Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. Being the third book of four advocating the non-existence of God, I was hoping to find something new with a different author of the New Atheists movement. Unfortunately, all I found was the same ranting & raving that you have with Richard Dawkins, coupled with equally assertive and unfounded statements about science, the evil of religion, and so on and so forth. Reading this short little book felt a bit like eavesdropping on a drunkard just ranting and letting tangent lead to tangent. To Harris’ credit, however, he does an excellent job at showing just how awful arrogance in regards to personal worldviews really is (although he fails to be any less arrogant about his own; it’s funny the number of double standards you keep coming across), and he advocates a sort of humility unknown to his own work. He writes a lot about stem cell research and abortion, and he makes some excellent points in those regards. At the end of the day, however, I didn’t find anything new in Letter to a Christian Nation, and certainly nothing too challenging.
The Devil’s Delusion by David Berlinski. The subtitle to this book is called The Pretentions of Scientific Atheism, and Berlinski—a secular, non-practicing Jew—does an amazing job showing how the assertions of New Atheism, especially in regards to science, make much use of countless unprovable assumptions. As a mathematician in love with science itself, Berlinski critiques science from the inside, and this makes his points that much more formidable. Much of the book focuses on a defense of the cosmological argument as presented by Thomas Aquinas (much quoted and misunderstood by New Atheists) and by earlier Muslim theologians, and Berlinski demolishes many of the theories and ideas postulated by scientists over the last couple decades to avoid the cosmological argument altogether. It’s quite telling, and Berlinski shows this, that some of the most recent (and wildest, not to mention unfounded) theories in science are directed against the cosmological argument, seeking a way around its implications. So far, no sturdy theories have been presented, and Berlinski seems exasperated at the lengths his fellow scientists will go to discredit God and religion in general. His main point, again and again, is that belief in God requires less assumptions than a belief in no God. The architecture of the universe, from a mathematician’s point of view, seems to scream for something or someone lying behind the scenes. I appreciate Berlinski’s book for two reasons: (1) he addresses my main interest in the whole ordeal, namely the assumptions required to undergird a belief; and (2) he writes not from any religious point-of-view, in the sense that he is not a practicing Jew, nor a practicing Christian, nor one to ascribe to any sort of dogma. He’s a theist, convinced of the existence of God but not making any claims past that, and the lack of bias towards any particular religious program.
I have two more books to read regarding this assumption—The Reason for God by Timothy Keller and An Atheist’s Manifesto by Michael Onfray—and then after those book reviews I’ll post my own personal conclusions on the subject. In the meantime, my attentions are being redirected towards my creative side: having finished Book One in the zombie serial, I’m going to script out the majority of Book Two and finish the revisions of Dwellers of the Night. I made the novel unavailable over a year ago to do some fine-tuning, and it got lost in the chaos of life. However, my readers have not failed to realize it’s gone, and I’ve been receiving emails asking where it’s available. So I should probably make it available so it’s not apparent how mindless I can be at times.
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