Publisher Comments
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. John Allen Paulos is a professor of mathematics at Temple University. His books include the bestseller Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences (H&W, 1988), A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, and A Mathematician Reads the Newspapers. 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. "The volume gets off to a bracing start, deftly dismantling creationist arguments that the astonishing complexity of life could have come about only through the efforts of a master designer, by succinctly showing how Darwin's theory of natural selection and free-market economics provide well-confirmed alternative explanations for the evolution of complex systems . . . Writing in clear, direct prose, Paulos shows how even everyday references to purpose and intention can be easily reformulated in scientific, nonpurposive terms."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "The volume gets off to a bracing start, deftly dismantling creationist arguments that the astonishing complexity of life could have come about only through the efforts of a master designer, by succinctly showing how Darwin's theory of natural selection and free-market economics provide well-confirmed alternative explanations for the evolution of complex systems . . . Writing in clear, direct prose, Paulos shows how even everyday references to purpose and intention can be easily reformulated in scientific, nonpurposive terms."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Paulos wades through the classical arguments for the existence of God and systematically refutes them . . . It is readable and concise, with moments of great logical rigour and dry wit."— Amanda Gefter, New Scientist magazine
"Paulos deserves high praise for turning out a book that is brief, forthright, and amiable. While making the same basic points as, say Dawkins's The God Delusion, it avoids the often choleric tone of that work, keeping a light, conversational tone where Dawkins hurls flaming rhetorical fireballs of denunciation . . . The book is organized in a way that readers inclined to skepticism but who have never seriously studied the debate over the viability of theism will find convenient and quite useful in their private debates with friends, relatives, and even clergymen of various persuasions. Paulos lays out, seriatim, most of the classical philosophical arguments for the existence of a deity, and immediately refutes them as they arise. Thus we find the ontological argument, the argument from First Clause, the argument from design, the argument from the seeming existence of moral universals, and so forth, laid out one by one and just as soon demolished. It will be noted that these chapters are as brief as they are easygoing . . . Irreligion will, I'm confident, take a distinguished place in what one might call the canonical literature of the New Atheism, and I highly recommend it, especially to bright youngsters who will find its occasional use of mathematical ideas pleasant."— Norman Levitt, Skeptic
"John Allen Paulos has written a charming book that takes you on a sojourn of flawless logic, with simple and clear examples drawn from math, science, and pop culture. At journey's end, Paulos has left you with plenty to think about, whether you are religious, irreligious, or anything in between."— Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History and author of Death By Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries
"For years John Allen Paulos has been our guide for reading newspapers, playing the stock market, and understanding what all those graphs and charts and formulas really mean. No one knows how to dissect an argument better than Paulos. Now he has turned his rapier wit to the grandest question of them all: is there a God? Those who are religious skeptics will find in Paulos's analysis new ways of looking at both old and new arguments, and those who believe that God's existence can be proven through science, reason, and logic will have to answer to this mathematician's penetrating analysis."— Michael Shermer, Publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American, and the author of How We Believe, The Science of Good and Evil, and Why Darwin Matters
"Using the methods of mathematics, reason and logic, Paulos wrestles religious belief systems to the ground and in the process proves he is as good a writer as he is a mathematician. The book is short, to the point and humorous, and God knows, this subject could use more humor."— Joan Konner, Dean Emerita of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and editor of The Atheist’s Bible
"Another virtuoso performance from a master in the use of mathematics to explore the conundrums and mysteries of everyday life."— Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind
"John Allen Paulos has done us all a great service. “He’s done it again. John Allen Paulos has written a charming book that takes you on a sojourn of flawless logic, with simple and clear examples drawn from math, science, and pop culture. At journey’s end, Paulos has left you with plenty to think about, whether you are religious, irreligious, or anything in between.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History and author of Death By Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries "For years John Allen Paulos has been our guide for reading newspapers, playing the stock market, and understanding what all those graphs and charts and formulas really mean. No one knows how to dissect an argument better than Paulos. Now he has turned his rapier wit to the grandest question of them all: is there a God? Those who are religious skeptics will find in Paulos’s analysis new ways of looking at both old and new arguments, and those who believe that God’s existence can be proven through science, reason, and logic will have to answer to this mathematician’s penetrating analysis." —Michael Shermer, Publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American, and the author of How We Believe, The Science of Good and Evil, and Why Darwin Matters "Using the methods of mathematics, reason and logic, Paulos wrestles religious belief systems to the ground and in the process proves he is as good a writer as he is a mathematician. The book is short, to the point and humorous, and God knows, this subject could use more humor."—Joan Konner, Dean Emerita of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and editor of The Atheist’s Bible "Another virtuoso performance from a master in the use of mathematics to explore the conundrums and mysteries of everyday life."--Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind "John Allen Paulos has done us all a great service. Irreligion is an elegant and timely response to the manifold ignorance that still goes by the name of 'faith' in the 21st century."-- Sam Harris, author of the New York Times best sellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian NationJohn Allen Paulos is a professor of mathematics at Temple University. His books include the bestseller Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences (H&W, 1988), A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, and A Mathematician Reads the Newspapers. Preface
Are there any logical reasons to believe in God? Billions of people over thousands of years have entertained this question, and the issue is certainly not without relevance in our world today. The chasms separating literal believers, temperate believers, and outright nonbelievers are deep. There are many who seem to be impressed with the argument that God exists simply because He says He does in a much extolled tome that He allegedly inspired. Many others subscribe with varying degrees of conviction to more sophisticated arguments for God, while atheists and agnostics find none of the arguments persuasive.
Such questions of existence and belief, if not the formal arguments themselves, have always intrigued me. I remember as a child humoring my parents when they discussed Santa Claus with me. I wanted to protect them from my knowledge of his nonexistence, and so I feigned belief. My brother, three years my junior, was only a baby, so it wasn’t him I was trying not to disillusion. My qualitative calculations had proved to me that there were too many expectant kids around the world for Mr. Claus to even come close to making his Christmas Eve rounds in time, even if he didn’t stop for the occasional hot chocolate. This may sound like quite a pat memory for the author of a book titled Innumeracy to have, but I do remember making rough “order of magnitude” calculations that showed that Santa Claus was way overextended.
As I’ve written elsewhere, if there is an inborn disposition to materialism (in the sense of “matter and motion are the basis of all there is,” not in the sense of “I want more cars and houses”), then I suspect I have it. At the risk of being a bit cloying, I remember another early indicator of my adult psychology. I was scuffling with my brother when I was about ten and had an epiphany that the stuff of our two heads wasn’t different in kind from the stuff of the rough rug on which I’d just burned my elbow or the stuff of the chair on which he’d just banged his shoulder. The realization that everything was ultimately made out of the same matter, that there was no essential difference between the material compositions of me and not-me, was clean, clear, and bracing.
My youthful materialism quickly evolved into adolescent skepticism, dismissive of just-so tales devoid of evidence. The absence of an answer to the question “What caused, preceded, or created God?” made, in my eyes, the existence of the latter being an unnecessary, antecedent mystery. Why introduce Him? Why postulate a completely nonexplanatory, extra perplexity to help explain the already sufficiently perplexing and beautiful world? Or, if one was committed to such an unnecessary mystery, why not introduce even more antecedent ones such as the Creator’s Creator, or even His Great-Uncle?
This vaguely quantitative and logical mind-set no doubt predisposed me to choose the career I have—I’m a mathematician who’s morphed into a writer—and to view the world in the way I do. It is what has animated me to write the books and columns I’ve written, some of which have touched on what I call irreligion—topics, arguments, and questions that spring from an incredulity not only about religion but also about others’ credulity. As this and the above anecdotes suggest, I’ve always found the various arguments for the existence of God that I’ve come across wanting. There is an inherent illogic to all of the arguments that I’ve never dealt with head-on. Here in Irreligion I’ve attempted to do so.
My approach in this book is informal and brisk (at least I hope it is), not ceremonious and plodding (at least I hope it isn’t). Interspersed among the arguments will be numerous asides on a variety of irreligious themes, ranging from the nature of miracles and creationist probability to cognitive illusions and prudential wagers. Beginning with a schematic outline of an argument, most chapters will briefly examine it and then present what I believe is a succinct deconstruction. The arguments considered range from what might be called the golden oldies of religious thought to those with a more contemporary beat. On the playlist are the first-cause 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. These arguments overlap to an extent, but I’ve loosely categorized them in an order that seems somewhat natural.
Don’t worry if your mathematical skills are rusty or even completely absent. Although I’m a mathematician, I’ve not included a single formula in the book. This doesn’t mean that mathematics plays little role in what follows. The subject enters in two ways. First, I invoke bits of logic and probability throughout the book, always taking pains in my expositions of them to avoid not only formulas but equations, complicated computations, and technical jargon. Second and more significant, mathematics, or at least my mathematical sensibility, reveals itself in the analytic approach, my choice of examples, and the distaste for extraneous details apparent herein. (Mathematicians are a bit like the laconic Vermonter who, when asked if he’s lived in the state his whole life, replies, “Not yet.”)
Fully discussing the arguments for God and their refutations, together with the volumes and volumes of commentary and meta-commentary that they continue to generate, brings to mind the predicament of Tristram Shandy. He was the fictional fellow who took two years to write the history of the first two days of his life. In an effort to avoid Shandy’s fate and not lose the withered forest for the debunked trees, I’ve tried in this book—actually more of a handbook or a compendium—to sketch with a lightly heretical touch only the most trenchant refutations of the arguments for God. That is, just the gist, with an occasional jest. These refutations—some new and idiosyncratic, but many dating back centuries or even millennia—are not nearly as widely known as they once were, and therefore, I believe, there is value in having them all available in one place. (For this reason I’ve here adapted some sections from the other books and columns of mine that I mentioned above.)
This effort is especially important now given this country’s rampant scripture-spouting religiosity and the policies and debacles to which it has already led and to which it may further lead. A representative of the Enlightenment, which, unfortunately, sometimes seems to be in the process of being repealed, Voltaire presciently observed, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” This dire forecast is all the more likely to come to pass when politicians and a substantial portion of a large political party are among the most effective purveyors of beliefs such as the “Rapture.” (On the other hand, 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.”)
The first step in untangling religious absurdities is to recognize that the arguments for the existence of God depend on the definition of God. Who or what is God? Some authors write that He is ineffable or define Him in some idiosyncratic manner as synonymous with nature or with the laws of physics or in an indeterminate number of other ways.
Most conventional monotheistic characterizations of God (Yahweh, Allah), however, Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Imprint: Hill and Wang
Distributor: MPS
Publication Date: 12-26-2007
Pages: 176
Measurements: 7.50in X 5.00in X 0.69in |
