’ to Jonathan Miller’s multi-part televison documentary, Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief (which I wish I could find on DVD because I’d like to see it). Simply put this six part series consists of interview footage with prominent Atheists that had to be cut from the original documentary. As Miller says in his introduction for this series, the BBC agreed with him that much of this cut material was interesting enough to warrant broadcast, and the conversations presented here must at the very least be considered informative and well reasoned ones, even if you are a staunch theist.Interview subjects include the playwright Arthur Miller (who actually spends the bulk of his interview talking about anti-Semitism), Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg (who I didn’t think I was going to like but did), and others like Cambridge Theologian Denys Turner (yes an atheist theologian), and philosopher/ Darwin expert Daniel Dennett. Richard Dawkins the distinguished biologist and writer is probably the most famous of the group as far as being an atheist goes. My favorite of the interview subjects however was the philosopher Colin McGinn, who has now got me interested in learning more about his work. Intellectually stimulating, and something of a novelty as this is material something I have seldom encountered outside of books. Hard to score, but I’ll give it an A for the material and interview subjects (and for Atheism I suppose) and a B for presentation.