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| Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up | 
 enlarge | Author: John Allen Paulos
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Category: Book
List Price: $20.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  44 reviews
Sales Rank: 11352
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 176
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0809059193
Dewey Decimal Number: 212.1
EAN: 9780809059195
ASIN: 0809059193
Publication Date: January 2, 2008
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Product Description
A Lifelong Unbeliever Finds No Reason to Change His Mind
Are there any logical reasons to believe in God? Mathematician and bestselling author John Allen Paulos thinks not. In Irreligion he presents the case for his own worldview, organizing his book into twelve chapters that refute the twelve arguments most often put forward for believing in God’s existence. The latter arguments, Paulos relates in his characteristically lighthearted style, “range from what might be called golden oldies to those with a more contemporary beat. On the playlist are the firstcause argument, the argument from design, the ontological argument, arguments from faith and biblical codes, the argument from the anthropic principle, the moral universality argument, and others.” Interspersed among his twelve counterarguments are remarks on a variety of irreligious themes, ranging from the nature of miracles and creationist probability to cognitive illusions and prudential wagers. Special attention is paid to topics, arguments, and questions that spring from his incredulity “not only about religion but also about others’ credulity.” Despite the strong influence of his day job, Paulos says, there isn’t a single mathematical formula in the book.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 39 more reviews...
 Non-Proofs of God's Existence December 27, 2007
167 out of 176 found this review helpful
For centuries, people who believe in the different gods that people have adopted have insisted that there are good logical reasons to believe in their particular gods. Logic and science can do nothing to disconfirm the existence of these gods, but at the same time, if an attempt at a logical proof of a god's existence is presented, then the proof can be logically examined to see if it holds water. John Allen Paulos has looked at the proofs and finds them leaky. Paulos is a mathematician who has previously told us how a mathematician plays the stock market or how a mathematician reads the newspaper. Now, in _Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up_, he goes for the big game. His book shows the results of his examination of the question that is the first sentence in his book: "Are there any logical reasons to believe in God?" His book is a review of the ways that religious people have demonstrated to their own satisfaction (but not to his) that the existence of God can be logically derived. He has written before on this sort of theme, but his book is an attempt to deal directly with the "inherent illogic to all of the arguments." Jonathan Swift said, "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into", and Paulos acknowledges this: "I have little problem with those who acknowledge the absence of good arguments for God, but simply maintain a nebulous but steadfast belief in `something more'".
Plenty of the arguments for God's existence here are well known; in fact, they are classics, and have been the subject of discussion and refutation for centuries. They may fortify the faith of those who already believe (although Paulos shows that they are untrustworthy fortifications), but again, already believing is the key. Right off the bat is the First Cause argument, presented in Paulos's summary:
1. Everything has a cause, or perhaps many causes.
2. Nothing is its own cause.
3. Causal chains can't go on forever.
4. So there has to be a first cause.
5. That first cause is God, who therefore exists.
It all seems convincing at first sight, and believers who wish to use this sort of thinking as evidence for their beliefs would be wise not to give it a second look. Paulos explains that a big problem is #1 above, which assumes too much. An alternative #1 is, "Either everything has a cause, or there's something that doesn't," and there isn't any way of getting around the truth of that. If everything has a cause, then God does, too, as does his cause and so on forever; and if there is something that doesn't have a cause, there is no reason that this something has to be elevated into the supernatural, for the physical world itself might be the thing that does not have a cause, and that's an end of the chain.
And so Paulos goes on, through this brisk little book which takes on one supposed proof after another: the Argument from Design, the Anthropic Principle, the Ontological Argument, Pascal's Wager, and more. Each of the chapters, most less then ten pages long, dispatches each would-be proof. Paulos has used more logic and less mathematics here; there are no equations in the book, for instance, although there are dips into pure mathematics when discussing such things as probabilities for Pascal's Wager. There is a good deal of humor and wonderfully clear writing. Nonbelievers are probably already familiar with the arguments for and against God's existence, but some of Paulos's counterarguments are novel and all are expressed in a pithy and easily memorable form. Believers ought to enjoy puzzling out the challenges here, and should have a renewed appreciation for the importance of faith, however lacking logical confirmation, as the foundation of their beliefs.
 A Short, Amusing Sermon Preached to the Choir January 21, 2008
104 out of 138 found this review helpful
To like this book you must approach it as you might approach a blog you enjoy: Pharyngula, for example, or Bad Astronomy, or The Atheist Ethicist (and if you are considering this book at all, you would enjoy any of those). In other words, you find here some short, discursive, disconnected essays, often shallow, but also often amusing or thought-provoking. If the chapters of this book were postings in a blog and you read them online, one or two a week, you'd be amused and impressed.
As a book, and especially as a book with the ponderous subtitle "A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up," the contents are a disappointment, and I'm sorry I spent the cash for it. Paulos is not a philosopher, and seems to have only as much grasp of the body and methods of philosophy as any other smart, well-educated person might. Which means, any real philosopher could make toast of him. I don't think there's a god either, but I have enough respect for the brains of many generations of theologians to know that their arguments cannot be blown off in a page or two, nor should they be.
I have in my collection Michael Martin's Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (look it up here in Amazon), 536pp of careful, scrupulous, deeply-researched refutations of the arguments that Paulos throws darts at. Or, if you prefer less-weighty books, see Philosophers Without Gods edited by Louise M. Antony. Here you find shorter essays but each tackles a small, well-defined topic and deals with in tones of humanity, generosity and humility that are quite absent from Paulos's writing. He's a very bright guy with some good insights, but at least in this book, has done his purported subject much less than full justice.
Brevity is the something of wit--not "soul," though. December 28, 2007
69 out of 73 found this review helpful
What "Irreligion" brings to the table is brevity. Sometimes I wished for a little more exposition, but ultimately I think Paulos's tactic was right on. There's little in "Irreligion" that hasn't been covered (and more comprehensively) by Stenger, Dawkins, Edis, and other science-based New Atheists, but only a convinced atheist is likely to read tomes such as those fine thinkers have produced. A religious skeptic or nominal believer, on the other hand, is not terribly likely to plow through so much material (and in some cases, insulting and excessive snark) as is present in works such as "The God Delusion." But she might find a fast-paced, easily digested little book like this one just the thing to stimulate thought and promote a more rational outlook. Atheists, like theologians, can tend to go on and on, self-importantly. The rare book like "Irreligion" that gets in, makes its provocative points, then gets out is a very welcome addition to neo-atheism literature, not least because of the vivid wit Paulos brings to the subject. I loved his analogy of something to a scholar who had proved that Homer had not written "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," but they were "written by another blind poet of the same name." That's the sort of lowkey humor that makes the subject matter feel brisk and breezy rather than onerous, ponderous, and stale.
 Himalayan theological illiteracy and philosophical ignorance January 14, 2008
57 out of 150 found this review helpful
I am sorry about the title of this review. I wanted to like this book, because I enjoyed the author's "Innumeracy" so much, and because Paulos appears to be a witty, kind, self-deprecating, nice man, but alas, this book is what happens when an expert in one field steps outside it into something about which he knows absolutely nothing, and apparently refuses to consult any real experts in the other fields. At least he admits his thoroughgoing materialism, which explains the fact that he doesn't have even the most primitive and rudimentary grasp of basic spiritual truths that were found compelling by even such great minds as that of Dante, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and many thousands more, let alone by the most basic lived experience of two millennia of saints. The most charitable thing I can say about this is very thin book, padded with irrelevancies, is that it may be this bad because it was rushed out in order to cash into the recent rash of books on atheism - the worst of all being Sam Harris's "Letter to A Christian Nation," a profoundly ignorant and hate-filled screed.
One hardly knows where to begin, especially in the limits of an Amazon review. . Essentially, it contains straw men within a giant straw man - attacks on positions no one holds - and reductions to the lowest possible common denominator. The book consists of the reduction of twelve possible positions for the existence of God into syllogisms, a dubious start - I know of no religious person who holds that God is the end of a chain of philosophical reasoning, the conclusion to an argument. The counterarguments to the "classical" arguments are, as the New York Times says, utterly sophomoric (suffice it to say he misunderstands simple philosophical terms like "first" when it means logically primary rather than temporally prior, and "cause"). There is a whole section arguing against those who see faith as a "feeling," a howler if there ever was one: a feeling - especially, as Paulos would put it, a gut visceral feeling - is precisely what faith CANNOT be, even if some believers are so inarticulate as to describe it that way.
It is hard to know who the audience of this book is. Some arguments - that the existence of God is proved by alleged cryptic number codes in the bible - are held by no one but the tinfoil-hat crowd who believe in alien abductions. Others, like Pascal's Wager, are probably held by one at all.
Some things in the book are just astonishing. He drags up the old canard about blaming the Jews for the death of Christ - an evil idea to be sure, but one repudiated not merely recently by John Paul II, but as far back as Pope Gregory the Great, and NEVER a part of Christian doctrine, only the sin of individual Christians. Next, Paulos insists that atheists can be as moral as religious people, a fact that is not only NOT denied by the faith I know most about - Catholicism - but in fact it MUST be the case that the nonreligious can be moral, since Catholicism states that all moral claims (as opposed to those from revelation alone) must be arguable by reason alone. Paulos goes further and claims that atheists would actually be more moral because they would not be doing good for a reward, a claim that shockingly misunderstands people's motivations. And it is as if he imagines that the "eternal life" promise refers to a series of endless days after one has died, rather than an in-breaking of eternity beginning in the here and now. Every believer and every saint claim to experience the goodness and love of God in THIS life, and not merely in waiting for the next.
I don't even want to get started on his misunderstanding of miracles.
The theological illiteracy is nearly matched by philosophical ignorance, or at least a level of knowledge that comes out of a freshman introductory text rather than a reading of primary sources. Paulos clearly has no understanding of Aristotle, and his comments on natural law are among the howlers in the book - so wrong-headed that one is left open-mouthed in astonishment. I have taught philosophy for years, and believe me, I will use examples from this book - not for the reasons Paulos might have hoped for, but rather as examples of how NOT to argue!
All in all, I have to agree with the New York Times, which calls the arguments put forth by Paulos "silly," and whose review points to the index, where one finds Anne Coulter but not Karl Barth - nor, might I add, Luigi Guissani, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger, John Paul II's voluminous writings philosophical and theological writings, or any theologian who understands the relation of faith and reason.
Earth to authors of these "new atheist" books: millions of Christians believe that evolution is the efficient/material explanation of creation, and believe this AS Christians, in harmony with their Churches (e.g. the Catholic Church), not in spite of it. Millions of Christians (including the Pope) understand hermeneutics and exegesis far, far, FAR better than the writers of these potboilers, who take the Bible more literally than many fundamentalists. Millions of Christians, again in accord with their church's teachings, believe in the role of rationality in moral and political reasoning, and indeed invented the idea of separation of Church and State (as far back as "Render unto Caesar...). It really isn't hard to do the research, instead of simply buying the idiotic, ignorant, and embarrassingly wrongheaded platitudes of Dawkins/Dennet/Harris/Hitchens. And please, for the love of not God but whatever you believe in, STUDY UP on what intelligent believers ACTUALLY BELIEVE about faith and reason, and please study the history of the weird idea that faithc is a private, subjective, internal "feeling" came from. Knocking down simple-minded fundamentalists is just shooting fish in a barrel.
If one wants to read an atheist, try the truly great European atheist and Marxist Jurgen Habermas, and friend and admirer of Pope Benedict XVI. His genius blows all these American writers clean out of the water.
How does anyone disprove Under-the-Bed-Monsters? January 30, 2008
15 out of 19 found this review helpful
Do monsters lurk under the bed?
Paulos is not one to convince a worried six-year-old that no Monsters lurk under the bed. Sure, he could logically and incisively prove Under-the-Bed-Monsters do not exist, as he exquisitely disproves a dozen different beliefs older people use to explain God. His logic, reasoning and explanations are impeccable - - but hollow. When anyone deals with Monsters, Ghosts, Angels or God, they are dealing with emotion rather than logic.
This is a delightful book for those who already know God is false. But it doesn't address the central issue: Why are so many Americans, and especially engineers and technology workers, so committed to God-cults? Why are so many Americans "crusaders" for God, just as so many Moslems are "jihadists" for Allah? In Iran today, there is a separation of mosque and state with each having separate leaders. In America today, a prime requirement to be president is an absolute faith in a close personal relationship with God.
Richard Hofstadter said Puritan resistance to old religious and civil hierarchies in England launched a fervent opposition to all book learning in America. This founding principle of the United States led to the War of Independence, but it has also produced a trend to self-chosen religion instead of what the state imposes. Today's mega-churches, extreme fundamentalism and televangelists are part of a rich American heritage; a direct product of Salem witch hunts, frenzied tent revivals, the fanaticism of radio evangelism and unrestrained freedom itself.
Disproving God is similar to disproving Monsters. If the emotional origins are understood, a parent can comfort such fears. It is the emotional approach to religion which explains why Americans, after rejecting the dictates of an Established Church, are so suscepticle to the dictates of any church - - the more independent in its belief the better - - provided it is of their own rebellious choosing. Paulos attempts to use logic to explain such emotion; religion uses emotion to create its own logic.
Although this is a wonderfully logical rebuttal of current fads about God and fully deserving of its many five-star rankings, a skeptical reader is left with a suspicion that Paulos couldn't calm the fears of a six-year-old who believes monsters do lurk under the bed.
The logic of Paulos is impeccable; BUT, Under-the-Bed-Monsters don't listen to logic. Nor do Crusaders, Jihadists, or many Americans.
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