A well-written, accessible collection

books:


	• Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life Oxford University Press, USA, 2007 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Red meat for the thinking mind

This anthology contains rich, red meat for the inquiring mind, provender for a feast of thinking. Not all of the twenty essays in it are equally good, but all are written in accessible language; all deal with significant issues; and many of them are full of illuminating, surprising ideas and approaches.

Editor Antony asked nineteen other professors of philosophy to write on some aspect of "Atheism and the Secular Life." Some of the responses were biographical, recounting the passage from childhood devotions to adult atheism. Some delve into the old arguments for and against belief, but always with original slants. A few (and the most interesting) describe a constructive philosophical basis for "the secular life." The following are cursory descriptions of some of these essays.

Stewart Shapiro opens with what could be a downer, "Faith and Reason, the Perpetual War." He examines three possible relations between religion and reason. The first is that they are necessarily and perpetually at war; the second that they are incommensurable (Gould's non-overlapping magisteria); the third a rationalist tradition that they can somehow be interpreted as pulling in the same direction. Shapiro finds good reasons to reject the latter two, so only the stance of perpetual war is left, and Shapiro leaves us no more than a hope for "grudging, mutual respect."

Following this dour start, several writers sketch their passages from different kinds of belief to different kinds of atheism. Joseph Levine describes with feeling and sympathy the satisfactions of being a devout rabbinical student and the comforts of living in a strict orthodox community, and the slow process of divorcing from these. He makes the key observation that, as he now sees it, belief in God is morally wrong because it "expresses a rejection, or denial... of one's humanity [and] ... makes servility to authority the ultimate aim of human life."

Louise Antony describes her childhood struggles with the illogic of Catholic doctrine with a bright humor that reminded me of Julia Sweeney. She found her true calling in her first college philosophy class: "Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered that philosophy was all about arguing! ... I could scarcely believe that I could earn credits just for doing what (to me) came naturally."

Edwin Curly was raised Episcopalian and, at age 16, turned to the back of his prayer book and for the first time gave the Articles of Religion a critical reading. Here he details the many problems he found, arguing that the the doctrines of Original Sin, Predestination, Salvation by Faith, Hell, and Exclusivism (that all but believers go to Hell) -- all of which are well-supported in scripture and are official parts of the creed for at least Catholics and Episcopalians -- are offensive to reason and justice and morally repugnant. He says well-intentioned Christians who downplay or discount these doctrines can only do so by drastically reinterpreting their own scriptures.

Marvin Belzer argues, not against belief in God, but against trust in dogma. He describes how a comforting childhood faith lead him, gradually and by natural stages, to shed all the trappings of Christian practice and dogma as superfluous. He gives clear arguments why no specific creed can ever be what God wants people to focus their lives on.

Where the first half opened with Shapiro's grim analysis, the second opens with two upbeat and constructive essays based in Aristotle. Anthony Simon Laden in "Transcendence without God" interprets Aristotle's Ethics to mean that the virtuous person is so because he pays excellent attention to those things that repay excellent attention. Transcendent experience can arise from expanding and developing our capacity for attention to include the full humanity of others.

Marcia Homiak makes it more explicit: "Aristotle's key idea is that the best life for a human being (the most human of human lives) consists in the full realization of [our] distinctive human powers." She draws out the need for community, for ethical virtue, and for continual effort to improve, all trending toward a life of "Aristotelian flourishing." The benefits of this life are comparable to the similar benefits claimed for the religious life.

Kenneth A. Taylor tackles the concept of Divine Providence, the source of so much of a believer's emotional comforts. The notion that there is a God who loves humanity and guarantees eventual triumph of good over evil turns out to be philosophically empty when combined with the idea of radical free will (required by many Christian philosophers to explain why evil exists). But if there is no Godly guarantee of a future perfection, and if our lives lack the significance they would gain from contributing to that end, what's left to give meaning? In a crucial passage that I find deeply meaningful Taylor writes:

"Suppose we grant that we live in a finite, merely material universe, containing at its core nothing of intrinsic or objective value, governed by no purpose and no universal or absolute moral law. Still, whatever else the universe does or does not contain, we exist in it and through it. And we are creatures who value things. We do not find or discover value in the universe, as if values were antecedently present inpendently of anything that we do or are. ... We create values ... simply by engaging in the merely human and entirely natural activity of taking things to matter to us. ... We may cry out with longing and despair to the cold uncaring universe to embrace our value, to vindicate our right to value what we value. But we will hear only silence in return.... So be it. We do not matter to the universe. Still, we matter to ourselves and sometimes to others who sometimes matter to us in return. And that is all the mattering that it is worth our while to concern ourselves about."

Still, absent a divine lawgiver, how do we avoid a chaotic moral relativism? Taylor details a philosophical basis for the formation of "moral communities." He shows how each person has the ability to choose to bind herself to a given norm; and how that act also grants to others the right to hold one to the self-chosen norm. A web of such reciprocal grants of moral holding and binding creates a stable moral order "entirely of our own constituting.... The work of building from the bottom up an all-encompassing moral order is heroic work, invigorating work, work that calls upon the best of ourselves."

The same moral ground is plowed in a different direction by Elizabeth Anderson, who tackles the issue of how, without God to sanction moral rules, moral rules can be anything but personal opinion (as W. L. Craig holds they would be). Her first approach is to advance a "moralistic argument," namely that if any line of evidence leads to something morally repugnant, that entire line of evidence should be rejected as untrustworthy. Then, taking the Bible with "fundamentalist sincerity," she lists in detail and at length the heinous, unjust, barbarous acts and practices described both in the Old and New Testaments. (Many of these citations will be familiar to the non-believer, but one was new to me: In 2nd Thess. 2:11-12, it is said that God deludes some so they cannot believe. So God deliberately overrides the free will of some, in order to send them to Hell -- which rather weakens the ideas of both free will and divine justice.)

Anderson examines the different strategies believers adopt to explain or justify these "hard sayings," but concludes that there is always a residue that will lead to a moral offense, and so nothing in the Christian line of evidence is trustworthy. And the evidence advanced by every creed since Thor, Baal and Zeus has been of the same kind and is no more reliable.

That still leaves the problem of what can ever make a difference between good and evil and so counter Craig's argument? Anderson, like Taylor in the previous essay, argues that the key is reciprocity. Although none of us have the authority to compel obedience on another, all of us have the authority to make moral claims on others, calling them to account for their acts; but in doing so, we automatically open a reciprocal right for others to call us to account in turn. It is the reciprocity that creates morals. If there is a person who asserts that "all things are permitted," as Craig claims they should do, that person, in denying others the ability to call him to account, also resigns any ability to judge others. We deal with such people with physical deterrence -- and they cannot complain when we do, because they have opted out of all moral claims!

Anderson concludes that "morality, understood as a system of reciprocal claim making ... does not need its authority underwritten by some higher, external authority.... Far from bolstering the authority of morality, appeals to divine authority can undermine it."

To end an over-long review I want to give a (surely inadequate) summary of the late David Lewis' "Divine Evil," in which he advanced what was to me a novel twist on the well-known Argument from Evil: that we should at least be skeptical of the existence of a benevolent God in the light of the suffering that billions of sentient beings have endured for millions of years and continue to endure. Add up all of that suffering that God has permitted to happen, Lewis says, and it is yet trivial beside another kind of suffering: a type which God not only permits but positively decrees. There is in all varieties of (Bible-based) theisms some concept of damnation, a punishment for those who are in some fashion insubordinate to the divine. This punishment is promised to consist of eternal suffering. There is ample biblical support for this idea; Lewis cites several passages (Matt. 13:49-50, Matt. 25:41ff, etc. etc.).

Damnation is the promised lot of a considerable fraction of humanity, but even if it were only for a single soul, it is eternal; ergo the sum of it will, in the infinity of time, add up to more than all the suffering of mortal lives since time began. Thus the evil of damnation is immeasurably greater than the evil of ordinary suffering -- and it is not merely permitted, but positively decreed by God. Lewis writes of God that "He places people in a situation in they must make a judgment that binds them for eternity, and he knows that some will be so inadequately informed that they will opt for an eternity of torment... It is hard to distinguish between God and the parent who equips the nursery with sharp objects galore and plenty of matches, fuses, and dynamite."

Lewis examines the arguments of "incompatibilist" free will (that God must let people choose to damn themselves) and finds injustice remains; and the arguments that, despite the explicit texts, damnation is not a barbeque but a state of being isolated from God, saying if it is a state of suffering in any sense, it is still infinite in sum, and an unjustly permanent punishment for transient error. If the biblical texts are granted any credibility at all, it has to be that God intends to deliberately create more suffering in the future than has ever occurred in the past. Well, so what? So this, Lewis says: would you have respect for a person who professes to admire the careers of Hitler or Stalin? No? Then consider: Christians profess to admire God, who (they have to admit) intends to hurt far more people, infinitely longer than Hitler or Stalin could have dreamed of doing. Should you then respect Christians?

Unlike books by the celebrated "New Atheists" this book does not contain colorful, slashing language and easy pejoratives against religion. Instead, it contains powerful ideas, many of them positive, all carefully worked out with measured langauge. It is a demonstration of the value of philosophy and the use of philosophers: to really think things through in an original way, and show us how to do the same.

for more information click here

Wonderful collection

One of the readers complains in his review that this book presents no new arguments against the existence of God. Well, that's asking a bit too much. Throughout history all the arguments have been clearly stated - it would be like wondering why nobody has invented a pair of trousers with three legs. There are the standard proofs for the existence of God and the refutations of these. But let's not in the rush forget what the word `atheist' actually entails. To my understanding it means nothing more than the absence of belief in God. You can also have a positive belief that God does not exist, but to actually deny his existence is untenable. Not even Richard Dawkins goes further than to say that `God almost certainly does not exist'. (The God Delusion p.158)
PHILOSOPHERS WITHOUT GODS is a wonderful collection of essays. Some are more philosophical than others. Personally I enjoyed the first part, `Journeys', the most. Here the writers describe their departure from belief into a secular life. Most of them hold no grudge against religion but rather lost their faith through youthful inquiry or perhaps a change of environment. One writer describes the clash of influences when he left the Jewish `yeshiva' and went to public school in Los Angeles. After years of studying the Talmud he found himself making friends with the hippies of the 1960s counterculture.
Most reviewers point out that the tone is milder than in many other books and even if that's generally true, it's not always the case. In part two, `Reflections', you'll find some more rigid reasoning and the essay by David Lewis is uncompromising, to say the least. He argues that a theist has to take Scripture literally to be able to call himself a Christian. There is no middle ground for a more liberal or modern interpretation. You just cannot explain away God's evil ways in especially, but not exclusively, the Old Testament. And here it is; not a `new' argument, but what Lewis presents as a `neglected' one. Usually when considering the question of evil, we focus on the evil that God fails to prevent. But Lewis turns it around and concentrates on the evil that God himself perpetrates. He compares God with the Führer and concludes that the good people he knows to be Christians, must be smitten to follow such a leader. He talks, Dawkins-like about these believers as being `infected' and states that ecumenicism will only make things worse because it engenders tolerance, for example towards a literal reading of the horrors of Scripture. Uncompromising stuff indeed.
Then Georges Rey gives us eleven reasons why believing in God is actually a form of self-deception. It seems to me, that no matter how well you argue this case, it's bound to be fruitless to anyone of faith.
Apart from this, PHILOSOPHERS WITHOUT GODS is a book for believers and non-believers alike.

for more information click here

Solid

Intended largely for a general audience, this is a collection of essays on atheism written by a group of philosophers who are themselves atheists. The essays fall into three categories, reflections on the life of atheists, with both its costs and benefits, psychologically satisfying atheistic alternatives to theism, and critiques of religion. The authors are a broad spectrum of philosophers, some whose professional work is directly related to philosophy of religion and most whose work is in other fields. Among the authors is the late David Lewis, regarded widely as one of the most important philosophers of the last half century. All the essays are written well and thoughtful. Recurrent themes are the general incoherence of theistic views and the danger of religion in authorizing immoral acts. While written in a much less polemical tone than popular works by Dawkins and others, the basic points are much the same.

for more information click here

A well-written, accessible collection

The first half of Philosophers Without Gods - Journeys - introduces a range of issues pertaining to the debate between theists and atheists with engaging, first-person narratives of how the philosopher in question moved from faith to atheism. Without saying so explicitly, these autobiographical essays reinforce the connections between philosophy and the lives of the real people from which it emerges. (Interestingly, the beginning point for most of these journeys is faith rather than neutrality or indifference.) For some the movement towards atheism was a source of unmitigated liberation while for others the movement entailed genuine costs. The acknowledgement by atheists that theistic belief, whatever its shortcomings, can nevertheless offer consolation and moral guidance is one of the collection's strengths.

The second half of the collection - Reflections - contains more conventional philosophical essays that raise issues such as how one goes about defining the God in which one does or does not believe, alternatives to theism such as Aristotle's notion of human flourishing, self-deception, and how much "respect" theism deserves. Like all collections, some of these essays are more compelling than others but there are several gems here, such as David Owen's essay "Disenchantment" and Elizabeth Secord Anderson's survey of the morality in the Bible.

Overall, this is a well-written and accessible collection that exposes the issues between theists and atheists largely without philosophical jargon and the unfortunate, but all too frequentr, rancor that typically characteriszes those debates. (The reviewer is the author of The Search for Meaning: A Short History.)The Search for Meaning: A Short History

for more information click here

Kinder, Gentler.... Intolerance?

Narrow-mindedness, smug feelings of superiority, intolerance and more. Exactly the things they accuse theists of being and, yet, they somehow fail to see it in themselves. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? (Matthew 7:3)

Now, if that was all you were to read, you might think that I disliked this book. Any time I say something negative about atheist writings, people assume I'm saying it from a knee-jerk theist position. I am not so far removed from being an atheist, myself, but there is something in all of the atheist writings that I've encountered which really bothers me.

I enjoyed most of this book. In fact, there is something worth reading in each of the essays. My favorite essay, if I had to pick one right now, would be Reasonable Religious Disagreements by Richard Feldman. Too bad that, in the end, he turned out to be less reasonable than his students, whom he found fault in for being too respectful and tolerant of others beliefs. My least favorite requires no reflection at all... that would be Thank Goodness! by Daniel C Dennett. Regardless of his personal beliefs, the scope of his ingratitude toward others and their kindnesses toward him is unforgivable. He is exactly the type of person that fosters feelings of wariness and mistrust toward atheists.

What I most disliked about the book is that it seemed so many of them were using the same playbook. The same terms, the same arguments. If I never hear/see the term "fellow feeling" again it will be too soon.

I don't think there was really much new in the way of their arguments against God. Well, actually, I should say against Christianity because that really seems to be the object of their criticisms. On the other hand, the book is not overly offensive (and I say this, not as a theist, but as a de facto atheist) and so is likely to actually be read by theists. Still, I would like to see someone come up with an original argument. Arguing that "absence of evidence is evidence of absence", as Georges Rey does, just doesn't fly. His assertion that everyone knows this is a bit disingenuous. Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

I have no issues with the atheist belief that there is no God. I do think, however, that, at least in the writings that I have seen, they hurt their own cause with their intolerance of theists beliefs and their sarcastic and ridiculing attitude toward those who hold religious beliefs.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2

Atheists are frequently demonized as arrogant intellectuals, antagonistic to religion, devoid of moral sentiments, advocates of an "anything goes" lifestyle. Now, in this revealing volume, nineteen leading philosophers open a window on the inner life of atheism, shattering these common stereotypes as they reveal how they came to turn away from religious belief.
These highly engaging personal essays capture the marvelous diversity to be found among atheists, providing a portrait that will surprise most readers. Many of the authors, for example, express great affection for particular religious traditions, even as they explain why they cannot, in good conscience, embrace them. None of the contributors dismiss religious belief as stupid or primitive, and several even express regret that they cannot, or can no longer, believe. Perhaps more important, in these reflective pieces, they offer fresh insight into some of the oldest and most difficult problems facing the human mind and spirit. For instance, if God is dead, is everything permitted? Philosophers Without Gods demonstrates convincingly, with arguments that date back to Plato, that morality is independent of the existence of God. Indeed, every writer in this volume adamantly affirms the objectivity of right and wrong. Moreover, they contend that secular life can provide rewards as great and as rich as religious life. A naturalistic understanding of the human condition presents a set of challenges--to pursue our goals without illusions, to act morally without hope of reward--challenges that can impart a lasting value to finite and fragile human lives.
Collectively, these essays highlight the richness of atheistic belief--not only as a valid alternative to religion, but as a profoundly fulfilling and moral way of life.

for more information click here

hot