The Impossibility of God

Rating:
Summary: If you love symbolic logic, you'll love this book
Review: I bought this book hoping to get ammunition to use in arguments with theists. I found the book to be useless for that purpose: the arguments are too abstruse for general use. If you are a professional philosopher well versed in symbolic logic, this will be just the book for you. For lay people, though, it is tough sledding and, in the end, not very interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Beware philosophistication of atheists: Let God Speak!
Review: I find this book unpalatable, for intellectual and moral reasons. Here comes someone claiming once for all putting to rest the issue of God or noGod. Reminds me of what happened with the death of God movement when it was arrogantly declared," God is dead! Signed, Nietzsche." Then in 1900 it was declared, "Nietzsche is dead. Signed, God."

As Francis Schaeffer said "God is there and He is not silent." As Chuck Colson said "God's justice, though deferred, is assured." As C.S.Lewis said "That which is not eternal is eternally out of date," and "You can no more deny the existence of God than the lunatic can dispatch the sun in the sky by scribbling 'darkness' on the walls of his padded cell."

Those who claim to be philosophisticates with superior intellectual prowess are most susceptible to tomfoolery and self duping with their own and others' mental acumen. As the saying goes, they're "too smart by half" or "outeducated". Universal truths like E=mc2 can in essentials be grasped by a child, yet challenge the finest minds. So too the Bible and Jesus Christ as Logos-Creator of all. The True God satisfies the Sunday School child and challenges the Augustines, Athanasius', Anselms, Aquinas', Luthers, Calvins, Wesleys,Pascals, Jonathan Edwards' (claimed one of the finest philosopher-intellects on the American continent), Schweitzers (Nobelist) and the rarely-rivaled mind of a C.S.Lewis or J.R.R.Tolkein.

The Bible has yet to be categorically disproven. Recent archaeological discoveries point more and more to its unabashed accuracy and truthfulness. Some silver amulets were found last month to date from @600BC, inscribed with these words from the Torah: The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace." (Numbers 6:12)

This book and its anti-God biased adherents (having smarts is one thing; being very smart is altogether another) have no answer for archaeology, the teleological, cosmological, moral and fideistic arguments for God and against atheism.

Let God be true and every man a liar, as St. Paul (one of the finest minds of history) said in his letter to Rome. It is challenged to any atheist to read Romans or Gospel of John with an open mind and see what your honest conclusions are.

Paul to the Romans is the church's hull, most heavened output of an earthen skull.

Rating:
Summary: Consider...
Review: I have a Ph.D. in physics and the Bible is not the only book I've read. For the first 39 years of my life I had been an atheist, a communist, and a God-hater. Since two years ago, I believe and love God (who loved me dearly long before I ever acknowledged His existence).

I read with interest the other reviews of Martin's book. If any of you are "open-minded" atheists, agnostics, or skeptics, would you please consider reading one of the following books. They are all available on amazon.com and most are less than $10 used.

The books are: "The Fingerprint of God", "The Creator and Cosmos", and "The Creator and Time" by a Ph.D. in astronomy, Dr. Hugh Ross; and "Origins of Life" by Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross.

These books use modern scientific evidences from astronomy, physics, and biology to argue very persuasively for the existence of God.

I gave Martin's book 3 stars, not one, because it gives, at the first glance, good arguments. However, a close scrutiny shows them to be either flowed or outdated. I think it is important to look at other points of view in order to strengthen (or weaken) your own. In the past 2 years, I haven't read or heard anything that has shaken my belief in GOD, except perhaps for a very brief time. I have repeatedly found flawed any argument that claims the unbelief in God is reasonable.

Rating:
Summary: A Quick Thought
Review: I haven't purchased, nor read this book. This is a response to Dennis Littrell's review (and thus, I gave the same rating as he).

Dennis has many good points, but says:

>> First, any God worth the name is beyond the restrictions of human logic <<
Granted, there may be beings that exist beyond our knowledge. There may be 47 gods, all that do not follow our logic. There may be 16 gods, a cat, and a chair that all exist beyond our knowledge and toy with us mere mortals as they wish (and toy with a way we do not understand), the chair being slightly more powerful than god #12 and god #4, being much more evil than the cat, would give us hives; or give us a million dollars (because the lack of human-logic means his "evil" attribute makes no sense to us). But none of this matters. If such things exist beyond our own logic and understanding, there is no use for them. There is, then, no need to study, much less worship, such a thing.

>> ...By the rules of logic, the answer is no. But might there be some sort of meta-logic of which we are not yet aware? <<
Sure. And there may be a super-cow that sits on a super-chair that dictates such a meta-logic. But in our life, this does not matter. ANYTHING can exist. Pick an adjective, say blue, and a verb, say jump, and a noun, say shoe, and you can say a Blue Jumping Shoe is responsible for morals. Why, we don't know. How, we don't know. In fact, the logic behind these morals (which may differ from our own!) is beyond us. Who cares? Anything outside human logic does not affect our lives and therefore is not to be considered.

>> Second, let me present a definition of God that, for some reason, the authors do not consider ... namely, a God with no attributes, a God about which nothing can be said, in short "God, the Ineffable." <<
I'll take your challenge and say something about this god. If this god has no attributes, it does not exist. Or, if you want to say its attributes are beyond our knowledge, so is the Green Sleeping Elf that is responsible for all human tooth decay. *shrug* It doesn't matter. Unless a "god" or "super being" or "meta-logical entity" actually affects this world in a way that humans can understand (ie. follows our understanding of the world, our logic, our rationale), it has no affect on us and there is absolutely no value in studying, much less worshipping, or even thinging about "it".

Rating:
Summary: Laughable!!!
Review: I think this book should be retitled 'The Impossibility of Athiests to Employee Reason or History'.

Am I a zealot? Nah, although I'm sure I will be accused of being one. Here is the problem with this book. All, and I do mean all, of these arguements are 1)not new-they've been around since at least the time of Thomas Aquinas in one form or another. 2)They have all been answered conclusively since at least the time of Thomas Aquinas. For example, the problem of evil and how that disproves God. Funny though that the very problem of evil has converted alot of very educated and bright people. Know why? Its been answered and not just answered in general, but incontrovertably. That's just the most obvious of the problems with the arguements in this book.

So the arguements are old, tired and have been refutted. Even a cursory reading of 18th century thought will demonstrate that. So why 2 stars instead of 1? Well, I figured it was a nice try.

Its a feel good for athiests....sort of like what athiests claim that God is for the rest of us. Ha Ha Ha!

Rating:
Summary: If the book were as hilarious as some of these reviews ...
Review: If the book were as hilarious as some of these reviews, we would have a comic classic on our hands. It is not. What God would or would not do if God really existed? Oh, please.

Here is the general form of the arguments the book gives for the non-existence of God. If God exists, then He would do X. Not X. Therefore, God does not exist. What these guys are really saying is this: "If I were GOD, then I would do X. Not X. Therefore, ..." Well, if you ask me, the correct conclusion is: "Therefore, I am NOT GOD." I agree -- they are NOT GOD.

Who is writing this stuff? Even more serious, who is publishing this stuff? Even more serious, are these people really reading this stuff?

Rating:
Summary: Impossibility of historical truth apart from Genesis
Review: In the God of Genesis we trust; bibleless atheists grope blunderbussed. Darwin can't compete with Moses' witness; evolution thrives on doubt's unfitness. Don't dismiss Christ's Word unless you've read it with proof so watertight true facts discredit. The Bible's so far stood time's test; darwinianism's secondguessed. If God's an impossibility, He sure serves some vast utility for a majority's imaginary tranquility.

Rating:
Summary: "Proving" a negative
Review: It would seem a bit of a stretch to "prove" the impossibility of God, since proving a negative has long been considered impossible. And it would seem to be quite a task to prove that God does not exist given that the presumably easier task of proving the positive that God does exist has never been done--at least not done well enough to convince most philosophers.

At any rate, what we have here are 32 closely-argued essays and an appendix written by 25 academics collected from mostly philosophic journals such as Philo, Sophia, the International Journal from Philosophy of Religion, etc, along with excerpts from various books. What is demonstrated is that the sort of hair-splitting arguments for which philosophy is famous are still alive and well in academia.

To my mind what the authors come close to proving (in the most painstaking fashion) is that the usual definitions of God are inadequate, thereby allowing one to derive contradictions from those definitions, contradictions that prove that God, defined in such and such a way, cannot exist. For example (and several of the contributors use variations on this theme), God cannot be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-benevolent since there exists the palpable presence of evil in the world. Actually the editors break this down more finely and throw out three categories of "disproofs" which might be called, (1) the argument to disproof from definition; (2) the argument to disproof from evil; and (3) the argument to disproof from doctrine. In the latter, what is demonstrated is that a particular formulation of God is inconsistent with a particular religious doctrine, demonstrating that THAT God cannot exist.

The astute reader will note that all three categories rest on demonstrating a disconnect between definitions. What the various authors are trying to do is NOT to prove that God does not exist, rather that it is impossible to define God in such a way that contradictions do not arise. As the editors point out in their introduction, the real task here is to show that God is a logical impossibility, and therefore, like a square circle, cannot exist.

One can get a feel for what the authors are up to by considering some of the essay titles. (God forbid that one should actually read the arguments!) Matt McCormick, for example, entitles one of his two essays, "Why God Cannot Think" with the subtitle: "Kant, Omnipresence, and Consciousness." What McCormick argues (borrowing from Kant) is that since God is omniscient and omnipotent, God is also omnipresent. However, McCormick argues, such a God cannot have a higher consciousness "because in order to be conscious a being must be limited in ways that an omnipresent thing is not." McCormick gets this notion from Kant's idea that "an omnipresent being cannot make object/representation discriminations, so it cannot make a self/other distinction." Consequently "it cannot apply concepts or form judgments." McCormick goes on to conclude that "an omnipresent being cannot have higher consciousness, so it cannot have a mind." Ergo, it cannot think!

Regardless of how one might feel about this argument, there is the additional question as to whether proving the impossibility of "it" is the same thing as proving that "it" does not exist. The other essays are similar in that they attempt to ensnarl prospective gods in webs made from human logic.

I have a couple of answers to this (if you will) sophisticated sophistry.

First, any God worth the name is beyond the restrictions of human logic, and can even exist and not exist at the same time. (Demigods, such as the anthropomorphic God as seen in fundamentalist Christianity or the many personifications of God in Hinduism or the gods presented in this book, etc., are a different matter of course.) In a similar question one might ask can the universe (or anything) exist and not exist? By the rules of logic, the answer is no. But might there be some sort of meta-logic of which we are not yet aware? Consider that something as simple as so-called "fuzzy logic" was unknown to the ancient Greeks, and the Boolean logic taught today was not completely formulated (if it is indeed completely formulated) until recent times.

Second, let me present a definition of God that, for some reason, the authors do not consider--or perhaps I missed it among the 439 pages of text. This is the definition of God from the Vedas, and is the source of the so-called "Way" of the Taoists, namely, a God with no attributes, a God about which nothing can be said, in short "God, the Ineffable." I challenge the authors to find some contradiction in a God about which nothing can be said!

What I think this book's authors demonstrate is that old saw about the futility of trying to reconcile the ways of God to man. In a sense, if we reverse the arguments, we can see just how apparently impossible it is to prove the usual--namely that God exists--while demonstrating that to even discuss such matters, it is necessary to have our terms clearly defined. There is the God of Old Testament. He is, by his actions, a far cry from the ocean of Brahma that one encounters in the East.

Nonetheless I like this book. It is handsomely presented by Prometheus Books, and well edited and proofread. In this age of mass media censorship (coercive, prior and self), it is good to see that in book publishing even the most unpopular views are still being allowed full expression.

Rating:
Summary: Atheology 101
Review: The Impossibility of God is a wonderful compilation of potent arguments against the existence of God. That is, a God defined in a way that defies logic and reason. The book accomplished what it intended, showing the Impossibility of God. I certainly recommend this book as being a vigorous, entertaining and up-to-date refutation of the figment of man's imagination (the existence of God).

Rating:
Summary: The Breathtaking Perversity of Theists
Review: The reviewer dmitri works himself into a lather attempting to dissuade the reader from becoming an atheist. Since I am feeling feisty right now and am taking a break from writing a paper, I will address some of his laughable reasons adduced for that purpose.

dmitri asserts that the authors of this fine text are cocksure because they believe that God exists in no possible world. He goes on to say that there is a small chance that God does exist. Clearly that is begging the question, since the issue at hand is whether or not there is a small chance that God exists. If dmitri disagrees with the authors, then perhaps he should specify which arguments he finds unsound and why he finds them so. I can assure you that any attempt on his part would have to possess more content than the drivel that he did in fact type. Criticizing the general strategy of proving that a being does not exist is absurd, since this sort of argumentation occurs daily and with great success in philosophy departments across the country.

dmitri appeals to Pascal's Wager as well. That this argument is still used by theists is fine evidence that the foundations of theism are on the verge of collapsing--it is a desperate final attempt to get the trained intellect to believe despite the mountain of evidence against theism. If you are convinced by the wager, I have a nearby bridge to sell you.

dmitri also recommends the books by C.S. Lewis and Lee Strobel. Unfortunately these two men have the philosophic intelligence of Baptist youth ministers. Please see S.T. Joshi's book God's Defenders for a hilarious criticism of Lewis's buffoonery. Strobel, I trust, can be exposed as a sophist within a few minutes of careful reading.

So we see that dmitri proposed no good reasons for his contempt for Martin's book and atheism in general. But sadly, dmitri is a token of a type--the pseudo-intellectual Christian. Watch out for this sort. Far more dangerous that the typical religious dolt.