philosophical book about God/religion for guy suffering existential angst and fear about afterlife possibility

[Castel]

Why are so many of you guys on the anti-Dawkins side so hostile?

Ooh. Don't open the "hostility" door. Historically it hasn't worked out well.

[Grogsmash]

And since you so helpfully point out that Dawkins responds to these points, that means he doesn't respond to the cosmological argument either.

I think you misunderstand me. Dawkin's responds to the complaints that he is strawmanning the cosmological argument. That is, he responds directly to the criticisms of the criticisms of the cosmological argument.

Anyway, you say that the weaker (strawman) cosmological argument is uninteresting. I counter that the stronger argument, that just wants to say "A god exists" but gives us no information about who he is, what he wants or anything, to be completely uninteresting also. Especially given that it effects me in no way if you believe in a God with no context.

[Rorshach]

I think you misunderstand me. Dawkin's responds to the complaints that he is strawmanning the cosmological argument. That is, he responds directly to the criticisms of the criticisms of the cosmological argument.

Anyway, you say that the weaker (strawman) cosmological argument is uninteresting. I counter that the stronger argument, that just wants to say "A god exists" but gives us no information about who he is, what he wants or anything, to be completely uninteresting also. Especially given that it effects me in no way if you believe in a God with no context.

Perhaps you should, you know, read the argument before declaring it uniteresting? Usually a very good idea.

[Grogsmash]

Or you know, you could read Dawkin's book before foaming at the mouth to attack me for defending it.

49 question marks? Seriously?

[Rorshach]

Or you know, you could read Dawkin's book before foaming at the mouth to attack me for defending it.

49 question marks? Seriously?

This is a really weak response, and misleading to boot. Weak, because it doesn't adress the issue - that you haven't read the cosmological argument. Misleading, because what I've done is point out that you misrepresent the link - not that you defend Dawkins.

Somedeadman - that's the reason for the heat. Grogsmash doesn't read the argument, misconstrues it and doesn't relent when pressed. Dawkins doesn't enter into this, really.

[Grogsmash]

This is a really weak response, and misleading to boot. Weak, because it doesn't adress the issue - that you haven't read the cosmological argument. Misleading, because what I've done is point out that you misrepresent the link - not that you defend Dawkins.

So you foam at the mouth to attack me, and then complain I don't respond to you rationally? Nice.

Just for the record, I know what the cosmological argument is. So, again 49 question marks?

[Rorshach]

So you foam at the mouth to attack me, and then complain I don't respond to you rationally? Nice.

Just for the record, I know what the cosmological argument is. So, again 49 question marks?

You haven't really shown you do. And it's not - like you claimed - included in the link. Try harder.

If you return with another attemt at deflecting, I'll ignore you like you ask for.

[Sci-2]

Why are so many of you guys on the anti-Dawkins side so hostile?

The theistic arguments are poorly represented.

As I said earlier, best to go directly to theist vs. naturalist philosophers.

[dornishscorpion]

I have to say that i am more concerned with the arguments of trueness of religions than the existence or nonexistence of a god who directly intervenes in human lives and more importantly wants to be known

[Richard]

Then you want Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell - it's a step by step deconstruction of why religions exist (and, taken as read, are false) and should be more than enough for any rational human being to put their doubts to rest. On its own admission, it's very consciously olive-branchy in its approach to those who may believe, but more importantly, it doesn't indulge in the low grade mockery and sarcasm that Dawkins employs and is in the end a lot more powerful for it.

(I wasn't a fan of The God Delusion, despite liking Dawkins' other work immensely - his deep frustration with religious idiocy comes through, but I think TGD was a venting of that frustration unworthy of the man).

[Grogsmash]

Then you want Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell -

Thanks for the rec, just picked up the audiobook.

[SomeDeadMan]

Then you want Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell - it's a step by step deconstruction of why religions exist (and, taken as read, are false) and should be more than enough for any rational human being to put their doubts to rest. On its own admission, it's very consciously olive-branchy in its approach to those who may believe, but more importantly, it doesn't indulge in the low grade mockery and sarcasm that Dawkins employs and is in the end a lot more powerful for it.

(I wasn't a fan of The God Delusion, despite liking Dawkins' other work immensely - his deep frustration with religious idiocy comes through, but I think TGD was a venting of that frustration unworthy of the man).

I think you really do a disservice to the hard hitting approach. Sure, there's a place for the nicey-nicey approach, but for me personally, it was Dawkins' powerful, no prisoners, straight to the point treatment that broke through for me. Not all believers need to be treated like children. I mean there was a skeptical Guardian article about exorcism the other day, which genuinely started listing some positives of exorcism for balance.

That is a gift to believers. They will jump on that and ignore the rest. There's absolutely no reason religion should be some sort of special category of beliefs which is immune to humorous and mocking rebuttal - you know, like every other subject in existence. Religious people aren't all big babies, even if some react like it when gently goaded. People like that shouldn't be appeased.

[Sci-2]

Then you want Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell - it's a step by step deconstruction of why religions exist (and, taken as read, are false) and should be more than enough for any rational human being to put their doubts to rest.

While I appreciate the in-group selection and shaming tactic implied in the bold - it would hardly be a Richard post without them - I think you're overstating the case here. <<insert appropriate smiley>>

Though I do realize skeptics like to use mere disbelief as a sign of critical thinking I've yet to be convinced the former should be regarded as evidence for the latter.

I think you really do a disservice to the hard hitting approach. Sure, there's a place for the nicey-nicey approach, but for me personally, it was Dawkins' powerful, no prisoners, straight to the point treatment that broke through for me. Not all believers need to be treated like children. I mean there was a skeptical Guardian article about exorcism the other day, which genuinely started listing some positives of exorcism for balance.

That is a gift to believers. They will jump on that and ignore the rest. There's absolutely no reason religion should be some sort of special category of beliefs which is immune to humorous and mocking rebuttal - you know, like every other subject in existence. Religious people aren't all big babies, even if some react like it when gently goaded. People like that shouldn't be appeased.

You act like the extinction of religion is something we need to actively strive for, or someone deserves to be mocked simply for having faith in any kind of immaterial entity or process.

It's basically making atheism into a missionary faith that needs to be evangelized.

[Jo498]

The cosmological argument, as formulated by that link, is quite weak. The third point says it doesn't support any religion in particular. The sixth point basically says that the argument shouldn't have any connection to anything in science. Why would Dawkin's bother arguing with that version of the argument, when the vast majority of the time it is used in a much stronger fashion?

You apparently did not read the link. Feser does not explain the argument there. (The "didactic" problem with the argument is mainly that it rests on a whole metaphysics most people nowadays are only vaguely familiar with.) He only shows that Dawkins and Dennett (and many others) do not even discuss the cosmological argument in the way it has been proposed in about 2400 years of Theism. What Dawkins etc. do is similar to a case where some fundamentalist preacher would claim that a major claim of Darwinian Evolution was that an ape-like creature gave birth to a human baby. This is of course nonsense and was never claimed by any Darwinian.

This is exactly paralleled in that the stupid argument "Everything has a cause, but this does not apply god, therefore god is the first cause of everything else" was never proposed by any serious writer or commenter of Theism. It is a straw man par excellence. And Dawkins does not know or (more probably) does not care that he is attacking a straw man. Of course he thinks they are not even worth serious study. But how could he know if he never looked at a serious exposition of them?

FWIW I think that both Dawkins and Feser overestimate the relevance of arguments in the accepting or rejecting of some faith/religion; I guess Dawkins says so, but as he has not understood these arguments in the first place (any more than anyone who thinks that some ape gave birth to a human has understood evolution), he is hardly qualified to "debunk" them. Feser claims that he converted to Catholicism, because he was in the end convinced by the classical theistic arguments after years of being an atheist. But I think that this is a very rare case. I think historically the main thrust of these arguments has not been to convert non-believers (and these would not have been atheists, but "pagans" in most cases), but show that religion, science and rational thinking are not at odds with each other.

[Sci-2]

FWIW I think that both Dawkins and Feser overestimate the relevance of arguments in the accepting or rejecting of some faith/religion; I guess Dawkins says so, but as he has not understood these arguments in the first place (any more than anyone who thinks that some ape gave birth to a human has understood evolution), he is hardly qualified to "debunk" them. Feser claims that he converted to Catholicism, because he was in the end convinced by the classical theistic arguments after years of being an atheist. But I think that this is a very rare case. I think historically the main thrust of these arguments has not been to convert non-believers (and these would not have been atheists, but "pagans" in most cases), but show that religion, science and rational thinking are not at odds with each other.

A hearty +1 to this. Philosophical arguments aren't go[ing] to convince many people, but it's worth actually challenging the correct arguments rather than strawmen if one wishes to be a serious intellectual about the matter.

Makes me recall the skeptic Massimo's complaints about New Atheism in general:

I would actually go so far as to charge many of the leaders of the New Atheism movement (and, by implication, a good number of their followers) with anti-intellectualism, one mark of which is a lack of respect for the proper significance, value, and methods of another field of intellectual endeavor.

[SomeDeadMan]

You act like the extinction of religion is something we need to actively strive for, or someone deserves to be mocked simply for having faith in any kind of immaterial entity or process.

I really don't know how you got there from me saying I think the hard hitting approach is more effective at convincing people. There is not a single sentence in there which suggests atheism is 'a missionary faith that needs to be evangelized'. I think you may be projecting on to what I'm saying. There really is nothing in what I said to suggest that at all.

Saying that, I'm pretty sure the millions of dead people, in the name of religion, the tens of millions of those disfigured in the name of religion, would be in favour of the idea of religion at least having a bit of an evolution. Me personally? I'd rather everyone just woke up one day and realised how ridiculous it is.

By the way, these critics of new atheism aren't given anymore weight just because they themselves are atheists. Their criticisms are still stupid - and it looks to me like they've just noted that the straight to the point approach is losing favourability, and attempting to assert themselves as sort of new new-atheist gurus. Build the brand, exploit the market, etc.

[Jo498]

Very roughly, the cosmological arguments says something like this:

Every change/movement/changeable thing needs a cause.

This cause has to be something that is not changeable itself, but initiating change in other things (otherwise infinite regress or causal loops threaten)

There is change in the world (uncontroversial from experience)

Then either we have an infinite series (not temporally in the standard versions) of causes or causal loops (show that this does not work, which may be hard!) or something that can be a "prime cause" (without needing to be caused itself).

Show that this prime cause must exist and is unique (also hard)

This prime cause is what we call God.

One version of this argument stems from Aristotle's physics; it does not presume (or show) a creator or some act of creation in the past (Aristotle's world was temporally indefinitely extended and not created). Of course it doesn't argue for a christian/jewish/muslim god.

This is very rough and probably doesn't meet even the standards of a brief summary. I am certainly no expert on this stuff. It also presupposes many claims of aristotelian metaphysics, especially final causation (which was more or less abandoned in early modernity, but it is a contentious issue).

[SomeDeadMan]

Here:

"1. The Unmoved Mover. Nothing moves without a prior mover. This leads us to a regress, from which the only escape is God. Something had to make the first move, and that something we call God.

2. The Uncaused Cause. Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause, and again we are pushed back into regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God.

The Cosmological Argument. There must have been a time when no physical thing existed. But, since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that something we call God.

All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress. Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creative of design, to say anything of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts. Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can't change his mind about his intervention, which means he is no omnipotent. Karen Owens has captured this witty little paradox in equally engaging verse:

Can omniscient God, who

Knows the future, find

The omnipotence to

Change His future mind?

To return to the infinite regress and the futility of invoking God to terminate it, it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a 'big bang singularity', or some other physical concept as yet unknown. Calling it God is at best unhelpful and at worst perniciously misleading. Edward Lear's Nonsense Recipe for Crumbobilous Cutlets invites us to 'Procure some strips of beef, and having cut them into the smallest possible pieces, proceed to cut them still smaller, eight or perhaps nine times.' Some regresses do reach a natural terminator. Scientists used to wonder what would happen if you could dissect, say, gold into the smallest possible pieces. Why shouldn't you cut one of those pieces in half and produce an even smaller smidgen of gold? The regress in this case is decisively terminated by the atom. The smallest possible piece of gold is a nucleus consisting of exactly seventy-nine protons and a slightly larger number of neutrons, attended by a swarm of seventy-nine electrons. If you 'cut' gold any further than the level of the single atom, whatever else you get it is not gold. The atom provides a natural terminator to the Crumboblious Cutlets type of regress. It is by no means clear that God provides a natural terminator to the regresses of Aquinas. That's putting it mildly, as shall see later..."

There. No mockery, derision, or - the horror - """""disrespect""""". Just rational argument. I often wonder if these people who think Dawkins some daemon have even read the book.

[DaveSumm]

You act like the extinction of religion is something we need to actively strive for, or someone deserves to be mocked simply for having faith in any kind of immaterial entity or process.

This is the crux of why these arguments get so heated I think; believers get frustrated that atheists don't take the subject matter seriously, atheists truly don't believe it deserves taking seriously. I actually think mocking is a crucial and necessary aspect of human culture, it keeps bad ideas in check. Hence religions enormously inflated stake in public discourse; mocking it had been considered in bad taste for so long and it has grown into the space we've allowed it.

All this cosmological argument stuff is beginning to sound like the teapot rebuttal a few pages back; your argument doesn't count because we define God to be exempt from it. You're practically defining God to be un-argue-against-able and then marveling at how well he stands up to argument.

[Richard]

I think you really do a disservice to the hard hitting approach.

On the contrary, I'm all in favour of hard-hitting, especially where something as lethally dangerous as religion is concerned - but TGD came off petulant and childish, and that damaged any real hard hitting it might have done. I really, really wanted to like it, but found it distastefully shallow. Basically, I think Dawkins was looking with horror at the global retrenchment of religious fundamentalism, decided that something needed to be done, and so dashed the book off in a hurry as a rallying cry. I suppose to that extent - as rallying cry - it works, but I still can't pretend it's a good book. Dennett's Breaking the Spell, on the other hand, is.