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What to Believe? -- Books For and Against the God Hypothesis Reviewed
by Dr. William Harwood
ISBN: 978-1-935444-02-2
Midwest Book Review
What To Believe?: Books For and Against the God Hypothesis Reviewed, by WILLIAM HARWOOD, (World Audience, Inc., 2008), A review by G. Richard Bozarth
What to Believe? offers 134 book reviews. The connection of a lot of them to the God Hypothesis is distant, and a few of them, especially the reviews of novels, have no connection at all. Almost all the books are strongly connected to religionism. It's a small quibble, and Harwood could most likely reply that my titles are not always wonderful.
The only reviews that failed to interest me were the ones of science fiction novels, and not because I dislike science fiction. I've loved sci-fi since I was a teenager. Harwood obviously is also a sci-fi fan, but the sci-fi novels reviewed in this book did not bring out the best in him like so many of the nonfiction books did.
Harwood is a prolific Freethought writer who has been publishing for a long time. He knows a lot and shares that knowledge in his reviews, usually as rebuttal. A lot of the interesting content also comes from the books he reviews. For example, the Talmud has a version of the Flood fairy tale that is different from the Bible's. In this version the terrible thing Noah's third or second son (I have two Bible dictionaries that disagree about Ham's status) did to his drunken father after the Flood was not seeing him naked. It was castrating him. That makes the story a lot more entertaining in my opinion. Another example is the conflicting genealogies for Jesus in the New Testament. I had not known that the Roman Catholic Church solved the problem by claiming that the genealogy in Luke is supposed to be for Mary. That is not a conclusion supported by the text in The Jerusalem Bible, which is a modern English translation of the Roman Catholic version of the Bible. The subtitle used for that section of Luke is The ancestry of Jesus. Perhaps it's one of those things the RCC is still debating and has not yet turned into dogma.
Harwood has intellectual teeth and likes to use them. Here are some of the bites he inflicts in What To Believe?:
--To a scientist (or historian such as myself), the question, is water wet?' can be answered in one word. There is little doubt in my mind that a philosopher could write a 600-page dissertation on the question-and other philosophers would see it as actually saying something.
--A theist can be moral, but only if, while paying lip service to every teaching of his religion's sacred books, his observable behavior in fact repudiates those teachings.
--The masturbation fantasy that recognition of a problem and determination to solve it can cause a species to evolve in a desired direction is the hallmark of sociobiology.
--Prejudice is not unchristian. It is one of the core traits of Christianity. Many Christians express unprejudiced views, but they do so because they reject the teachings of their bible, the most vicious and hate-ridden endorsement of prejudice ever written, with the possible exception of the Koran
--All godworshippers are insane.
--Any university that accredits a faculty or school of theology thereby illegitimates itself to the same degree as if it maintained a school of astrology or tealeaf reading.
--Unless the masses are made to realize that religion, besides being a delusion and a failed hypothesis, is the root of all evil, there is no possibility of humankind exterminating religion before religion exterminates humankind.
--What religion addict cannot find a rationalization for anything he deems expedient, anything whatsoever?
--Persons who believe the world it going to end within their lifetimes tend to pursue policies they believe will make it happen.
I agree with the above almost 100 percent-almost because I would have written irrational instead of insane. And there are things in What To Believe? I do not agree with.
Harwood accuses The Story of Civilization by Will Durant (and Ariel for the last five volumes) of being "scissors-and-paste high school pablum." I know this accusation isn't true because 1 have read TSOC. The definition of pablum in The American Heritage College Dictionary, 3rd edition, is trite, insipid, or simplistic writing, speech, or conceptualization. That does not describe TSOC. Will Durant's writing is a contender for the gold medal in nonfiction writing, and a book of exquisite and profound aphorisms could be produced by mining TSOC.
Durant's huge, 11 volume, bestselling history of Western civilization is a supreme example of the outline-of genre of nonfiction. The purpose of outline-of books is to distill the work of professionals for consumption by intelligent nonprofessionals. It's still a popular form, and writers who do good outline-of work usually enjoy commercial success. If Durant can be scorned as a "scissors-and-paste" author, so can H. G. Wells (an outline-of superstar before Durant with his bestselling The Outline of History), Joseph McCabe (a champion of Atheism who wrote several outline-of pamphlet series for Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, a famous Freethought publisher), and all of the other outline-of authors I've read (for example, Louis J. Halle, Out of Chaos, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977). Harwood is unjust.
Harwood is particularly outraged by Don Brown, who wrote the amazingly successful The Da Vinci Code, which I've also read. Harwood dislikes Brown because Code was not written to be as historically accurate as possible. He condemns Brown for using intentional wild speculations ... designed purely to sell books. He makes this silly accusation even though Harwood fully understands the novel, being a novel, is fiction. Fiction by definition is a fantasy, a fairy tale, or, to use the term Stephen King likes, a lie. It's not meant to be true even when it is as historically accurate as possible. Fiction is fun precisely because it is not chained to reality and thus can be loaded with "wild speculations". And when did it become bad to strive to write fiction that also sells books after it is published? The condemnation, if carried to its logical conclusion, puts Harwood in the position of insisting that there should be some law of literature that requires historical fiction to be nonfiction as much as possible, which would be absurd because it would condemn many writers whose greatness has been long established (for examples, Homer and Shakespeare). I absolutely enjoyed Code from first word to last and highly recommend it to those who enjoy novels based on intentional wild speculations.
Harwood calls himself a nontheist instead of an Atheist. He prefers nontheist because it is the more useful and less vilified name. I prefer Atheist because it is more in-religionists-faces than nontheist. Harwood is unquestionably a militant as I am, and I wouldn't argue with a person who rates him more militant than me, so his preference for nontheist seems odd because nontheist is not a militant term. Because militant Atheists have been scaring and enraging religionists for over 200 years, when religionists hear Atheist, they know "militant" is there even if it is unspoken. That it why Atheists who are not militant are always seeking some other term. Harwood, however, isn't one of the Good Doggy Atheists. His preference for nontheist is not an attempt to avoid scaring or enraging religionists.
Harwood bas sent pages of Synopsis of English Grammar to national news anchors who used substandard English. Several of his reviews point out grammar violations by the authors. I'm not with Harwood on this. I have a literary artist's attitude towards grammar. What are rules that should not be broken to Harwood are guidelines to me. I ignore them whenever I disagree with them or to accomplish my mission as a writer. Humans have been trying to control language with rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation for as long as there has been language, but it is futile to do it. Language is part of human culture, thus subject to constant evolution. Change is inevitable. That is why Chaucer's famous English tales have to be translated for the average English reader today. However, the farther writers stray from the contemporary rules of language, the closer they get to losing clear communication with contemporary readers, and the more talent they need to persuade them their writing is a good reading experience. I stray, but I'm not nearly so bold as Bret Easton Ellis or Cormac McCarthy.
What To Believe? has a lot to offer Atheists, Freethinkers, and Secular Humanists. I recommend it highly.
Response by William Harwood
Mr Bozarth's need to write Atheists, Freethinkers, and Secular Humanists fully explains my preference for a single all-embracing term that no one in the included categories (or agnostics) would deem inapplicable to him/herself.
----
Dr William Harwood is a contributing editor of American Rationalist and is the author of 36 books and over 500 articles and book reviews published in professional journals in nine countries. He has retired from gainful employment, and since 2000 has been living on a government pension. (Canadians can afford to do that.)
The book reviews in this collection have previously been published in Free Inquiry, Skeptical Inquirer, American Rationalist, Humani, Freethinker, Skeptic, Freethought Perspective, Open Society, and Midwest Book Review.
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