Intelligent and rational Christianity is not an apologetic modern response to the era of science and atheism: it is at the heart of the tradition from the beginning.

For people of faith, God without God presents the faith in language that works in the new century: intelligent, rational and accessible.

It puts people of faith on the front foot, not the back foot, in their engagement with contemporary debates around the role of faith in both individual lives and wider society.

It is completely free from any fundamentalist undercurrent, and yet radically orthodox.

It even speaks the language of contemporary non-religious and eastern spirituality, while resonating fully with the spiritual inheritance of the west.

For others – atheists, agnostics, secularists, fundamentalists, pluralists, those of other faiths – God without God is an invitation to see what lies at the intelligent and rational heart of the Christian tradition, rather than its noisy fundamentalist fringes.

The text is referenced throughout to the two most significant authoritative texts in existence. The first is the bible. The second is the catechism – a comprehensive and scholarly review of two thousand years of Christian theology and philosophy. It carries the authority of the Catholic church, which alone makes up more than half of world Christianity, and against which all other forms of Christianity define themselves.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was instrumental in the compilation of the catechism, which was published in 1992 as part of the ongoing response, decade by decade, to the Second Vatican Council. Whatever we make of his instinctive conservatism in leadership, his catechism bears witness to his distinction as philosopher and theologian, and to his repeated theme of the compatibility of faith and reason.

Bible and catechism together ensure that God without God is not out on the fringes, but right at the heart of the faith.

For the person of faith, it is endlessly frustrating to be told, repeatedly, by atheist and fundamentalist alike, what Christianity is, in terms that plainly make no sense. Atheist and fundamentalist conspire together to misrepresent the faith, insisting that the faith demands a God who is a wrathful king and a bible that is an infallible oracle. The atheist rightly mocks, and the fundamentalist defends the indefensible.

Most liberals commit the same offence, maintaining the fundamentalists’ notion of an angry God: God is just angry (and you are required to feel guilty) about different things, like global warming and poverty. Lately they also accept the fundamentalists’ definition of the bible as an oracle, but deem it a fallible and therefore dispensable oracle, instead of accepting it on its own terms as literature. Christianity becomes whatever they want it to be on any given day.

The point of God without God is not to make up yet another version of Christianity based on how one person happens to feel today, but to get to an authentic Christianity through the two most authoritative sources in existence: the bible (allowed to speak for itself on its own terms rather than being forced into a role it was never designed for), and the catholic catechism, an 800-page compendium of the entire Christian belief system completely unrivalled in history for its authoritative and comprehensive coverage.

The result is remarkable: a presentation of the faith entirely compatible not only with the bible, the catechism, the ancient creeds and the very best of the western spiritual tradition, but also with the anti-fundamentalist atheism of a writer like Richard Dawkins in a text like The God Delusion: intelligent, rational faith.