Feisty entry into contentious field of atheist manifestos

[struggle4progress]

7. Review: AC Grayling's latest attack on faith is smug, glib and lamentable

By Tom Payne
7:00AM GMT 27 Feb 2013

People are still debating whether or not Life of Pi, book or film, can make you believe in God. The novel didn’t have that effect on me. A C Grayling’s book came much closer: his “case for humanism” made me begin to long for faith. Or at least to long for a longing for it.

The book is really two books, or a brace of pamphlets, the first of which sets out to demolish any faith you might have had. It is written in the style of a don seeking to be accessible and sometimes forgetting himself, so that there are sentences such as: “If any such do not mean by ‘religion’ what has been painstakingly identified in the foregoing, then that closes the conversation…” It’s worth saying that his definition of “religion” isn’t that painstaking, and by the end of the book, humanism means pretty much what he wants it to mean: lots of sensible people thinking and doing good things.

There is one joke that works, although maybe it isn’t a joke. Here it is: “Pascal said that… the existence of a deity can be neither proved nor disproved (here he was mistaken; see above)…” You had to be there. This is on page 99, at which point he’s spent a while seeking to disprove that god exists (no capital g for Him). What he really offers are rebuttals of those who have sought to prove that there is a God. Before that, he’s devoted some time to making those who entertain a faith seem as silly as possible. When he comes to quoting a philosopher of faith, Alvin Plantinga, who accuses the New Atheists of “inane ridicule and burlesque”, you can see that Plantinga has a point. Pity the fool ...

What’s most lamentable about this book is not the quirks of tone, the infelicities of emphasis or the inconsistency, indeed occasional lack, of method. It’s the façade of appreciating how believers have created great art, without recognising the imaginative process behind it, and indeed behind faith. St Anselm’s arguments for God, along with Descartes’, are more revealing about the capacity of the human mind than they are about God, and deserve celebrating for that ...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9885308/Review-AC-Graylings-latest-attack-on-faith-is-smug-glib-and-lamentable.html