A. C. Grayling

Anthony Clifford Grayling (b. 1949) is a British philosopher trained at Sussex and Oxford, where he completed his DPhil under A. J. Ayer and Peter Strawson. He was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, and in 2011 founded New College of the Humanities, serving as its Master. His scholarly work spans epistemology, the history of early-modern philosophy, and human rights, with monographs on Berkeley, Descartes, and Wittgenstein.

Grayling is widely identified with the public movement often labelled "New Atheism," alongside Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens, though he prefers the term secular humanist. In The God Argument (2013) he distinguishes critique of theistic arguments from the positive case for a humanist ethics, arguing that classical proofs (cosmological, design, ontological, moral) fail and that religious belief lacks adequate evidential warrant. Against All Gods (2007) collects polemical essays on the social harms of organized religion. The Meaning of Things offers a secular reflection on virtues and the good life.

Critics, including theologians such as John Haught and Keith Ward, charge Grayling and fellow New Atheists with caricaturing sophisticated theology and conflating fundamentalism with religion as such. He has also faced controversy over the founding model of NCH and over his attribution practices in The Good Book (2011). Grayling continues to defend Enlightenment rationalism, liberal democracy, and an evidentialist ethics of belief.