Even for a British public intellectual who has written more than 20 books, including a biography of Descartes and a history of liberty in the West, having a first play produced in New York is an event worth celebrating.

A.C. Grayling, a professor of philosophy at the University of London who also writes frequently for the British press, was in town the other day to see the early previews of “Grace,” a play he cowrote with Mick Gordon that is opening in a production by MCC Theater on February 11. In the play, which had a run in London in late 2006, the main character, Grace, a scholar and atheist loosely modeled on Richard Dawkins, falls out bitterly with her son when he decides to become an Episcopal priest.

“Grace” attempts to address the increasingly sharp debate between religious believers and nonbelievers. Surprisingly, although neither Mr. Grayling nor Mr. Gordon is religious — and Mr. Grayling, like Mr. Dawkins, has been a frequent critic of religion — the play is remarkably balanced.

“The play doesn’t try to sway audiences one way or another,” Mr. Grayling, whose books include “Against All Gods: Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness” and “The Choice of Hercules,” an examination of the humanist view of the good life, said. Instead, “Grace” presents the audience with a philosophical problem: Should we follow our reason or our sympathies? Grace offers a strong intellectual case against religion, while her son, Tom, relies more on emotion than reason, saying that the closer one gets to God, the more lost and uncertain one becomes. Yet Grace is also stubborn and harsh, ready to sacrifice her relationship with her son rather than to forgive his decision. Tom, on the other hand, respects her views and asks only her acceptance.

“The truth of the matter is that she has the best arguments,” Mr. Grayling said of Grace, “but she puts them in a very unattractive and rebarbative way — as you might think Richard Dawkins does. Tom has the very charming character and warm persona, but if you look at what he says, [he] doesn’t really have arguments. He just feels a certain way about it.” The scenario in the play reverses the traditional dynamic, Mr. Grayling noted. “Historically, the Church was adamant it was right, and if you disagreed they burned you at the stake,” he said.

How, you might ask, does a British philosopher come to write an off-Broadway play?

Mr. Gordon runs a theater company in London called “On Theatre.” A former associate director at the National Theatre, Mr. Gordon was frustrated by reading “a lot of writing by young playwrights that wasn’t about anything,” he said in an interview. He decided to start creating plays on specific topics, in collaboration with experts in the given fields. He wrote a play called “On Dying” with Marie de Hennezel, a psychologist for the terminally ill and the author of “Intimate Death: How the Dying Teach Us To Live.” He wrote another, called “On Ego,” with the neuropsychologist Paul Broks. After reading Mr. Grayling’s book “What Is Good?,” which contrasts the religious and humanist views of life, Mr. Gordon asked Mr. Grayling to work with him on a play about religion.

The two men had about a year of intense discussions, Mr. Grayling said, trying to figure out how to dramatize the debate between belief and non-belief. When they had worked out the dramatic scheme, Mr. Grayling wrote a script, which they then passed back and forth several times. “It’s a wonderful working relationship,” Mr. Grayling said. “It’s so completely mutual that it’s like we’re one person.”

In fact, the relationship was so successful that Messrs. Grayling and Gordon are now collaborating on four other projects: two more “theater essays,” one on identity and another on the nature of truth; a play about the relationship between Descartes and Queen Christina of Sweden; and a play called “A Visitor in Berlin,” based on a true story about a German couple who hid a Jewish man in their apartment during World War II.

None of this slows up Mr. Grayling’s regular production of books. “I always write two books at once, because you can go from one to the other, and it’s very refreshing,” he said. “When I was much younger, I would come home at night, and I would need to play chess against the computer for an hour or two. Then one day I said to myself, ‘What the heck am I doing? I could be devoting this time to another project.'”

His next book, for the publisher Bloomsbury, will be a sort of bible for non-believers: a freely-edited compilation of material from Eastern and Western philosophy and literature, to be titled “The Good Book.”

If a religious person were feeling depressed or despairing, Mr. Grayling explained, he might go to the Bible to be comforted and inspired. “But if you’re a nonreligious person,” he continued, “and [you feel] this hunger of the heart, this yearning for the absolute which we all have, or moments of depression or despair, well, where do you go?”

Mr. Grayling — who said that in his first year of school, he spent his whole year’s allowance in a half-semester, going to plays in London — is clearly delighted with his new playwriting career.

“The reason I’m a philosopher is that philosophers are allowed to stick their noses into everything,” he said. “I believe that when we compartmentalize everything into history and literature and science, that’s only for the purpose of a syllabus so we can teach people things and get them to take exams. Actually, everything is all one thing: Everything I write and do is part of the one great endeavor of trying to understand this world and understand ourselves.”

Writing plays, he said, is just “another way of articulating that perspective — to try to get people to see and to think for themselves.”