Another review, from the Toronto Star, more positive than the NYT one:
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/297564
To pursue my (crabby) point about good and bad books. For a little decisive evidence, let’s use this more positive review from the Star. Sorry for the length:
(1) Paulos gives advice about debating, only to ignore it:
“It’s repellent for atheists or agnostics,” he admonishes, “to personally and aggressively question others’ faith or pejoratively label it as benighted flapdoodle or something worse. Those who do are rightfully seen as arrogant and overbearing.”
That doesn’t prevent him from doffing the gloves. The ontological argument is “logical abracadabra.’’ The design, or teleological argument, is a “creationist Ponzi scheme’’ that “quickly leads to metaphysical bankruptcy.’’
Much of theology is “a kind of verbal magic show.’’ A claim that a holy book is inerrant because the book itself says so is another logical black hole.
Objection: ‘Abracadabra’, ‘creationist’, ‘Ponzi scheme’, ‘bankruptcy’ and ‘magic show’ are all things that humans do or make - none of them are properties of arguments. That may appear a very small point, but consider. First, Paulos admonished folk against just such personal attacks, and the fact that the book employs them as qualities of arguments or beliefs is obscuring the personal attacks, not avoiding them. (Sure, we might well ask if creationists are setting up an intellectual Ponzi scheme and so forth - but none of that interesting discussion would be about arguments pro and con God’s existence). Secondly, none of those terms are exact - all are metaphorical at best. None of them have any mathematical rigor - and what other, lesser kind of rigor was I to expect?
Paulos is a fine writer, as Innumeracy and other books attest. Therefore he has more choices in his writer’s toolkit than ‘write like an utterly boring textbook’ and ‘write with a lot of pin-pricks against various opponents, and a lot of hazy but exciting metaphors.’
(2) Here is a rather subtle example:
Those and other efforts remind one of the story, perhaps apocryphal, of Catherine the Great’s request of the German mathematical giant Leonhard Euler to confront atheist French philosopher Denis Diderot with evidence of God. The visiting Euler agreed, and at the meeting, strode forward to proclaim to the innumerate Frenchman: “Sir, (a+bn)/n = x, hence God exists. Reply!”
Diderot was said to be so dumbfounded, he immediately returned to Paris.
To Paulos, the tale is a great example of “how easily nonsense proffered in an earnest and profound manner can browbeat someone into acquiescence.”
It seems obvious that Euler didn’t believe the argument he made, even if he believed each of its parts (i.e. that (a+bn)/n = x, and that God exists). And Euler didn’t claim to have won, even if Diderot *may* have acquiesced. Once more, Paulos hasn’t told us exactly about arguments, but about browbeaters - again, he’s on about certain people. Okay, down with browbeaters. But this isn’t what a mathematician as such thinks, but rather what you can find any shmo atheist saying. And he took a whole story to say it, and mis-used the story a bit, too.
A better interpretation is that Euler was having fun with both Catherine and Diderot: “You, Catherine, dont’ know enough math to know there’s no proof within it for or against God, and you, Diderot, are also too innumerate to even pretend you know if my argument is good or not.’ To be fair, Paulos makes that point too; however he forgets to attach it to the Euler/Diderot story where it makes better sense.
Here is an example from the Star review of an appeal to authority that shifts ground (two fallacies in one):
As for the problem of good and evil, he defers to fellow atheist, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg: “With or without religion, good people will do good, and evil people will do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion.”
To defer to another person, whose arguments aren’t reviewed, is to appeal to an authority - it’s an appeal rather than a legitimate argument from authority because the ‘popular’ audience intended for the book won’t all agree with Weinberg. Okay, forget those people - the book’s just for atheists. But then whither it being popular? That means ‘for the people’ - the average person at least. If the book’s just for atheists and militant agnostics, that’s just preachign to the choir.
Further, even if Paulos’ claim from Weinberg may be true, it is not obvious, and it’s poorly phrased - is Weinberg talking about people who belive in a God or in a separate moral realm whatever that may be (and thus ‘religion’ is a paraphrase), or rather about an organized church (and so contra religion as such)? To move from ‘god’ to ‘religion’ is a shift in ground.
So the whole passage is confused, and shifts ground (inadvertantly) from the original book’s thrust (arguments pro and con *God*), while employing as extra evidence a not wholly relevant and rathe rdifferent set of arguments (those pro and con organized beliefs about God).
So: hastily written, at best, and containing ‘arguments’ that may well make the right troops feel good about themselves, but ultimately have no inner strength.
I’m not here to argue on God’s behalf. I’ll settle for defending a more strict worship of the goddess Reason. So far, Paulos’ book looks scrappy and uneven, and full of logical holes - maybe they’re not fatal holes to his general argument - we shall see - but they certainly eat at his authority, and they can get lodged in people’s minds as mistakes in reasoning will do.
We could well add to this from the NYT review by Holt. I ask the reader just to put aside which ‘horse’ he’s betting on, and treat each argument like a horse-doctor. So to speak.
Kirk
