Paulos Reasons against God in Irreligion

“Are there any logical reasons to believe in God?” asks John Allen Paulos in the preface to his newest book Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up. After 149 pages, he stops writing the “why” of his answer, but it’s quite clear from the first lines that the answer is “no.” This book will infuriate the religious because it attacks religion for daring to be more than belief without evidence in the unseen and unknowable.

He offers 12 arguments for belief in three different sections (classical, subjective, and psycho-mathematical) and he quickly and wittily debunks each. In some places, he proves himself to be a professor of mathematics (he’s on the faculty of Philadelphia’s Temple University) but usually casts the formulae at a sixth grade level allowing all but the most innumerate to follow his reasoning.

It is reasoning where he takes unfair advantage of the opposition. Faith is, by definition, irrational. One knows something to be true in the absence of conclusive evidence – were the evidence conclusive, one wouldn’t have faith but knowledge. The religious have faith, but not even the Pope, Grand Ayatollah Sistani or Reverend Rick Warren of the Saddleback megachurch would dare proclaim much knowledge of God. All of this is to say that reason doesn’t get them very far, whereas mathematicians get around pretty well in areas like logic. Intellectually speaking, he brings a gun to a knife fight.

Worse for those of blind and rigid faith, he writes with a charm and sense of humor utterly lacking in, say, the Books of Isaiah or Revelations. On page 75, he says, “It’s been my experience that, everything being equal, many people are more impressed by fatuous blather that they don’t understand than by simple observations that they do. Disdaining Occam’s razor, they like their explanations hirsute.” Or on page 89, “The resort to dreams, premonitions, absurd connections, and posthumous interventions in the argument from miracles is irrational, but it’s not honestly so, as is the surrealists’ two-word argument for God. Their argument: Pipe cleaner.”

The difficulty many of the religious have stems from their literal-mindedness and their insistence on monotheism. Using the proper pantheon, and accepting the mythology as a metaphor, science and religion are easily reconciled. The Big Bang which created the universe and for which there is clear and convincing evidence is such an example. When Odin and his brothers Vili and Ve landed the killing blow on the frost giant Ymir and created the world (Midgard) from the corpse, that was merely a metaphor for the Big Bang and all that followed. Hell, at least it’s a better opening that Genesis, and Odin is a much less prickly fellow than Yahweh.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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