George H Smith, "Atheism: The Case Against God"

[ciphergoth]

I've read all four of the recent books by the "four horsemen", and for the most part none have made me feel "yes, this is the book I want to press into the hands of believers". I would like there to be at least one book that I might be able to recommend, and having heard good things about this 1974 book, I ordered it from Amazon on a whim.

It certainly comes a *lot* closer than any of those four. It has a very dry style; there are no witty personal stories, few anecdotes, and only a smattering of historical background. But all four of the horsemen books seem somewhat scattershot in their approach, except perhaps Dennett, whose book seems like not so much an attack on religion as a hastily-repurposed discussion of religion originally intended for an atheist audience. This book is much more bulldozer than scattershot, and methodically dismantles the "sophisticated" defences of religion I actually hear from believers.

Its bulldozer-like nature may be seen in its chapter structure; first, clarify what atheism is and establish that the burden of proof lies with the theist; then tear down obfuscation as a means to confound rational discussion of the issue; demolish the idea that faith and revelation can supplement reason as guides to the truth (discussing and destroying a variety of attempts to defend the idea of faith). Only then are the traditional arguments for the existence of God, such as the cosmological argument, painstakingly taken apart; and only after that are the negative moral consequences of religion discussed.

There are a few problems. Smith is (or at least was) an Objectivist, and this leads to some sad errors; his defence of the idea of moral facts in Chapter 11 Section 2, for example, is just embarrassing. And it seems a shame to discuss the argument from design without even mentioning evolution; I can see that as a philosopher you want to show that the argument is *inherently* flawed, and of course it is, but it's evolution that robs it of its emotional impact. I still find myself thinking that I may have to write my ultimate book on the subject, but I have quite a few other books I'd have to read first to know if there was a gap in the market, and I can't afford quite that many whims :-)

No argument, no matter how good, can turn the head of someone who is prepared to say in terms that they intend to cling to an idea no matter how much they have to embrace irrationality in order to do so, as many sophisticated believers openly say. But still, when I read the four horsemen books, I felt I knew how believers were going to evade the conclusions they were pushing for, and I would love to know how a serious, philosophically knowledgable believer would go about avoiding the conclusions of this book.



Update: as usual, anonymous comments should be signed to be unscreened.

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

The problem with the Four Horsemen books is that they deliberately set out to attack the notion of a god or gods. That's immediately going to be a turnoff for most believers.

I personally recommend Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, as while it only tangentially tackles the problem of gods and afterlives, it shows how to use the scientific method to see through hokum, dogma, logical fallacies and outright lies. More a case of leading a horse to water than forcing it to drink.

[skibbley.livejournal.com]

So do you have an idea now of the book-that-should-be-written?

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Does it focus mainly on the traditional so-called proofs? I was told on my metaphysics course that those were intended to demonstrate the internal coherence of the theology of the time to people who already believed rather than to provide proofs as we would normally understand the term, and I don't base my faith on any of them (I know exactly what's wrong with each of them.) If there's more to it than that, and especially if it addresses the argument I've made to you about the axiomatic character of my faith, I might have a look at it later in the year and let you know what I think (my existing bookpile is still quite large, and I have some reading goals for the year for which books by white men aren't terribly helpful, which is why I won't make a more definite promise.)

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

Interesting factoid I learned recently: if you survey members of different scientific disciplines, you find the lowest rate of religious belief among psychologists. You might think it would be, say, physicists, who know in their bones that there's no logical room for a meaningful god, but apparently that doesn't stop them. OTOH, knowing in your bones that there are alternative explanations for religious impulses and having a framework to understand them -- while logically providing no evidence either way for the existence or non-existence of god -- seems pretty effective at producing non-belief in practice.

If I were trying to convert believers, I might try handing them a book on comparative religions in social contexts. "Here are 10 cultures, and how and why religion works the way it does for each"

[pavlos.livejournal.com]

I owe you a proper article on this, but here's the condensed version.

Myth is not a naive theory intending to explain the universe. It is a brilliantly successful technology for changing it. Myth functions within the human brain, where the experience and interpretation of the world takes place, and modifies it. Myth is a psychoactive technology, like wine.

Like most other memes in the human mind, myth is both symbiotic and parasitic. The people who host it actively (and defensibly) wish to retain it for its positive psychological effects. It's also parasitic, and open to abuse like a drug, leading to self-destructive or aggressive behaviour. That is why, typically people who don't host myths, or host them in a safe compartmentalized way, whish to eradicate them from others.

One who assumes that myth is a delusion is presumptuous and biased. Sure, some lesser superstitions may be true errors of reasoning, but the big ones, like religion or ideology, are psychoactive devices deliberately hosted by a person. Wanting to remove them is an imposition, such as wanting to make a drinker or smoker quit. Attempting to debunk myth is a form of harassment, such as reaching out and spoiling someone's drink or smoke. It just isn't the way to make people quit.

In my opinion, the important battle is to establish tolerance between the myth-users and non-users. It has to be couched in those terms and there's good evidence that myth-users would cooperate, such as many examples of rational physicists, businesspeople, etc. who are also religious. Ground rules are needed to curb the desire of myth-users to impose the myth as universal, as well as the tendency of non-users to banish it. Myth should be a private freedom to indulge in responsibly, like any drug.

Beyond that, to the extent that non-users believe that myth-users would be better off rid of their myths, the process of conversion should be memetic and the goal of conversion should be psychological welfare. In other words, non-users should understand the network of memes that myth-users host and offer alternative memes in an order that they might be accepted and gradually replace the mythical memes, hopefully resulting in a happier mind. This process is (and should be) similar to the conversion process used by bona-fide myth-users.

Of the four horsemen, although Dawkins and Hitchens are eloquent and sometimes entertaining, it should be clear from the above that I find their approach wholly misguided and ineffective. In the case of Dawkins, given his previous intellectual achievement I'd simply call his recent work "dumb", and Hitchens strikes me as somewhat irresponsible. Dennet is much more productive in his approach, although sadly he's not as engaging a speaker or writer. I'm closest to Dennet's thinking as far as I know, but haven't read the field very widely.

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

Oh my God, I am too stupid for all this! It is however a pleasure and a joy to watch lizw arguing with you here. She says all the things that I would say if my brain were also the size of a planet.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

This is a bit late, but there are two things that don't seem to be addressed by the argument in the book (as you summarize it) and haven't come up in the comments as far as I can see.

First, I'm uncomfortable with requiring logical consistency in definitions on this topic, because I'm personally familiar with two independent lines of theological reasoning (Taoism and Jewish kabbalism) that claim that as finite beings, any definition we can put forward for "god" is necessarily incomplete and inconsistent. How much does the book's argument depend on the notion that we need to be able to define this term in a logically consistent manner, and why does he take this position in the first place?

Second, and this might not be addressed in the book at all, but I would like to raise the issue of direct subjective experience of the supernatural (not necessarily of "god"). A lot of modern philosophical debate of atheism .vs. theism (from both sides, AFAICT) takes it as an axiom that this just doesn't happen, but I think if you asked a random sample of "ordinary" believers you would get a substantial number of them saying yes, I have personally experienced something for which my only available explanation is supernatural. [This is not to say that there might not be a wholly natural explanation available to e.g. someone with more knowledge of the workings of the brain; only that a supernatural explanation is the only one the questionee's got.]

I raise this because it seems to me that as long as argument from the atheistic side dismisses all such experience in terms like "well, of course there is a natural explanation, you're just not edumacated enough to know it, and we're not going to consider it any further" they're not going to get anywhere. In fact, I would imagine that that would be a hurl-book-with-great-force moment for anyone who's had such an experience.