This bad book has three nontrivial merits. It is quite clear about the moral equality of theists and atheists, and the moral neutrality of one’s stance on the question of God. Though arrogant, it is not hateful. And it makes the rare but important point that God’s existence or nonexistence is not a matter of probability (pp. 135, 137). Dawkins’ 2009 London bus advertisement campaign said “There's probably no God”; Steven Unwin wrote a theistic book called The Probability of God, and my previous post here reviewed God? Very Probably: Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of God, by Robert Nelson. That theism vs. atheism is not a matter of probability is an important point, one which I make from the theist side in the book I’m now writing. It was good to see an atheist assert the same.
Apart from that, however, Irreligion is a sleepwalking mess of a book. The phrase “question-begging” has deteriorated in public discourse so that it now means “begging for a particular question to be asked,” but it originally referred to a specific fallacy of reasoning that assumes the very proposition that’s supposed to be at issue. J. A. Paulos engages in this fallacy quite often, and the habit is diagnostic of a materialist frame of mind that tends to produce the same two types of character again and again: either a Dawkins-esque tiresome firebrand, or a Wildean jester, smiling on the foibles of naive mankind from somewhere above the fray (Christopher Hitchens’ unusual charm, erudition, and moral authority made him a rare combination of the two). Thankfully, Paulos is decidedly of the latter type, but it can get pretty tedious, pretty quickly, especially if you’ve read similar books before. Question-begging is common to both types. Here is Paulos on Hume’s argument against miracles:
That is, the whole weight of science is the prima facie evidence against a miracle's having occurred. Carl Sagan's remark "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is germane and, incidentally, can be formalized by a use of Bayes' theorem. This doesn't mean scientific laws are always correct. Whatever evidence exists that a certain phenomenon miraculously violates a particular scientific law is evidence as well that the scientific law in question is simply wrong. If before the invention of the telephone, for example, someone heard the voice of a friend who was hundreds of miles away, one might consider this a miracle. The evidence for this miraculous event, however, would also be evidence that the physical law that the event appears to violate (regarding how fast sound travels in air, let's say) is wrong or doesn't apply.
Note that this is no mere exposition of Hume, but a set of assertions about the world. As I’ve often pointed out, a good response to Sagan’s famous remark is this: People who say "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" have a habit of ignoring extraordinary evidence. The rest of the paragraph begs the question whether there are or are not supernatural events, since if there are, the laws of nature do not apply to them but do continue to apply to nature. It will not do to insist that every rule must apply in all cases, since some rules have what are called “exceptions.” The ambition of scientific laws is to include all cases and exclude none, but that is aspirational, and to disregard that limitation is hubris, whether or not the hubris remembers to present itself as humility.
Paulos quotes the mathematician Leopold Kronecker: “God made the integers, all the rest is the work of man,” but insists that “even the whole numbers were the work of man.” This unsupported claim runs counter to the views of the great mathematicians, but it is a good bit of instruction as to how an atheist ought to sound. If the market for the book is atheists-in-training, it’s an appropriate remark to make, though it begs the question of whether numbers and other mathematical structures are invented or discovered.
Either everything has a cause or there's something that doesn't. 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 as God or a tortoise.
This level of theological ignorance is striking. Paulos’ quite reasonable logic applies to any entity you might want to put in the “first cause” position, except for God, the only relevant candidate for the job, whom the question is about. It is not part of the definition of “a tortoise” that it is eternal, uncaused, beyond the human intellect, and uniquely adequate to the ineffable fact that there is a world at all. The author seems remarkably uninformed.
On page 4, Paulos asks, “Why cannot the physical world itself be taken to be the uncaused first cause?” Because the physical is what must have a cause, and God is not physical.
On page 6: “Placing God outside of space and time would also preclude any sort of later divine intervention in worldly affairs.” Nope. Panentheism is the name for the view that God is both immanent throughout the universe and infinitely transcendent of its boundaries. The Creation is no more a complete exhaustive container of God’s existence than the number one hundred--for all its beauty of symmetry and structure--is an exhaustive image of infinity.
On page 8 is a particularly weak paragraph:
Why did He create the particular natural laws that He did? If He did it arbitrarily for no reason at all, there is then something that is not subject to natural law. The chain of natural law is broken, and so we might as well take the most general natural laws themselves, rather than God, as the arbitrary final "Because." On the other hand, if He had a reason for issuing the particular laws that He did (say, to bring about the best possible universe), then God Himself is subject to pre-existing constraints, standards, and laws. In this case, too, there's not much point to introducing Him as an intermediary in the first place.
Again, one feels one is dealing with a stranger to the territory to which he claims to be a guide. “Arbitrarily for no reason at all”? Theism is not an impersonal hypothesis about the world that has nothing to do with the creatures who are persuaded of it; it is a form of life, a stance toward our own existence that attributes it to a Divine origin. To take seriously the idea that God is real---and far more real than waking embodied history (just as the latter is more real than dreams or fiction)---is to consider that the Divine motive for creating the universe, and us within it, may have been to experience relationship with conscious beings capable of freely engaging in such a relationship.
Next, note that the “might as well” clause makes little sense. If “there is then something that is not subject to natural law,” why wouldn’t we turn to that greater power, rather than try to salvage the broken authority of a compromised naturalism?
The paragraph ends with a version of Einstein’s question of whether God had any choice in making the laws of nature the way He did. Paulos insists---as if it were a matter of course---that if God, too, were bound by laws like those that describe the electroweak interaction, or gravity, or even the apparently ineluctable logic of arithmetic and the syllogism, this would amount to a diminution of His omnipotence. But it certainly need not. Why should God be in any meaningful way limited by the fact that He cannot, say, die or make a mistake, or conjure a stone so heavy that even He can’t lift it?
On page 12, we find a strange assumption that pops up elsewhere in the book: that a “creator would have to be of vastly greater complexity …than the life-forms it created.” Need God be complex? For Kant, Schopenhauer, and the Idealist tradition, the noumenal world is not plural. Since number only pertains to the phenomenal world, Schopenhauer says somewhere of the noumenon that it isn’t even unitary! Long before those 18th and 19th Century philosophers wrote, medieval mystics noticed that the heart of monotheism---Hashem echad, “God is One”---might not even be the whole story of God’s freedom from plurality and number, as the Inventor of the integers themselves. So no, God need not be “more complex” than the organisms he creates.
Paulos’ chapter on the Argument from Design ignores evolutionary convergence, brackets-out randomness where randomness is the issue under discussion, and fudges its dismissal of Michael Behe’s argument from “irreducible complexity.” Paulos does a good job of evoking the way complex systems can grow into place as simpler antecedents are gradually enhanced and expanded. His excellent example is the global supply chain with its mines and forests, factories, ports, shipping lanes, distribution hubs, and grocery stores with their fully stocked shelves, all humming along as if designed at the same time and implemented onto a blank slate. Of course these complex webs of industry and commerce developed gradually from simpler versions, step by step. Of course complex organisms and ecosystems can be thought of in a similar way. But Behe’s famous example of the bacterial flagellum has still not been explained away (I write this in 2025, seventeen years after Irreligion appeared), and the briefly successful attempt to do so (by appealing to the injectosome as a supposed transitional precursor of the flagellum) has been discredited.
The chapter on the Anthropic Principle seemed to me quite unconvincing, while the chapter on the Ontological Argument just showed how inadequate are the left brain’s tools of logical discourse for the kinds of ultimate questions theism entails. Paulos the mathematician is good at debunking numerology, in a well-argued chapter critiquing supposed “Bible codes” that purport to find hidden messages in sequences of equally spaced letters in the Bible. I have no use for numerology. But he also accuses theists of confirmation bias (to which we are indeed susceptible), though he engages in plenty of it himself.
In the middle of the book, in a chapter called “The Argument from Subjectivity (and Faith, Emptiness, and Self)", we get the following frank admission: “Still, one shouldn't reject the insights and feelings of those with perfect pitch simply because one is tone-deaf. Or, to vary the analogy: It wouldn't be wise for the blind to reject the counsel of sighted people (my emphasis, p. 77).” This is very much the case with atheists who write books like this one about how illogical faith is, without realizing that logic does not encompass every kind of truth. How delightful to find an atheist with the imagination, and the humility, to realize this and state it with the analogy of atheism as blindness and faith as sight! Yet, a moment later, we are admonished:
The undermining disanalogy in this response is that a sighted person's observations can be corroborated by the blind. A sighted person's directions, for example, to take eleven steps and then to turn left for eight more steps to reach the door of the building can be checked by a blind person. How can an agnostic or atheist learn anything from someone who simply claims to know there is a God?
If the theist “simply claims to know,” then he or she can teach very little. But with the motivation and the wherewithal to be of help in the matter, he or she may be able to teach a great deal of it. William James, Huston Smith, Iain McGilchrist, Karen Armstrong, Ann Lammot, Raimon Panikkar, and a thousand other authors have written books that helped struggling agnostics pivot into a faith they had been yearning for. This is a completely different accomplishment from the futile and absurd endeavor to convince a committed atheist of anything.
A chapter on prayer asserts that there are no scientific studies establishing its effectiveness (p. 87). Though they are of widely varying quality, there are many such studies, some much harder to impeach than others (see, for example, Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe). On page 146 he expresses a wish that American atheists had some sort of civic organization to advance their cause and advocate for their preferences---but Paul Kurtz had already founded the Council for Secular Humanism in 1980, and the Center for Inquiry in 1991.
Paulos’ know-nothingism extends to other chapters and subjects as well, often with ugly results. In an effort to demonstrate how unreliable are historical claims about Jesus, a single paragraph on p. 91 contains the following cluster of bullshit stories:
A bit more than forty years ago, in the full glare of the modern media, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and we have only a hazy idea of the motivation of the killer or, possibly, killers. And a bit more than thirty years ago, the Watergate controversy erupted before a phalanx of cameras and microphones, and we still don't know who ordered what. And only a few years ago, well into the age of the Internet, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, the United States responded by invading Iraq, and we have yet to learn the complete story of the attack, the training of the attackers, the lead-up to the war, and so on.
These bogus claims are not only ahistorical, they are not even anecdotal: they are proverbial. It is a piece of cliche “conventional wisdom” that “we” know nothing significant about these three deep events (see Peter Dale Scott) in American History. Indeed, there is now very little of any significance that “we”---people who actually study these historical episodes---do not know about the assassination of President Kennedy. Though much has been learned since 2008, even then there was a near-complete picture of who played which roles, with which motivations, at various levels of the successful Dallas plot, and of the plots in Tampa and Chicago that did not succeed. To say of 11-22-63 in 2008 the phrase “killer or, possibly, killers” is obscenely negligent, irresponsible, and glib. Spend a few months studying Watergate or 9/11 and you are likely to feel similarly about Paulos’ use of these events, too, as emblems of supposedly inevitable and universal ignorance.
Some 17 pages later, Paulos goes back to this subject and performs a more egregious feat of intellectual poverty:
Because of its momentous nature, people searched for a suitably momentous reason for the assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald was an unprepossessing nobody who seemed ill suited for the job of giant-slayer. There had to be something more, and maybe there was, but one added reason for the intense fascination with other possibilities was the charming [sic] superstition that significant consequences must necessarily be the result of significant perpetrators.
This is not just a trite meme that has been redeployed in print by hundreds of intellectual prostitutes (like Gerald Posner---whereas Paulos is simply being lazy, not whoring himself) since it was spawned in CIA internal memoranda, long since released. It is a pernicious insult to people who did get off their asses and investigate, with results that turned up momentous bad actors motivated by momentous stakes. “Charming”? STFU, Sir.
Now, I ain't no Christian, but it seems a little disingenuous to say “the New Testament accounts of Jesus” were “written many decades afterward (between 70 and 100 CE).” If he ever existed, and if he was murdered by Rome around 33 CE, then the year 70 CE may have been less than four decades later, which is not quite “many.” And the Letters of Paul, which comprise more than 48% of the New Testament, were written by a man who claimed to have had a vision of Jesus only two years after the Crucifixion, and who was himself murdered in 64/65 CE.
J. A. Paulos’ comparison of the deaths of Socrates and Jesus, while unoriginal, is poignant in its way. But its questions are either disingenuous or awfully naive, given that the author has undertaken the book that he has. Paulos is rightly criticizing Mel Gibson’s hateful movie "The Passion of the Christ," which actually dares recycle the old Christ-killing charge against “the” Jews:
Assume for the moment that compelling historical documents have just come to light establishing the movie's and the Bible's contentions that a group of Jews was instrumental in bringing about the death of Jesus; that Pilate, the Roman governor, was benign and ineffectual; and so on. Even if all this were the case, does it not seem hateful, not to mention un-Christian, to blame contemporary Jews?
My fellow 21st Century Jews can appreciate this compassionate distinction between us, who cannot possibly be guilty of Jesus’ killing, and our ancestors, who were innocent of it, too. Gibson’s movie is, of course, a lot worse than Paulos’ grotesque little thought experiment, in which, for the sake of argument, we are to imagine that our ancestors’ Jewish leaders---the Sanhedrin in charge of Roman-dominated Jerusalem---were somehow responsible for Jesus’ torture and murder. Only an ignoramus can indulge in this offensive fantasy, because it is well known that Pontius Pilate had already been recalled by Rome from previous similar assignments because his crowd control tactics were excessively violent and provocative of avoidable civil unrest among subject populations. He was by no means “benign and ineffectual.”
It is just not interesting to point out the mere illogic of Christian bigotry. What is interesting, is to explain how and why the anti-Judaism---of the Gospels, and of Paul’s letters, of John Chrysostom and Luther and Pope This and Pope That---got in there in the first place. But that takes research and time and effort, not just armchair speculation and musing.
It is refreshing to read Paulos’ comparison of Jesus’ execution to that of Socrates, asking “what zealous coterie of classicists or philosophers would hold today's Greeks responsible?...It would be absurd, not to mention un-Socratic, for anyone to attribute guilt to contemporary Athenians” (p. 93). But it is not so refreshing to hear the next question, novel though it is: “Would a cinematic account of [Socrates’] death focus unrelentingly on his clutching his throat and writhing in agony on the ground after drinking the hemlock?” (p. 93). The “Passion” of Jesus’ Crucifixion was a death by torture, an ordeal that went on for at least six hours, designed to be humiliating, agonizing, and prolonged. Socrates, by contrast, was executed not by a brutal military power from an alien culture, but by the magistrates and citizen-jurors of his own city-state. He drank the mandated poison in the privacy of a prison cell, surrounded by his ardent admirers and friends. Apparently, death by hemlock ingestion is typically traumatic, but brief---though it can also be sudden and painless, and according to Plato, it was so for Socrates. The lack of drama, the philosopher’s peaceful acceptance of the court’s verdict, and of the brevity of embodied life (with or without capitol punishment) was part of the point of Plato’s story about the wise old man whose gifts Athens squandered.
“Whatever one's beliefs or lack thereof,” writes Paulos, “Socrates and Jesus (at least as portrayed by Plato and the authors of the New Testament) were great moral leaders whose ideas constitute a good part of the bedrock of our culture.” Tell that to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas constitute a good part of the bedrock of modernity. Nietzsche (mostly) despised both of those men as ruinous corrupters of the noble cultures of Classical Athens and Rome, a pair of con-men who swindled people into trading strength for weakness, achievement for idleness, and healthy competition for a race to the bottom. Nietzsche lost his mind in 1890 at the age of 56 and died in 1900, long before the darkest of his widely varying ideas took root in European soil, and were realized in unprecedented horrors on a vast scale. I do not agree with his critiques of Jesus and Socrates. But Paulos is mistaken to claim that “Whatever one's beliefs… Socrates and Jesus were great moral leaders.”
All in all, this is a mediocre example of a mediocre genre that appeals to smug nihilists. I don’t hate the book, but I sure don’t like it, either. I read it for the same reason I read its myriad equivalents: to find out whether they have any strong arguments for atheism.
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