Can We Be Good Without God?: A Conversation About Truth, Morality, Culture & A Few Other Things That Matter

Rating:
Summary: Simplistic and Weak Arguments
Review: I have to agree 100% with the previous reviewer. I found this authors intent to be deceitful.. the weakest arguments from the opposing viewpoints are stated and then refuted. It is common sense that if you want your argument to be taken seriously you should always attack your opponents strongest points. On this the author fails. The author has also failed to show where objective morals come from?? Do we have an authenticated record in Gods own writing? Failing this, all documents are men's words, and men being fallible means there are no objective morals.

Rating:
Summary: This book is a fraud
Review: It poses as a conversation between several parties with varying viewpoints about "morality" in order to come to a better understanding of morality. The various viewpoints are represented by a Christian, a moral relativist, an evolutionist, a secular humanist, and an atheist. However, the Christian author's intent is merely to show the other points of view as foolish and sets up one straw man argument after another in an attempt to bolster his arguments. The author hopes to show us how only objective moral principles can help us wade through the really tough moral issues of our time. He assumes we all share these objective morals; indeed, he assumes they are universal in all cultures, a fatal flaw in his argument that could be skewered by anyone who's taken a college level sociology class.

He refuses to give his "opposing viewpoint" characters the intelligence to ask the demanding questions needed to really explore this topic; because he doesn't really care to explore it, he just wants to impose his view on others. His attempt to justify his "my moral view is right because I got it directly from god and you didn't" attitude falls completely flat on anyone not already buried in theistic dogma. If you want to read what humanists really think, read Free Inquiry; if you want to know what atheists really think, go to the American Atheists website; if you want to know what an evolutionist thinks, read Dawkins. This book isn't worth the time.

Rating:
Summary: Shallow and Unenlightening
Review: This work is philosophically naive and a bit immature in presentation. It is presented in the attractive package of fiction, somewhat like a Platonic dialogue without the art or wit. As a resource, even the sources Chamberlain cites are not very thorough, and his choices of what to refer to seem odd and haphazard at times. A student who wants to understand the issues would do better to look elsewhere. Most problematic is the fact that Chamberlain has a shockingly shallow grasp of human character, and an even weaker understanding of the positions he aims to refute.

The main problem with the book is its naivety. An author should not use fiction as a device if he does not understand people or how to write them. The characters in Chamberlain's story are childish and naive and almost never talk or act like adults. His presentation of their viewpoints is also shallow and sometimes insulting. A "graduate student in philosophy" goes through the whole book as if she had never heard of any of the ethical theories or ideas being discussed, a rather absurd notion, and so far from reality that it fails to suspend disbelief. People storm out of the audience in the middle of a debate because they "can't handle it," something that never happens in real life and looks ridiculous in fiction. In essence, since Chamberlain is pitting his Christ-like figure against such ignorant children, he cannot fail to win. But not being a fair fight, the result is not useful to the reader, who would like to understand the other characters and their views better than Chamberlain allows.

Besides this, the two central philosophical flaws in the book are first, Chamberlain dismisses subjectivism far too readily (see p. 176--a responsible study of ethics requires a serious look at the full arguments on the subjectivist side, not just Chamberlain-style characatures), and second, he rests on an argument that was destroyed by the Euthyphro dilemma defined by Plato over 2300 years ago (see pp. 182-7): what is good is good because it is in God's nature--but why then is it to be called good? Because it is God's nature, or because we can see that God's nature conforms to an external concept of goodness? This tautology gets us nowhere. Chamberlain never explains why what is in any god's nature should be called "good." What if it were in God's nature to call for the summary murder of family members who become Hindus? (and he does, cf. Deuteronomy 13:9) Would that make it good? In other words, Chamberlain never answers the question that the book aims to answer, for he only addresses the divine-command aspect of the Euthyphro dilemma, totally failing to see that the same dilemma applies to divine-nature explanations.