Eric Reitan

Eric Reitan is an American philosopher who teaches at Oklahoma State University, where his work focuses on philosophy of religion, ethics, and social philosophy. He is best known for Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion's Cultured Despisers (2008), a sustained philosophical response to Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and other New Atheist writers. Drawing on the liberal Protestant tradition of Friedrich Schleiermacher (the title alludes to Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers) and on analytic philosophy of religion, Reitan argues that the New Atheist critique mistakes a narrow fundamentalist construal of religion for religion as such, leaving more reflective theistic positions untouched. He defends a conception of God as the transcendent ground of an ethico-religious hope rather than as a competing scientific hypothesis, and treats religious belief as rationally permissible though not strictly demonstrable. Reitan has also written on universalism—co-authoring The Inescapable Love of God-type arguments with John Kronen in God's Final Victory (2013), defending Christian universal salvation against traditional infernalist views—and on ethical topics including hate speech and same-sex marriage. His work situates him among philosophers (alongside figures such as Alister McGrath, David Bentley Hart, and Keith Ward) who criticize New Atheism from a broadly Christian but non-fundamentalist standpoint, while engaging analytic methods.