I thank R.R. Reno for pointing us to Leon Wieseltier’s essay on Alex Rosenberg’s exercise in reductionism, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. (And yes, Edward Feser’s review was a real pleasure as well.) Reviews like this do us a double service: while they entertain and instruct, they also steer us clear of bad books that would be a waste of our time (although I daresay Rosenberg’s title alone would have done the job for me).
Wieseltier calls Rosenberg’s “the worst book of the year.” Big claim, that. Many candidates present themselves, some in the remainder bins, some on the bestseller lists. (Thomas Friedman is always in contention.) My own nominee–certainly the worst book I read in 2011–is Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life. (In Britain its title was The God Instinct, and God knows why W.W. Norton decided to change it for the U.S., where Christopher Hitchens had a hit with God Is Not Great.)
Here is Bering’s whole argument, to save you the trouble: Human beings evolved by believing a number of stupid things in order to survive and reproduce. The dumbest thing they evolved to believe is that there is a God. If you still believe there is a God, now that you have read my book, you should wise up and stop, already.
Okay, there’ s a little more than that–but seriously, not much. Bering works in the field of cognitive psychology, which has made a number of interesting findings about the “naturalness” of religious belief. (A much better exploration of such findings is Justin Barrett’s Why Would Anyone Believe in God?) But his book is fatally marred by his smarmy atheism and his gleeful mockery of religion, qualities that are particularly grating in light of the fact that he does not even attempt to offer any warrant whatsoever for his convictions that there is no God, that we are merely bodies with firing synapses in the region above our necks, that those bodies are merely the products of blind evolutionary chance, and so on. Bering presents himself as a relentless practitioner of “logic,” but he seems blissfully uninterested in our logical nature, and appears never to have encountered a genuine philosophical thought of any kind–let alone a theological one. In the end, the book is really rather sad for the glimpse it gives of its author’s soul. (And why that last word appears in his book’s subtitle, I cannot say.)
January 4th, 2012 | 12:28 pm
[...] REDUCTIONISTS, THAT IS: “Reductionists on Parade.” See also “Against Atheist [...]
January 4th, 2012 | 1:49 pm
[...] http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2012/01/04/reductionists-on-parade/ [...]
January 4th, 2012 | 2:34 pm
I’m not sure what the fuss is about. Don’t theists (or Christians, at any rate) basically maintain that all of the conclusions someone like Rosenberg draws follow inevitably from atheism? Will there ever be a book written by an atheist on atheism that theists will say, “Well, ultimately I don’t agree with him, but he makes some very powerful arguments, many of which I don’t have any answers for.”
The #1 Christian book on Amazon is Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back. I wonder what Leon Wieseltier or Edward Feser would have to say about it.
January 4th, 2012 | 3:26 pm
he does not even attempt to offer any warrant whatsoever for his convictions that there is no God, that we are merely bodies with firing synapses in the region above our necks, that those bodies are merely the products of blind evolutionary chance, and so on. Bering presents himself as a relentless practitioner of “logic,”
It is Gilbert & Sullivan logic. It works just like real logic, only it has the capacity to navigate neatly around things that are self-evidently true.
Because it’s just obvious – in the same way that it’s just obvious all Englishmen have a sense of duty and love their Queen – that there is no God.
January 4th, 2012 | 4:41 pm
Blake,
It doesn’t sound like a great book, but do books on religion start out by proving the existence of God, or just assuming it to be true? Why should the burden be on atheists to “prove” that God does not exist? It seems to me atheists are just as entitled to their assumptions as theists. Nobody has proven the existence of God (or gods). When you want to discredit something (e.g., humanism, atheism) you sneer at it as a “religion.” Why don’t you ever take religion to task for being religion?
January 4th, 2012 | 5:23 pm
do books on religion start out by proving the existence of God, or just assuming it to be true?
So in other words, atheism is better than religion because religion relies on faith, but it’s unreasonable to hold atheism to a higher standard in terms of actually, you know, not relying on faith.
Is that about how it is?
January 4th, 2012 | 5:34 pm
david nickol,
you seem to miss the point. rosenberg, bering, and others are not being taken to task because they maintain assumptions that lead them to be atheists. everyone starts from something that may be accurately described as a statement of faith. rather, they are being taken to task for promoting such awful arguments that fellow atheists are embarrassed by the spectacle of their illogic (“I believe X is true; therefore anyone who believes ~X is a backwards fool”).
I’ve encountered a number of respectable arguments for atheism. the use of a priori reasoning isn’t one of them.
best,
kristan
January 5th, 2012 | 9:18 pm
“Why should the burden be on atheists to “prove” that God does not exist?”
Dear David Nickol: I do think that some versions of the ontological argument do shift the burden of proof in just that way. Example:
(1) God by definition is the Supreme Being, or maximally perfect Being.
(2) A maximally perfect Being cannot come into existence, which would imply contingency and hence a lack of perfection, but also could not pass out of existence, which would imply decline and hence a lack of perfection.
(3) Either God exists right now or does not exist right now.
(4) If God does not exist right now and cannot come into existence, it is logically impossible for God to exist, ever.
(5) If God does exist right now and cannot pass out of existence, then God exists necessarily.
(6) So, based on the above, either it is logically impossible for God to exist, ever, or God exists necessarily.
(7) It is not logically impossible for God to exist.
(8) So God exists necessarily; which means that God exists.
It seems to me that if I wanted to refute the above, I would need to focus on (7). In other words, if it actually IS logically impossible for God to exist, the argument falls apart.
However, what that does is shift the burden of proof. The atheist, in order to refute this argument, needs to demonstrate that it is logically impossible for God to exist. Otherwise, the existence of God is entailed.
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