Simple, quick, neat, elegant, stylish, readable, and comprehensive.

Takes the most common, popular and "strongest" arguments for a god and gives them a logical seeing to.

Thank god it's also full of humour. ( )

(posted on my blog: davenichols.net)

Mathematician John Paulos offers a very brief book full of very brief responses to common modern arguments for the existence of God. Each short chapter offers a basic argument made for God, and Paulos presents his logical refutation. This book is so short, I had finished it in one sitting. Paulos muddles at times, makes strange excursions, ends explanations well short of full, and offers an amazing amount of choppiness in a book of such short length.

Overall, Paulos argues familiar lines to skeptical readers, and most of his presentation is not approachable to the novice or less-well read reader. While he works in some mathematical logic without many actual equations, some of his references are to subjects most readers won't understand. This work is mostly effective in shooting down the for-God arguments, but many of Paulos's explanations are meandering, muddled, and sometimes end abruptly. There is even one case where he states the argument could be fleshed out more, and then walks away from it. WTF?

Anyway, not a bad overview of the refutations, but not a very clean treatment. For a better and more comprehensive version of this same theme (with better mathematics and science content), see Victor Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist. Not specifically recommended for anyone and not one of the better offerings I've read on the subject. Two and one-half stars. ( )

Surprisingly thin. Paulos' earlier works are meaty, slim volumes on innumeracy. This one covers the territory but rambles; enjoyable if taken as the notes from an interesting dinner conversation with a smart guy, but isn't structured well enough for the lay reader. And the omission of Popperian falsifiability is astonishing. ( )

The subtitle just about says it all; 149 short pages do the job once over lightly. I've sometimes thought that math could be a good area for religious people to redirect their energies toward, but I guess they lack the requisite brainpower.

John Allen Paulos has written a breezy, but cogent, debunking of most of the "logical" arguments for the existence of God. Most of Paulos's arguments come down to Occam's razor. Positing the existence of God is not necessary to explain any of the phenomena discussed and is usually just an extraneous step in the ostensible argument. Some of the arguments for God's existence are merely logical ledgermain [sorry Anselm] that don't have God as a valid conclusion.

This book, like the recent efforts of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins, is important in our absurdly pious and largely hypocritical political campaign. He seems to be saying to Americans, "Hasn't anyone here heard of the Enlightenment?" He quotes one of Voltaire's most telling epigrams: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

His final chapter is an exhortation to other infidels to make themselves heard since there are plenty of them, even though they are members of one of the least trusted categories of people in American society.

(JAB) ( )