Michael Martin

Michael Martin (1932–2015) was an American analytic philosopher and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Boston University, where he taught from 1965 until his retirement in 2002. Trained in philosophy of science and the social sciences (PhD, Harvard, 1962), Martin became one of the most systematic defenders of atheism in late twentieth-century analytic philosophy. His landmark Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (1990) offered an extended case for what he called "negative atheism" (the absence of justified theistic belief) and "positive atheism" (the affirmation that God does not exist), engaging classical and contemporary natural theology, religious experience arguments, and Wittgensteinian fideism. The Case Against Christianity (1991) extended the critique to specifically Christian doctrines, including the historicity of Jesus and the resurrection. With Ricki Monnier he edited two influential anthologies, The Impossibility of God (2003) and The Improbability of God (2006), gathering logical disproofs and evidential arguments against theism. He also edited The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (2007), a standard reference. Martin was a prominent critic of Alvin Plantinga's reformed epistemology and of evidentialist apologetics by William Lane Craig and Richard Swinburne, and he was in turn challenged by these figures and by Paul Copan. Though sometimes viewed as more measured than the "New Atheists," his work remains a key resource for the philosophical case against theism.