Happy Birthday, Mark Twain

Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes, and wishes he was certain.

-Mark Twain, Notebook, 1879

Happy Birthday, Richard Dawkins

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006)

Happy Birthday, Einstein

I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

--Albert Einstein, The World as I See It

Creationism in Texas? Shocking!

Saw this on Jerry Coyne's Website. Baylor University's Medical Center has a quarterly journal that has just published a critique of Darwinism by someone named Joseph P. Kuhn. It's a strange and almost incoherent offering that seems to be a grab-bag of common tropes from the intelligent design community. Not only does he appear unfamiliar with established scientific facts, he seems to have only the loosest grasp on what counts as a logical argument.

Happy Birthday, Spinoza

Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles, and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.

- Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677)

Kitcher's "Living With Darwin"

Philosopher Philip Kitcher's excellent little book Living With Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith seeks to answer two clusters of questions surrounding the opposition to Darwinism found in the Intelligent Design (ID) and Creationist movements. First, how is it possible to argue against Darwin, given scientific consensus? What are the strategies employed by critics of Darwin and how do those strategies fare? Second, why does Darwinism provoke such antipathy and recoil in the first place?

Your tuning fork is off pitch, Francis.

If you're a scientist who wants to show that science and faith are compatible and that the deep mysteries of physics or biology point to the existence of a creator in order to be adequately explained, then getting the endorsement of Richard Dawkins is basically a rhetorical homerun. And, apparently, Francis Collins has done just that. He claims, and we have no real reason to doubt him, that Richard Dawkins admitted in a private conversation that the argument for the existence of God based on the "fine tuning" of the universe is "the most troubling argument for nonbelievers to counter."

And why wouldn't it be?

Is Faith a Virtue?

The epistemic status of faith is problematic on the face of it—to believe a proposition on faith is to believe without relying on either empirical evidence or the endorsement of reason. This much seems uncontroversial, for if reason or evidence were available to support the belief faith would be redundant. When someone claims to belief in something "on faith" they are bypassing reason and empirical evidence and asserting that they are justified in doing so. The issue I'd like to address here is twofold. One, can faith be reconciled with the demands of reason and empirical evidence? Two, if it cannot, then is faith a responsible way to form beliefs?

One way to answer this question is to say "No" to the first part and to simply assert that the dictates of faith outweigh the dictates of reason and evidence. This is the stance taken by those who claim that the world is around 6000 years, evidence of geology be damned. I'm not going to address this position here. Let it suffice to say that if you're uninterested in acknowledging that claims of faith need to be reconciled with what we know about the world, the rest of this post is not for you.

Evaluating the First Enquiry critique of traditional religion

I've summarized the two sections that comprise the two halves of the critique of traditional religion contained in Hume's First Enquiry here and here. Now I want to take a look at how the two arguments complement each other and evaluate how good a critique they make.

Although he is not explicit in this, I take it that Sections X and XI of the First Enquiry are intended by Hume to jointly show that neither the miraculous events of revealed religion nor the conclusions of natural theology can serve the purpose of acting as a rational foundation for religious belief. Hume leaves it to the reader to evaluate whether religious belief is rational without these supports, but the implication is pretty clear that he thinks it is not.

As I see it, there are three main approaches to establishing the foundations of religious belief in the history of philosophical theology. First, there is the a priori approach, exemplified by the sorts of arguments that occupied mediaeval theologians. The various formulations of the ontological argument, the first cause argument, etc. are ways of attempting to establish the existence of God and determine his properties through an analysis of the contents of our concepts and by applying deductive logic once those concepts are clarified. Second, there is revealed religion, which calls on miracle accounts, authority, tradition, scripture, and revelation to provide the epistemic justification for religious belief. Third, there are a posteriori approaches to religion exemplified in natural theology. This approach looks at the way the world is and argues that the existence of God is a necessary component of any adequate explanation of the world.

Hume's critique is targeted at the second and third approaches. His critique of revealed religion is primarily occupied with the lack of foundation of miracle accounts, but the argument is easily extended to all forms of justification of revealed religion. There is no logically sound reason why we should believe anything on the basis of authority, scripture, tradition, or revelation. There is simply no logical connection between the speaker of a proposition and its truth value.

Our confidence in each of these bases must then rely in their perceived reliability. But experience is the only way to determine what is reliable, and so the content of a claim made in scripture or from the pulpit has to be judged according to the likelihood criteria by which all other claims about matters of fact are judged. And in the case of vast swaths of scripture, tradition, etc. the overwhelming evidence is that the way religion describes how the world is (with miracles, angels, talking donkeys, resurrections, etc.) is far different than  our normal sensory or scientific experience of the world. This being the case, we ought to apportion our beliefs to the evidence and reject revealed religion.

Hume's critique here is devastating to the method of justification of revealed religion. An advocate of revealed religion will have to offer a plausible reason to think that authority, etc. are generally trustworthy that does not call on reliability, because as Hume has shown, the probability (and thus general reliability) of scientific accounts of the world that contradict religion is far greater than the probability that the miraculous events that pepper scripture and tradition actually occurred. This reason won't be able to point out a necessary connection between the source of information and its truth value because no such connection exists. And it won't be able to claim that we can trust revelation, authority, or scripture as true or miracle accounts as likely because of the truthfulness or power of the deity, because the existence of this deity or the truth of religion is supposedly justified by these things. Invoking God to buttress the veracity of the scripture (or authority, etc.) which is used as a reason for positing God's existence is as straightforward a circularity as you could ask for.

The reach of his critique of the Design Argument is much more limited, however. A posteriori proofs for the existence of God are essentially inferences to the best explanation, and at the point at which Hume was writing in the mid 18th C., there was not much in the way of scientific theory that could conclusively argue against a divine creator being a candidate for the best explanation for the existence of the universe and the order that we see in it. Newton's universe was a static place with fixed laws and no discernible origin; it is not until the development of modern cosmological theory that anything approaching an understanding of the beginnings of the universe was developed. Similarly, Darwin's extraordinary achievement of detailing a natural mechanism to explain adaptation and order in the biological world was still a century away. So, Hume was unable to fully refute the Design Argument's claim to have established the likelihood of a deity.

What Hume's argument did accomplish, though, is still significant. By correctly identifying the Design Argument as an argument from effect to cause he was able to show just how little advocates of that argument can hope to get from it. All it warrants is the inference to some being or entity of we know not what sort with we know not what properties that is sufficient somehow to bring about the existence of the universe in some fashion. Not exactly the anthropomorphic God of traditional religion. Nothing more can be concluded because for the other attributes traditionally attributed to God (omniscience, omnipotence, goodness) there is scant evidence in the world we see. The Design Argument gives us none of these properties. And, having blocked the methods of revealed religion, Hume has also blocked one avenue of supplementing the minimal conclusions of the Design Argument to get something approximating Christian dogma.

Hume's critique does not address the a priori method of establishing the existence of God, however. My supposition is that his Empiricist worldview would have led him to simply dismiss any a priori arguments attempting to establish the existence of God, or for that matter, any matter of fact. He probably was right to do so, but defending that position is a task for another day.

Hume’s critique of the Design Argument in the First Enquiry

Section XI of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding sets out Hume's critique of the Design Argument in the form of a dialogue between Hume and a friend. The ostensible reason for the dialogue is to determine whether someone who denies that there will be reward or punishment in a future life for deeds and misdeeds in this one will undermine morality, but within the course of the discussion, it becomes clear that the (or at least a) primary target of Hume's discussion is the traditional design argument for the existence of God. Hume's goal is not to refute the argument outright; it is rather to limit the scope of what someone ought to claim on the basis of having established the existence of God through this argument.

Hume's friend starts out by reviewing the argument from design. It is ‘an argument drawn from effects to causes.’ Advocates of the design argument claim that it establishes no more than is warranted by the facts.

The friend then lays out rules for inference from effects to cause: (1) the cause must be proportional to the effect; no qualities may be assigned to the cause beyond what are necessary and sufficient to bring about the observed effect. Anything more is conjecture. (2) No further effects may be inferred from the cause beyond what is already known. The existence and order of the universe shows the power, intelligence and benevolence of God only to the degree that those qualities are displayed in his creation. Any further attribution of qualities is hypothesis. We cannot ‘mount up to Jupiter’ from effects to causes and then ‘descend downwards’ to new effects. Any attribution of other qualities or effects has no foundation either in reason or experience. In other words, an inductive argument of this sort for the existence of God can establish no more facts about the purported deity than are necessary to account for those features of the world that the positing of God is needed to explain.

So, even granting that the existence of the universe requires a cause of some kind, is it reasonable to look at the world and contend that it demonstrates any of the qualities that should lead us to believe that the creator (whatever it was) was an intelligent, benevolent designer as we're instructed by traditional religion to believe? There is no prima facie reason to believe that the world is just—injustice is clearly all around us, in fact.

The defender of the ultimate justice of the universe might point to future reward and punishment as evidence of the justice of the world, and thus to the existence and justice of its creator. The idea here would be that although justice does not obtain in the present world, God will balance the books in the future. However, the rules of inference from effect to cause only give us the right to attribute the justice of the visible world to its creator. The friend poses this question: is there distributive justice in this world? If not, then the absence of justice in the world does not give us warrant to expect it in the future; in fact, it should lead us to the opposite conclusion.

Experience serves as the only standard by which to judge a claim about the world; any inference beyond what experience provides is unwarranted. Having found these limits unacceptable, some have allowed speculation and imagination to carry them to concepts beyond what experience provides. One of these, that there is an intelligent, benevolent cause of the universe, is ‘uncertain’ and ‘useless,’ in the words of Hume's friend. It is uncertain because it lies beyond experience, and it is useless because the inference to an intelligent cause will not allow us to infer anything further than its mere existence.

Hume puts forward a possible objection that an advocate of the Design Argument might raise, though. Is it truly the case that we cannot infer anything further about the creator than simply that he created the world? We are certainly permitted to infer the existence of a builder if we happen upon a house partially built, and once we infer a builder, are there not many things that we can also affirm about the builder? There are many things that we know about builders, after all. It is interesting here that Hume's objection anticipates the sort of claim that is often made by advocates of the Design Argument and other arguments for the existence of God. If, once we've established a creator, we can come to knowledge of the other properties of that creator (by reason, revelation, etc.) then we can build upon the foundation of the inductive Design Argument. Perhaps we can indeed 'mount up to Jupiter' and come back down again.

The friend replies that the difference is that in the case of the house we are familiar with men as builders from other experiences, and have seen that houses are built by men. If we had no such experience of builders, then we would not be able to make the inference from the existence of a house to existence of a builder. In that case the situations would be analogous, but we could not argue from effect to cause and then make inferences about the other properties of that cause.

Once again, for Hume experience is the sole foundation for knowledge, and any attempts to put flesh on the skeleton of the notion of a creator arrived at through the Design Argument is merely speculation. We have no independent experience of the deity, who is known only by his products, so we cannot infer any further attributes beyond those necessary for the creation of the world. We have no license to suppose the deity possess qualities like goodness or justice in any measure beyond what is observable in the world.

Anything further is speculative, and the source of our tendency to attribute additional qualities to God is a projection of our own qualities, and our belief that God will reward and punish in a future life is derived from this anthropomorphic projection. In reality, we cannot say anything more about that deity’s nature than is included in his works. No new fact can be inferred from the ‘religious hypothesis’ beyond what is given in experience.

An implication that Hume's argument carries, but which he does not bring to the surface explicitly (probably for political reasons) is this: if Hume is right about the limits of the Design Argument that served as the centerpiece for natural theology's attempts to establish the truth of traditional religion, then if we accept Hume's attack on revealed religion in his discussion of miracles in the prior section of the first Enquiry, the foundations of traditional religious belief are destroyed.

Hume, D. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1772), ed. Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Hume on Miracles

Hume’s argument against the rationality of believing in miracles (found in Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (EHU) section X) is simple, elegant, and to my judgment, decisive.

According to Hume, all knowledge of matters of fact comes from experience. A matter of fact on his view is basically anything that isn’t a mathematical or analytical truth. However, Hume acknowledges that though experience is the only guide in reasonings regarding matters of fact, it is not infallible; experience in some cases is less than uniform. ‘A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence’ in cases where experience is not uniform (EHU, 170). A man should weigh the opposing evidence as if evaluating conflicting ‘experiments’ and judge more probable the results that occur more frequently.

Hume considers testimony as it relates to these epistemic norms. Experience provides the basis of our belief in human testimony (a consequence of experience providing us with the basis of all of our beliefs). We feel testimony to be reliable because we have experience with people as truth-tellers, and know by experience what psychological and social factors cause people to tell the truth, such as the general human inclination to tell the truth and the desire to avoid the shame of being exposed as a liar. Since testimony is founded on experience, its reliability should subject to the same measures of proof and probability as all other experimental evidence gathered from experience.

Testimonial reports of marvelous [which for Hume are unlikely but not impossible] and miraculous events are one source of positive evidence for their occurrence; in fact, since authority and tradition amount to forms of testimonial evidence, testimony is really the sole evidential ground for miracles for any person who has not witnessed a miracle herself. However, against the testimony in favor of a miracle we have our uniform experience of the world operating according to fixed laws; this experience serves as counterevidence to the possibility that the miraculous event reported might have occurred. Here we have two sources of evidence, both grounded in experience, in conflict. Our belief should side with the body of evidence that is more probable based on our experience.

Hume is making the empirical bet that in every case the evidence that the universe operates according to laws which prohibit the miraculous event will overwhelm the positive evidence for the miracle, which should be considered against the possibility that the story of the event is contrived, misunderstood, or misreported. Hume offers a maxim by which to evaluate miracle claims: the falsehood of the miracle report must be more miraculous than the miracle reported in order to warrant belief.

When we hear a report of a miracle, say, a man rising from the dead, we should weigh the probability of this occurrence against the probability that the testimony is false, and apportion our belief accordingly, which is to say, reject the miracle report as false.

Hume’s argument has not destroyed the possibility of miracles, of course. He has only shown that it’s irrational to believe in one if one takes the view that we ought to base our beliefs on the preponderance of evidence.

Claiming that the miracle is an act of God doesn’t increase its probability or weigh in its favor, according to Hume, since all we can know of God is known via nature, which speaks uniformly against the miraculous. The testimony of miracles is insufficient to found a religion, given that what grounds testimony in general also refutes it in the case of miracles. So the miraculous nature of any religion cannot be given as a defense of its veracity. Given that Christianity cannot be believed without at least one miracle, it is only faith that might compel assent to it, and this faith must be affirmed in opposition to reason, understanding, and experience.

References:
Hume, D. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1772), ed. Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

What's So Great About Christianity (Part 2)

Part 2 of “What’s So Great About Christianity” is an argument that the political and moral virtues cherished in modern Western society are the direct inheritance of the West’s Christian roots. The implication we are supposed to draw from this is that if these virtues find their roots in Christian ideas, then they are unsupportable or unsupported outside the Christian conceptual framework. It is, I think, uncontroversial that Christianity was influential in the development of western values, so the validity of D’Souza’s argument will turn on whether these values are defensible without accepting the full Christian message.

In chapter five D’Souza argues that the modern concept of limited government is a product of Christ’s injunction to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” in Matthew 22. It is important to note that even if the concept of limited government can be traced to Christ’s teachings, the first appearance of governments that were limited in the sense we mean when we say “limited government” came about as a product of the Enlightenment in Europe and America. It may be that the monarchies of the Middle Ages and early modern period were limited in their power by natural restrictions in resources or technology, so that people had a modicum of freedom of action unencumbered by governmental interference, but it likely wasn’t from lack of trying on the government’s part. These governments weren’t limited out of philosophical considerations about universal individual rights and liberties. Also, the notion of the separation of church and state may have conceptual roots in St. Augustine’s “City of God” as D’Souza claims, but it would be difficult to convince historians that anything like the modern separation existed in the Middle Ages. So, even if the idea is traced to Christian thought, it was not practiced by Christian society until well after the founding of Christianity.

It is unclear to me why D’Souza thinks Christianity specifically should be credited with the growth of religious tolerance (pp. 53-4); while it’s true that Christians (like the philosopher John Locke) were at the forefront of arguing for religious tolerance, it is equally true that their opponents, the people who wanted to limit religious freedom, were Christians as well.

D’Souza concludes chapter 5 by saying “Today courts wrongly interpret separation of church and state to mean that religion has no place in the public arena or that morality derived from religion should not be permitted to shape our laws” (56). But if there is not a non-religious justification for a law, then it seems to me at least arguable that the law is a violation of the prohibition of the establishment of religion. If the law is on the books only because of the religious rules of one particular sect, then it amounts to the government advocating that religion. Take as an example laws that prohibit the sale of alcohol on Sundays in certain areas. These laws clearly have no other purpose than to impose a particular religious moral prohibition on the community at large.

Chapter 6 compares the morality of Christianity to that of the ancient Greeks and Romans, in order to argue that Christian morality is more in concert with what we all believe today. He starts by arguing that Paul “repudiates an entire tradition of classical philosophy” (57) when he claims that people don’t do evil strictly out of ignorance of the good. The view that the philosophical problem of “weakness of will” is solved by claiming that ignorance is the cause of bad actions is Plato’s, but it certainly is not Aristotle’s view. Aristotle devotes a substantial portion of his “Nicomachean Ethics” to discussion about the problem of weakness of will, none of which is acknowledged by D'Souza. D’Souza also mischaracterizes the real content of Aristotle’s moral philosophy by claiming that he “cherished” the “great-souled” man. Aristotle does mention (as one type of virtuous man) the man who is better than others (more noble, wealthy, etc) and knows it, and certainly this is not something that we would consider to be a virtue today. But this idea of the great-souled man plays very little role in Aristotle’s ethics. The bulk of his discussion is centered on the concept of human well-being and virtues like courage, temperance, friendship, justice, and other traits that we still value today. These concepts get their first philosophical justification and discussion in the Greeks, not in Christian thought. Christianity certainly contributed to the development of moral philosophy, but the idea that it displaced Greek moral concepts in doing so is simply historically inaccurate.

His claims that Christianity invented the family are also historically debatable. He insinuates that in Greece homosexuality was the norm for sexual life, and little value was placed on marriage. Nothing I’ve read about ancient Greece confirms this. People married, lived together, had children, etc. in Greece (much as they did in most of the ancient world). Certainly the modern family structure has been influenced by Christianity, but D’Souza seems to imply that if it weren’t for Christianity, that nothing approximating the modern family would exist, and I can see very little evidence that this is true.

Chapter 7 attempts to argue that from the very beginning Christianity transformed notions of human dignity and laid the groundwork for our modern notions of human equality and freedom, a proposition that I think is false. D’Souza really does not take seriously the fact that there are not injunctions against slavery in the bible. There may be instructions to treat slaves well, but there is certainly nothing in the bible that directly admonishes people for owning slaves. This has to be accounted for if you are going to argue that the notions of human dignity and equality are the unique product of Christian thought. His response that Christians were discouraged from holding other Christians as slaves is no response at all if he is attempting to show that Christianity contains within it fully formed ideas of equal rights for all.

D’Souza criticizes the ancient Greeks for being a slaveholding society, but lauds the Christian founders of the U.S. as championing freedom 1800 years after the foundation of Christianity supposedly paved the way for equal rights for all. Never mind the fact that western nations had been ruled by Christian leaders since the end of the Roman Empire, and would have had the power to abolish slavery long ago. Never mind the fact that even in the U.S. it ultimately took a Civil War to finally deal with the problem of slavery in half the country.

I’m fully aware that slavery was a complicated political problem and a deeply entrenched institution that was not exclusively practiced within Christianity; slavery is a problem of human history, not only of Christian history. But then neither is the abolition of slavery an exclusively Christian achievement; D’Souza can’t credit only Christianity for the eventual abolition of slavery when Christian society took very few steps toward that abolition in the 12 or 13 centuries prior to the Enlightenment.

Ultimately, though, the second part of D’Souza’s book is built on one long non-sequitor. His argument is intended to imply that because the values we share as a western culture have their origins in Christian thought that if we give up Christianity we will be required to surrender of all of those values. But this simply does not follow. It mistakes the context of the discovery of an idea for the context of its justification. What ultimately or properly grounds a moral idea does not have to be identical to what was used to justify it in the first place. As children we may learn to be kind to others in order to avoid punishment from our parents, but once we reach adulthood, and we no longer are threatened by punishment, we may realize that there are perfectly good reasons to be kind to others that are entirely divorced from our parents’ prescriptions. Likewise, if Christianity has hit upon good moral ideas, then those will be rationally defensible outside the context of Christianity. The political and moral ideals valued in western society are now, whatever their roots, valued for their own sake, not because of their place in a religious metaphysic.

In addition to the fact that the values we have are now entrenched to the point that no loss of religious belief would necessitate a “re-valuation” of values, those values are not simply the common currency of conventional moral and political thought and without further philosophical justification. There is a lot of work that has been done in philosophy in the foundations of ethics and politics, with fully developed theories that provide objective foundations for democratic values and moral principles. D’Souza’s argument presumes that any attempt to ground morality without religion is bound to fail, but we have no reason to believe that it is impossible to provide the rational foundations of moral and political ideals without (explicitly or implicitly) invoking religious propositions to do so.

D'Souza, What's So Great About Christianity (Part One)

Dinesh D’Souza’s “What’s So Great about Christianity” is, according to his preface, a book whose goal is to answer the arguments of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris; D’Souza takes them to be representative examples of modern atheism. He intends his book to be for believers and unbelievers alike, but as we’ll see, much of the book is an exercise in preaching to the choir. It could be argued that some of the writers he’s targeting are guilty of some rhetorical excesses, but D’Souza returns excess for excess, and his argument erodes into ad hominem at several points.

In addition to attempting to tackle the criticisms of these writers, he wants to show that historically Christianity has been a force almost exclusively for good, that the discoveries of science don’t force Christians to give up any of their core beliefs (on the contrary, he finds confirmation of the Christian account of the way the world is in modern science), that faith is eminently reasonable, that the mass murders of the 20th century are the logical extension of acquiescence to atheism, and that the real motivation for atheism is “cowardly moral escapism” (xvii). Clearly there is no way that any author could thoroughly cover all the topics he proposes, considering counterarguments and evidence that is in tension with the arguments presented. I actually think that this is part of his rhetorical strategy, which I think can justifiably be called “scattershot argumentation”. Fire a collection of half truths, distortions, carefully mined quotations, and cobbled together arguments at your target, all the while ignoring the logical consequences of your conclusions or whether things you’ve said before are in conflict with what you’re claiming now. While the reader is trying to come to terms the barrage of fallacies and lacunae, reload and fire again.

Before I start to discuss the specifics of D’Souza’s book, I think it is important to note that it is at least possible that every one of D’Souza’s conclusions could be true (at least the ones that don’t contradict each other, and there are a few of those). The issue, though, is whether he has given us any reason to believe those conclusions. I’m going to argue that in fact he hasn’t, and that each of his arguments either fails or is irrelevant to the truth of the propositions he is defending.

That said, on to “Part One: The Future of Christianity.” There are two kinds of arguments in D’Souza’s book: those which are invalid and those which are irrelevant to the truth of Christianity (some fit in both categories). The first part of the book is full of arguments of the latter kind. In chapter one he trumpets the growth of traditional Christianity in the US and worldwide. Liberal Christianity is shrinking, and conservative Christianity is growing. He cites statistics showing the Southern Baptist Convention has grown from 8.7 million members in 1960 to 16.4 million now. What he fails to mention is that the population of the US has grown from 179 million in 1960 to 306 million today, making that near doubling of members a little less impressive: it represents an increase from 4.86% to 5.35% of the total US population. Growth to be sure, but the raw numbers don’t tell the whole story. He also ignores data that show that as people receive more education (which one would think is a good thing), they are less likely to believe religious accounts of the world. See this Gallup poll for instance. At any rate, the popularity of Christianity doesn’t bear on whether or not it’s true.

Chapter two offers a quasi-evolutionary account of why religion is becoming more popular, but it is important to note that if this argument is correct, it doesn’t entail anything at all about the truth of the teachings of religion.

Chapter three gives what I think is a fairly accurate (if simplified) summary of some the arguments of the “New Atheists” but a consequence of trying to argue against multiple authors simultaneously is that you have to lump together people who may not all hold the same beliefs. The implication of addressing them as the New Atheists is that one can lump them together without distortion on a broad range of issues, which may or may not be true.

One example of the type of rhetoric that I think demonstrates that this book is not really a serious attempt to engage those who disagree with D’Souza can be found on page 31, where he says that “the Christian villain, Satan, has now become the atheist hero.” I get his point, that Milton’s portrayal of Satan’s refusal to accept God’s authority is like the atheist’s refusal to do so, but this is a problem on two levels. I haven’t read Milton (well, I’ve tried, but… so boring…), but presumably Satan believed in the existence of the God he was flouting, whereas the atheist does not. But more to the point here, does D’Souza really think that it is conducive to the productive exchange of ideas to tell your opponent that if he disagrees with you he loves the Devil? It’s a silly rhetorical device designed to rally the troops and give them a quotable little turn of phrase.

Chapter four is an attempt to scare Christians about the motives of atheists. Apparently atheists want to steal your children. It’s true that some writers seem to advocate educational or governmental agencies interfering with the rights of parents to control what their children are taught, but the same is true of Christians who want to mandate that creationism is taught alongside evolution in science class.

He complains that the ACLU is advocating in court on behalf of proponents of evolutionary theory but not for proponents of Boyle’s Law (34). Fair enough, but I suppose if there were an organized effort on the part of Boyle’s Law deniers to teach a religious alternative to Boyle’s Law, they might be.

He criticizes Daniel Dennett’s proposal to teach religion as a “natural phenomenon,” saying that by this Dennett means that it should be taught as if it is untrue. Dennett neither says this nor implies it. In his book “Breaking the Spell” he offers the suggestion (page 25) that courses in comparative religion should be taught in public schools in which students are introduced to the ideas of the major religions without one religion being advocated. That doesn’t have anything to do with any of those religions being true or untrue.

D’Souza also seems to think there is a sneaky cabal of literature professors trying to destroy western civilization on college campuses. There are certainly some people who think that religions are all false, and want other people to believe that way, and some of those people are university professors, but he doesn’t offer any evidence that there is a widespread abuse of authority or belief coercion being practiced in universities. He offers up a few quotes from a couple of professors indicating that they think that they should try to dissuade students from holding their parents beliefs, and an uncited quotation from a “champion of agnosticism” to the effect that atheists try to get college students to have sex in order to break them of their religious beliefs (38). I’m inclined to view this quotation as a fabrication, if for no other reason than the fact that nobody has to encourage college students to have sex with each other.