Augustine's Way into the Will: The Theological and Philosophical Significance of de Libero Arbitrio Book

A large, impressive, and difficult book.

Sobel analyzes the concept of God (worthy of worship but not necessarily; he has nothing but bad things to say about descriptions of God as necessary or as essentially whatever) various arguments for the existence of God (those defending some sort of perfect-being theology, e.g., ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments in their various permutations), two key attributes of the standard depiction of God (omniscience and omnipotence), major arguments against the existence of God (including a noteworthy attempt to rehabilitate the logical problem of evil), and various forms of Pascalian wagers (which to him don't necessarily construe God as a perfect being). Each chapter is followed by pertinent appendices, which typically give more detail on the chapter's argument or focus more on response to a particular interlocutor, often using extensive symbolic logic and Bayesian probability (a fair amount of which was and will remain above my pay-grade). The body of each chapter is significantly more accessible than the appendices, but I want to be clear that even these "more accessible" parts are densely argued and unforgiving to the philosophically uninitiated. That said, Sobel can also be funny.

Recommended for those with good training in philosophy and formal logic.