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Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up
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.
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.
158 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 141 reviews
October 3, 2009
Written by a mathematician who went out of his way to refrain altogether from using formulas and equations and stick strictly to prose, this charming book is a humble refutation of a collection of the most common arguments in favor of the existence of god. Paulos goes through these arguments one after the other, first documenting the form of the argument itself before discussing how the argument holds up.
For people who are already avowed nonbelievers, this book is an invaluable resource to aid in breaking down and analyzing the attempts of the religious to push belief, demonstrating with each page how weak the arguments in favor of god really are. For readers who do believe, this is a confirmation of what they already know - that belief is a personal matter and that for lack of clear evidence, there is no irrefutable argument for the existence of a supreme being.
Far from being an extremist about religion, Paulos' tone is that of a man who sees danger in the forceful side of religion and simply wishes to arm those who do not wish to be forced. His arguments are as sensible and thorough as one would expect those of a mathematician to be while remaining very approachable. I would recommend this book to anybody, particularly the nonreligious and religious moderates as well as anybody making a study of contemporary American religious culture.
For people who are already avowed nonbelievers, this book is an invaluable resource to aid in breaking down and analyzing the attempts of the religious to push belief, demonstrating with each page how weak the arguments in favor of god really are. For readers who do believe, this is a confirmation of what they already know - that belief is a personal matter and that for lack of clear evidence, there is no irrefutable argument for the existence of a supreme being.
Far from being an extremist about religion, Paulos' tone is that of a man who sees danger in the forceful side of religion and simply wishes to arm those who do not wish to be forced. His arguments are as sensible and thorough as one would expect those of a mathematician to be while remaining very approachable. I would recommend this book to anybody, particularly the nonreligious and religious moderates as well as anybody making a study of contemporary American religious culture.
April 29, 2011
I've been through this one two and a half times and still haven't figured out for whom this book was written.
This book takes a few of the classic arguments for the existence of God and refutes them. He refutes them effectively but in the standard manner. Your average atheist or agnostic already knows these arguments. The average theist will be put off by the tone of the tome, which is a bit condescending. Some atheists will be put off by that too.
What disappointed me about the book was actually one of the ground rules Paulos set down for himself: to avoid using too much math. I know. If I'd read the first chapter before buying, I would have been less disappointed, but the title suggested that I would learn something, if not about religious argument, then about math. I ended up learning very little from this book, and I think the people who could learn from this book either will not read it or will dismiss it. This is not really this book's fault, but I was hoping that a book by a mathematician would have less personality and would just state the argument and the rebuttal. Obviously, I was just not familiar with the author.
So this is a tough one. The arguments are well laid out, but they are not new arguments. The humorous asides keep things interesting, but they make the author vulnerable to accusations of bias, which (as Hitchens says of religion) poisons everything. They make the book too easy to dismiss, which is unfortunate, since his descriptions of the arguments and the rebuttals are sometimes especially useful.
For some time, I've wished that someone would come out with a more objective, theist-friendly book on atheism. This is not that book.
This book takes a few of the classic arguments for the existence of God and refutes them. He refutes them effectively but in the standard manner. Your average atheist or agnostic already knows these arguments. The average theist will be put off by the tone of the tome, which is a bit condescending. Some atheists will be put off by that too.
What disappointed me about the book was actually one of the ground rules Paulos set down for himself: to avoid using too much math. I know. If I'd read the first chapter before buying, I would have been less disappointed, but the title suggested that I would learn something, if not about religious argument, then about math. I ended up learning very little from this book, and I think the people who could learn from this book either will not read it or will dismiss it. This is not really this book's fault, but I was hoping that a book by a mathematician would have less personality and would just state the argument and the rebuttal. Obviously, I was just not familiar with the author.
So this is a tough one. The arguments are well laid out, but they are not new arguments. The humorous asides keep things interesting, but they make the author vulnerable to accusations of bias, which (as Hitchens says of religion) poisons everything. They make the book too easy to dismiss, which is unfortunate, since his descriptions of the arguments and the rebuttals are sometimes especially useful.
For some time, I've wished that someone would come out with a more objective, theist-friendly book on atheism. This is not that book.
September 26, 2008
Why I read this book: I saw a mention of it online, either on a website or Amazon. As an atheist married to a mathematics major, I was curious to see Paulos's take.
This was a good book for me to read on the airplane; it was (mostly) interesting, but not too challenging. (As I get older, I find that noisy settings--like airplane cabins--make it hard for me to concentrate.)
The book is pleasantly and smoothly written; it deals with how none of the popular "mathematical" or "scientific" proofs of the existence of God really work from a mathematical or scientific standpoint. (This wasn't exactly news to me.)
Ultimately I found the book disappointing. I guess that as I get older I want more fire and brimstone in my rants against religion (for instance, The God Delusion ). This seemed too mild; while the author makes his personal hardcore materialism plain (and his descriptions of that were the part I most enjoyed), he won't go so far as to argue that the lack of compelling logical or scientific proof is a weakness of religion or religious belief.
The other thing I enjoyed: Like the author, I find it ironic that religious conservatives tend to argue vehemently against any sort of central planning in their rich and diverse free markets but insist that our rich and diverse ecosystem must be the result of central planning (aka "intelligent design"). I noticed this some years ago, but this book is the first time I've seen anyone else draw attention to it.
(Finished 2008-09-18 15:16EDT)
This was a good book for me to read on the airplane; it was (mostly) interesting, but not too challenging. (As I get older, I find that noisy settings--like airplane cabins--make it hard for me to concentrate.)
The book is pleasantly and smoothly written; it deals with how none of the popular "mathematical" or "scientific" proofs of the existence of God really work from a mathematical or scientific standpoint. (This wasn't exactly news to me.)
Ultimately I found the book disappointing. I guess that as I get older I want more fire and brimstone in my rants against religion (for instance, The God Delusion ). This seemed too mild; while the author makes his personal hardcore materialism plain (and his descriptions of that were the part I most enjoyed), he won't go so far as to argue that the lack of compelling logical or scientific proof is a weakness of religion or religious belief.
The other thing I enjoyed: Like the author, I find it ironic that religious conservatives tend to argue vehemently against any sort of central planning in their rich and diverse free markets but insist that our rich and diverse ecosystem must be the result of central planning (aka "intelligent design"). I noticed this some years ago, but this book is the first time I've seen anyone else draw attention to it.
(Finished 2008-09-18 15:16EDT)
February 5, 2008
If Dawkins or Dennett are a little too hardcore for you, Paulos might be the one to truly deflect the mainstream meme that has placed the poorly thought out label of 'fundamentalist atheism' on this movement. He's thorough in his debunking of 'God Exist' arguments without being arrogant. For those who want a summary of false claims of the supernatural, IRRELIGION is a nice primer for those of us within the U.S. minority that is, as Penny Edgall puts it, "the glaring exception to the rule of increasing tolerance over the last 30 years". (In the U.S., that is, many other countries like Japan are way ahead of us on this progressive front.) Even when the logic gets a little too text-book-y, Paulos returns with some nicely concise prose.
May 23, 2009
Paulos playfully takes on 12 alleged 'proofs' of the existence of a deity - proofs that range from the subtly fallacious to the downright silly. The thing I liked most about the book was that Paulos summarized most of the proofs in syllogistic form, to help expose the flaws in the proofs. He cites an example from Woody Allen :
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, all men are Socrates.
It has never seemed to me that the proofs of god's existence are very difficult to refute, but Paulos at least brings good humor to the task - humor without rancor or condescension.
My question is : what would constitute a 'proof', or even evidence, of the existence of a deity. I think that it would be of the same nature as evidence for, say, dark matter. That is, there would need to be some phenomenon that is not accounted for by our physical theories, that in fact contradicts our physical theories, and that is explainable by the existence of a deity with well-defined properties. Moreover, the deity explanation would have to be such that specific additional predictions could be formed from that explanation, and those predictions could be empirically tested.
But there are two problems here: first, religious believers are unable to ascribe any well-defined properties to their deities. Most of their deities were invented by primitive people who imagined god as a kind of really big and powerful person. So contemporary believers either stick with that story, or replace it with a sort of fuzzy 'god is everywhere as a kind of spirit' concept, which inherently has no explanatory value whatsoever.
Second, a 'deity hypothesis' that actually predicts and explains natural phenomenon is no longer in the realm of the supernatural, and therefore does not refer to a deity at all. Unless, of course, you want to think of natural laws as a deity.
So evidence or 'proof' of god of an empirical nature is doomed from the outset: scientific evidence can only ever be evidence of natural processes, not super-natural entities.
Creationists and other fundamentalists seem to have an intuitive idea that this is so - hence the many 'god of the gaps' arguments for creationism and the formation of the universe.
On the other hand, purely analytical proofs can tell us nothing about the world. By definition, any statement about the world, in particular any statement about what does or does not exist, is an empirical statement, not an analytic statement. For example, Euclidean geometry tells us nothing about the actual geometry of the universe that we inhabit. Neither do any of the non-Euclidean geometries. The question of whether the fifth postulate holds in the real world is one that can only be decided by observation of the real world.
So an analytic proof of god's existence is likewise impossible.
This leaves us with Wittgenstein's observation that "a nothing is as good as a something about which nothing can be said". It is often asserted by religious believers that atheists are just like them, in the sense that atheists have a fundamental belief in something that can't be proven but must be taken 'on faith': namely, the non-existence of a deity. But I would argue that most atheists in fact don't feel much need to deny the existence of a deity, but simply see no reason to believe in something for which there is absolutely no evidence and which explains nothing.
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, all men are Socrates.
It has never seemed to me that the proofs of god's existence are very difficult to refute, but Paulos at least brings good humor to the task - humor without rancor or condescension.
My question is : what would constitute a 'proof', or even evidence, of the existence of a deity. I think that it would be of the same nature as evidence for, say, dark matter. That is, there would need to be some phenomenon that is not accounted for by our physical theories, that in fact contradicts our physical theories, and that is explainable by the existence of a deity with well-defined properties. Moreover, the deity explanation would have to be such that specific additional predictions could be formed from that explanation, and those predictions could be empirically tested.
But there are two problems here: first, religious believers are unable to ascribe any well-defined properties to their deities. Most of their deities were invented by primitive people who imagined god as a kind of really big and powerful person. So contemporary believers either stick with that story, or replace it with a sort of fuzzy 'god is everywhere as a kind of spirit' concept, which inherently has no explanatory value whatsoever.
Second, a 'deity hypothesis' that actually predicts and explains natural phenomenon is no longer in the realm of the supernatural, and therefore does not refer to a deity at all. Unless, of course, you want to think of natural laws as a deity.
So evidence or 'proof' of god of an empirical nature is doomed from the outset: scientific evidence can only ever be evidence of natural processes, not super-natural entities.
Creationists and other fundamentalists seem to have an intuitive idea that this is so - hence the many 'god of the gaps' arguments for creationism and the formation of the universe.
On the other hand, purely analytical proofs can tell us nothing about the world. By definition, any statement about the world, in particular any statement about what does or does not exist, is an empirical statement, not an analytic statement. For example, Euclidean geometry tells us nothing about the actual geometry of the universe that we inhabit. Neither do any of the non-Euclidean geometries. The question of whether the fifth postulate holds in the real world is one that can only be decided by observation of the real world.
So an analytic proof of god's existence is likewise impossible.
This leaves us with Wittgenstein's observation that "a nothing is as good as a something about which nothing can be said". It is often asserted by religious believers that atheists are just like them, in the sense that atheists have a fundamental belief in something that can't be proven but must be taken 'on faith': namely, the non-existence of a deity. But I would argue that most atheists in fact don't feel much need to deny the existence of a deity, but simply see no reason to believe in something for which there is absolutely no evidence and which explains nothing.
November 8, 2012
This won't convince anyone not already convinced, but Paulos does apply a mathematical edge to the analysis.
The most telling chapter was the last - Athiests, Agnostics, and "Brights". I agree with Paulos in that I am also not too fond of the name "Brights", but maybe it'll catch on. The statistics are disturbing in how others view atheists and non-believers. The stigma is still hard to overcome.
The most telling chapter was the last - Athiests, Agnostics, and "Brights". I agree with Paulos in that I am also not too fond of the name "Brights", but maybe it'll catch on. The statistics are disturbing in how others view atheists and non-believers. The stigma is still hard to overcome.
April 26, 2010
I really enjoyed this book. It introduced me to some interesting arguments that I hadn't heard previously. I really liked Paulos' random humor sprinkled throughout as well.
There were some concepts that I felt were beyond my understanding but I don't think that detracted from the reading overall.
I think this was a great intro book to read for the beginning atheist (is there such a thing?) or an agnostic. Now onto more in-depth books! Perhaps Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins?
There were some concepts that I felt were beyond my understanding but I don't think that detracted from the reading overall.
I think this was a great intro book to read for the beginning atheist (is there such a thing?) or an agnostic. Now onto more in-depth books! Perhaps Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins?
December 5, 2009
This is a wonderful book! It is short, elegant with a sometimes humorous angle. Some of the arguments are subtle, so subtle that you need to think "between the lines". But that is fine, because unlike other books on this subject, Paulos does not throw things in your face. His writing is concise, not repetitive at all, and yet the occasional humorous approach helps to keep one's interest.
April 18, 2010
It's me, over here in the choir robes. Nothing in this book I didn't already embrace, I mean. The geeky mathematical angle was a huge bonus. I found this audio book fun, funny and comforting. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you like. And I do.
March 29, 2016
Here it is: This book will explain WHY the arguments for God just don't add up. Once i'm done this collection I'll never have to go to church again, no more religious studies, no more pondering theological issues that are spread throughout the globe and history, no more praying, or hope of an eternal existence with a Savior...
"Cough!" Finally done this bit of atheist pseudo-intellectual crap. (Does that sound mean? Naw. Just getting started) Is this guy just another nerd who had his girlfriend stolen by some buffed up religious guy? (I can't think of what else would make Dawkins and John Allen spend so little time on their actual areas of expertise? Oh Well!)
But be assured my Christianity is 100% sound after reading this dribble - and Church is looking better than ever. God and I are most likely both laughing. This stuff will make good toilet paper in Heaven/or HEll? But that's mostly theologically incorrect. My bad.
I know this books title can be misleading to some people. All that assumed self-righteous belittling of the Jesus of Scripture - with a promise that arguments for God just won't add up. Of course the author latter shoots himself in the foot by stating:
"So do the arguments and counterarguments in this book conclusively prove there isn't a God? No, of course not..."
Well then, Nothing much to see here folks, move along. Hmmm, the interesting thing about math is that it gives very accurate answers (so we hope, ask my accountant?) - too bad this guys hatred of religion is mostly just complaining about his personal misfortunes from select bits of the religious groups and thought. NO math or science here really. Not even anything conclusive really - like i said "My faith is perfectly in tack."
____________________________________________________________
Now for a guy who attempts to reduce god to his own understanding of science and logic - he didn't even succeed in making a straw god that he could later light on fire. It seems John Allen is desperately hoping that none of his readers will actually study Theology in any depths. Or how Christianity has played out over the last 20 centuries. (Oh, i'm sure atheists claim to be an expert in this area, but any quick conversation usually just shows their frustration with anything that calls sin what it actually is. Until it bites them in the.... Wait till your eight year old daughter turns sixteen: Sin will have a whole new meaning (unless you don't really love or care for her.)
If you wish to destroy Christianity and make the world a better place, here's two suggestions (I'm helpful that way!):
Read the Bible - admit that it's an amazing wonderful loving tale of redemption (love and Justice)... but maybe it's just not true. Anything other than that is a waste of any Christians time. The Good book speaks for itself. (even if you don't like or comprehend it.) Remember: God is a Cosmic Father, He's not your buddy. What do the words RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU say? Don't fuss about with how liberal secular scholars hatefully claim they got there. Just SHUT UP and read them. Then go from there. :cD
Suggestion two is: prove that you have carefully and extensively questioned Atheism. I'll wait...
It's one thing to desire to remove religious values, but it's another to boldy hold up something else in its place that is a guaranteed noble and goodly truth. Atheism really has no goodness (or even badness for that matter). Everything in its' meaningless path is up for grabs. Live then DIE! The universe does not care. Even truth does not really matter or care: Death does not care. Now enjoy your joyful atheism. (and STOP borrowing moral values from the Bible, get your marriage from apes and evolving fish with legs.) Remember that when your husband cheats on you with his 21 year old secretary. Atheism doesn't care or really have any equality or justice.
I was going to go through each chapter in this book and show where it fails. (Not that any atheist would agree with me: hatred trumps ALL). But after reviewing I realize that most of these arguments are really NOT worth discussing. But I'll do one:
Argument From Subjectivity Chapter...
1.People feel in the pit of their stomach that there is a God.
2.They sometimes dress up this feeling with any number of unrelated, irrelevant, and unfalsifiable banalities and make a Kierkegaardian "Leap of faith" to conclude that God exists.
3.Therefore God exists.
Wow, there's an argument that doesn't add up. You think? Just silly. Way to stack the deck and show some deep thinking Mathboy.
Rule number 1 of proper Christian theology: never trust your feelings - they often lie. Attacking charismatic religious folk is as easy/dumb/ and obvious as an atheist challenging God by giving him 3 minutes to appear in a taco chip. (YES, i've heard atheists say crap like this ENDLESSLY... "Yawnnn!") WHAT?! It actually worked. Bizarre.
Okay lets try one more - just to see how systematic professor Paulos really is:
John's remarks on Jesus and Other Figures (chapter).
I was looking forward to this chapter (I find Jesus incredibly interesting). But there was nothing here. Just some interesting babble about "these figures are often themselves taken by many as proofs of God's existence." Sorry, but you don't see me Looking behind bushes for Jesus, Buddha or Muhammad (or the Jolly Green Giant.) And mentioning the Da Vinci Code is just pure comedy in any serious religious discussion. I don't see anyone worshiping THOR just because he's written about in a few stories. Here's some deep thoughts:
Mankind doesn't go around inventing religions (too busy sinning and getting our freak on). It takes demons with nothing better to do for a few centuries to invent and sustain false religions. Just FYI.
Which leads us to John's (desperate for any material to fill this atheistic propaganda pamphlet) chapter on:
The Argument from Prophecy (and the Bible Codes).
Once again our "Hacking at Burning Strawmen" author picks some fringe Bible Code charismatic lunacy to prove His rebellious hatred for the Biblical God (and possibly some other gods that are just comically mythical). Kind of like me finding a God hating homeless guy who hasn't bathed in 2 years and lives in a box behind a Chinese food store - and making him my example of the present/future reality of atheism. (We all know Stalin is a better example anyway.)
But seriously, the Bible is fun enough to read normally without having to turn it into a math puzzle that spells out Chicago Bulls. (at least J.A. Paulos has a sense of humor. I'm sure your wife enjoys that - it's good for your marriage. You don't have a 21 year old HOTTIE secretary do you? Nah...)
At the end of the day Paulos is really just an evangelical atheist who assumes he made his point because HE'S TALKING. Typical Professor's ego here.
But to help the guy out (again...)
Here's what does add up about God:
Our planet, Our nature, Our hopes, Our sins, Our purpose. But that's probably way over any atheists head - but fun to think about on their deathbeds. (there's still time, and hope. May God Bless you!)
Here's another:
Observe how our world reacts to Jesus and the Bible. Just read it and watch carefully. You'll see some interesting things - from confusion, to Love, to debauchery, to evil, to blasphemy, to murder, to false religions springing out of this classic and successful religion... all from this simple source.
And for a bonus: Have a look at the Jews and Israel throughout the last 19 centuries. Fascinating! The Nation that shouldn't be - and yet there it is, doing what the Bible said it would over 1900 years ago. This of course is pointless to discuss with atheists (and fun!)- but if you are just about sick and ready to vomit from this NEW militant atheistic onslaught, do some basic research with an open mind. (too much - I know!) But I can hope.
"Cough!" Finally done this bit of atheist pseudo-intellectual crap. (Does that sound mean? Naw. Just getting started) Is this guy just another nerd who had his girlfriend stolen by some buffed up religious guy? (I can't think of what else would make Dawkins and John Allen spend so little time on their actual areas of expertise? Oh Well!)
But be assured my Christianity is 100% sound after reading this dribble - and Church is looking better than ever. God and I are most likely both laughing. This stuff will make good toilet paper in Heaven/or HEll? But that's mostly theologically incorrect. My bad.
I know this books title can be misleading to some people. All that assumed self-righteous belittling of the Jesus of Scripture - with a promise that arguments for God just won't add up. Of course the author latter shoots himself in the foot by stating:
"So do the arguments and counterarguments in this book conclusively prove there isn't a God? No, of course not..."
Well then, Nothing much to see here folks, move along. Hmmm, the interesting thing about math is that it gives very accurate answers (so we hope, ask my accountant?) - too bad this guys hatred of religion is mostly just complaining about his personal misfortunes from select bits of the religious groups and thought. NO math or science here really. Not even anything conclusive really - like i said "My faith is perfectly in tack."
____________________________________________________________
Now for a guy who attempts to reduce god to his own understanding of science and logic - he didn't even succeed in making a straw god that he could later light on fire. It seems John Allen is desperately hoping that none of his readers will actually study Theology in any depths. Or how Christianity has played out over the last 20 centuries. (Oh, i'm sure atheists claim to be an expert in this area, but any quick conversation usually just shows their frustration with anything that calls sin what it actually is. Until it bites them in the.... Wait till your eight year old daughter turns sixteen: Sin will have a whole new meaning (unless you don't really love or care for her.)
If you wish to destroy Christianity and make the world a better place, here's two suggestions (I'm helpful that way!):
Read the Bible - admit that it's an amazing wonderful loving tale of redemption (love and Justice)... but maybe it's just not true. Anything other than that is a waste of any Christians time. The Good book speaks for itself. (even if you don't like or comprehend it.) Remember: God is a Cosmic Father, He's not your buddy. What do the words RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU say? Don't fuss about with how liberal secular scholars hatefully claim they got there. Just SHUT UP and read them. Then go from there. :cD
Suggestion two is: prove that you have carefully and extensively questioned Atheism. I'll wait...
It's one thing to desire to remove religious values, but it's another to boldy hold up something else in its place that is a guaranteed noble and goodly truth. Atheism really has no goodness (or even badness for that matter). Everything in its' meaningless path is up for grabs. Live then DIE! The universe does not care. Even truth does not really matter or care: Death does not care. Now enjoy your joyful atheism. (and STOP borrowing moral values from the Bible, get your marriage from apes and evolving fish with legs.) Remember that when your husband cheats on you with his 21 year old secretary. Atheism doesn't care or really have any equality or justice.
I was going to go through each chapter in this book and show where it fails. (Not that any atheist would agree with me: hatred trumps ALL). But after reviewing I realize that most of these arguments are really NOT worth discussing. But I'll do one:
Argument From Subjectivity Chapter...
1.People feel in the pit of their stomach that there is a God.
2.They sometimes dress up this feeling with any number of unrelated, irrelevant, and unfalsifiable banalities and make a Kierkegaardian "Leap of faith" to conclude that God exists.
3.Therefore God exists.
Wow, there's an argument that doesn't add up. You think? Just silly. Way to stack the deck and show some deep thinking Mathboy.
Rule number 1 of proper Christian theology: never trust your feelings - they often lie. Attacking charismatic religious folk is as easy/dumb/ and obvious as an atheist challenging God by giving him 3 minutes to appear in a taco chip. (YES, i've heard atheists say crap like this ENDLESSLY... "Yawnnn!") WHAT?! It actually worked. Bizarre.
Okay lets try one more - just to see how systematic professor Paulos really is:
John's remarks on Jesus and Other Figures (chapter).
I was looking forward to this chapter (I find Jesus incredibly interesting). But there was nothing here. Just some interesting babble about "these figures are often themselves taken by many as proofs of God's existence." Sorry, but you don't see me Looking behind bushes for Jesus, Buddha or Muhammad (or the Jolly Green Giant.) And mentioning the Da Vinci Code is just pure comedy in any serious religious discussion. I don't see anyone worshiping THOR just because he's written about in a few stories. Here's some deep thoughts:
Mankind doesn't go around inventing religions (too busy sinning and getting our freak on). It takes demons with nothing better to do for a few centuries to invent and sustain false religions. Just FYI.
Which leads us to John's (desperate for any material to fill this atheistic propaganda pamphlet) chapter on:
The Argument from Prophecy (and the Bible Codes).
Once again our "Hacking at Burning Strawmen" author picks some fringe Bible Code charismatic lunacy to prove His rebellious hatred for the Biblical God (and possibly some other gods that are just comically mythical). Kind of like me finding a God hating homeless guy who hasn't bathed in 2 years and lives in a box behind a Chinese food store - and making him my example of the present/future reality of atheism. (We all know Stalin is a better example anyway.)
But seriously, the Bible is fun enough to read normally without having to turn it into a math puzzle that spells out Chicago Bulls. (at least J.A. Paulos has a sense of humor. I'm sure your wife enjoys that - it's good for your marriage. You don't have a 21 year old HOTTIE secretary do you? Nah...)
At the end of the day Paulos is really just an evangelical atheist who assumes he made his point because HE'S TALKING. Typical Professor's ego here.
But to help the guy out (again...)
Here's what does add up about God:
Our planet, Our nature, Our hopes, Our sins, Our purpose. But that's probably way over any atheists head - but fun to think about on their deathbeds. (there's still time, and hope. May God Bless you!)
Here's another:
Observe how our world reacts to Jesus and the Bible. Just read it and watch carefully. You'll see some interesting things - from confusion, to Love, to debauchery, to evil, to blasphemy, to murder, to false religions springing out of this classic and successful religion... all from this simple source.
And for a bonus: Have a look at the Jews and Israel throughout the last 19 centuries. Fascinating! The Nation that shouldn't be - and yet there it is, doing what the Bible said it would over 1900 years ago. This of course is pointless to discuss with atheists (and fun!)- but if you are just about sick and ready to vomit from this NEW militant atheistic onslaught, do some basic research with an open mind. (too much - I know!) But I can hope.
December 5, 2010
Like a person with no ability to appreciate art writing about painting, Paulos writes about religion from the perspective of a strong, early intuitive feeling toward materialism. Paulos conflates the idea of explanation with the idea of meaning, thus missing the richness of life. Toward the middle of the book, Paulos acknowledges the metaphor of a person with perfect pitch trying to explain music to someone who is tone deaf, but he then pivots to an analogy of sightedness v. blindness, as if the ability to perceive blunt facts were more important than finding and appreciating their meaning.
Throughout, Paulos is contemptuous of all believers and though he can be witty most of the contempt just comes across as cruel.
On page 100, Paulos calls the belief that God is Love "equivocating" and not persuasive, but offers no explanation for this beyond making fun of the syllogism, "God is love, love is blind, my uncle is blind, therefore my uncle is God." While that false syllogism is equivocating because it uses the word "is" in different ways, he fails to appreciate that intuition of the divine love is as real a way of knowing as skeptical inquiry is. That's just the way he's made, but he doesn't appreciate that others are made differently.
Paulos makes some assumptions about his arguments:
-That everything important is subject to empirical or public evidence.
-That everything important is open to being resolved by public debate.
-That people's minds are open (although, ironically, Paulos acknowledges that this isn't true).
Paulos comes back again and again to what is "persuasive" without delving any deeper into what persuasion entails. Persuasive to whom? Based on what presuppositions or intuitions?
Throughout, Paulos is contemptuous of all believers and though he can be witty most of the contempt just comes across as cruel.
On page 100, Paulos calls the belief that God is Love "equivocating" and not persuasive, but offers no explanation for this beyond making fun of the syllogism, "God is love, love is blind, my uncle is blind, therefore my uncle is God." While that false syllogism is equivocating because it uses the word "is" in different ways, he fails to appreciate that intuition of the divine love is as real a way of knowing as skeptical inquiry is. That's just the way he's made, but he doesn't appreciate that others are made differently.
Paulos makes some assumptions about his arguments:
-That everything important is subject to empirical or public evidence.
-That everything important is open to being resolved by public debate.
-That people's minds are open (although, ironically, Paulos acknowledges that this isn't true).
Paulos comes back again and again to what is "persuasive" without delving any deeper into what persuasion entails. Persuasive to whom? Based on what presuppositions or intuitions?
March 18, 2010
This is a nifty little (150 pages) book that takes the major arguments for the existence of God and dispatches them quickly and more or less painlessly, simply by examining the logic behind them. All of the hoary favorites are here (Argument from First Cause, Ontological Argument, etc.), plus some newer, less formal sources of belief, each presented in the form of a syllogism that Paulos examines and breaks down. For the most part, Paulos doesn't bother with marshaling facts and evidence against theistic arguments, but concerns himself solely with the logic (or lack thereof) behind them. Thus, for example, in discussing the Argument from Design, he doesn't try to show how bacterial flagella or the mammalian eye could have evolved; he points out that the general argument that things are too complex to have arisen without a designer begs the question of what "too complex" means; necessitates a greater (supernatural) complexity whose origins are inexplicable; and then details, from a mathematician's perspective, how probability works in favor of, not against, evolution. The discussions are quick, to the point, and effective. Now if someone would just shoot Kirk Cameron.
January 31, 2018
Me declaro ateo desde hace a lo menos 8 años y siempre estoy buscando literatura afín para poder darle sustento teórico a mi “no creencia”. ¿Podrán decir lo mismo los creyentes verbosos? Sin caer en descalificaciones innecesarias para quienes profesan alguna creencia religiosa, tiendo a pensar que no. Paulos, doctor en matemáticas, en este pequeño ensayo da una serie de argumentos convincentes y respaldados por simples ejercicios racionales (apoyados en las matemáticas) del porqué es poco probable la existencia de dios o un ser todopoderoso. Una lectura ágil e ilustrativa en torno a la consecuencia de saber que tenemos una sola vida y que el “premio” de una vida eterna y celestial, cada vez es más difícil de sostener porque somos humanos irracionales que intentamos ante sucesos que no conocemos, darle una explicación más allá de la lógica. Pero es solo cuestión de tiempo en que cada vez más seamos los ateos quienes salgamos del armario en que la religión nos ha puesto. Es una lectura entretenida para comenzar a pensar el ateísmo. Te puede acompañar un fin de semana, seas creyente o no.
January 31, 2016
My 16 year old son read it and told me "don't read it!" as my sister had loaned it to me. Well, now I know why, because I didn't get it (and neither did he). I didn't understand the logic in it. What's the need for all these huge words throughout? Making it easier to read would have made it easier for the reader to understand his point of view. I hated this book and could hardly wait to finish it, made myself finish it.
October 22, 2017
Quite fun, but skates very fast over a lot of the arguments. I can't imagine it being persuasive to anyone who wasn't an atheist already. I must have been given this as a present years ago, and forgotten I had it. I found it on my shelves and read it as I enjoyed other more mathematical books by Paulos.
June 7, 2025
This bad book has three nontrivial merits. It is quite clear about the moral equality of theists and atheists, and the moral neutrality of one’s stance on the question of God. Though arrogant, it is not hateful. And it makes the rare but important point that God’s existence or nonexistence is not a matter of probability (pp. 135, 137). Dawkins’ 2009 London bus advertisement campaign said “There's probably no God”; Steven Unwin wrote a theistic book called The Probability of God, and my previous post here reviewed God? Very Probably: Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of God, by Robert Nelson. That theism vs. atheism is not a matter of probability is an important point, one which I make from the theist side in the book I’m now writing. It was good to see an atheist assert the same.
Apart from that, however, Irreligion is a sleepwalking mess of a book. The phrase “question-begging” has deteriorated in public discourse so that it now means “begging for a particular question to be asked,” but it originally referred to a specific fallacy of reasoning that assumes the very proposition that’s supposed to be at issue. J. A. Paulos engages in this fallacy quite often, and the habit is diagnostic of a materialist frame of mind that tends to produce the same two types of character again and again: either a Dawkins-esque tiresome firebrand, or a Wildean jester, smiling on the foibles of naive mankind from somewhere above the fray (Christopher Hitchens’ unusual charm, erudition, and moral authority made him a rare combination of the two). Thankfully, Paulos is decidedly of the latter type, but it can get pretty tedious, pretty quickly, especially if you’ve read similar books before. Question-begging is common to both types. Here is Paulos on Hume’s argument against miracles:
Note that this is no mere exposition of Hume, but a set of assertions about the world. As I’ve often pointed out, a good response to Sagan’s famous remark is this: People who say "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" have a habit of ignoring extraordinary evidence. The rest of the paragraph begs the question whether there are or are not supernatural events, since if there are, the laws of nature do not apply to them but do continue to apply to nature. It will not do to insist that every rule must apply in all cases, since some rules have what are called “exceptions.” The ambition of scientific laws is to include all cases and exclude none, but that is aspirational, and to disregard that limitation is hubris, whether or not the hubris remembers to present itself as humility.
Paulos quotes the mathematician Leopold Kronecker: “God made the integers, all the rest is the work of man,” but insists that “even the whole numbers were the work of man.” This unsupported claim runs counter to the views of the great mathematicians, but it is a good bit of instruction as to how an atheist ought to sound. If the market for the book is atheists-in-training, it’s an appropriate remark to make, though it begs the question of whether numbers and other mathematical structures are invented or discovered.
This level of theological ignorance is striking. Paulos’ quite reasonable logic applies to any entity you might want to put in the “first cause” position, except for God, the only relevant candidate for the job, whom the question is about. It is not part of the definition of “a tortoise” that it is eternal, uncaused, beyond the human intellect, and uniquely adequate to the ineffable fact that there is a world at all. The author seems remarkably uninformed.
On page 4, Paulos asks, “Why cannot the physical world itself be taken to be the uncaused first cause?” Because the physical is what must have a cause, and God is not physical.
On page 6: “Placing God outside of space and time would also preclude any sort of later divine intervention in worldly affairs.” Nope. Panentheism is the name for the view that God is both immanent throughout the universe and infinitely transcendent of its boundaries. The Creation is no more a complete exhaustive container of God’s existence than the number one hundred--for all its beauty of symmetry and structure--is an exhaustive image of infinity.
On page 8 is a particularly weak paragraph:
Again, one feels one is dealing with a stranger to the territory to which he claims to be a guide. “Arbitrarily for no reason at all”? Theism is not an impersonal hypothesis about the world that has nothing to do with the creatures who are persuaded of it; it is a form of life, a stance toward our own existence that attributes it to a Divine origin. To take seriously the idea that God is real---and far more real than waking embodied history (just as the latter is more real than dreams or fiction)---is to consider that the Divine motive for creating the universe, and us within it, may have been to experience relationship with conscious beings capable of freely engaging in such a relationship.
Next, note that the “might as well” clause makes little sense. If “there is then something that is not subject to natural law,” why wouldn’t we turn to that greater power, rather than try to salvage the broken authority of a compromised naturalism?
The paragraph ends with a version of Einstein’s question of whether God had any choice in making the laws of nature the way He did. Paulos insists---as if it were a matter of course---that if God, too, were bound by laws like those that describe the electroweak interaction, or gravity, or even the apparently ineluctable logic of arithmetic and the syllogism, this would amount to a diminution of His omnipotence. But it certainly need not. Why should God be in any meaningful way limited by the fact that He cannot, say, die or make a mistake, or conjure a stone so heavy that even He can’t lift it?
On page 12, we find a strange assumption that pops up elsewhere in the book: that a “creator would have to be of vastly greater complexity …than the life-forms it created.” Need God be complex? For Kant, Schopenhauer, and the Idealist tradition, the noumenal world is not plural. Since number only pertains to the phenomenal world, Schopenhauer says somewhere of the noumenon that it isn’t even unitary! Long before those 18th and 19th Century philosophers wrote, medieval mystics noticed that the heart of monotheism---Hashem echad, “God is One”---might not even be the whole story of God’s freedom from plurality and number, as the Inventor of the integers themselves. So no, God need not be “more complex” than the organisms he creates.
Paulos’ chapter on the Argument from Design ignores evolutionary convergence, brackets-out randomness where randomness is the issue under discussion, and fudges its dismissal of Michael Behe’s argument from “irreducible complexity.” Paulos does a good job of evoking the way complex systems can grow into place as simpler antecedents are gradually enhanced and expanded. His excellent example is the global supply chain with its mines and forests, factories, ports, shipping lanes, distribution hubs, and grocery stores with their fully stocked shelves, all humming along as if designed at the same time and implemented onto a blank slate. Of course these complex webs of industry and commerce developed gradually from simpler versions, step by step. Of course complex organisms and ecosystems can be thought of in a similar way. But Behe’s famous example of the bacterial flagellum has still not been explained away (I write this in 2025, seventeen years after Irreligion appeared), and the briefly successful attempt to do so (by appealing to the injectosome as a supposed transitional precursor of the flagellum) has been discredited.
The chapter on the Anthropic Principle seemed to me quite unconvincing, while the chapter on the Ontological Argument just showed how inadequate are the left brain’s tools of logical discourse for the kinds of ultimate questions theism entails. Paulos the mathematician is good at debunking numerology, in a well-argued chapter critiquing supposed “Bible codes” that purport to find hidden messages in sequences of equally spaced letters in the Bible. I have no use for numerology. But he also accuses theists of confirmation bias (to which we are indeed susceptible), though he engages in plenty of it himself.
In the middle of the book, in a chapter called “The Argument from Subjectivity (and Faith, Emptiness, and Self)", we get the following frank admission: “Still, one shouldn't reject the insights and feelings of those with perfect pitch simply because one is tone-deaf. Or, to vary the analogy: It wouldn't be wise for the blind to reject the counsel of sighted people (my emphasis, p. 77).” This is very much the case with atheists who write books like this one about how illogical faith is, without realizing that logic does not encompass every kind of truth. How delightful to find an atheist with the imagination, and the humility, to realize this, and to state it with the analogy of atheism-as-blindness and faith-as-sight! Yet, a moment later, we are admonished:
If the theist “simply claims to know,” then he or she can teach very little. But with the motivation and the wherewithal to be of help in the matter, he or she may be able to teach a great deal of it. William James, Huston Smith, Iain McGilchrist, Karen Armstrong, Ann Lammot, Raimon Panikkar, and a thousand other authors have written books that helped struggling agnostics pivot into a faith they had been yearning for. This is a completely different accomplishment from the futile and absurd endeavor to convince a committed atheist of anything.
A chapter on prayer asserts that there are no scientific studies establishing its effectiveness (p. 87). Though they are of widely varying quality, there are many such studies, some much harder to impeach than others (see, for example, Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe). On page 146 he expresses a wish that American atheists had some sort of civic organization to advance their cause and advocate for their preferences---but Paul Kurtz had already founded the Council for Secular Humanism in 1980, and the Center for Inquiry in 1991.
Paulos’ know-nothingism extends to other chapters and subjects as well, often with ugly results. In an effort to demonstrate how unreliable are historical claims about Jesus, a single paragraph on p. 91 contains the following cluster of bullshit stories:
These bogus claims are not only ahistorical, they are not even anecdotal: they are proverbial. It is a piece of cliche “conventional wisdom” that “we” know nothing significant about these three deep events (see Peter Dale Scott) in American History. Indeed, there is now very little of any significance that “we”---people who actually study these historical episodes---do not know about the assassination of President Kennedy. Though much has been learned since 2008, even then there was a near-complete picture of who played which roles, with which motivations, at various levels of the successful plot, and of the plots in Tampa and Chicago that did not succeed. To say of 11-22-63 in 2008 the phrase “killer or, possibly, killers” is obscenely negligent, irresponsible, and glib. Spend a few months studying Watergate or 9/11 and you are likely to feel similarly about Paulos’ use of these events, too, as emblems of supposedly inevitable and universal ignorance.
Some 17 pages later, Paulos goes back to this subject and performs a more egregious feat of intellectual poverty:
This is not just a trite meme that has been redeployed in print by hundreds of intellectual prostitutes since it was spawned in CIA internal memoranda, long since released. It is a pernicious insult to people who did get off their asses and investigate, with results that turned up momentous bad actors motivated by momentous stakes. “Charming”? STFU, Sir. Really.
Now, I ain't no Christian, but it seems a little disingenuous to say “the New Testament accounts of Jesus” were “written many decades afterward (between 70 and 100 CE).” If he ever existed, and if he was murdered by Rome around 33 CE, then the year 70 CE may have been less than four decades later, which is not quite “many.” And the Letters of Paul, which comprise more than 48% of the New Testament, were written by a man who claimed to have had a vision of Jesus only two years after the Crucifixion, and who was himself murdered in 64/65 CE. J. A. Paulos’ comparison of the deaths of Socrates and Jesus, while unoriginal, is poignant in its way. But its questions are either disingenuous or awfully naive, given that the author has undertaken the book that he has. Paulos is rightly criticizing Mel Gibson’s hateful movie "The Passion of the Christ," which actually dares recycle the old Christ-killing charge against “the” Jews:
My fellow 21st Century Jews can appreciate this compassionate distinction between us, who cannot possibly be guilt of Jesus’ killing, and our ancestors, who were innocent of it, too. Gibson’s movie is, of course, a lot worse than Paulos’ grotesque little thought experiment, in which, for the sake of argument, we are to imagine that our ancestors’ Jewish leaders---the Sanhedrin in charge of Roman-dominated Jerusalem---were somehow responsible for Jesus’ torture and murder. Only an ignoramus can indulge in this offensive fantasy, because it is well known that Pontius Pilate had already been recalled by Rome from previous similar assignments because his crowd control tactics were excessively violent and provocative of avoidable civil unrest among subject populations. He was by no means “benign and ineffectual.”
It is just not interesting to point out the mere illogic of Christian bigotry. What is interesting, is to explain how and why the anti-Judaism---of the Gospels, and of Paul’s letters, of John Chrysostom and Luther and Pope This and Pope That---got in there in the first place. But that takes research and time and effort, not just armchair speculation and musing.
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Apart from that, however, Irreligion is a sleepwalking mess of a book. The phrase “question-begging” has deteriorated in public discourse so that it now means “begging for a particular question to be asked,” but it originally referred to a specific fallacy of reasoning that assumes the very proposition that’s supposed to be at issue. J. A. Paulos engages in this fallacy quite often, and the habit is diagnostic of a materialist frame of mind that tends to produce the same two types of character again and again: either a Dawkins-esque tiresome firebrand, or a Wildean jester, smiling on the foibles of naive mankind from somewhere above the fray (Christopher Hitchens’ unusual charm, erudition, and moral authority made him a rare combination of the two). Thankfully, Paulos is decidedly of the latter type, but it can get pretty tedious, pretty quickly, especially if you’ve read similar books before. Question-begging is common to both types. Here is Paulos on Hume’s argument against miracles:
That is, the whole weight of science is the prima facie evidence against a miracle's having occurred. Carl Sagan's remark "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is germane and, incidentally, can be formalized by a use of Bayes' theorem. This doesn't mean scientific laws are always correct. Whatever evidence exists that a certain phenomenon miraculously violates a particular scientific law is evidence as well that the scientific law in question is simply wrong. If before the invention of the telephone, for example, someone heard the voice of a friend who was hundreds of miles away, one might consider this a miracle. The evidence for this miraculous event, however, would also be evidence that the physical law that the event appears to violate (regarding how fast sound travels in air, let's say) is wrong or doesn't apply.
Note that this is no mere exposition of Hume, but a set of assertions about the world. As I’ve often pointed out, a good response to Sagan’s famous remark is this: People who say "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" have a habit of ignoring extraordinary evidence. The rest of the paragraph begs the question whether there are or are not supernatural events, since if there are, the laws of nature do not apply to them but do continue to apply to nature. It will not do to insist that every rule must apply in all cases, since some rules have what are called “exceptions.” The ambition of scientific laws is to include all cases and exclude none, but that is aspirational, and to disregard that limitation is hubris, whether or not the hubris remembers to present itself as humility.
Paulos quotes the mathematician Leopold Kronecker: “God made the integers, all the rest is the work of man,” but insists that “even the whole numbers were the work of man.” This unsupported claim runs counter to the views of the great mathematicians, but it is a good bit of instruction as to how an atheist ought to sound. If the market for the book is atheists-in-training, it’s an appropriate remark to make, though it begs the question of whether numbers and other mathematical structures are invented or discovered.
Either everything has a cause or there's something that doesn't. The first-cause argument collapses into this hole whichever tack we take. If everything has a cause, then God does, too, and there is no first cause. And if something doesn't have a cause, it may as well be the physical world as God or a tortoise.
This level of theological ignorance is striking. Paulos’ quite reasonable logic applies to any entity you might want to put in the “first cause” position, except for God, the only relevant candidate for the job, whom the question is about. It is not part of the definition of “a tortoise” that it is eternal, uncaused, beyond the human intellect, and uniquely adequate to the ineffable fact that there is a world at all. The author seems remarkably uninformed.
On page 4, Paulos asks, “Why cannot the physical world itself be taken to be the uncaused first cause?” Because the physical is what must have a cause, and God is not physical.
On page 6: “Placing God outside of space and time would also preclude any sort of later divine intervention in worldly affairs.” Nope. Panentheism is the name for the view that God is both immanent throughout the universe and infinitely transcendent of its boundaries. The Creation is no more a complete exhaustive container of God’s existence than the number one hundred--for all its beauty of symmetry and structure--is an exhaustive image of infinity.
On page 8 is a particularly weak paragraph:
Why did He create the particular natural laws that He did? If He did it arbitrarily for no reason at all, there is then something that is not subject to natural law. The chain of natural law is broken, and so we might as well take the most general natural laws themselves, rather than God, as the arbitrary final "Because." On the other hand, if He had a reason for issuing the particular laws that He did (say, to bring about the best possible universe), then God Himself is subject to pre-existing constraints, standards, and laws. In this case, too, there's not much point to introducing Him as an intermediary in the first place.
Again, one feels one is dealing with a stranger to the territory to which he claims to be a guide. “Arbitrarily for no reason at all”? Theism is not an impersonal hypothesis about the world that has nothing to do with the creatures who are persuaded of it; it is a form of life, a stance toward our own existence that attributes it to a Divine origin. To take seriously the idea that God is real---and far more real than waking embodied history (just as the latter is more real than dreams or fiction)---is to consider that the Divine motive for creating the universe, and us within it, may have been to experience relationship with conscious beings capable of freely engaging in such a relationship.
Next, note that the “might as well” clause makes little sense. If “there is then something that is not subject to natural law,” why wouldn’t we turn to that greater power, rather than try to salvage the broken authority of a compromised naturalism?
The paragraph ends with a version of Einstein’s question of whether God had any choice in making the laws of nature the way He did. Paulos insists---as if it were a matter of course---that if God, too, were bound by laws like those that describe the electroweak interaction, or gravity, or even the apparently ineluctable logic of arithmetic and the syllogism, this would amount to a diminution of His omnipotence. But it certainly need not. Why should God be in any meaningful way limited by the fact that He cannot, say, die or make a mistake, or conjure a stone so heavy that even He can’t lift it?
On page 12, we find a strange assumption that pops up elsewhere in the book: that a “creator would have to be of vastly greater complexity …than the life-forms it created.” Need God be complex? For Kant, Schopenhauer, and the Idealist tradition, the noumenal world is not plural. Since number only pertains to the phenomenal world, Schopenhauer says somewhere of the noumenon that it isn’t even unitary! Long before those 18th and 19th Century philosophers wrote, medieval mystics noticed that the heart of monotheism---Hashem echad, “God is One”---might not even be the whole story of God’s freedom from plurality and number, as the Inventor of the integers themselves. So no, God need not be “more complex” than the organisms he creates.
Paulos’ chapter on the Argument from Design ignores evolutionary convergence, brackets-out randomness where randomness is the issue under discussion, and fudges its dismissal of Michael Behe’s argument from “irreducible complexity.” Paulos does a good job of evoking the way complex systems can grow into place as simpler antecedents are gradually enhanced and expanded. His excellent example is the global supply chain with its mines and forests, factories, ports, shipping lanes, distribution hubs, and grocery stores with their fully stocked shelves, all humming along as if designed at the same time and implemented onto a blank slate. Of course these complex webs of industry and commerce developed gradually from simpler versions, step by step. Of course complex organisms and ecosystems can be thought of in a similar way. But Behe’s famous example of the bacterial flagellum has still not been explained away (I write this in 2025, seventeen years after Irreligion appeared), and the briefly successful attempt to do so (by appealing to the injectosome as a supposed transitional precursor of the flagellum) has been discredited.
The chapter on the Anthropic Principle seemed to me quite unconvincing, while the chapter on the Ontological Argument just showed how inadequate are the left brain’s tools of logical discourse for the kinds of ultimate questions theism entails. Paulos the mathematician is good at debunking numerology, in a well-argued chapter critiquing supposed “Bible codes” that purport to find hidden messages in sequences of equally spaced letters in the Bible. I have no use for numerology. But he also accuses theists of confirmation bias (to which we are indeed susceptible), though he engages in plenty of it himself.
In the middle of the book, in a chapter called “The Argument from Subjectivity (and Faith, Emptiness, and Self)", we get the following frank admission: “Still, one shouldn't reject the insights and feelings of those with perfect pitch simply because one is tone-deaf. Or, to vary the analogy: It wouldn't be wise for the blind to reject the counsel of sighted people (my emphasis, p. 77).” This is very much the case with atheists who write books like this one about how illogical faith is, without realizing that logic does not encompass every kind of truth. How delightful to find an atheist with the imagination, and the humility, to realize this, and to state it with the analogy of atheism-as-blindness and faith-as-sight! Yet, a moment later, we are admonished:
The undermining disanalogy in this response is that a sighted person's observations can be corroborated by the blind. A sighted person's directions, for example, to take eleven steps and then to turn left for eight more steps to reach the door of the building can be checked by a blind person. How can an agnostic or atheist learn anything from someone who simply claims to know there is a God?
If the theist “simply claims to know,” then he or she can teach very little. But with the motivation and the wherewithal to be of help in the matter, he or she may be able to teach a great deal of it. William James, Huston Smith, Iain McGilchrist, Karen Armstrong, Ann Lammot, Raimon Panikkar, and a thousand other authors have written books that helped struggling agnostics pivot into a faith they had been yearning for. This is a completely different accomplishment from the futile and absurd endeavor to convince a committed atheist of anything.
A chapter on prayer asserts that there are no scientific studies establishing its effectiveness (p. 87). Though they are of widely varying quality, there are many such studies, some much harder to impeach than others (see, for example, Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe). On page 146 he expresses a wish that American atheists had some sort of civic organization to advance their cause and advocate for their preferences---but Paul Kurtz had already founded the Council for Secular Humanism in 1980, and the Center for Inquiry in 1991.
Paulos’ know-nothingism extends to other chapters and subjects as well, often with ugly results. In an effort to demonstrate how unreliable are historical claims about Jesus, a single paragraph on p. 91 contains the following cluster of bullshit stories:
A bit more than forty years ago, in the full glare of the modern media, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and we have only a hazy idea of the motivation of the killer or, possibly, killers. And a bit more than thirty years ago, the Watergate controversy erupted before a phalanx of cameras and microphones, and we still don't know who ordered what. And only a few years ago, well into the age of the Internet, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, the United States responded by invading Iraq, and we have yet to learn the complete story of the attack, the training of the attackers, the lead-up to the war, and so on.
These bogus claims are not only ahistorical, they are not even anecdotal: they are proverbial. It is a piece of cliche “conventional wisdom” that “we” know nothing significant about these three deep events (see Peter Dale Scott) in American History. Indeed, there is now very little of any significance that “we”---people who actually study these historical episodes---do not know about the assassination of President Kennedy. Though much has been learned since 2008, even then there was a near-complete picture of who played which roles, with which motivations, at various levels of the successful plot, and of the plots in Tampa and Chicago that did not succeed. To say of 11-22-63 in 2008 the phrase “killer or, possibly, killers” is obscenely negligent, irresponsible, and glib. Spend a few months studying Watergate or 9/11 and you are likely to feel similarly about Paulos’ use of these events, too, as emblems of supposedly inevitable and universal ignorance.
Some 17 pages later, Paulos goes back to this subject and performs a more egregious feat of intellectual poverty:
Because of its momentous nature, people searched for a suitably momentous reason for the assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald was an unprepossessing nobody who seemed ill suited for the job of giant-slayer. There had to be something more, and maybe there was, but one added reason for the intense fascination with other possibilities was the charming [sic] superstition that significant consequences must necessarily be the result of significant perpetrators.
This is not just a trite meme that has been redeployed in print by hundreds of intellectual prostitutes since it was spawned in CIA internal memoranda, long since released. It is a pernicious insult to people who did get off their asses and investigate, with results that turned up momentous bad actors motivated by momentous stakes. “Charming”? STFU, Sir. Really.
Now, I ain't no Christian, but it seems a little disingenuous to say “the New Testament accounts of Jesus” were “written many decades afterward (between 70 and 100 CE).” If he ever existed, and if he was murdered by Rome around 33 CE, then the year 70 CE may have been less than four decades later, which is not quite “many.” And the Letters of Paul, which comprise more than 48% of the New Testament, were written by a man who claimed to have had a vision of Jesus only two years after the Crucifixion, and who was himself murdered in 64/65 CE. J. A. Paulos’ comparison of the deaths of Socrates and Jesus, while unoriginal, is poignant in its way. But its questions are either disingenuous or awfully naive, given that the author has undertaken the book that he has. Paulos is rightly criticizing Mel Gibson’s hateful movie "The Passion of the Christ," which actually dares recycle the old Christ-killing charge against “the” Jews:
Assume for the moment that compelling historical documents have just come to light establishing the movie's and the Bible's contentions that a group of Jews was instrumental in bringing about the death of Jesus; that Pilate, the Roman governor, was benign and ineffectual; and so on. Even if all this were the case, does it not seem hateful, not to mention un-Christian, to blame contemporary Jews?
My fellow 21st Century Jews can appreciate this compassionate distinction between us, who cannot possibly be guilt of Jesus’ killing, and our ancestors, who were innocent of it, too. Gibson’s movie is, of course, a lot worse than Paulos’ grotesque little thought experiment, in which, for the sake of argument, we are to imagine that our ancestors’ Jewish leaders---the Sanhedrin in charge of Roman-dominated Jerusalem---were somehow responsible for Jesus’ torture and murder. Only an ignoramus can indulge in this offensive fantasy, because it is well known that Pontius Pilate had already been recalled by Rome from previous similar assignments because his crowd control tactics were excessively violent and provocative of avoidable civil unrest among subject populations. He was by no means “benign and ineffectual.”
It is just not interesting to point out the mere illogic of Christian bigotry. What is interesting, is to explain how and why the anti-Judaism---of the Gospels, and of Paul’s letters, of John Chrysostom and Luther and Pope This and Pope That---got in there in the first place. But that takes research and time and effort, not just armchair speculation and musing.
SEE FULL REVIEW AT
www.poetrypoliticscollapse.com
November 18, 2010
for fans only
Librettino che riordina e riesamina le varie prove logiche che nei secoli hanno tentato di "dimostrare" l'esistenza di dio. Limitandosi quasi unicamente al dio dei monoteismi trascendenti, ovvero a quello cristiano.
La lettura è veloce, lo stile è garbato e ironico, non senza qualche osservazione puntuta che magari potrebbe un po' infastidire il credente.
Ma probabilmente non molti credenti leggeranno questo libro che, come tanti altri del genere, verrà aperto soprattutto da chi già la pensa come l'autore; il quale, del resto, dice chiaramente e con umiltà e onestà che non ha alcuna intenzione di convincere nessuno o dimostrare alcunché, ma semplicemente di esporre le ragioni per cui, lui, personalmente, non crede in dio.
Emblematico il passaggio: "...la verità è che non voglio farmi troppe beffe dei bisogni emotivi, che riguardino l'amore oppure Dio. Semplicemente, io non sento alcun bisogno di credere"; nonché: "È davvero ripugnante che un ateo o un agnostico attacchino aggressivamente e sul piano personale la fede degli altri, magari bollandola come un cumulo di sciocchezze per imbecilli. Chi si comporta così è giustamente accusato di essere arrogante e prepotente".
Difetto del libro è la sua ambizione divulgativa non del tutto riuscita. Trattando in maniera assai concisa argomenti logici e filosofici, con varî excursi nella matematica, il volumetto rischia d'essere troppo semplice se non semplicistico (assai discutibile, ad esempio, porre sullo stesso piano creazionismo e intelligent design) per lo specialista; e al contempo ancora troppo tecnico per il profano.
Ma la più grossa pecca è l'introduzione scritta da Odiffredi.
Quattro paginette in cui, trascurando il consiglio dell'autore di non "attaccare aggressivamente e sul piano personale la fede degli altri bollandola come cumulo di sciocchezze", Odiffredi parte in quarta affermando, non si sa con quanta ironia, che i credenti renderebbero "questo mondo molto peggiore con la loro presenza", e ammonendoci poi che "sarebbe un eccesso di stima [sia mai!] nei confronti dei credenti pensare che dietro alle motivazioni della loro fede ci siano sempre argomenti sofisticati", tracciando, caso mai ci fossero dubbî, un 'illuminante' parallelo coi media che "prosperano speculando sul fatto che la gente è molto più impressionata dalle sciocchezze che non capisce, che dalle cose serie che potrebbe capire".
Eh, per fortuna che c'è Odiffredi, che a quanto pare sa, lui, quali siano le cose serie e quelle idiote, il vero e il falso, il giusto e lo sbagliato; inutile che ci dica da che parte sta lui... non certo da quella dell'errore.
E quindi conclude citando Voltaire: "chi crede ad assurdità, finisce per commettere atrocità".
Non conosco il contesto originale della frase, ma credo si potrebbe fare un bel discorso sul significato che 'assurdo' e 'ovvio' vanno ad assumere relativamente al contesto sociale e culturale, e che è soprattutto qui che si gioca la produzione di atrocità, le quali, non a caso, sono state somministrate da regimi politici atei e clericali, scientifici e teocratici in egual misura.
Mio caro Odiffredi, ti rivelerò dunque un segreto: le atrocità non vengono attuate automaticamente da chi non fa di scienza, logica e matematica la misura del Mondo (le quali, tra l'altro, sono strumenti descrittivi, e non prescrittivi); le atrocità le realizza o avalla chi è convinto inflessibilmente di avere la Verità nella sua testa o i modi corretti per ottenerla, e quindi la sacra missione di combattere le Tenebre... e questo indipendentemente che la 'Verità' sia quella del testo sacro o degli attuali risultati della scienza, e che le 'Tenebre' siano quelle di Satana e del peccato o dell'oscurantismo religioso.
Librettino che riordina e riesamina le varie prove logiche che nei secoli hanno tentato di "dimostrare" l'esistenza di dio. Limitandosi quasi unicamente al dio dei monoteismi trascendenti, ovvero a quello cristiano.
La lettura è veloce, lo stile è garbato e ironico, non senza qualche osservazione puntuta che magari potrebbe un po' infastidire il credente.
Ma probabilmente non molti credenti leggeranno questo libro che, come tanti altri del genere, verrà aperto soprattutto da chi già la pensa come l'autore; il quale, del resto, dice chiaramente e con umiltà e onestà che non ha alcuna intenzione di convincere nessuno o dimostrare alcunché, ma semplicemente di esporre le ragioni per cui, lui, personalmente, non crede in dio.
Emblematico il passaggio: "...la verità è che non voglio farmi troppe beffe dei bisogni emotivi, che riguardino l'amore oppure Dio. Semplicemente, io non sento alcun bisogno di credere"; nonché: "È davvero ripugnante che un ateo o un agnostico attacchino aggressivamente e sul piano personale la fede degli altri, magari bollandola come un cumulo di sciocchezze per imbecilli. Chi si comporta così è giustamente accusato di essere arrogante e prepotente".
Difetto del libro è la sua ambizione divulgativa non del tutto riuscita. Trattando in maniera assai concisa argomenti logici e filosofici, con varî excursi nella matematica, il volumetto rischia d'essere troppo semplice se non semplicistico (assai discutibile, ad esempio, porre sullo stesso piano creazionismo e intelligent design) per lo specialista; e al contempo ancora troppo tecnico per il profano.
Ma la più grossa pecca è l'introduzione scritta da Odiffredi.
Quattro paginette in cui, trascurando il consiglio dell'autore di non "attaccare aggressivamente e sul piano personale la fede degli altri bollandola come cumulo di sciocchezze", Odiffredi parte in quarta affermando, non si sa con quanta ironia, che i credenti renderebbero "questo mondo molto peggiore con la loro presenza", e ammonendoci poi che "sarebbe un eccesso di stima [sia mai!] nei confronti dei credenti pensare che dietro alle motivazioni della loro fede ci siano sempre argomenti sofisticati", tracciando, caso mai ci fossero dubbî, un 'illuminante' parallelo coi media che "prosperano speculando sul fatto che la gente è molto più impressionata dalle sciocchezze che non capisce, che dalle cose serie che potrebbe capire".
Eh, per fortuna che c'è Odiffredi, che a quanto pare sa, lui, quali siano le cose serie e quelle idiote, il vero e il falso, il giusto e lo sbagliato; inutile che ci dica da che parte sta lui... non certo da quella dell'errore.
E quindi conclude citando Voltaire: "chi crede ad assurdità, finisce per commettere atrocità".
Non conosco il contesto originale della frase, ma credo si potrebbe fare un bel discorso sul significato che 'assurdo' e 'ovvio' vanno ad assumere relativamente al contesto sociale e culturale, e che è soprattutto qui che si gioca la produzione di atrocità, le quali, non a caso, sono state somministrate da regimi politici atei e clericali, scientifici e teocratici in egual misura.
Mio caro Odiffredi, ti rivelerò dunque un segreto: le atrocità non vengono attuate automaticamente da chi non fa di scienza, logica e matematica la misura del Mondo (le quali, tra l'altro, sono strumenti descrittivi, e non prescrittivi); le atrocità le realizza o avalla chi è convinto inflessibilmente di avere la Verità nella sua testa o i modi corretti per ottenerla, e quindi la sacra missione di combattere le Tenebre... e questo indipendentemente che la 'Verità' sia quella del testo sacro o degli attuali risultati della scienza, e che le 'Tenebre' siano quelle di Satana e del peccato o dell'oscurantismo religioso.
April 26, 2014
Atheist authors such as John Allen Paulos strive to bring out a contrarian streak in their readers, but they may get more than they bargain for - though I've been living religion-free for over a year now, I have yet to find an atheist book that doesn't disappoint me in some way. Books of any genre written by atheists and agnostics? Often amazing. Books about atheism and agnosticism? Often tedious, derivative, and repetitive.
I had hope for this one when I put it on hold at the library. The author is a mathematician, so I thought he would avoid low-hanging fruit and focus on the refined arguments for deism which so trouble intelligent people. I guess I expected something like Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story. Certainly I expected more than a few passing references to Gödel. Alas, this emaciated volume is yet another primer for arguing with fundies on the internet. In each chapter, Paulos picks up a famous argument for God's existence, then states the almost-as-famous refutation in his own words. Every time his big mathematician brain starts going down an interesting path, as with his thoughts on complexity and the amusing possibility of an emergent god, he changes the subject to miracles or Bible codes or something else beneath him and his readers. For a man who thinks atheists are smart, John Allen Paulos talks to me like I'm pretty stupid.
The prose has that snotty quality that is de rigueur in post-Dawkins atheist writing; there's nothing wrong with unbeliever's drollery in the abstract, but Paulos' digs at missionaries, the Republican Party, and people who send him hate mail only serve to enhance the sense that I've read this book before...several times. When one goes back and reads Russell, Camus, Steven Weinberg, Nietzsche, and Freud, one gets the sense that atheist writing used to have a lot of tonal diversity. What the hell happened?
This book makes me sad. I'm sad now.
I had hope for this one when I put it on hold at the library. The author is a mathematician, so I thought he would avoid low-hanging fruit and focus on the refined arguments for deism which so trouble intelligent people. I guess I expected something like Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story. Certainly I expected more than a few passing references to Gödel. Alas, this emaciated volume is yet another primer for arguing with fundies on the internet. In each chapter, Paulos picks up a famous argument for God's existence, then states the almost-as-famous refutation in his own words. Every time his big mathematician brain starts going down an interesting path, as with his thoughts on complexity and the amusing possibility of an emergent god, he changes the subject to miracles or Bible codes or something else beneath him and his readers. For a man who thinks atheists are smart, John Allen Paulos talks to me like I'm pretty stupid.
The prose has that snotty quality that is de rigueur in post-Dawkins atheist writing; there's nothing wrong with unbeliever's drollery in the abstract, but Paulos' digs at missionaries, the Republican Party, and people who send him hate mail only serve to enhance the sense that I've read this book before...several times. When one goes back and reads Russell, Camus, Steven Weinberg, Nietzsche, and Freud, one gets the sense that atheist writing used to have a lot of tonal diversity. What the hell happened?
This book makes me sad. I'm sad now.
February 6, 2008
This small, breezy book covers many of the main arguments for god. Most of the refutations aren't original, but Paulos doesn't claim they are - he just thinks it'd be useful to have them all in one place. Fair enough. He's generally pretty careful, as you'd expect a mathematician to be, but he does at one point make the extremely silly mistake of assuming perfect mixing of human populations when calculating descendents.
In any case, his subject matter doesn't interest me a great deal. Yes, all these arguments have been used (even Pascal's wager, believe it or not - I had it used on me once). And yes, they're all silly. But I prefer the in-depth critiques of Taner Edis and Dawkins, and am really interested in why people believe these things. (The "logical" arguments don't make sense, so it must be something else, and people cling to their beliefs with the tenacity of an affective decision, not an empirical one.) Hence Breaking the Spell, for example, was much more interesting to me.
In any case, his subject matter doesn't interest me a great deal. Yes, all these arguments have been used (even Pascal's wager, believe it or not - I had it used on me once). And yes, they're all silly. But I prefer the in-depth critiques of Taner Edis and Dawkins, and am really interested in why people believe these things. (The "logical" arguments don't make sense, so it must be something else, and people cling to their beliefs with the tenacity of an affective decision, not an empirical one.) Hence Breaking the Spell, for example, was much more interesting to me.
January 19, 2020
Premessa necessaria: non ho letto, ancora, questo libro. Non sono un matematico, anzi non mi piace la matematica, ma mi piace pensare nell’esistenza di quello che gli uomini, dalla notte dei tempi, chiamano Dio. Mi piace anche pensare, contrariamente a quanto scrive nell’articolo il prof. Stefano Zecchi, qui di seguito riportato, che se Dio esiste, gli piacerà senza dubbio giocare con la matematica terrena così come viene fatta da questi scienziati terreni/terrestri che si ostinano a fare i ...marziani senza rendersene conto. Non so se spenderò questi euri per l’acquisto del libro dell’illustre matematico americano John Allen Paulos, prefato da Odifreddi. Nel frattempo leggetevi ciò che dice Stefano Zecchi nell’articolo qui appresso. Ho assegnato, comunque, la massima valutazione al libro...
per la provocazione.
Dio non gioca con i matematici.
Abbiamo la prova matematica, attraverso un matematico, del perché ai ragazzi di oggi non piace la matematica. Il matematico è il professor Piergiorgio Odifreddi che deve la sua esistenza su questa terra a un miracolo di Padre Pio. Infatti, si calcola matematicamente che tutto ciò contro cui il professore si scaglia ha uno sviluppo esponenziale d’interesse sempre più complesso da valutare.
Il professore se l’è presa con Babbo Natale (figura perniciosa da espellere dal consesso umano), con le fiabe (forme di corruzione ideologica), con i giochi di prestigio nei circhi equestri (attentati all’integrità psichica di grandi e piccini). Adesso se l’è presa con quei babbei che credono in Dio, e gli sono bastate quattro paginette scritte in largo - ci riferiamo alla sua introduzione al saggio dello scienziato americano John Allen Paulos La prova matematica dell’inesistenza di Dio, appena uscito da Rizzoli - per dimostrare che Dio non esiste, naturalmente con prove matematiche alla mano del tipo: se moltiplico una pera per lo zero viene fuori un bello zero.
Ma il miracolo c’è. Dopo gli attacchi di Odifreddi abbiamo avuto invasioni di Babbi Natali, numerose come gli sbarchi dei gommoni a Lampedusa; le fiabe, perfino le più vecchie e noiose, sono diventate best seller; i prestigiatori si pagano al prezzo di Ronaldinho. La Santa Sede attende un sensibile aumento delle vocazioni.
Einstein diceva che i matematici devono tirare fuori le idee tra i 20 e i 23 anni, perché dopo il loro cervello è bruciato. Ci sembrava un’esagerazione: ricordo l’ansia dei miei compagni, iscritti alla facoltà di Matematica di fronte a questa sentenza di Einstein: avrebbero avuto pochissimo tempo a disposizione per giocarsi il tutto per tutto. Noi che studiavamo altre cose li consolavamo: «È un modo di dire per non perdere tempo», dicevamo, e invece, leggendo oggi Odifreddi, ci accorgiamo che quella di Einstein non era affatto un’esagerazione e che anzi, dopo aver ascoltato anche l’altro matematico, Paolo Giordano, bisognerebbe anticipare i tempi: è amaro ammetterlo, ma i cervelli dei matematici si bruciano in un battibaleno.
Bertrand Russell, grande matematico nei suoi verdi anni, ha resistito benissimo alla vecchiaia perché sapeva essere ironico, riusciva a scherzare su se stesso e le sue difese dell’ateismo non scomodavano la matematica. Odifreddi è invece il tipico girotondino: mentre Nanni Moretti alza nei girotondi il cartello con scritto «Abbasso Berlusconi», lui ne ha uno con scritto «Abbasso Dio», e distribuisce ai passanti volantini con la dimostrazione matematica della non esistenza di Dio.
Come fanno i ragazzi ad appassionarsi a questa matematica che sembra avere come scopo l’annientamento di Babbo Natale, l’abolizione delle fiabe e dei giochi di prestigio, la negazione di Dio spiegata in un volantino distribuito durante il girotondo con Moretti e Travaglio?
Oggi i giovani vivono in una cultura essenzialmente anti-crociana pur senza aver letto una riga di Croce. Nessuno sostiene più, come intendeva il filosofo Benedetto Croce, che le scienze sono forme di sapere senza conoscenza ma soltanto strumenti «utilitaristici» per «misurare» il mondo.
Il miracolo dell’esistenza del professor Odifreddi sembra anche una grazia che Padre Pio ha fatto a don Benedetto: la lettura dell’opera omnia del professore (si fa alla svelta: sono poche pagine) sta incoraggiando un’ampia rivalutazione del pensiero di Croce. Capire e misurare il mondo sono proprio due mestieri diversi.
All’università, quando il ’68 era un anno qualsiasi di là da venire, avevo come professore di logica matematica Ettore Casari. Un genio. Di notte andava a studiare all’osservatorio astronomico di Brera, di mattina studiava a casa sua, di pomeriggio veniva a fare lezione a noi, cinque o sei ragazzi. Nell’auletta, mentre spiegava e riempiva la lavagna di formule, aleggiava la sua ansia, la tensione, la volontà di ricerca dell’incontrovertibilità: da un momento all’altro ci aspettavamo che si sprigionasse dalla sua testa il grande teorema, il «teorema Casari». Poi era lui il primo a sorriderci sopra e a tranquillizzare noi ragazzotti spaventati dalla sua intelligenza. Con un teorema misuri il frammento di una realtà incommensurabile che, per provare a comprenderla, si può solo interpretare all’infinito.
Talvolta, però, è accaduto che sulla terra ci siano stati geni come Aristotele, Leibniz, Pascal che sono riusciti a misurare il mondo e a capirlo. Erano filosofi e matematici e hanno provato a raccontarci il significato della vita nel tempo finito e quella che, forse, ci attende quando il tempo si cancella nell’eternità.
Questo mondo ha conosciuto altri, un po’ meno grandi: Voltaire, Diderot, per esempio. Ce l’avevano con chi credeva nell’esistenza di Dio. Le loro riflessioni era profonde, argute, ironiche: irritavano altri filosofi e fedeli. Però i loro libri erano letti e discussi con passione, perché innanzitutto sapevano scrivere bene e non prendevano in giro il lettore, liquidando un problema millenario di tutte le civiltà della terra con quattro banalità, per di più sgrammaticate.
Stefano Zecchi - IL GIORNALE - 6 settembre 2008
per la provocazione.
Dio non gioca con i matematici.
Abbiamo la prova matematica, attraverso un matematico, del perché ai ragazzi di oggi non piace la matematica. Il matematico è il professor Piergiorgio Odifreddi che deve la sua esistenza su questa terra a un miracolo di Padre Pio. Infatti, si calcola matematicamente che tutto ciò contro cui il professore si scaglia ha uno sviluppo esponenziale d’interesse sempre più complesso da valutare.
Il professore se l’è presa con Babbo Natale (figura perniciosa da espellere dal consesso umano), con le fiabe (forme di corruzione ideologica), con i giochi di prestigio nei circhi equestri (attentati all’integrità psichica di grandi e piccini). Adesso se l’è presa con quei babbei che credono in Dio, e gli sono bastate quattro paginette scritte in largo - ci riferiamo alla sua introduzione al saggio dello scienziato americano John Allen Paulos La prova matematica dell’inesistenza di Dio, appena uscito da Rizzoli - per dimostrare che Dio non esiste, naturalmente con prove matematiche alla mano del tipo: se moltiplico una pera per lo zero viene fuori un bello zero.
Ma il miracolo c’è. Dopo gli attacchi di Odifreddi abbiamo avuto invasioni di Babbi Natali, numerose come gli sbarchi dei gommoni a Lampedusa; le fiabe, perfino le più vecchie e noiose, sono diventate best seller; i prestigiatori si pagano al prezzo di Ronaldinho. La Santa Sede attende un sensibile aumento delle vocazioni.
Einstein diceva che i matematici devono tirare fuori le idee tra i 20 e i 23 anni, perché dopo il loro cervello è bruciato. Ci sembrava un’esagerazione: ricordo l’ansia dei miei compagni, iscritti alla facoltà di Matematica di fronte a questa sentenza di Einstein: avrebbero avuto pochissimo tempo a disposizione per giocarsi il tutto per tutto. Noi che studiavamo altre cose li consolavamo: «È un modo di dire per non perdere tempo», dicevamo, e invece, leggendo oggi Odifreddi, ci accorgiamo che quella di Einstein non era affatto un’esagerazione e che anzi, dopo aver ascoltato anche l’altro matematico, Paolo Giordano, bisognerebbe anticipare i tempi: è amaro ammetterlo, ma i cervelli dei matematici si bruciano in un battibaleno.
Bertrand Russell, grande matematico nei suoi verdi anni, ha resistito benissimo alla vecchiaia perché sapeva essere ironico, riusciva a scherzare su se stesso e le sue difese dell’ateismo non scomodavano la matematica. Odifreddi è invece il tipico girotondino: mentre Nanni Moretti alza nei girotondi il cartello con scritto «Abbasso Berlusconi», lui ne ha uno con scritto «Abbasso Dio», e distribuisce ai passanti volantini con la dimostrazione matematica della non esistenza di Dio.
Come fanno i ragazzi ad appassionarsi a questa matematica che sembra avere come scopo l’annientamento di Babbo Natale, l’abolizione delle fiabe e dei giochi di prestigio, la negazione di Dio spiegata in un volantino distribuito durante il girotondo con Moretti e Travaglio?
Oggi i giovani vivono in una cultura essenzialmente anti-crociana pur senza aver letto una riga di Croce. Nessuno sostiene più, come intendeva il filosofo Benedetto Croce, che le scienze sono forme di sapere senza conoscenza ma soltanto strumenti «utilitaristici» per «misurare» il mondo.
Il miracolo dell’esistenza del professor Odifreddi sembra anche una grazia che Padre Pio ha fatto a don Benedetto: la lettura dell’opera omnia del professore (si fa alla svelta: sono poche pagine) sta incoraggiando un’ampia rivalutazione del pensiero di Croce. Capire e misurare il mondo sono proprio due mestieri diversi.
All’università, quando il ’68 era un anno qualsiasi di là da venire, avevo come professore di logica matematica Ettore Casari. Un genio. Di notte andava a studiare all’osservatorio astronomico di Brera, di mattina studiava a casa sua, di pomeriggio veniva a fare lezione a noi, cinque o sei ragazzi. Nell’auletta, mentre spiegava e riempiva la lavagna di formule, aleggiava la sua ansia, la tensione, la volontà di ricerca dell’incontrovertibilità: da un momento all’altro ci aspettavamo che si sprigionasse dalla sua testa il grande teorema, il «teorema Casari». Poi era lui il primo a sorriderci sopra e a tranquillizzare noi ragazzotti spaventati dalla sua intelligenza. Con un teorema misuri il frammento di una realtà incommensurabile che, per provare a comprenderla, si può solo interpretare all’infinito.
Talvolta, però, è accaduto che sulla terra ci siano stati geni come Aristotele, Leibniz, Pascal che sono riusciti a misurare il mondo e a capirlo. Erano filosofi e matematici e hanno provato a raccontarci il significato della vita nel tempo finito e quella che, forse, ci attende quando il tempo si cancella nell’eternità.
Questo mondo ha conosciuto altri, un po’ meno grandi: Voltaire, Diderot, per esempio. Ce l’avevano con chi credeva nell’esistenza di Dio. Le loro riflessioni era profonde, argute, ironiche: irritavano altri filosofi e fedeli. Però i loro libri erano letti e discussi con passione, perché innanzitutto sapevano scrivere bene e non prendevano in giro il lettore, liquidando un problema millenario di tutte le civiltà della terra con quattro banalità, per di più sgrammaticate.
Stefano Zecchi - IL GIORNALE - 6 settembre 2008
August 8, 2012
I have been a long time fan of John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences where he talks about the harm to society of a population that does not know how to do math. When I saw this book, couldn't help picking it up.
Gave it four stars because it is well written and important. He runs through the various arguments for the existence of God, and points out the fallacies in each. Very clear, very organized. And not too long. I listened to the audio version which lasted a mere 5 hours.
It is probably not going to convince anyone either way. After all, there are no new arguments. Instead, it is helpful in getting an overview of the entire range of various traditional arguments.
Gave it four stars because it is well written and important. He runs through the various arguments for the existence of God, and points out the fallacies in each. Very clear, very organized. And not too long. I listened to the audio version which lasted a mere 5 hours.
It is probably not going to convince anyone either way. After all, there are no new arguments. Instead, it is helpful in getting an overview of the entire range of various traditional arguments.
December 5, 2009
Another excellent book from the author of 'Innumeracy' - this time he takes on about all the arguments for the existence of God, at least in any of the forms envisioned by mainstream religions.
Some other authors writing on this topic have taken tones ranging from urgent to strident. I believe there's a place for their outlooks, because as they note, a large share of the human suffering in the world is rooted in religion. However, Paulos' take is much gentler, more accepting of believers though not of some of their actions; he's good-naturedly poking fun at them and at their belief systems rather than yelling at them.
Near the end of 'Irreligion' he gets more serious in arguing for acceptance of atheists as an increasingly necessary form of tolerance akin to that being won by ethnic, racial, gender-identity, and indeed religious minorities.
Hear, hear!
Some other authors writing on this topic have taken tones ranging from urgent to strident. I believe there's a place for their outlooks, because as they note, a large share of the human suffering in the world is rooted in religion. However, Paulos' take is much gentler, more accepting of believers though not of some of their actions; he's good-naturedly poking fun at them and at their belief systems rather than yelling at them.
Near the end of 'Irreligion' he gets more serious in arguing for acceptance of atheists as an increasingly necessary form of tolerance akin to that being won by ethnic, racial, gender-identity, and indeed religious minorities.
Hear, hear!
August 29, 2016
I borrowed the book from my neighbourhood library, curious about how a Mathematician might perceive believers' reasons for their faith.
While the author attempts to argue against the reasons given for the existence of God, there is a lack of consistency in the train of thought and conclusions drawn were less than solid. The fleeting chapters seem unrelated to one another.
I came away from the book feeling confused and not sure what the author's intention of writing the book was - to prove the non-existence of God or to show the incredulity of believers' arguments? While the book title is clear on the author's intention, the content is not. The author's arguments appear to be jumbled up and somewhat inconclusive, ending sometimes in jest, which further devalued his assertions. It becomes even more confusing with the inclusion of philosophies as support for his arguments.
December 10, 2011
God does not compute...or at least the belief in a divine power does not logically withstand scrutiny according to Paulos, who systematically refutes all the extant arguments for the supernatural from his perspective as Professor of Mathematics at Temple University. This is a subject Paulos has written on before in various columns so readers of his will find all of this to be familiar ground.
Are his analyses as eloquent as those of Hitchens, or as provocative as Dawkins? Not hardly. He's a numbers guy and his reasoning will appeal primarily to students of mathematics or logic. Still, this is a different take on a subject that has seen dozens of new works in recent years.
Are his analyses as eloquent as those of Hitchens, or as provocative as Dawkins? Not hardly. He's a numbers guy and his reasoning will appeal primarily to students of mathematics or logic. Still, this is a different take on a subject that has seen dozens of new works in recent years.
July 11, 2010
Over all a good read. I don't know if I would put it up as something for a philosopher per se to read. But, anyone interested in a mathematical glean on the proofs for god could benefit from this book.
It is a short engaging work. Which I think would be only slightly offensive to any theist reading it, though I can't imagine any theist picking it up unless they were already beyond them self in such a way as to not get offended.
It is a short engaging work. Which I think would be only slightly offensive to any theist reading it, though I can't imagine any theist picking it up unless they were already beyond them self in such a way as to not get offended.
March 13, 2013
I have read most of Paulos' other books. In this one he falls apart, blinded by his hatred of morality. He erects a facade of mathematical legitimacy and then hides behind his paper tiger to take cheap, angry potshots at people of faith.
And I am not writing this as a hurt person of faith. I, too, am atheist. Paulos takes the cheap and angry way and ends up sounding like all of the other angry anti-moralists writing their angry books and calling themselves "The Brights" (sic).
And I am not writing this as a hurt person of faith. I, too, am atheist. Paulos takes the cheap and angry way and ends up sounding like all of the other angry anti-moralists writing their angry books and calling themselves "The Brights" (sic).
January 12, 2010
Easier to read than most books of this genre, at times the author does wander off a bit with difficult references. However, for the most part, this concise text evaluates and debunks (not always successfully) most of the arguments for the existence of God. A good read that is more approachable than you would expect.
September 12, 2025
Paulos attacks the subject very methodically, first presenting his cases against "Four Classical Arguments" that God exists, then "Four Subjective Arguments," and, lastly, "Four Psycho-Mathematical Arguments." He also discusses the problem of atheists being one of the least trusted groups in the US and how to improve that situation. Interesting.
212.1
212.1
August 24, 2019
God is dead! Long live God!
God will exist as long as humans in their present form exist. God lives within the hearts and minds of humans. Whether God exists outside of our hearts and minds is what is at issue, and once again when the arguments are examined in some objective depth it becomes clear that, as Paulos puts it, they "just don't add up."
He formally presents a dozen arguments and finds them all wanting. He begins with the "first cause" argument, namely that everything must have a cause and that God is the first cause. This argument was refuted many centuries ago, mainly because it begs the question of what caused God? The obvious answer, God is the uncaused cause, or God caused himself, or God always existed, doesn't help since we could simply say the universe is uncaused, or that it always existed and leave a superfluous God out.
The second "classical" argument for the existence of God is the argument from design. This is the one creationists employ in their attempt to get around biological evolution. The world is too complex to have come about through the work of natural forces and/or it shows unmistakable signs of being designed. Therefore there has to be a designer and that designer is God. The problem with this argument is that what we think of as being "too complex" is more a statement about our lack of imagination than it is about anything else. The tendency for matter to self-organize along with the interplay of replication, mutation, and natural selection is more powerful in its ability to bring about complexity than our poor minds can imagine. Furthermore, the universe and its systems are not "designed." They evolve. The idea of a designer is an anthropomorphic notion alien to the way the universe works.
The third argument, which Paulos calls the argument from the anthropic principle, is basically a version of the argument from design. Here it is argued that the universe is just so perfectly fine-tuned for humans (or life) that it couldn't have come about by chance. Consequently there must be a fine-tuner and naturally that fine-tuner is God.
The fourth argument, the argument from being or ontology contends that God is the greatest and most perfect of all beings, and that one of the attributes of perfection is existence. Therefore God exists. I might say that an attribute of perfection is non-existence. Therefore God does not exist. The ontological argument is really a play on words and proves nothing. Or one could say, as Paulos reminds us, that the most perfect island (or most perfect anything) must exist since a necessary characteristic of perfection is existence.
Most of the other arguments are even less compelling than these hoary old deceivers. Take what Paulos calls the argument from coincidence:
"1. All these remarkable events happening at the same time can't be an accident.
2. There must be some reason for their coincidence.
3. That reason is God.
4. Therefore God exists."
Note that "1." is an unwarranted assumption, as is "2." "3." is an assertion which assumes that which is to be demonstrated. Paulos allows that this howler "is seldom made explicitly, but a number of common inane statements do more than hint at it." (p. 52)
What most of these arguments have in common is human incredulity. That is, what exists or has happened is just too, too much for us to accept without calling on some supernatural explanation, and that explanation is God. Therefore God exists as the explanation for everything we can't understand, which is an "argument" for God that Paulos doesn't consider specifically. It could even be said that as long as we are confronted with things we don't understand or events that are beyond our comprehension--that is, forever--God will necessarily exist as an explanation for these things and events. Therefore, you can't kill God. God is part of human nature. It could also be said that if God didn't exist, we'd have to invent Him. And it could be added that we did.
All in all this is a very readable introduction to a very slippery subject. Paulos is an engaging writer who knows how to entertain the reader. However, I was not quite so entertained here as I was with his A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market (2003) which I highly recommend. Probably I have been too much with the subject of arguments for and against God for too many years. For those of you interested in a more nuanced and deeper look at this subject you might want to read The Impossibility of God (2003) edited by Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier. Therein you will find that SOME Gods (that is, definitions of God) really are impossible in the same sense that there can't be an irresistible force and an immovable object, or a God that can do impossible things like squaring the circle.
Bottom line on all such philosophic adventures as far as I am concerned is this: you can't prove or disapprove supernatural things. Regardless, unlike Paulos, I am a deist, but as I like to say, the God I believe in is nothing like the usual ideas of God. In fact I guess I could say I believe in a God that represents what is beyond human understanding. Therefore I believe in a God about which nothing can be said.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
God will exist as long as humans in their present form exist. God lives within the hearts and minds of humans. Whether God exists outside of our hearts and minds is what is at issue, and once again when the arguments are examined in some objective depth it becomes clear that, as Paulos puts it, they "just don't add up."
He formally presents a dozen arguments and finds them all wanting. He begins with the "first cause" argument, namely that everything must have a cause and that God is the first cause. This argument was refuted many centuries ago, mainly because it begs the question of what caused God? The obvious answer, God is the uncaused cause, or God caused himself, or God always existed, doesn't help since we could simply say the universe is uncaused, or that it always existed and leave a superfluous God out.
The second "classical" argument for the existence of God is the argument from design. This is the one creationists employ in their attempt to get around biological evolution. The world is too complex to have come about through the work of natural forces and/or it shows unmistakable signs of being designed. Therefore there has to be a designer and that designer is God. The problem with this argument is that what we think of as being "too complex" is more a statement about our lack of imagination than it is about anything else. The tendency for matter to self-organize along with the interplay of replication, mutation, and natural selection is more powerful in its ability to bring about complexity than our poor minds can imagine. Furthermore, the universe and its systems are not "designed." They evolve. The idea of a designer is an anthropomorphic notion alien to the way the universe works.
The third argument, which Paulos calls the argument from the anthropic principle, is basically a version of the argument from design. Here it is argued that the universe is just so perfectly fine-tuned for humans (or life) that it couldn't have come about by chance. Consequently there must be a fine-tuner and naturally that fine-tuner is God.
The fourth argument, the argument from being or ontology contends that God is the greatest and most perfect of all beings, and that one of the attributes of perfection is existence. Therefore God exists. I might say that an attribute of perfection is non-existence. Therefore God does not exist. The ontological argument is really a play on words and proves nothing. Or one could say, as Paulos reminds us, that the most perfect island (or most perfect anything) must exist since a necessary characteristic of perfection is existence.
Most of the other arguments are even less compelling than these hoary old deceivers. Take what Paulos calls the argument from coincidence:
"1. All these remarkable events happening at the same time can't be an accident.
2. There must be some reason for their coincidence.
3. That reason is God.
4. Therefore God exists."
Note that "1." is an unwarranted assumption, as is "2." "3." is an assertion which assumes that which is to be demonstrated. Paulos allows that this howler "is seldom made explicitly, but a number of common inane statements do more than hint at it." (p. 52)
What most of these arguments have in common is human incredulity. That is, what exists or has happened is just too, too much for us to accept without calling on some supernatural explanation, and that explanation is God. Therefore God exists as the explanation for everything we can't understand, which is an "argument" for God that Paulos doesn't consider specifically. It could even be said that as long as we are confronted with things we don't understand or events that are beyond our comprehension--that is, forever--God will necessarily exist as an explanation for these things and events. Therefore, you can't kill God. God is part of human nature. It could also be said that if God didn't exist, we'd have to invent Him. And it could be added that we did.
All in all this is a very readable introduction to a very slippery subject. Paulos is an engaging writer who knows how to entertain the reader. However, I was not quite so entertained here as I was with his A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market (2003) which I highly recommend. Probably I have been too much with the subject of arguments for and against God for too many years. For those of you interested in a more nuanced and deeper look at this subject you might want to read The Impossibility of God (2003) edited by Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier. Therein you will find that SOME Gods (that is, definitions of God) really are impossible in the same sense that there can't be an irresistible force and an immovable object, or a God that can do impossible things like squaring the circle.
Bottom line on all such philosophic adventures as far as I am concerned is this: you can't prove or disapprove supernatural things. Regardless, unlike Paulos, I am a deist, but as I like to say, the God I believe in is nothing like the usual ideas of God. In fact I guess I could say I believe in a God that represents what is beyond human understanding. Therefore I believe in a God about which nothing can be said.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
November 21, 2010
A less than original but concise and approachable summary of rebuttals to arguments for the existence of god. Read my full review at my book review blog, Em and Emm Expound on Exposition.
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