Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Let me preface this review by stating that I am currently going through a crisis of faith. I was raised a Christian but I'm now in my senior year at Princeton and am currently going through the phase where I have to stop believing things because I grew up believing them and start believing them for my own reasons. The whole "you just have to have faith" thing always seemed to be a copout, so I've been reading with an open mind a bunch of books and online articles on apologetics and atheism in an attempt to find the truth. Persuasive arguments exist for both sides, but this book is not one of them. The first thing that struck me about this book is how obnoxious Dr. Carrier is. That doesn't necessarily mean his arguments are bad, but it did put me off. When he describes himself as a "world-renowned atheist", continually refers to his own work as incredibly important and well-written, and then plays the victim while simultaneously casting all Christians as ignorant and intolerant buffoons, it came across as very unprofessional and hypocritical. But that wasn't why I didn't like the book. The reasons I didn't like the book were that it basically revolved around "God doesn't do things the way I would, so he doesn't exist" and he either didn't mention contradictory evidence/arguments at all or grossly oversimplified them. For instance, take his argument about how God allows evil, and therefore he doesn't exist. While he briefly brings up the "free will" counter-argument, his analysis is very simplistic and has a huge hole. Namely, that if God interfered every time we were about to do something bad, we wouldn't have free will at all. Freedom to only choose the right choice is not free will. And good can't exist without evil, just like the concept of light makes no sense without the concept of darkness. Under Carrier's God, we'd be like calculators: programmed to only give the right answer. Or take his "God doesn't call me up and tell me exactly what to do in every situation, therefore he doesn't exist" argument. There's no mention whatsoever of C.S. Lewis's argument that our consciences are in fact God speaking to us, even though Carrier actually quotes Mere Christianity elsewhere in the book. Or take his refutation of the "The universe is fine-tuned for life" argument. He claims that the Universe is actually very inhospitable to life (black holes, vacuum, etc.) without even a mention that the scientific chances of a universe that permits life at all are about 1 out of 10^500 (let alone intelligent life), and that the current scientific theories to explain why ours does permit life (bubble universes, many worlds interpretation, etc.) all have big holes in them and have no data to support them. Basically, it seemed like Carrier's default strategy is to make up a few analogies, conclude that Christianity is ad hoc, and then never even mention the counter-arguments that would frame Christianity as not only viable, but the logical choice. That wouldn't require that he recognize that these arguments are good ones: he could still set them up and refute them a la Quentin Smith. But to not even mention them or grossly misstate them is just bad. I'm sure that Dr. Carrier has more elaborate and sophisticated reasons for being an atheist than are presented in this short, condensed book. But to me, Carrier's reasons for atheism as articulated here are no more persuasive than a Christian who claims that God exists "because the Bible told me so." p.s. I found it very ironic that Carrier holds up the Big Bang Theory as a prime example of the triumph of an atheist, scientific worldview when in fact the Big Bang Theory was proposed by a Belgian priest. It also failed to find mainstream acceptance for decades because the predominantly atheist scientific community of the time thought that it was much more theistic than the previously popular steady-state model and refused to give it credence.