"In this book distinguished theologian Michael J. Buckley, S.J. reflects upon the career of atheism from the beginnings of modernity to the present day. extending the discussion he began in his highly acclaimed At the Origins of Modern Atheism, the author argues that atheism as ideology was neither generated by the rise of hostile sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries nor occasioned by the inferential theology of Thomas Aquinas."--BOOK JACKET.