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The take-home message? Live and let live

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It's quite difficult to write a review about this book because the whole thing can be condensed into four words (see the title of this review). When it boils down to it it's just a little bit of a liberal manifesto (no surprise that its genesis was at the BBC) preaching respect and tolerance and defending people's right to their opinion, however silly. (And some of the views expressed within these pages ARE silly.) Which isn't really a bad thing; it's just an insipid thing. If it were a colour this book would be beige. In fact it IS beige. I'm just wondering why it has a picture of the British order of chivalry -- the Order of the Garter -- on its cover. Never mind. God works in mysterious ways. First things first. This book starts badly. (It rallies a little in the middle, then crashes and burns at the end, but more about that later.) The preface (or "challenge" or, allegedly, "disclaimer") should be used by the author to set out his stall. Tell us why he wrote the book and what he aims to achieve. Humphrys (I always want to spell it Humphries), however, seems to dive straight in at the deep end with a veritable phantasmagoria of disjointed and random thoughts on the subject. There's even a silly mistake (probably the editor's fault) on page two (two!?) where Humphrys claims to have called the opening chapter the "disclaimer" rather than preface or foreword when in fact he did no such thing. It's actually called the "challenge". Sure it's a silly oversight, but it just put me off right at the start. As the book progresses Humphrys becomes more and more anti-atheist and more and more sympathetic to the beleaguered believers (whom I suspect he feels sorry for). And he makes all the common mistakes along the way. Such as equating a theist's 'belief' to a scientist's 'belief' in his reason. Which is just a petty semantic coincidence that arises because the word 'belief' has more than one meaning, but one which believers and those who "believe in belief" never fail to employ. Humphrys steadies himself on this crutch on a number of occasions. Such as when he calls atheists "devout sceptics" -- another semantic conjuring trick that looks pretty but doesn't have a leg to stand on. But perhaps I'm being too harsh. Humphrys is an interesting person. He tells some nice stories (but he does seem to have a huge chip on his shoulder about reality-television stars, whom he suddenly attacks out of the blue on a number [more than two] of occasions) and comes across as a likeable and friendly person. But why doesn't he interview an atheist? Ah, you might say, this is because he is searching for God. OK, so why single out atheists throughout the book (especially the antichrist Dawkins) for so much venom? Why not give them a chance to defend themselves? Who knows, if they're so wrong they may have even inadvertently pushed you closer to God? And why fixate on "militant" atheists while all the while warning people of the dangers of paying too much attention to fundamentalist believers? To conclude, this is a very personal spiritual journey which is unlikely to offend anybody but nor is it likely to convert anybody. The message is one of religious toleration. Some might call it limp, a cop-out, insipid or lame. It is probably all of those, but there is some humour and plenty of warmth from the author. Also this is a short book. The characters are large and well spaced and the margins are generous. So it shouldn't detain you for long. PS: And there was no need to insult Irena Sendlerova. She says that the term "hero" when applied to her irritates her greatly. So a few lines down the page he calls her a hero. Either he's accusing her of false modesty (i.e. insulting her) or he's insulting her.

Decisions, decisions, decisions

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Well, if you've grown tired of reading books by religious writers who think they have all the answers figured out, or books by militant atheists who think they have all the answers figured out, at last here is a book by someone who can't make up his mind one way or the other - but still believes that he has all the answers figured out. After presenting a very lucid argument in favor of atheism, Humphrys then presents a very emotional argument in favor of religion. Then he drifts off into gross sentimentality - dredging up the kind of childhood reminiscences that make your own children cringe when you retell them the twentieth time. Humphry's talent is that he makes you think you have heard his stories twenty times already, even though you haven't. My suggestion - give this book a pass, save your money, and use it to buy a book by either McGrath or Dawkins.

Agree to Disagree

Customer Rating:

I enjoyed this book immensely. It's grounded in a journalist's unwillingness to accept anything at face value and probably represents the way many people look at God and religion. It's not the way I look at it. My beliefs may be considered fundamentalist in some aspects and Humphrys clearly shows how odd they look to outsiders. He also understands that people like myself are happy with them, just as agnostics, atheists and people who do not believe in Christianity, are happy with theirs. He also understands that "militant" is the correct term to apply to those who are incapable of accepting that disagreement on the nature of reality does not imply superstition or stupidity. "Militant" is a particularly apt term as it correctly identifies the political ideology underlying the approach of Richard Dawkins who admits an inability to understand how anyone can believe in God and appears too willing to assume that there was a religious basis for 9/11 rather than a political one dressed in religious language. Tolerance is the foundation of a free and democratic society and books like "In God We Doubt" represent the essence of free speech. As a believer it gave me a greater understanding of why people disbelieve and, to some extent, why they do believe. Thankfully, in a debate which is unlikely to be resolved, it departs from the militant opinion that there are two opinions - theirs and the wrong one. Humphreys wrote as a journalist but his contribution to the debate about the existence of otherwise of God is far more valuable philosophically than those who proclaim to be oases of clear thought in a world blinded by its own unwillingness to accept intellectual totalitarianism

Best get those splinters looked at...

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It's badly written and badly researched...so bad, in fact, that I quite enjoyed reading it. After a couple of hundred pages it all comes down to this...Rod Liddle is my mate, he's clever and witty and he thinks its OK to believe in god if you want. Cheers JH By the way, any chance you can get your buddy to write a book expanding upon why? ps Can you explain why almost every atheist you quote or refer to (at least in the latter part of the book) is 'militant'. Is it a term applied to those atheists with a strong conviction that there is no god? I'm interested, because I wonder why you don't also refer to believers with a strong conviction there is a god in the same way? Afterall the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury have fairly forthright views on the subject and I don't see you referring to either as 'militant' Christians.

So where's the doubt?

Customer Rating:

This is a puzzling, and unsatisfying, book. It is a spin-off from a Radio 4 series 'Humphrys in Search of God', in which he interviewed senior representatives of the three Abrahamic faiths - Rowan Williams, Tariq Ramadan and Jonathan Sacks - about the nature of, and reasons to believe in, God - specifically, a god who serves simultaneously as creator, judge and guardian. After introducing himself as a `genuine agnostic', he considers the issues under seven headings. The first five are In the Beginning, which establishes the reasons for his own scepticism from childhood on; Battle Lines, which records the grounds of the debate and some major protagonists - Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath, William Lane Craig and Lewis Wolpert - and quotes some spectacularly meaningless theobabble from Keith Ward. The State of the Nation reports the results of a YouGov poll which he commissioned in the wake of the series, which seemed to indicate significant divergence between professed beliefs and practice; extracts from The Interviews, bringing out particularly the problems of suffering, evil and injustice, and the self-contradictions inherent in the three traditions; and Letters, extracts from his post bag following the broadcasts - by far the biggest he has ever had on any programme. Throughout all these sections - three-quarters of the book - he maintains an impeccably sceptical stance, and I found myself wondering, Where's the wiggle room? What space is left for `and yet'? Finally, in Conscience, we find out. And it comes in the form of a hybrid between what Dawkins has characterised as `the argument from personal incredulity', more usually encountered in support of Intelligent Design, and a simple yuk factor. Having earlier pointed out the patent absurdity of the assertion that there is no morality without God, he has this to say: "Kindness, altruism, generosity, empathy and pity are the noblest of human virtues. To reduce them to a "strong urge" and to put lust into the same category is to suggest that we can no more help ourselves feeling pity that we can help ourselves feeling sexual desire. Follow this thinking to its logical conclusion and you reduce human beings to the level of a marauding, oversexed chimpanzee." How often did Darwin himself, almost a century and a half ago, hear the same critique? The meat of his argument here is about the roots of altruism, particularly when carried to heroic lengths - he cites Lisa Potts, seriously injured when she stood between her class of nursery-school children and a machete-wielding recipient of `community care', and Irena Sendlerova, who over an extended period smuggled thousands of Jewish children to safety from the Warsaw ghetto. Although such actions are very rare, compared with instances of standing by and acquiescing in clear breaches of received morality, he infers from them the presence of a `divine spark' - without however being very clear about its nature or distribution. He has read The Selfish Gene, but clearly not understood it very well, because he says, of such conflicts between moral duty and self-preservation, `By any Darwinian measure the stronger is bound to be self-preservation.' And a little further on, `We cannot describe their actions in Darwinian terms.' I hope he means, `There is as yet no explanation for such phenomena that is agreed between evolutionary and cognitive scientists,' because otherwise he hasn't understood the nature of science any too well, either. Finally, in Something .... Or Nothing, he calls on atheists to stop being so nasty about believers. Not all believers, he says, are obviously stupid, and not all religious belief leads to bad behaviour (although earlier on he has expressed significant reservations about the benevolence of the Sharia provisions about amputation and stoning). And, after all, it serves as a great source of consolation to millions of people. OK, John, so you believe in belief. It's pretty hard not to. And you believe that its outcomes are not always as malign as some people make out. But what on earth has that got to do with whether or not it's true? Where does the `doubt' come from?