Ricki Monnier

Ricki Monnier is an American philosopher associated with the analytic atheology project, best known as co-editor with Michael Martin of two influential anthologies, The Improbability of God (2006) and The Impossibility of God (2003), both published by Prometheus Books. These volumes assemble work by analytic philosophers of religion arguing, respectively, that God's existence is improbable on available evidence and that the concept of God is internally incoherent. The collections gather contributions from figures such as Quentin Smith, Theodore Drange, Graham Oppy, Richard M. Gale, J. L. Schellenberg, and Patrick Grim, organizing arguments by category: incoherence of divine attributes, the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, and probabilistic arguments from naturalism. Monnier helped establish Atheology.com as a venue for systematizing arguments against theism, and contributed framing material distinguishing definitional, deductive, and inductive disproofs. His editorial work has been criticized by theistic philosophers (notably defenders of classical theism and reformed epistemologists) for presupposing narrow conceptions of God amenable to formal refutation, while sympathizers credit the volumes with consolidating a rigorous analytic case for atheism distinct from the more polemical "New Atheism." Monnier's own published philosophical output is limited, with his contribution lying primarily in editorial synthesis and the curation of analytic atheology as a field.