Religião sem Deus

by Ronald Dworkin

Originally delivered as the Einstein lectures at Bern University on 12–14 December 2011.

The text of a draft of the lectures, presented on 8 December 2011 in the Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy at NYU School of Law coordinated by Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel, is available here: http://www.law.nyu.edu/academics/coll...

Videos from the three lectures are available here: https://cast.switch.ch/vod/channels/1...

An excerpt from the published version of the first chapter is available here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...

Genres: Religion, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Atheism, Spirituality, Theology

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Ronald Dworkin, QC, FBA was an American philosopher of law. He was a Jeremy Bentham Professor of Law and Philosophy at University College London, Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University, and has taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford. An influential contributor to both philosophy of law and political philosophy, Dworkin received the 2007 Holberg International Memorial Prize in the Humanities for "his pioneering scholarly work" of "worldwide impact." His theory of law as integrity is amongst the most influential contemporary theories about the nature of law.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enchantment

One of the consequences of language, perhaps the most important but least recognised, is that the world becomes symbolic. Things stand for other things, things they are not. Symbols, including words, are not like things that are not symbols. Although it gets very complicated, what it comes down to is that while they have no value in themselves, symbols connote value. ‘Food’ is good; ‘poison’ is bad. The symbol for the highest good (and bad) is what constitutes the divine. Words in particular tend to become sacred. Value, and therefore God, is inherent in language-using. We extol religion every time we open our mouths to speak.

The source of religion in language is not part of Dworkin’s analysis. But it should have been. It would clarify his opinion that “religion is deeper than God.” As it is, Dworkin narrows himself unnecessarily into religion as a “worldview,” an attitude which relies on a belief in “the full, independent reality of value.” For him, value exists in a sort of Platonic realm as an ideal to which we commit ourselves as if to another person.

Dworkin’s position resolves itself into a sort of poetic pantheism: “I shall take these two—life’s intrinsic meaning and nature’s intrinsic beauty—as paradigms of a fully religious attitude to life.” Really? Intrinsic meaning and beauty? Such belief, such faith, has fundamentalism written all over it. What on Earth could an otherwise intelligent human being have been thinking? Meaning only exists in the language that expresses it. And nothing of intrinsic value exists within language.

Dworkin is afraid that some people consider values as illusory. I understand his concern. But the way to contest this opinion is not to argue about their reality, much less their permanence, but simply to point out that ‘illusory’ is a term denoting value for the people who use it. They make his argument for him if only he would have listened. His worry was one typical of those intellectuals who mistake the map of reality with the journey of life.

Value, like language, is a social phenomenon. Both are real but not because they exist in some other spiritual world. They certainly are beyond us as individuals; they are a crucial part of our lives that we cannot control; and they make the communal lives we have possible. But neither value nor language is intrinsic to the world aside from our creating it. Both change incrementally whenever they are employed. They are neither subjective nor objective, but reside in that fascinating intermediate universe of the inter-subjective, where all existence is shared. One can remain enchanted with these things, and the world, without claiming more for them than they deserve or demand.

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ronald Dworkin's Last Book

Over a lengthy career, the late Ronald Dworkin (1931 -- February 14, 2013) gradually expanded his philosophical scope from legal philosophy and a rejection of legal positivism to broad questions of ethics, metaphysics, and value. Thus, Dworkin's broadest statement of his philosophy is included in "Religion without God" (2013) which Dworkin submitted to his publisher shortly before his death. This short book is based upon lectures Dworkin gave in December 2011 at the University of Bern. Due to illness, he was unable to revise the book as fully as he had hoped.

"Religion without God" is a short pocket-sized book of 160 pages in four chapters. In many portions, Dworkin speaks from the heart as well as the mind. The book has intimacy and eloquence as well as thought. In its meditations on death in the final chapter, the book has a valedictory tone.

In addition to its intimacy, the book is striking in some of its strong philosophical assertions. This is not primarily in Dworkin's exposition of non-theological religion, a subject many writers have explored. It lies more in what appear to be Dworkin's strong claims for objectivity and realism in the realm of values and in his claims for philosophical rationalism, necessitarianism and intelligibilty. Many contemporary American philosophers would be hesitant when faced with such strong positions. Dworkin seems to me not to fully develop or support some of these difficult positions. He argues for some but not for all of them in his longer book of 2011, "Justice for Hedgehogs".

I found the book departs in places from its theme of "Religion without God". In the third chapter titled "Religious Freedom", Dworkin moves from broader philosophical questions back to Dworkin's more usual focus on legal philosophy and political liberalism. The chapter examines religious freedom and personal liberty under the constitution and deals with matters such as gay rights, same sex marriage, abortion, conscientious objection, and the extent to which the use of illegal hallucinogenic drugs should be allowed to religious groups. Dworkin argues that the first amendment right to religious freedom is better viewed as a legal right to protection for decisions showing "ethical independence" or the freedom of individuals to choose for themselves the fundamental ways to live their lives as long as these ways do not impinge upon other people. The discussion is interesting but slightly off-focus for the book as a whole. In addition, I am unclear about whether Dworkin's claim for "ethical independence" is consistent fully for his claim for the objectivity of ethical values which he supports in the remaining sections of the book.

The remaining three chapters, particularly the first and last, do develop Dworkin's views on the relationship between religion and God. Broadly, Dworkin distinguishes between a religious outlook and a naturalistic outlook. The latter Dworkin argues is based solely on science and materialism and has no place for values or purpose. Dworkin's criticism of naturalism needs careful thought and development and may not fully convince those who hold to a broad naturalistic position. The religious outlook, for Dworkin, "accepts the full, independent reality of value" and makes two claims about objectivity. First the religious outlook involves a commitment to the objective meaning and importance of human life. The purpose of life, for Dworkin, is for each individual to make his life successful by living well, accepting responsibility for oneself and one's projects and acknowledging moral responsibilities to other people. Second, the religious outlook holds that nature in not simply a brute matter of fact to be studied by science "but is itself sublime: something of intrinsic value and wonder."

Dworkin argues that in the sense he has developed both theists and atheists may be religious. He maintains that religions have a fact or scientific component and a value component. Dworkin then argues at some length that value commitments and the objectivity of ethical claims do not depend upon facts of a natural or supernatural sort. In other words, the objectivity of value claims is a matter of the value claims themselves and does not depend on a God for validation. The existence of God would not be sufficient to validate the claims in any event. Hence a person can be religious, for Dworkin, without commitment to the existence of God, although Dworkin does not argue against theism per se in the book. Dworkin's arguments for the separation of God's existence from value are based upon Plato's dialogue the "Euthyphro" and on David Hume's argument that questions of value cannot be decided by questions of fact.

In the first and fourth and to some extent the third chapters of the book, Dworkin expands on the objectivity of value and on the nature of living well. The second chapter, "The Universe" consists of a lengthy, challenging excursus into physical science. Some religious individuals, theist or non-theist, might have qualms about the relevance of this chapter, which develops the strong character of some of Dworkin's philosophical views. Broadly, Dworkin considers modern physics and develops his view he maintains is part of the religious outlook, that the universe is beautiful objectively and in whole (rather than just in part to some human beings), and consistent and rational throughout rather than an assemblage of complex, unrelated facts. He concludes: "[f]or those of us who think beauty real, the scientific presumption that the universe is finally fully comprehensible is also the religious conviction that it shines with real beauty." Dworkin's position in this chapter, for me, approaches that of philosophical idealism and rationalism which most contemporary thinkers reject. That does not make the position mistaken. I was fascinated, if not entirely convinced, to read how close Dworkin comes to it.

This short book is a fitting testament to Dworkin and takes his work well beyond the scope of the legal philosophy for which he will be remembered. The book represents aspiration and vision more than completeness. I was glad to think with Dworkin about philosophy, value, and a meaningful life in this, his final book.

Robin Friedman

[Rein · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up during my recent travels, assuming (correctly) that it would provide a good perspective to recent re-evaluations of what religion is - something I need for a book about Asian worldviews I am working on. It is a heart-warming little treatise, a serious scholar's attempt to reconcile, toward the end of his life, his atheism with the idea of religion. I was actuallty torn between giving it 3 and 4 stars because I can sympathize with the attitude. But there are some serious problems in his approach, which made me finally settle for 3 ("liked it") instead of 4 ("really liked it") - as the book itself begs the question of what "really" means.

Dworkin's basic tenet is that religious attitude - seeing the beauty of the universe and feeling the need to live a good life - does not have to be grounded in theism, or godly religion, but is also available to atheists and agnostics. There is nothing wrong with that (a question of terminology), but his stance, which he describes as "ungrounded value realism" slowly starts to presuppose an objective existence of beauty and values, which are self-identical, continuous and universal. Dworkin is careful to quote Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko as authors of "ravishing" paintings alongside Raphael, but on the whole this view still smacks of classicism or at least the 19th century, and dangerously provides a ground for disdain for people who do not have the ability to see this beauty. The ontological status of values is also just set to "real" and "objective", without a proper clarification of what this means. Plato? St.Thomas? Hegel? Why do values and beauty have to be eternally the same? And so Western, despite claims to universality?

In the third chapter, which speaks about religious freedom, Dworkin is back on his home ground of legal scholarship and provides quite a few interesting insights, particularly when he proposes that religious freedom should not be a "specific right" to worship, practice etc, but a part of the general "ethical independence" that governments have no right to interfere with. This approach indeed seems to be able to clarify quite a few issues and, among other things, explains why religious freedom should entail the right to gay marriage and abortion. His legal philosophy is sound and invites one to read more of his work, especially "Justice for Hedgehogs", from which he quotes quite a bit.

[Pavel · Rating 4 out of 5]

An attempt to expand the scope of "religious conviction" by dissociating it from belief in one or more supernatural entities, in order to subsume a form of atheism and agnosticism under the constitutional clause that protects freedom of religion. The form of atheism which gets thus protected is the one which subscribes to what Dworkin calls "religious attitude", essentially the commitment to objective moral values and intrisic beauty of the universe. The problem is, of course, whether any attitude dissociated from belief in God can be properly called "religious", but Dworkin is referring to Einstein's claim that he is himself a devoutly religious man despite being an atheist, and one can see why Dworkin needs the dissociation. This seems a promising practical tack, at least prima facie, to make atheism more acceptable in the US.

[Reed · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dworkin's arguments are not compelling. I would not recommend this one. I'm about to start Mark Johnston's Saving God: Religion After Idolatry. Johnston's a solid philosopher and, if you're interested in contemporary accounts of "alternative religiosity," I would recommend checking his titles out.

[Wind · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kitap 2 ön kabul üzerinden ilerliyor, bunlar; din eşittir inanç ve etik veya akıl ile edinilen değerler inançtır. Doğrusu ben bu iki önermeye de katılmıyorum. Birinci önerme sadece ve sadece seküler toplumlar için geçerli. Sekülerleşmemiş toplumlarda din sadece bir inanç değil aynı zamanda kültür ve yönetim biçimi. Bu toplumlarda dinin inanç dışında bir çok işlevi var. Diğer önermeye de katılmam mümkün değil çünkü tanrıdan geldiği kabul edilen inançlar ile insanlık tarihi boyunca insanın tecrübeleri ve aklı ile geliştirdiği değerlerin aynı düzlemde kabul etmek bence mümkün değil. Bunlar dışında kitapta ilginç bölümler de yok değil. Eğer konuya ilginiz varsa göz atabilirsiniz.

[Leonardo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Discute los límites entre un dios y la cosmología, entre un dios y el derecho yankee. Habla de Dios como quien no tiene la menor idea de quien está hablando. Pareciera no darse cuenta que escribe desde una determinada posición. Busca hacerse el muy abierto, intenta proponer como deben convivir los que creen y los que no, desde una posición de intermediario, como si no tuviera una clara posición tomada. ¿Habrá leído a León XIII alguna vez?

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

The religious people on the one hand, and the secular/scientific people on the other: that’s the back-of-the-postcard version. But the philosopher and legal theorist Ronald Dworkin was both an atheist (he did not believe in a personal god) and a non-naturalist (he believed that certain no-natural things—not gods, but values) were objectively real. In this, his last book, he argues that many atheists have much more in common with believers (in God) than might appear to be the case: the atheists reject what Dworkin himself calls the “scientific content” of the major religions (namely, that a god or gods exist, and that this is the root of our experience of value), but many of them share with theists an essentially religious view, which is that our own response to the world cannot be explained or fully appreciated on the basis of any exclusively scientific picture of the world’s contents.

Frankly, I don’t know whether I agree with Dworkin or not; on balance, probably not. But his arguments are a useful antidote to a certain kind of facile “scientistic” view. He rehearses why it is that ‘Hume’s Principle’ explodes the idea that believers can defend their values as true just because god says they are true—but he also notes that this cuts two ways: sure, our sense that cruelty is wrong is and should be independent of what god allegedly says about it, but it also is and should be independent of what theory tells us about the structure of the empirical world.

There’s a connection Dworkin could easily make here but doesn’t. Cruelty is wrong because it’s the deliberate infliction of suffering; suffering is bad (indeed exists) because we are conscious; and consciousness is the perhaps the biggest of several thorns in the flesh of what might fairly, I think, be called "shallow naturalism." They don’t call it the Hard Problem for nothing.

The main representative of this view is Richard Dawkins, who comes in for some criticism here that's all the more telling for being so polite and so knowing. Dawkins himself is of course devastating against soft religious targets, but he has his own problems. We can al agree perhaps that the universe is just, like, awesome! But, on Dawkins's view surely what one ought to say that it isn’t in fact awesome, but only causes emotions of awesomeness in some people? And, wait, if that’s so, then why insist that it’s awesome? Why not insist instead on what we've just admitted, which is that it objectively—scientifically—isn’t? Here I think at once of the philosopher Jerry Fodor’s remark about Dawkins: “whatever his virtues, a feeling for the hardness of hard questions pretty clearly isn’t among them.”

Dworkin’s position, in contrast, is that in calling the universe awesome we are responding to the objective (external) fact of its awesomeness - in which case naturalists are left with the puzzle of where in the universe this property could possibly be located. (This might be called the Hard Problem of Awesomeness...)

There’s almost no jargon here, and Dworkin is a lucid, elegant writer. On the other hand, he’s a subtle thinker moving among very abstract and difficult distinctions, so despite its brevity this is not bedtime reading. The third section offers a sketchy but interesting investigation of religious freedom—and why, in Dworkin’s view, rights to religious freedom are almost invariably biased in favor of the values and beliefs of theists, as distinct from both ‘religious atheists’ and naturalists. He argues that they should be reconstructed as rights to ‘ethical independence,’ which would respect equally the beliefs of theists, ‘religious atheists,’ and naturalist atheists. A good lens through which to think about current debates about providing contraception benefits to employees, say—or flower arrangements to gay couples.

[Sam Eccleston · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has a curious unfinished feeling to it; the concepts deployed are not as well defined or thoroughly fleshed out as one might expect from a thinker of Dworkin's stature. This may be because the concepts in question were originally articulated in lecture form, but it is more likely to be because the editing process was cut prematurely short by the author's death. In view of this, it is difficult to review the book fairly, because one suspects that the inadequacies of the book are a result of the termination of this editing process before its natural completion.

Nevertheless, the argument can be analysed independently of this consideration. I read the book in a day, which really tells you quite a lot about what was wrong with it; it just isn't long enough. Massive questions involving complex issues requiring detailed and nuanced treatment are dealt with in a matter of paragraphs. This is enough to give you a feel for what Dworkin is trying to say, but not enough to glimpse how he might deal with any of the myriad potential questions his analysis raises.

An example will suffice to illustrate my point. He claims about thirty pages in that the traditional theistic equivalence between the being and the goodness of God is simply an unconvincing mystification with no possibility of being fleshed out convincingly. This seems like a rather premature conclusion; surely there are actually quite sophisticated arguments here that need to be dealt with. For example, one could maintain that all conscious beings are in some sense identical with the contents of their dispositions, emotions, and thoughts: they are the mental world they inhabit. We don't speak of mortal, temporal creatures as being identical with their attributes because they exist in time and their attributes change, but this, according to the classical theistic tradition, is not true of God, who is eternal an immortal. In other words; God is a single eternal act, and so he is fully identical with his characteristics.

This possibility, and a myriad others, are simply not considered in any real detail by Dworkin. Even though he rightly eschews the often rather silly and hysterical accusations levelled against religious traditions by prominent atheists, he nevertheless defines his discussion against a supposed orthodox religious tradition which, in silhouette, looks rather like the less sophisticated end of mainstream evangelical Protestantism. This isn't a straw man per se, but it is a missed opportunity.

Similarly, his claim that wonder and beauty are objective properties of the natural order is somewhat lacklustre and unconvincing; surely the best he can justify saying here is that our sense of wonder and beauty tracks objective features of the natural order?

He comes into his own when he moves into questions more directly in his field; the most enlightening and well argued passages of the book deal with the politics of religious freedom, and indeed, the book is worth reading for this alone. Nevertheless, there is still a distinct note of incompleteness. He labours against the backdrop of an implied neutral standpoint between competing conceptions of the good. This standpoint would, theoretically, allow governments to mediate between the claims of different faith traditions fairly; only limiting the expression of faith when a question of safety or the public good arose. The problem here is that the answer to precisely these kinds of questions looks different to people of different faiths. Though Dworkin acknowledges this, he seems unable to follow this thought to its logical conclusion; that the supposed neutrality of the state is a bit of an illusion.

Nevertheless, the lady work of a great man; worth reading.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book interesting, though it didn't take me anywhere particularly new. It had a gentle and respectful tone, while exploring some quite deep areas, albeit rather briefly.

Dworkin is a legal philosopher, and I appreciated the way he tries in this book to tease out what are the aspects/values of religion that do not belong exclusively to religion, that may require legal protection whether or not an individual is a believer in a god. He explores the ethical responsibilities that belong to individuals, and concepts of what it means to live a morally good life. These are very similar for both theist and atheist, even when it comes to some of those big ethical issues that have become dominated by politicised religious voices, such as a woman's right to an early abortion. Dworkin argues that the law should give equal concern for the well being of every citizen, while at the same time giving equal respect for individual responsibility to make freely the ethical choices he or she sees fit for living a morally good life. Equal concern includes protecting some from others' actions and beliefs, whether political, economic or religious, where they may have an unjust impact that is not a result of their own responsible choices. It's a complex game.

I enjoyed Dworkin's exploration of beauty, a concept covering so many possibilities, and claimed by both religion and physics! Can a natural world of such beautiful symmetry and order be explained without a concept of a god or a guiding intelligence? I think Dworkin's would say yes it can. Perhaps we find it hard to live with ideas of randomness and accident, and unanswered questions, but the world is no less awesome for that. The problem is that as soon as we start using words like beauty, awesomeness or perfection, whether to describe the natural world or the divine, we are drawing on a humanly constructed concept, imposing a value which is quite independent of the thing we describe. It is about our responses, our values, rather than something produced by the thing we describe. It is thus a value shared equally by believers and non believers, seeking expression for their experience of wonder.

[Faheem · Rating 1 out of 5]

Here's my take: Book Review of Ronald Dworkin’s ‘Religion Without God’

'The late Ronald Dworkin, Professor of Jurisprudence and Legal theory in New York and UCL, was not only the preeminent legal philosopher of his generation but also an influential contributor to political philosophy, and important public intellectual. His writings encompass over twenty books, including Law’s Empire (1984) and Justice for Hedgehogs (2011) and while his writings concentrate on law and political philosophy, just before his death Dworkin finally turned his attentions to religion from which we have this short suggestively titled essay Religion without God [henceforth RWG].

Religion Without God was posthumously published and edited based on the Einstein lectures Dworkin delivered to the University of Berne in 2011, and as the book jacket suggests the first iteration of a much larger book, before he succumbed to illness from cancer. More often than not, the essay reads like what it is, a set of notes for a lecture. Its melodious prose conveys the immediacy of what surely must have been a mesmerizing set of lectures, on the other it suffers from the inclusion of obscure arguments and fitful presentation some of which would certainly be excised. The careful reader cannot help wondering how much of these ideas would survive the inevitable drafting, peer criticism and redrafting that any publication has to endure. A measured evaluation of Religion without God is then, some would say rather aptly, irresolvable and finally imponderable, and this leaves the reader with all the satisfaction of going toe-to-toe with Dworkin for three rounds of shadow boxing. In the end the reader has to focus on what is presented to him, and not what could’ve been, a sentiment that he would surely approve. For the purposes of brevity, I concentrate my attentions to evaluate the success, or otherwise as I argue here, of his provocative attempt to make case for ‘religious atheism’ as a coherent analytic concept.

...'

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dworkin defines religion in a such a way as to allow the inclusion of the godless among the religious. I am sympathetic to this move as such (he might also have adjusted the goalposts such that some godders were removed from the religious camp too; but he doesn't). I wouldn't mind being bracketed among the godless religious myself and I can relate to his more impressionistic accounts of the features that qualify. As it turns out though, I don't get so bracketed because for that to happen I would have to believe in "objective values".

But that's just me. In general I was very impressed with the clarity of the exposition and the skill with which he separated out things that are logically separate (to take a fairly obvious one, the existence of a god and life after death) and set out the stakes and issues.

THe one major weakness in the argument, in my judgment, is that he has very definite views on certain values, which leads him to make bold and rather unconvincing statements about the possibility of a state determining where certain lines should be drawn on the basis of its understanding (i.e. his understanding) of how things stand with respect to (some) values - in the context of, for instance, the teaching of intelligent design v. the teaching of Darwinism in schools, gay marriage, the right to abortion, etc. I share his liberal preferences pretty much, but I am not convinced as he seems to be that his positions on them are supported by an understanding of objective values that could command the consensus of supreme court judges (and others).

Nevertheless I think this short book is excellent and well worth re-reading a number of times. It attempts to set up a fresh way of looking at the themes of religion and theism and succeeds at least partially, and that's not something that happens at all often as far as I'm aware. (And you're not obliged to subscribe to the "objective value" claim yourself in order to accept the sense of his arguments about religion).

Doporuceno.

[Darin Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this series of posthumously published lectures, Dworkin begins to establish a framework for a religious attitude that does not rest upon nor require a belief in a supernatural deity. At its core "the religious attitude...insists that values are real and fundamental, not just manifestations of something else; they are as real as trees or pain ... the world of value is self-contained and self-certifying." In essence Dworkin is say that there are things that are good or evil because of their inherent nature, not because a theistic god has proclaimed them to be so. A religious person, theistic or otherwise, "has an innate, inalienable ethical responsibility to try to live as well as possible in his circumstances. They accept that nature is ... something of intrinsic wonder and beauty."

It is unfortunate that Dworkin could not expand this work before his untimely death. There is a nascent theological framework here that both compliments and extends process theology. As such it has the potential to illuminate the devotions of both theistic and atheistic religious persons. Perhaps the central point of Dworkin's book is that atheism and religiosity are not mutually exclusive. Even though this book is short, it is a bit of a dense read. It is well worth the effort. I hope others will continue his work and extend his thinking

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, slim book attempting to chart a third way between theism and naturalism. Essentially, Dworkin attempts to disassociate "religion" from theism and make it more about experiences of awe, beauty, objective value, and the numinous before the face of the cosmos, our fellow creatures, and the ethical obligations of our own short lives. These aspects of religious experience, Dworkin argues, should be and in fact are accessible to atheists; an atheist's experience of the "numinous" in the cosmos, that nature is "beautiful," that a scientific theory is "elegant," that certain behaviors are "right" or "just" are in fact real and not simply an evolved emotional response to phenomena. Dworkin enlists scientists and philosophers to his cause.

Though short, the book is not quite as accessible as I would have liked it to be—if Dworkin's ideas get any traction, it will be someone else who popularizes them. A chapter on religious freedom and the legal challenge of defining "religion" is overlong and largely unnecessary. Still, it's a worthwhile read—particularly for those who were convinced by Dawkins' "The God Delusion" but find naturalism to be an unsatisfactory alternative to theism.

[Aaron Aoyume · Rating 4 out of 5]

Legacy

It is interesting how last books carry with them a special meaning that, curiously enough, have something to do with what Dworkin tries to convey with RwoG. I could only think of Nemesis, where Philip Roth wrote his last word: "invincible". Here, Dworkin seems to compile all he knows into a "theory of everything" that puts together quantum mechanics, semiotics, philosophy of art and theology into a vision about what life means and, more importantly, what death means. He cannot avoid thinking of all the legal issues he had worked on all his life but what makes me give 4 stars to this book are the very two last pages. This is Dworkin's parting glass, all his money he'd ever had spent in good company, all the harm he'd ever done to none but him... Good night and joy be with you all.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

[3½ stars] This is the first book of Dworkin's I've ever read, and I think I'd have gotten more out of it if I'd already been familiar with his work or if I'd read the book more slowly. The publisher notes that Dworkin's illness and death prevented him from expanding the book as he'd planned to, which also might have made it easier to absorb. I have optimistic thoughts of rereading it at some point and really thinking about it. But even on this first reading, I was intrigued by his ideas on religious atheism and his argument that religious freedom should be based on a right to ethical independence rather than on belief in God(s).

[Alexander Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book, I am very pleased with Professor Dworkin's perspective. He brings up some serious logical errors in a social governmental policy context and proceeds to offer some more cogent solutions. It is very pleasing to see someone who understands the problems of established religion in a society living under established laws natural and human science as well as government. I recommend this book to any person interested in policy, law, or applications of social aspects in religious law.

[Sam Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite line of the book as it leads to its closure "The Romantic poets said we should try to make our lives into works of art." Amen. And so because I believe our values and morality are inherent and our drive to live life well is intrinsic and not illusions I can perhaps consider myself a 'religious atheist'.

[Carl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Once again I didn't get far with this author. I guess he's not for me. He writes about values; says he wants to demonstrate that they have reality & validity "out there" as opposed to being creations of our preferences. It seems that personally, I choose to live as if I accept his thesis but I find myself disliking attempting to intellectualize about it. Seems contrived to me.

[Rob Schlapfer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding, clear-headed thinking rooted in Western {Christian-ish} Legal values and norms. Look for a host of populist versions coming to print in the months + years to come. This will be a prominent theme among Post-Evangelicals as they move toward Post-Theism. I think so, at least.

[Jim Blessing · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author discussed how during history people have been willing to kill others who worship different gods or the same gods in different ways and that passion was the cause of terrible religious wars in Europe that made religious toleration imperative there. Many other points were made.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not very thought provoking (not much new offered), but an honest summary of Dworkin's ideas. I loved the respectful tone and the ability to view both sides of issues without an agenda. Recommended read.

[Stefania Noerman · Rating 1 out of 5]

maybe because i read it not too long from Mere Christianity, i tend to compare both books. i prefer the Mere Christianity because of its fluid, logical, and thought-provoking features. This one is quite the opposite, but I can feel how the author wanted to convey his message.

[DinahKate]

“referenced in WSJ review 4 30 14 of why science does not disprove god”

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great analysis of diverse problematics around the protection of the right to a free exercise of religion and freedom of religion. Great last chapter!

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The universe is just there, and that's all."

"The point is not in the least what to make of it, but only, very delightfully and very damnably, where to put one's hand on it."

[Chris Kendig · Rating 4 out of 5]

While some of its arguments are a bit wandering, the book's central premise that principled atheists and theists have more in common than is typically recognized is an important one.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

See review of certain aspects in Journal of Creation 2016:30(3). See also S.A. de Freitas' review in for Journal for Juridical Science 2013:38(2):142–151.

[Daniel Zhu]

Read for my religious studies course.

[Dirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting discussion of religion and its place in our world