Science > Physics > NYT Review of a Mathematician's New Book about God
| Topic: |
Science > Physics |
| User: |
"Agent Smith" |
| Date: |
22 Jan 2008 10:56:51 AM |
| Object: |
NYT Review of a Mathematician's New Book about God |
Books of The Times
Prime Roller, Prepare to Meet a Wiseacre
http://tinyurl.com/33njmd
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: January 22, 2008
Sam Harris’s 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the
Future of Reason, set off a noisy boomlet of antireligion books,
including Richard Dawkins’s provocative if preachy tome, The God
Delusion (2006), and Christopher Hitchens’s furious (and often very
funny) jeremiad, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
(2007). These books provided a vehement response to the growing
influence of evangelicals in American politics and the raging fires of
fundamentalism around the world, and they even led to talk about the
stirrings of a new atheist movement.
Leah Paulos
John Allen Paulos
IRRELIGION
A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up
By John Allen Paulos
158 pages. Hill & Wang. $20.
First Chapter: ‘Irreligion’ (January 13, 2008) At their best, these
books performed the valuable service of reminding readers how far some
politicians have departed from the Enlightenment values of the founders
and the principle of separation of church and state particularly at a
time when Mike Huckabee, a leading contender in the Republican
presidential race, has called for the Constitution to be amended so that
it can be brought in line with God’s standards.
At their worst, these books simply spewed invective against religion,
helping to ratify believers’ accusations that atheists and agnostics
lack respect for others’ convictions (something believers are frequently
guilty of themselves).
The latest entry in the God wars is Irreligion by John Allen Paulos, the
mathematician best known for his best-selling book Innumeracy. In this
hasty and very lumpy volume Mr. Paulos proposes to expose the irrational
basis of religious thinking, much the way he exposed rampant
mathematical illiteracy in Innumeracy, this time providing some brisk
refutations of the greatest-hits arguments for God, from the golden
oldies of religious thought to those with a more contemporary beat.
The volume gets off to a bracing start, deftly dismantling creationist
arguments that the astonishing complexity of life could have come about
only through the efforts of a master designer, by succinctly showing how
Darwin’s theory of natural selection and free-market economics provide
well-confirmed alternative explanations for the evolution of complex
systems.
Writing in clear, direct prose, Mr. Paulos shows how even everyday
references to purpose and intention can be easily reformulated in
scientific, nonpurposive terms. For instance, The thermostat is trying
to keep the house at a steady temperature can be rephrased in terms of
metals’ different rates of expansion: When it gets hot, this metal
expands faster than the other one and tips a switch turning the furnace
off, and when it gets cool, the metal contracts faster, turning the
furnace back on. No one is really attributing intentionality to the
metals.
In his opening chapters Mr. Paulos uses simple logic to point up the
gaping holes in the so-called first-cause argument. Either everything
has a cause, or there’s something that doesn’t, he writes. The first-
cause argument collapses into this hole whichever tack we take. If
everything has a cause, then God does, too, and there is no first cause.
And if something doesn’t have a cause, it may as well be the physical
world.
What’s more, he notes, the uncaused first cause needn’t have any
traditional God-like qualities. It’s simply first, and as we know from
other realms, being first doesn’t mean being best. No one brags about
still using the first personal computers to come on the market. Even if
the first cause existed, it might simply be a brute fact or even worse,
an actual brute.
As the book progresses, however, Mr. Paulos’s writing becomes
increasingly technical and increasingly jokey, and his reasoning becomes
more and more difficult for the nonmathematician to follow. His
repudiation of the ontological argument for the existence of God, for
instance, is based on a reductive, paper-tiger summation of the argument
itself: God is the greatest and most perfect possible being; this most
perfect being must possess all characteristics of perfection; and since
it’s better to exist than not to exist, existence is a characteristic of
perfection. Hence, God exists by definition.
Similarly, Mr. Paulos’s argument that doubt that God exists is almost
banal in comparison to the more radical doubt that people exist, at
least as anything more than nominal, marginally integrated entities
having convenient labels like Myrtle and Oscar is hardly persuasive.
After all, how many readers who aren’t college students having stoned,
late-night conversations want to debate whether or not they exist
themselves?
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| User: "Agent Smith" |
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| Title: Re: NYT Review of a Mathematician's New Book about God (2nd Page) |
22 Jan 2008 12:17:01 PM |
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As for Mr. Paulos’s discussion of the contradictions involved in a deity
being both omnipotent and benevolent, it consists of little more than
regurgitation of the Epicurus aphorism to the effect that if God is
willing to prevent evil but unable to, then he is not omnipotent; that
if he is able to but unwilling, then he is malevolent; and that if he is
both able and willing to prevent evil, then there is no explanation for
evil’s continued existence.
First Chapter: ‘Irreligion’ (January 13, 2008) Although Mr. Paulos
begins “Irreligion” by promising that he will not use any hard-to-follow
scientific formulas to make his case, he soon leads the reader deep into
the mathematical wilderness by talking about things like the “Boolean
satisfiability problem” and “combinatorial identities” and posing
annoying paradoxes that do little but remind the reader of the ordeal of
taking SATs. (“What is the smallest number of guests who need be present
so that it will be certain that at least three of them will know each
other or at least three of them will be strangers to each other?”)
In the course of this volume Mr. Paulos does provide some interesting
asides about the so-called “confirmation bias, a psychological tendency
to seek confirmation rather than disconfirmation of any hypothesis we’ve
adopted, however tentatively” (which would seem to have applications to
the Bush administration’s use of intelligence in the prelude to the Iraq
war). And he also does an entertaining job of applying probability
theory to people’s talk about miracles and amazing coincidences, which
they’ve taken as evidence of the existence of God.
Still, there is something perfunctory and hurried about all of Mr.
Paulos’s arguments, which will be shrugged off by anyone who has made
the leap of faith into belief, and which will seem obvious to anyone who
is already a proud heathen. Indeed, the reader finishes this volume with
the suspicion that it was a rushed and cursory project, turned out
quickly in an effort to catch the coattails of Messrs. Hitchens, Dawkins
and Harris.
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| User: "Allan Adler" |
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| Title: Re: NYT Review of a Mathematician's New Book about God (2nd Page) |
23 Jan 2008 01:42:21 AM |
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I wish you would post this to the moderated group soc.atheism. We can use
some good postings. Cross posting is not allowed, so you should just post
it to that one group.
--
Ignorantly,
Allan Adler <ara@zurich.csail.mit.edu>
* Disclaimer: I am a guest and *not* a member of the MIT CSAIL. My actions and
* comments do not reflect in any way on MIT. Also, I am nowhere near Boston.
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| User: "Agent Smith" |
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| Title: Re: NYT Review of a Mathematician's New Book about God (2nd Page) |
23 Jan 2008 02:22:54 PM |
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Allan Adler <ara@nestle.csail.mit.edu> wrote in
news:y93y7ahasyq.fsf@nestle.csail.mit.edu:
I wish you would post this to the moderated group soc.atheism. We can use
some good postings. Cross posting is not allowed, so you should just post
it to that one group.
If you think that it needs to be done, then go ahead and do it.
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