Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up | 
| Author: John Allen Paulos
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  34 reviews
Sales Rank: 4302
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: December 26, 2007
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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 29 more reviews...
 Where is the logic? June 27, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
There has been a tidal wave of books promoting the intellectual and social benefits of atheism in the past few years. Sadly most have been badly informed and intellectually dishonest. Atheists, not the religious, are exposing themselves as the illogical ranters. Of course there are some outstanding atheists - Michael Ruse, Quentin Smith and Jordan Howard Sober come to mind, but sadly the face of rational atheism is represented by Dawkins, Hitchin and Dennett who all have lost debates with 'illogical believers' in the past 15 months. As for Paulos' book I would hesitate to describe it as even schoolboy philosophizing as it fails to reach any level of academic respectability and is, if anything, even worse than the aforementioned efforts from the `New Atheists'.
His first area of attack is the 'first cause argument' which Paulos states can be slightly amended to become the 'cosmological argument';
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.
There are however two major problems with Paulos' version. Firstly no one in Western philosophical/theological history has even advanced the first cause/cosmological argument in this form. Paulos appears to have just made it up for this book. Secondly his version is not logically valid as the conclusion (5) does not follow from the earlier statements (1-4). All that is presented is a series of unconnected assertions unrelated to each other. Paulos' is constantly self-promoting his mathematical, logical mind but here he displays a complete failure to understand even the most basic logic.
A good example a modern first cause argument is the Kalam cosmological argument rediscovered and improved in modern thought by William Lane Craig.
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore the universe has a cause
This argument is logically valid. The conclusion (3) follows deductively from 1 and 2. The soundness of the argument, that the statements are true, requires considerable knowledge of cosmology, set theory, physics and philosophy. Some atheists dispute statement s 1 or 2 as being unsound by arguing that the universe did not have a beginning or some things that begin to exist are uncaused usually by arguing that, as quantum mechanics cannot supply significant conditions for certain phenomena, statement 1 not universally true. Notice as well that God is not mentioned in this argument as God; it is argued by theists, is the best explanation as to why the whole argument is true. Of course atheists are could argue that the existence of the universe is down to pure luck or beyond our ability to comprehend. In any event intellectual atheists are aware of the power of this argument and are prepared to engage with the issues seriously. I find it extremely unlikely that Paulos is not aware of the true first-cause/cosmological arguments. It appears that he knows that he is unable to refute it and has resorted to a pseudo-argument to sell his book.
The rest of the book is basically the same, bad logic, poor understanding of philosophy, an inability to engage, and the refutation of theistic arguments that are essentially made up by Paulos.
Two of the reviewers Neil deGrasse Tyson and Joan Konner praise the books logic but there is none is sight.
For a serious look at atheism please try the atheist authors Sober, Smith and Ruse mentioned above.
Could be much better June 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The book is an interesting attempt. However, there are cases of superficiality and pseudo-objectivity.
How come for example the author attacks the Bush administration who struggles against irrationalities and dangereous extremism and fanaticism in the world, and not the latest one itself? Prof. Paulos has to notice that if the Islamo-Fascism will prevail in the world instead of the US, he will not be able to write such a book. i guess he will not be able to live.
Opher Liba, Math Educator, Researcher and Author
 Ace philosopher? June 11, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I really wanted to like John Allen Paulos' Irreligion, but I found myself progressively frustrated and disappointed with it. I have three primary complaints: his arguments are either too compacted, too haphazardly presented, or too sloppy; he's indiscriminate in the arguments for God's existence he analyzes; and his style, loaded with asides and one-liner attempts at humor, is both distracting and, after a certain point, annoying. But atheism is such a hot publishing commodity these days that nearly anything can get published, especially if its author is already well-known. This is too bad, because atheism is a position that deserves better than it's been getting lately from its popularizing champions.
Paulos admits in the book's preface that as a mathematician he prefers lean arguments. Fine. So do I. But there's a difference between leanness and incompleteness. In his efforts to strip down both traditional God-arguments and responses to them, he sometimes misses important points. In discussing the cosmological First Cause argument, for example, he accepts Hume's understanding of causality as if it's conventional philosophical wisdom. In his objections to the argument from design, he carelessly draws a whoppingly bad analogy between economic systems of distribution (which clearly are the products of design) and nondesigned evolutionary processes. In discussing the ontological argument, which is probably the best chapter in the book, he for some reason morphs, for no comprehensible reason, into a criticism of one of the so-called impossibility arguments against God's existence (which is predictably, by this point, lean to the point of sketchiness). And in discussing so-called subjective arguments for divine existence, he strawmans them to an extent that no theist would be stupid enough to say "Yep, that's what I believe!"
Moreover, the book gives the impression of being thrown together, or at least having a lot of filler. Design, ontological, and cosmological arguments are serious efforts to justify God's existence, and any equally serious atheist argument needs to respond to them. But what's the point of bothering to respond to silly claims about biblical prophecy and putative numerical codes, or extraordinary coincidences, or prayerful interventions? Surely Paulos could've spent more time rigorously examining more reputable arguments for God's existence if he'd spent less time goofing around with biblical codes.
Finally, Paulos just can't seem to resist cracking a joke on virtually every page of text. Sometimes the gags are so long-winded that he (or his editor) puts them inside parentheses, and the flow of the argument on either side of them is seriously broken. Before long, the reader (or at least this reader) wants to shout: "Enough with the jokes, already! They're not funny, and they're not helping!" Additionally, Paulos fails to provide any references for the many interesting articles and studies to which he refers. So anyone wanting to take a look at them has to do a lot of internet legwork.
At one point in his book, Paulos sarcastically refers to evolution-denying Ann Coulter as an "ace biologist." Don't get me wrong. Paulos is a much better thinker than Coulter. But, alas. In the same spirit by which he designates Coulter an "ace biologist," I think it's fair to say that, at least so far as this little book goes, he's an "ace philosopher."
 too little, too late June 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As much as I enjoy the writing of John Allen Paulos (particularly A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper), I would have to characterize this book as being too little, too late.
Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation (Vintage) was the articulate first salvo of the New Atheists. This was followed by Richard Dawkins' masterful The God Delusion, which should be regarded as the consummate statement of the atheist position. The following year, Christopher Hitchens came out with God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, which was well-done, if a bit acerbic. But Hitchens was too late: he had already been comprehensively outdone by Dawkins, whose book is really all one needs to get started down the mind-cleansing path of non-belief.
And then this book comes along: much thinner, less funny, and certainly less exhaustive. Kind of hard to see what the point is. There's nothing that Paulos does here that hasn't been more capably and memorably done elsewhere.
It's readable, sure. But Paulos himself raises questions that cannot be capably addressed in such a thin volume. Nor does he seem to have the sheer erudition or organization Dawkins does.
In short, Paulos seems here to be idly musing in his armchair, whereas Hitchens and Dawkins are passionate, angry, and purposeful.
If you're only going to read one book from the so-called "New Atheist" crop, don't let it be this one.
A Sign of the Times June 3, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
Since Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion in 2006, bookstore shelves have groaned under the weight of glossy hardcover works proclaiming the gospel of New Atheism. At the same time, religious authors have packed their corner of the bookstore with apologetic works designed to equip believers with arguments to level at the armies of secularism. Bestselling author of Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences and professor of mathematics at Temple University, John Allen Paulos weighs in on the faith and reason debate with his new book Irreligion. In it, Paulos examines and attempts to deconstruct twelve popular arguments for the existence of God, drawing on the resources of logic, probability, evolution, and the power of the childlike question "why?" His presentation is brisk and witty (just the gist with an occasional jest), and the author thankfully refrains from proselytizing while remaining focused on undermining the rationality of traditional arguments for the existence of God (xiii). While Paulos holds nothing back in arguing for a rational, atheistic worldview, the handbook-style presentation and effective treatment of the essential arguments offer something for everyone. Though never striving to probe the depths of the philosophical tradition behind the faith and reason debate, Paulos provides a practical introduction to the arguments and responses that have motivated discussion for centuries.
Irreligion is propelled by the question "are there any logical reasons to believe in God," and it is clear from the very beginning that Paulos thinks that there aren't any. His central claim is that the arguments are "flawed" and "starkly feeble" which purport to prove the existence of God, whom he defines as omnipotent, omniscient, creator of the universe, and perfect, or at least exceedingly close to being so. It is important to note that Paulos never claims to address the God of any particular religion, and though several of the arguments he addresses in the book trace themselves back to Christian theologians, the various narratives, traditions, and attitudes proper to organized religion rarely appear.
The arguments he presents are grouped into three larger categories which he terms "classical arguments," "subjective arguments," and "psycho-mathematical arguments." The section on classical arguments includes the argument from first cause, the argument from design, and the ontological argument; the section on subjective arguments treats those related to miracles and coincidences; and the psycho-mathematical section includes arguments from incomprehensible complexity and Pascal's wager. Paulos usually begins a chapter with a rough schematic of the argument under consideration, to which he follows up with about ten pages of deconstruction by various methods. Paulos relies mainly on his own reasoning to raise doubts about the plausibility or rationality of the proof, but he also makes frequent use of real-world examples, thought-experiments, and references to well known philosophers to illustrate his points.
In a chapter that typifies the author's style and method of attack, Paulos takes a shot at the ontological argument, a classic proof for God's existence. Paulos opens by leading the reader through a short primer on recursive logic puzzles. Citing a passage from Plato's Euthydemus, the author shows how simple phrases layered on top of one another can be used to "prove" such statements as, "Your dog is your father, and his puppies are your brothers" (37). As an element of Paulos's refutation of the ontological argument, this primer on logical puzzles serves to introduce the reader to the possibility that internally consistent statements can be used to "prove" ridiculous conclusions. Paulos frequently uses such tutorials on logic and probability to give himself grounds for pointing out abuses of the subjects he finds in arguments for God.
After the logic lecture, Paulos lays out the ontological argument as described by its originator, Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. Following his usual method of illustrating schematically the argument du jour, Paulos summarizes as follows:
1.God is a being than which nothing greater can even be conceived.
2.We understand the notion of God as well as the notion of God's really existing.
3.Let's also tentatively assume God doesn't exist.
4.If we understand the notion of a positive being and that being really exists, then this being is greater than it would have been if we only understood the notion of it.
5.From these assumptions, we conclude that if God did not exist, we could conceive of a being greater than God (a being just like God, but really existing). This is a contradiction since God is a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.
6.Thus Assumption 3 is refuted and God exists (39).
Paulos's first response to the argument is to object that the argument "proves too much" (39). He supports this claim by summarizing the criticism of Anselm's contemporary, Gaunilo, who argues that Anselm's method of establishing the existence of God can also be used to prove the existence of all manner of perfect entities which clearly do not exist. Paulos gives the example of Gaunilo's perfect island, which he claims can be proved to exist by the same reasoning found in the ontological argument. Such name-dropping occurs frequently throughout the book, with the author presenting established arguments in one-sentence summaries.
The author furthers his criticism by characterizing the ontological argument as an abuse of the term "existence." Citing proponents of the ontological argument who claim that, unlike islands, only the abstract concept of being admits of absolute perfection, Paulos asks the question, "But does it really? And is existence even a characteristic in anything like the same way red or hard is?" (39). In this rhetorical critique, Paulos aims at undermining Assumption 4 (which states that a being is greater if it has the property of existence) by proposing an irreconcilable contrast between tangible, physical properties like color and hardness and the slippery notion of existence. This move, too, is typical of the rest of the work, as Paulos often relies on barbed, unanswered questions to make his points.
In the final part of the chapter, Paulos works to show that the ontological argument is illogical. In this effort, his first move is to suggest that the argument has only the same persuasive power as the recursive logic puzzles described above; that is to say, the argument's assumptions perhaps make sense in themselves, but together they reach a conclusion along a dubious path. Paulos also claims that the ontological argument does not prove God's existence because God's non-existence is not contradictory. He supports this claim with a paragraph about analytic and synthetic statements, explaining that analytic truths are true by the meaning of their terms, and synthetic truths are true because of the way the world is. Though Paulos never calls the ontological argument an attempt at an analytic proof, the fact that he includes such a discussion implies that, for him, the argument fails on logical grounds because it doesn't meet the requirement of analytic proof, that is, to show that a contradiction in terms occurs in the proposition's opposite.
Realizing that Paulos's goal with Irreligion is to provide only the most trenchant refutations of the arguments for God, his book achieves only mixed success. The brevity which is the book's strength is also its greatest weaknesses, as it forces the author to keep his arguments so simple that he cannot make use of the strongest refutations available. For instance, in his treatment of the ontological argument, Paulos gives only a cursory reply to the notion that being might be the only thing that admits of perfection, and he simply dismisses it with a rhetorical question. Many philosophers throughout history have supported the ontological argument by attaching positive value to the "property of existence," and it is easy to see how the everyday believer might feel that Paulos's dismissal is too abrupt. It was only with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason that philosophers were first able to discuss the problem of referring to existence as a property of a concept, and though Paulos seems to have this in mind when making his rhetorical dismissal, he misses out on the power of Kant's criticism. Kant maintains that existence is not a property of a concept because when we say that something exists, we do not mean to add an additional property of existence to the thing's concept. In fact, we assert that the thing can be found outside of thought and that we can experience it in space and time. Making use of this understanding of existence would allow Paulos to call all existence claims synthetic propositions (true because of the way of the world), and then, following Kant, he would be in a position to dismiss the ontological argument as an attempt to prove a synthetic proposition analytically.
If Paulos were to contend that he captures the essence and force of Kant's argument in his rhetorical dismissal of existence as a property, it could be pointed out that though he does discuss analytic and synthetic truths later in the chapter, he fails to draw any sort of connection between the existence claim present in the ontological argument and the possibility that all existence claims are by nature synthetic. The only way Paulos could respond to this criticism is to say that he does indeed make good use of the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, incorporating it into his assertion that the ontological argument fails because God's non-existence is not contradictory. However, Paulos never explicitly characterizes the conclusion of the ontological argument as synthetic or analytic truth, and he places the discussion of analytic and synthetic statements at the end of the chapter in a parenthetical aside that begins, "Relevant to further development of this idea..." (40). By suggesting that knowledge of analytic and synthetic statements is relevant only to the further development of the refutation, Paulos implies that this knowledge is not necessary to disprove the ontological argument to a satisfactory degree. Preferring brevity for forcefulness, the author misses an opportunity to prove the ontological argument illogical in a more powerful way.
A more general criticism of Irreligion is that the author too-often throws himself fastballs to hit out of the park. This is especially clear in his treatment of the argument from miracles. To "refute" this argument, Paulos relies on the heart-wrenching nature of questions relating to the problem of evil's existence in a world supposedly created by an all-good God. He asks, "Why do so many in the media and elsewhere refer to the rescuing of a few children after an earthquake or a tsunami as a miracle when they attribute the death of perhaps hundreds of equally innocent children in the same disaster to a geophysical fault line? It would seem either both are the result of divine intervention or both are a consequence of the earth's plates shifting" (86). With this passage, Paulos tries to show that the word "miracle," as it appears in everyday language, is meaningless. Tracing both the "miracle" and a tragedy to the same cause, the author attempts to present a double contradiction in which a supposedly good God is the cause of human tragedy and in which miracles and tragedies flow from the same source. Though this predicament may be enough to cause us to doubt the existence of the God Paulos defines at the beginning of the book, more sophisticated accounts of God's agency, the relation between humans and miracles, and the problem of evil do much to reduce, or even eliminate, the seeming contradictions presented in the chapter. It may be granted that Paulos sets himself to the task of refuting arguments for the existence of God and not to the task of generating a critique of theology, but without a developed understanding of God's agency, the author's exceptionally narrow definition of God precludes believers from extracting from similar examples things that they might call real evidence for God's existence. Put more simply, miracles are an extremely complex topic for writers on both sides of the debate, and to claim victory, as Paulos does, as soon as one trumpets the atheistic slogan, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" (88) is simply to show that the concept of God thus defeated is not especially well developed.
Though the problems with Irreligion presented here are real and unresolved, the humor and wit in Paulos's book will certainly earn him his fair share of readers. One cannot fault him for trying to bring some of the philosophical underpinnings of the faith and reason debate to the masses, and it is certainly true that anyone who has attempted a foray into the field has always received harsh criticism, no matter his achievement. Believers and atheists alike should be thankful that the book is infused with tones of tolerance, and bookstores everywhere should be thankful that there are only 158 pages more to stuff into the bulging stacks.
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