Much better than I expected.

I was prepared for a humanist rant. No doubt that's exactly how many people will receive this title--particularly those who don't bother to read it. (The same goes for this review, since the four stars are plainly visible above.)

Rather than fulminating, retired physicist Stenger proposes to undertake a scientific exploration of the God concept, and consider the evidence for or against this proposition.

George H. Smith, who wrote Atheism: The Case Against God decades ago, once cautioned atheists against getting into existence arguments about God with believers before the essential question of defining one's terms was disposed of.

So it is with this author. Stenger does not propose to refute all God concepts, past, present, and future. The God concept he challenges has specific attributes which distinguish it from other conceivable gods.

But neither does he set himself too small a task; the God he undertakes to disprove is no less than the one most popularly believed in the Western tradition; that being the personal God who created the universe for the benefit of human beings, who controls all events, who knows your innermost thoughts, who does not hide his existence from those open to evidence, and who will intercede on your behalf, given sufficiently earnest prayer and satisfactory achievements in piety.

It is this God, and not the gods of deists, animists, or Buddhists, that Stenger claims is subject to scientific scrutiny and found wanting.

Stenger's central thesis is a simple one, and he identifies himself as holding a minority viewpoint even among scientists in frankly stating it: if God's influence can be discerned in the material world, be it through the fine-tuning of the cosmos to permit us, the creator's most beloved creation, to flourish, or through the alteration of physical events--such as the ravages of disease or natural disaster--then such interventions should be empirically measurable. After all, a God whose influence is indistinguishable from random chance is not one who intervenes in any meaningful sense. A devoutly Christian craps-shooter who meticulously measures every throw of his dice over thousands of throws and finds a Gaussian distribution in the sums of the tosses has not benefited from divine influence, no matter earnest his prayers, because an atheist or worshiper of the wrong god will find the same result in his own craps games (assuming "fair" dice used by all involved, of course).

Stenger's approach is academically scrupulous and heavy on citations. While small, unreproduced medical studies about the positive effects of intercessory prayers on patient outcomes make headlines in the English-speaking press, subsequent, larger-scale studies with more controls which show no such effect fail to make the news. Stenger brings both sorts to the reader's attention here.

For me, the centerpiece of the book is a sequence of chapters aiming to disprove on physical grounds the miraculous creation of the universe. This material will no doubt be the most challenging to most readers, as despite the author's careful explanations for the lay reader, and complete avoidance of equations, it is still somewhat heavy going. For example, the discussion relies heavily upon the reader's grasp of the concept of entropy, which is something even many engineering students struggle with in their thermodynamics courses. Nevertheless, I myself have just enough background in physics to follow his argument, and it is a very neat one.

I do think his explanation of "why there is something rather than nothing" was hasty. I would liked to have seen more depth. It seemed to boil down to a bare assertion that the amount of entropy in an empty system is necessarily zero, so the second law of thermodynamics necessitates the spontaneous creation of energy (perhaps as a single pair of virtual particles). Put another way (and if my lay understanding of these Big Concepts is accurate), a zero-energy universe is subject to a vacuum metastability event--see Wikipedia for fascinating reading. Of course that on its face violates energy conservation, a law which Stenger otherwise recognizes as sacrosanct, so I'm not seeing how he squares this circle.

It is a nifty thought, but it sorely needs more development. As it stands, a believer can simply retort that one has "merely" identified the mechanism of miraculous creation. When the rest of Stenger's arguments are brought into play, I don't think this is the case, but the burden of tying this in should fall upon the writer, not the reader.

In any case, such a weakness is not fatal to Stenger's enterprise. Why? Because one has to, at all times, be wary of the typical believer's bait-and-switch. I've participated in many theist-vs.-atheist arguments in my life, and witnessed many more, and hardly a one has gone by without an extraction of an admission of the possibility, however remote, of some creator God, at which point the Bible-believing interlocutor races to force the substitution of *their* God, with Abraham, Noah's flood, the Exodus, the Ten Commandments, the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, salvation exclusive to those who exhort John 3:16, and so forth.

In short, the contra argument "if there is a possibility of any god, then *my* God must exist, and you'd do well to get right with Him right away" is a colossal non-sequitur for what should be reasons obvious to anyone practiced in elementary reasoning in any other context.

In fact, and in an admission I found very interesting, one of the species of gods that Stenger claims *not* to have refuted is the "hidden" God of some strains of evangelical Christianity. This is the God of John Calvin, who is omnipotent, who manipulates all sensory perceptions and instrument readings (if necessary) to eradicate evidence of his own presence, and refuses to reveal himself except to those who abandon evidence-based reasoning and are willing to proclaim themselves in his thrall as an act of blind faith. This God solves the problem of Evil by being not only indifferent to the fates of agnostics or liberal Christians, but who is willing to permit disaster to befall even his own elect so as not to give away the game to those who will only infer the existence of a God from evidence.

This God concept runs into major problems with the Cartesian theological argument, which holds that God is not a deceiver. Such a God would, you'd think, be a problem for writers like Karen Armstrong, who wants to rally all believers under one big ecumenical flag.

Stenger offers no comfort for such efforts. As he points out, theologians have never reconciled the Problem of Evil with the traditional traits of a Supreme Being who loves humanity--omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. That is, unless, one redefines one's notion of "goodness" to permit a literally cosmic campaign of deceit deliberately aimed at one's own supposedly favorite children.

And, as Stenger argues in his final chapter (and consistent with Christopher Hitchens et al.), it is precisely this variety of fervent religious belief which leads people to break from the universal ethical principles that humans uphold when not excessively entangled with religion, and deliberately slaughter innocents in the belief that one is serving a higher power that perfectly conceals itself from all objective observation.

Stenger's project is bad news for those who follow in the footsteps of Stephen Jay Gould and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and proclaim that there need be no conflict between the domains of reflection and study considered by religion and those considered by science. Stenger contends that there is no phenomenon not ultimately subject to being reasoned about, though he admits that in many domains we lack both the tools and a clear program for developing them. But to leave to religion only those areas science has not yet penetrated is cold comfort for many believers, and rightfully so. They do not want to see their God boxed into ever-smaller partitions as human knowledge grows without bound.

While he does not consider the subject himself, I would regard the evolution of the relationship between science and religion, and the shift of confessional affiliations, over the past couple of generations, as indicative that his thesis has explanatory power. One doesn't need to be a physicist to learn a little bit about the vastness of the universe and the difficulty humans have in surviving beyond the confines of our planet. One doesn't need to be a statistician to understand that prayers to alleviate the sufferings of the innocent, or prevent the deaths of the undeserving, often go unanswered--but not so often that the effects of prayer can be distinguished from random chance. The concept of an all-powerful God who loves all of humanity is hard to square with even the most fleeting glimpse at the evidence. At the same time, our culture prides itself on its theistic and Christian heritage (despite the deliberate efforts of many of the founding fathers, who permitted no allusion to Christian doctrine in the Declaration of Independence nor even mention of God in the federal Constitution). It's easy to identify as a "soft" Christian, and almost as easy to identify as agnostic ("leave me alone, and I won't trouble you to examine your beliefs").

With soft infidelity growing in popularity, it is no surprise that growing minorities, particularly in America, find themselves having to choose between fire-breathing, Calvinistic evangelicalism and a rejection of religious belief altogether. At first glance it is an irony that one of the gods Stenger doesn't claim to be able to refute is the one believed in by the most obnoxious of Christians (and, not coincidentally, those most hostile to scientific teachings where these conflict with scripture or the policy objectives of their political allies).

However, I think that further reflection reveals that this is not an irony, but rather a great opportunity. The Calvinistic evangelical tradition asks for blind faith in a large, complex tangle of propositions (usually including Biblical literalism, itself a pickle when one encounters mutually contradictory elements of scripture). This tradition bankrolls extreme politicians and supports the bombing of abortion clinics, preaches holy war against Muslims, and wants to enroll the apparatus of the government in inspecting your bed to ensure you're not engaging in forbidden forms of intercourse. (Or, in recent years, wants to prove that gay and lesbian pair-bonds are less stable than hetero ones by prohibiting such couples from explicitly and legally entering into those very forms of stable relationship.) Moreover, this tradition simultaneously claims that we are all miserable sinners and that we can have perfect knowledge about anything, thanks to divine revelation.

The alternative tradition, Stenger's tradition, asks only that you have faith in the human capacity to reason. Granted, it does ask that you credit this ability to some of your fellow human beings some of the time--we can't all be experts in everything. It acknowledges that we are fallible beings who may have to change our minds or expand our perspectives; it furthermore, in some of its more esoteric niches (ask me in comments), actually forecloses the possibility of knowledge to certain levels of detail. But it asks little else, and in return, it makes our current level of civilization possible.

Stenger spends a book explaining why this choice isn't a false one; the God concept which permits us to grant pluralistic lip service to both traditions evaporates in the light of reason.

In this book, Victor Stenger makes a strong case that cafeteria Christianity, and other modern religious traditions like it, are incompatible with careful reasoning based on our present level of knowledge about the universe. If you find the remaining alternatives--outright atheism; a God who is separate and apart from the universe, does nothing for humans, and does not respond to their prayers; or the vengeful, deceptive, hidden God of John Calvin, are all distasteful, then the fact that you're faced with a difficult choice is yet further evidence that God is not inclined to give you a lifetime of easy decisions.

And that may be because God simply doesn't exist.