God's Defenders Quotes

“God's existence needs to be established independently before he can be brought into account for causation; it cannot be assumed at the start.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“William James (1842-1910) was the first philosopher in America to gain universal celebrity. The hardheaded practical wisdom of Benjamin Franklin could hardly be termed a philosophy; from an entirely different perspective, the obfuscatory maunderings of Emerson did not count as such, either. Something with a bit more intellectual rigor of the English or German sort was needed if Americans were not to feel that they were anything but the ruthless money-grubbing barbarians they in fact were and are. James filled the bill. His younger contemporary George Santayana (1863-1952) was considerably more brilliant and scintillating, but for regular, 100 percent Americans he had considerable drawbacks. In the first place, he was a foreigner, born in Spain, even though his Boston upbringing and Harvard professorship would otherwise have given him the stamp of approval. Moreover, he was not merely suspiciously interested in art and poetry (The Sense of Beauty [1896], Three Philosophical Poets [1910]), but he actually wrote poetry himself! No, he would never do.
James, on the other hand, was just the sort of philosopher suited to the American bourgeoisie. His chief mission, expressed from one book to the next, was to protect their piety from the hostile forces of science and skepticism-an eminently laudable and American goal.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“The dominant question thus becomes not why religion has not died away but why it continues to persist in the face of monumental evidence to the contrary. To my mind, the answer can be summed up in one straightforward sentence: People are stupid.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“Buckley goes on to declare: "What keeps Christians afloat is the buoyant knowledge that no devastating damage has in fact been done to Christian doctrine" (N 55). Ah, blessed Bill! - how strong a shield your ignorance must be! I suppose one should not be surprised at Buckley's staggering ignorance of science, ancient and modern, but one might expect him to have a slightly better notion of the scientific and philosophical implications of many of the Christian doctrines in which he professes to believe. And although he claims to have read much in the area of Catholic apologetics, he seems wondrously unaware of the multitude of skeptical tracts that have, for many intellectuals, shattered the foundations of religious belief, whether it be Robert G. Ingersoll's Some Mistakes of Moses (1879) or Joseph Wheless's Is It God's Word? (1926) or Bertrand Russell's Religion and Science (1935), all the way down to Antony Flew's Atheistic Humanism (1993), Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World (1995), and beyond.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“And as for the contention that unbelievers who behave morally are implicitly adhering to Judeo-Christian standards of morality, Lewy has the matter exactly reversed. It is precisely because Christian ethics have, in the last two centuries, been shorn of their numerous elements of savagery, bigotry, and exclusivity that they are now in approximate conformity with the secular morals that the advance of civilization has engendered; and I repeat that this entire process has only come about because Christians have tacitly or explicitly rejected a multitude of moral axioms and adjurations plainly found in their scripture and plainly attributed to God or the son of God. Punishment of unbelievers, forced conversions, hostility to learning, subjugation of women, condoning of slavery - these and other moral principles found in the New Testament have been quietly jettisoned by mainline Christian churches, and only through relentless criticism from secular thinkers.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“It is clear, then, that religion - specifically the Judeo-Christian religion - has done virtually nothing, in two thousand years, to foster social, political, intellectual, and cultural equality between men and women, and in fact has done everything it possibly could to stand in the way of it. What is more important to note is that the Bible (a divinely inspired text, in the minds of its believers) sanctions this inequality emphatically and repeatedly, and every departure by the religious from its dictates on these issues is a departure from Judeo-Christian belief itself. One cannot be a religious Jew or a Christian and believe in equal rights for women.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“The remarks I have already quoted make abundantly clear how abject is Price's adherence to the democratic fallacy - i.e., the notion that what "millions" of people believe must be true, regardless of their overall intelligence or of how they came by the belief. It is a leitmotif in Price's work: "the majority opinion of Homo sapiens throughout our known history is worth, at a minimum, initial respect" (LM 26). I regret to say that the long history of almost universal human folly and error does not incline me to share Price's naive confidence on this point. Given that (to choose only one example among many) 47 percent of the American public believes that human beings were created, pretty much in their present form, a few thousand years ago - an opinion from which Price himself boldly dissents, actually acknowledging that the emergence of the human species may date to as early as four million years ago (PG 9) - Price's confidence in the intelligence of the masses does not appear warranted. And yet, the final sentence of Letter to a Man in the Fire repeats the dogma once again: "the proportional number of Homo sapiens who doubt the existence of a conscious Creator - the source of all good if nothing more - is likely no greater than it's ever been" (LM 108). This is fallacious on three separate grounds: first, the notion that truth is determined by a vote of the majority; second, the fact that outside of the pious United States, and especially in Europe, both the number and the proportion of those who call themselves atheists or agnostics has indeed risen markedly in the last hundred years; and third, the plain fact that during the past two centuries the intellectual elite (i.e., those who actually have some claim to expertise on matters of religion, philosophy, and science) have indeed become overwhelmingly skeptical in regard to the existence of a "conscious Creator.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“Toward the end Buckley becomes both a trifle paranoid and contradictory. He is so worried that the collectivist policies recommended by the faculty will be widely embraced that they will end up bankrupting the wealthy alumni of the college, resulting in "the impoverishment of every imaginable financial supporter of Yale, except the government" (G 171). The last time I checked-fifty years after Buckley's screed, and when many of the abhorred "collectivist" policies had been embraced as a matter of routine economic policy by the American government-Yale was still financially well endowed.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“Lewis seems to fancy that since a given atom is "irrational" (M 29) then no conglomeration of atoms could ever produce rationality. But by this argument no conglomeration of atoms could produce anything. A given atom of a rabbit is not itself a rabbit, so, on Lewis's reasoning, no conglomeration of such atoms could ever produce a rabbit.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“It would not seem necessary to conduct any detailed dissection of Lewis's theology, for the job has already been done by John Beversluis, who in C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (1985) has keenly, pungently, but entirely without malice and rancor knocked down every pillar of Lewis's defenses of God, Jesus, and Christianity. (Richard H. Purtill's sorry attempt at rebutting Beversluis only proves that Lewis's advocates are, on the whole, even less worthy of consideration than he was himself.) Beversluis exposes the manifold fallacies of Lewis's mode of argumentation: question-begging, false dichotomies, sheer ignorance of philosophical complexities, rhetorical sleight of hand, and much more. Perhaps his most frequent error is the enunciation of his opponents' views in a highly superficial and even misleading manner, to the point that they become caricatures of the positions he is attempting to refute. As Beversluis notes: "His tendency is to rush into battle, misrepresent the opposition, and then demolish it. The demolition is often swift and the victory decisive, but the view refuted is seldom a position anyone actually holds." One gains the strong impression that Lewis was simply unwilling, or perhaps even afraid, to deal forthrightly with views he disagreed with. It would be surprising to find someone of his general (but not philosophical) intelligence making such crude and grotesque errors in reasoning, were it not that he manifestly considered his opponents not merely factually wrong but morally repugnant and even dangerous, so that he set about attacking them with every weapon available, legitimate or otherwise.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“A vague notion has developed that it is bad form to criticize someone's religion, and, by extension, religion in general. To be sure, those well informed in history can only look with bemused horror at how the devotees of one religion, for hundreds or thousands of years, persecuted the devotees of other religions, or even "heretics" within their own religion; and it certainly does seem absurd nowadays to engage in this kind of disputation, especially given that one religion is no more likely to be true than another. We are in an age of "toleration" and ecumenicalism-a somewhat paradoxical development, at least in the West, given that the scriptures of each of the major religions of Europe and the Middle East (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) clearly and unequivocally declares that it and it alone possesses the truth about God and the universe. But surely it is still a valid procedure to assess the truth-claims of any given religion or all religions, and to determine whether their scriptures do or do not provide accurate information about human beings, human society, or the universe at large. Religions themselves have craftily put forth this hands-off principle precisely in order to shield themselves from scrutiny by pestiferous critics. Listen again to H. L. Mencken:

... even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge....
The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us.

”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“And when, in The Everlasting Man, Chesterton seeks to refute evolution by the following piece of idiocy-"Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else" (E 156) -one begins to sense the truth of H. L. Mencken's harsh remark, written at exactly this time, that hostility to the theory of evolution and other scientific doctrines is the result of pure ignorance:

The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought. It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or to the city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci. But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.

”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“What has clearly happened in the case of many otherwise intelligent people, is that childhood crippling of their brains and emotions in favor of some dogmatic religion has for all practical purposes made their theistic views impervious to logical analysis. It is an area they simply will not investigate objectively or impartially, because it has become so deeply fused with their entire self-image that it is beyond their psychological powers to question it. My own view is that this infantile brainwashing is one of the great crimes against humanity and it has been practiced for countless millennia (well before the advent of organized religion) and continues to be practiced to this day. Religious leaders would no doubt react with horror at the recommendation that children actually be allowed to make up their own minds about the adoption of a given religion, or any religion at all, until they are intellectually and emotionally ready to do so, without the prejudicial influence of parents, clerics, and the society at large. (No exception need be made for communist societies, for in such societies the people are brainwashed into atheism just as vigorously-and perniciously-as people in other societies are brainwashed into theism.) H. P. Lovecraft laid bare the matter long ago:

We all know that any emotional bias-irrespective of truth or falsity-can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value regarding the real "is-or-isn'tness" of things. Only the exceptional individual reared in the nineteenth century or before has any chance of holding any genuine opinion of value regarding the universe-except by a slow and painful process of courageous disillusionment. If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honorable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasihypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.

”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong