What’s better? To be fully reasonable or to have faith in God?

Many atheists think it is better to be fully reasonable and scientific than cling to the false comfort of religious stories. A leading example of this perspective is Dr. Alex Rosenberg, a professor of philosophy at Duke University.

In his book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, he explains the purpose of his book, namely, that “this book aims to provide the correct answers to most of the persistent questions” (2). His methodology is equally clear: “we will take the best reason for atheism—science—and show what else it commits us atheists to believing” (3).

Why would he do it this way? Because in his view, “science provides all the significant truths about reality, and knowing such truths is what real understanding is all about” (7). What’s the payoff? “If we can work through the details, we’ll get something much better—a real understanding of life, the universe, everything, warts and all” (17).

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In preparing for the upcoming launch of True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism (March 1), I’ve been reading and re-reading the work of many New Atheists. It is a bit tiresome, after a while, to only read attacks against religion instead of a positive, evidence-based case for atheism. So I’ve shifted gears and started into Dr. Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. Dr. Rosenberg is a philosophy professor at Duke University. And, to his credit, he wrote his book with a positive purpose: “its aim is to sketch out what we atheists really should believe about reality and our place in it” (KL 88). Overall, I very much appreciate the intention of Dr. Rosenberg in straight-forwardly explaining the nature and implications of an atheistic worldview (which he often refers to as ‘scientism’). He’s a great writer and it’s an interesting book to read.

Still, Rosenberg’s book faces many logical and rational challenges. For instance, very early on he writes that one of the most basic mistakes you can make is “to think that there is any more to reality than the laws of nature that science discovers” (KL 139), but he then very perplexingly goes on to say a lot of things that are very plainly not the laws of nature. Or if we are to understand his book as the deterministic outcome of the laws of nature, then we can no longer understand his words as an argument; rather, the letters on the page are the inevitable outcome of an a-rational process. With this statement, we have either self-contradiction or the abandonment of reason itself.

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