Grayling on the Grill II: an overall critique.

I just posted the following critical review of philosopher A. C. Grayling's new book, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, on Amazon.  Judging by blowback to date for critical comments of Grayling there, despite Grayling's talk about listening carefully and living with magnanimity, I don't expect too much love from this admittedly harsh (but detailed) review.  We'll see if anyone addresses my arguments. 

I will probably also focus on specific claims Grayling makes (or assumes) in later posts.  (See here for my initial impressions, which turned out to be precient.  Although Grayling does define "religion," his definition does indeed turn out tendendious.)

If you like or dislike the review, feel free to express your thoughts here, or on Amazon, where voting gives other readers a chance to see a useful review, or you can consign one soundly to the rubbish bin of history.   

(For a more sympathetic critical review, read what Keith Ward makes of this "bad argument.")


In the second half of this book, A.C. Grayling sets out to describe his moral principles, and those he thinks he shares with the humanist community in general. Among these are "magnanimity," which Grayling takes the trouble to give in both Latin and Greek (154), and being "informed, reflective, alert, responsive, eager for understanding . . . a good guest at the dinner table." This includes means acting towards those one disagrees with, paraphrasing Plutarch, as "a good listener, who hears what his interlocutors say (not what he thinks they have said) . . . "

Sounds reasonable.

Now let us see how Dr. Grayling actually deals with Christianity, and those who espouse it (and other theistic faiths) in the first half of this book. First people, then ideas.

In his introduction, Grayling thanks a number of "colleagues and fellows in the cause" of secular humanism, including the New Atheist barbershop quartet (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens [DDHH}) along with Paul Kurtz and others, and naming Victor Stenger as another valued ally. He then explains that his first task in this book will be "to deal with what religious apologists say in defending themselves from the arguments of those just listed."

I happen to be the author of one of the first, and I do think among the best, rebuttals of DDHH. So naturally I turned to the back of the book to see if Grayling mentioned me, or more likely, on which of the bigger-name Christian writers he concentrated his fire.

Marshall? No. John Lennox? Nope. Alister McGrath? Nyety. Dinesh D'Souza? Tim Keller? David Hart? No, no, heck, no.

So with whom does Grayling argue? Page after page, he keeps mentioning these "religious apologetics," as if they surrounded him like the ether, and he could read their minds. So who are these people, and what do they say? Where are the quotes? Which books has he read? Grayling is a philosopher, so maybe he wants to argue with philosophers. And indeed, Grayling does promise to deal with two well-known Christian philosophers, Blaise Pascal and Alvin Plantinga.

After 90-odd pages of painful nonsense (details later), we finally get to arguments from actual "apologists." But there are few quotes, and one has to wonder if he has actually read even Plantinga or Pascal!

Plantinga, he accurately notes, argues that faith in God is warranted, even without evidence. (Though I think blowing off the fine shades of Plantinga's argument.) But then Grayling makes this statement: "It would seem that Alvin Plantinga has abandoned attempts to show by argument that it is rational to hold theistic beliefs, because he now argues that there is no need to provide such arguments . . . "

I can imagine Plantinga's wry response to that gross non sequitur. This is like saying, "Marshall argues that peaches are not necessary for human health, so there must be no peach trees on his property." Well they are not absolutely necessary, but I do have them anyway. Of course the fact that evidence is not necessary (to Plantinga), in no way means there is no evidence. Plantinga thinks there is lots of it, and says so, as his actual readers know. A professional philosopher should not be so sloppy.

Pascal gets treated even worse. "The most celebrated such argument is Pascal's wager. Pascal said that because the existence of a deity can be neither proved nor disproved . . . by rational argument . . . " Again, "Pascal says that as long as the probability of a god's existence is non-zero . . . "

This is rubbish. Has Grayling actually read Pensees? In fact, Pascal offers several lines of rational argument for Christianity, which he thinks (and I generally agree) is compelling. The Wager in no way concedes that the evidence for Christianity is weak. In fact, it is addressed to practical issues: even given all this positive evidence for Christianity, that Pascal has been discussing, what if one still suffers doubts? How in practice should one deal with those doubts? (Note: see further brief discussion in the comments section.)

Dawkins made the same mistake about Pascal. One would hope that, as a professional philosopher espousing the values of listening well, Grayling would correct his ally and say "No, Pascal does not at all concede that the evidence against Christianity is either irrelevant or poor." Instead, Grayling falls into exactly the same trap, with less excuse.

Now let's go back to Grayling's moral values, again. He praises magnanimity, but he is seldom magnanimous towards Christians. He almost never praises those he disagrees with or gives their arguments the benefit of the doubt. He generally doesn't even bother to read them. In fact, if anything, Grayling appears to have read even less of those he purports to be disproving than Dawkins -- Dawkins at least quoted McGrath and Swinburne, and pretended to argue with them.

So how is Grayling "informed, reflective, alert, responsive, eager for understanding," such that even towards those he disagrees with, he proves himself "a good listener, who hears what his interlocutors say (not what he thinks they have said) . . . ?"

In fact, Grayling is just the opposite. He gets almost nothing about Christianity right, because he has not bothered to read or tried to understand what we really believe about practically anything. He doesn't quote actual Christian thinkers, he quotes nebulous "religious apologists" who appear to be little fairies roaming around the inside of his own thick skull. (Pardon the heat, I am feeling it after wading through this junk.)

Want more examples? I'll give some, but bare in mind that Grayling is here repeating common cliches in the skeptical community. If you're a skeptic, you'll probably nod your head at times, because responsible parties like Dawkins and Grayling are too intellectually lazy to do their homework, and even let you know what we say is the other side of the story -- whether we're right or not. So even if you think these cliches are true, you should recognize that it is Grayling's self-confessed responsibility to listen, as he promises, and as his own best moral values commend, to what we actually say, not to what he imagines we say, and to get our arguments right.

* "By 'faith' is meant believe held independently of whether there is a testable evidence in its favour, or indeed even in the face of counter-evidence." (19)

Heavens, no. That is almost never what Christians have meant by faith. I have given long strings of quotes, from the 1st Century to the 21st, and am collaborating with other scholars on a book on this very subject coming out next year, showing that this is NOT at all what Christians mean by "faith."

* "When the evidence is not merely insufficient but absent or contrary, how much more wrong to do as Doubting Thomas was criticized for not doing . . . to believe nonetheless." (102)

Thomas was not criticized for believing without evidence. He was criticized for, having witnessed Jesus' many miracles, heard Jesus predict his resurrection, and then heard multiple reports of that resurrection from people he had known and presumably trusted for years, refusing to believe in the face of that already excellent evidence.

This understanding of the Thomas story is assumed throughout John especially, who is attentive to such evidence, and throughout the narrative parts of the New Testament.

* "Most religious people do not, of course, subscribe to their religion because of arguments in favor of it . . . In the great majority of cases, people belong to their religion because it is the religion of their parents."

The word "because" is tricky here. One might be a Christian "because" one was raised a Christian, but also "because" it makes sense, you have examined and tried to live it, perhaps listened to its opponents and found their arguments unpersuasive. Ironically, Grayling speaks of believing without evidence, but gives no actual evidence to back up his claim about why people believe. A survey by the skeptic Michael Shermer shows that most believers do seem to cite rational reasons for their faith. (I did a similiar survey, and found experienced Christians cite evidence even more often.) So Grayling is asking us to "just believe," not only without evidence, but in the teeth of the evidence, on why Christians believe.

* "Explaining something by something unexplained amounts, obviously, to no explanation at all." (77)

Obviously not. "Where did my dolly go?" "The dog took it." "Well where do doggies come from?" "I don't know!" "But that's no explanation at all!"

Sure it is. One does not need to understand precisely how God is constituted, for "God did it" to be a rational explanation. Ultimately, none of our explanations are complete, and explanations of entities greater than ourselves will naturally be most tenous of all. As a philosopher, Grayling should be explaining such distinctions to his readers, not ignoring them.

* Grayling tries to flip the Ontological Argument on page 88 to disprove the Devil. "There is a being which is the least perfect of all beings; such a being which does not exist is -- since existence is a perfection -- less perfect than one that does; therefore the least perfect being necessarily does not exist."

Grayling doesn't seem to know he's refuting a heresy, here. The Devil is not God's opposite. He is not defined as "the least perfect being," but rather as the greatest angel, gone bad. Lewis says, "The greater something is, the worse it can become." Lewis is the most-read Christian writer of modern times, but Grayling evidently has never heard of him, certainly not bothered to read him.

* Grayling's caricature of the Moral Argument (which I do not make) is a farce.

* From the 5th to the 17th Centuries, "Religion took the view that it was right and science was wrong, and anyone who disagreed might be killed (for example, Giordano Bruno) . . . " (107)

This history is rubbish, as many historians of science have shown. (Most recently, Dr. Allan Chapman of Oxford's Wadham College.) And "magnanimous" Grayling never bothers even to mention the many historians who tie the rise of modern science directly to Christian theology.

And always the same example. If there were so many examples of Christians killing scientists, why always name the same one? This one is mistaken, though. Bruno was killed, wrongly of course, for heresy, not for espousing science.

* The "major if not sole endevour" of Discovery Institute in Seattle "is to promote ID theory."

All Grayling had to do was check the DI website to find that they have several other major arms, including (my favorite, since I live in the Seattle area) their useful work on promoting better transportation options in the Northwest.

* Grayling conflates Intelligent Design with creationists who argue that "nuclear decay rates were billions of times greater" in the past, concluding, "Such is the quality of thought in Creationism-ID 'science.'"

Whether you like ID or hate it, that is not magnanimous, that is just sleazy. Grayling should quote the specific person who made that claim, and not try to blame everyone in the ID movement for a claim some unnamed numbskull outside that movement made.

* "The Greek thinkers premised their views on the recognition that Creationist accounts are projections from the human experience of agency."

Yet Richard Carrier, a radical atheist who happens to be an expert on the origins of Greco-Roman science, points out that many ancient scientists actually did their science in honor of the Creator God. He even credits the rise of ancient science in part to the rise of Greek philosophical theism.

* Grayling tries to credit the Enlightenment, somehow, for the scientific revolution, as well as for everything else good in the modern world, even though the scientific revolution began long before most of the heroes of the Enlightenment were even born. He also downplays the fantastic early scientific revolution of the 13th Century -- check that, he hasn't mentioned it in the first two thirds of the book, anyway -- or the rich and important Medieval precidents for modern science, that historians have so explored. (Recently, James Hannam.) Grayling fails to breath a word of all this.

I could go on and on. Grayling misunderstands Confucian theology. (Which I wrote my dissertation on.) He tries to claim the Stoics for atheism, which they were not. He praises Epictetus, one of my favorites, too, but has he really read him? See my article last year in Touchstone Magazine, comparing Epictetus and Zhuang Zi. Epictetus not only believed in God, but was pious and zealous in his faith -- it permeates his teaching.

I am being harsher with Grayling, perhaps, than I would be with a popular writer, because he ought to know better. He espouses humanistic values. He ought to live by them. He ought to have read and fairly considered his opponents' actual arguments, rather than pretend to argue with nebulous "religious apologists" whom he cannot name or quote because (it seems) he heard about them second hand, and chooses to believe every disreputable rumor about those he disagrees with.

This is thus an illiberal and (in the most literal sense) inhumane book. I know atheists who really do embrace humanity, by remaining aware of the good in those they disagree with, by appreciating love, kindness, beauty, and excellence wherever they find it. But the fanatics seem to have the numbers, unfortunately. So do as Grayling says (sometimes, anyway), but not as(in this book) he does. And don't believe one part in five of what he says about "religion." (A word he defines rather tendentiously, by the way -- but that is the norm.)