Brad Warner's "There Is No God and He Is Always With You": Book Review

I've enjoyed the series of engaging books by Brad Warner joining his Zen practice to his life and music. He writes naturally, in a conversational style, and roams widely in his speculations. His new book takes on the God question. He adapts "inmo" from his mentor Dogen for the title "There Is No God and He Is Always With You." Typically gnomic, the kind of challenge Warner likes taking up.

He makes intriguing connections. Stoner rock, punk, his Japanese work experience, his battles with facing a fatal disease that runs in his family all inform his reflections. Like his other works, this book does feel like a series of extended blog entries or reflections more than a coherent whole, and the informal approach may frustrate academic types of readers. But as in comparing the Buddhist concept of being reborn over eons to the Norse one of Ragnorok, he hits on a few memorable insights overall.

On p. 66, he opines that God exists because we ask questions of him. On p. 77, he cites a song by Om, "Meditation is the practice of death" to remind us of our mortality. I confess that Warner has more fortitude than me or the friend he mentions who stays awake at night fearing self-annihilation. But Warner has always championed a tough-it-out on the cushion method to staring down the truth.

He nods to others who support his own search. Christopher Hitchens' typically provocative statement that even if Jesus was born to a virgin, performed miracles, and rose from the dead, still this track record would not prove to Hitchens that "what Jesus said was valid" (129) fits well as Warner shows with Dogen's skepticism about supernatural powers. While Warner validates his form of Soto Zen, he leaves open the doubts that occupy many of us who may be less convinced by proclamations of any who deem themselves holy. As he reminds us on p. 175, God is "a dangerous word" to bandy about.

Therefore while I may not be as convinced as Warner about the usefulness of adapting this loaded word within a Buddhist framework, he does encourage one to examine the Big Questions. And that, combined with his commonsense style and accessible musings, makes for another worthwhile book, as Warner deals with middle-age, restlessness, and the continual quest that beckons for the thoughtful, contemporary seeker. It's loose and casual, but it also sums up serious, dogged inquiries.
(Amazon US 1/5/17)

Christopher Hitchens' "The Portable Atheist": Book Review

As many reviews on Amazon precede mine, I will offer a sample of the places I found most engaging. Christopher Hitchens received plaudits from some and suspicion from others, even fellow travelers, for what seemed in the wake of his "god Is Not Great" bestseller a cash-in with not as much editing of the inclusions as a rapid assemblage. Too many of the 47 excerpts drag on; a careful compiler would have excised portions and given overviews, while translating passages from other languages and footnoting arcane references as so much material is drawn from sources long ago.

His introduction, on the other hand, pleases. It's a joy to read Hitchens, whether you agree with him or not. Early on his contrast between god-like cats and dogs who treat us like gods (15) establishes his point memorably. His frank question why "semi-stupified peasants in desert regions" receive revelations of their Creator vs. those among the rest of mankind resounds. (18) His humility that whether innate or inexplicable, we can still laugh at our folly of invention humbles us against such faith-claims. (25) As he cites his friend Richard Dawkins, we are all atheists of some sort, for who among us still worships Jupiter? (20) Hitchens thunders against theocracy as the original totalitarianism, the tyranny exerted against anti-theists who take on a more active stance of opposition against the despots determined still alive among us who exact punishment against thought-crime. (23)
Hitchens pithily and typically sums up the struggle: "the main enemy we face is 'faith-based.'" (29)

Among the entries, I perked up with Thomas Hobbes' examination of the four causes for the "natural seed" of religion. (45) David Hume's extended foray into the contradictory elements of a deity demanding both praise and terror serves as an early examination of the force that compels our fealty. (61) Then the poet Shelley tackles both the argument by design (89), and the fact that even two centuries ago, "men of genius and science" championed atheism (94) attests to this venerable legacy.

Leslie Stephens' name may be less familiar than the three mentioned above, but he responds to Cardinal Newman's appeal to conscience for belief in God with the plain admission that such an appeal "has no force for anyone who, like most men, does not share his intuitions." (155) Anatole France wittily captures the conundrum at Lourdes, full of crutches "in token of a cure." His friend points "to these trophies of the sick-room and hospital ward" to whisper: "One wooden leg would be more to the point." (168) Emma Goldman reasons how in every age, God has been forced to adopt himself to human affairs, a petty meddler rather than an eternal, awesome force for goodness. (186)

Bertrand Russell earns his allotted span in this anthology. He encourages the dogmatic reader to read papers of opposing views, good advice still. "If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason to think as you do. (275) Carl Sagan wonders logically why God is so visible in the biblical world while so obscure in ours. (318) Dawkins conjures up Mt .Improbable, where the seeker can climb by a gentler back slope towards rational discovery rather than a leap up the front precipice, as a way towards clarity. (387)

Victor Stenger's chapter 37 on cosmic evidence is lengthy but rewarding, as he dismantles arguments. A zero energy universe, rather than a miracle, is exactly its "mean energy density" for one appearing "from an initial state of zero energy, within a small quantum uncertainty" initially necessary. (314) While John Updike's rambling conversation in his novel Roger's Version puzzled me at first, the explanation of how quantum fluctuations or tunnels via Higgs Bosons sparked what became time and space prepared the way helpfully for the learned astronomical discussions by scientists in later pages.

Ibn Warraq's in-depth exegeses from Why I Am Not a Muslim similarly fill out a need here to get away from a steady attack on the Jewish and Christian versions of an Almighty. He also debates the principle within Islam of supersession, a series of revelations urging departure from earlier forms of belief to higher and then single ones. "If there is a natural evolution from polytheism to monotheism, then is there not a natural development from monotheism to atheism? is monotheism doomed to be superseded by a higher form of belief, that is, atheism--via agnosticism, perhaps?" (396) Wise words.

H.L. Mencken, for those contemplating pagan or pantheistic retreats, lists outmoded powers above and below to illustrate the dead voices of forgotten or outmoded forces once called upon by millions of our ancestors. Michael Shermer's discussion of the legend of the Wandering Jew seems superfluous, but Sam Harris' "In the Shadow of God" states a fundamental warning. "Whenever a man imagines that he need only believe the truth of a proposition, without evidence--that unbelievers will go to hell, that Jews drink the blood of infants--he becomes capable of anything." (457) A twist on the Grand Inquisitor of The Brothers Karamazov (the latter tale not here) as to God and morality?

Back to Dawkins, he notes how the Bible fails as a "truly independent guide to moral conduct," serving instead as a "Rorshach test" where people pick out what reflects their own morals and interests. (341) The God in this volume fails, he adds, to ultimately care about his creation. (336) Steven Weinberg seconds this. "But the God of birds and trees would have to be also the God of birth defects and cancer." (372) Salman Rushdie reflects: "Only the stories of 'dead' religions can be appreciated for their beauty. Living religions require much more of you." (381) A.C. Grayling denies that an atheist should label him or herself as one. "The term already sells a pass to theists, because it invites debate on their ground. A more appropriate term is 'naturalist,' denoting one who takes it that the universe is a natural realm, governed by nature's laws." (475) This spins back to Hitchens' start.

That is, he broadens the other contested term. "Religion is, after all, more than the belief in a supreme being. It is the cult of that supreme being and the belief that his or her wishes have been made known or can be determined." (loc. 393) This may be reductionist for scholars of the philosophy of religion. I aver so, but Hitchens tries to focus on the disputes among atheists over an "intervening" divinity. Men and women will continue, he avers, to create such. "We are unlikely to cease making gods or inventing ceremonies to please them for as long as we are afraid of death, or of the dark, and for as long as we persist in self-centeredness." (loc. 385) One last reminder, from the introduction again. "If anything proves that religion is not just man-made but masculine-made, it is the incessant repetition of rules and taboos governing the sexual life." (loc, 418) Hitchens, for all the scattered evidence marshaled here untidely at times against the presence of such a querulous God, endures as a presence. (Amazon US 1/5/17)

John C. Wathey's "The Illusion of God's Presence": Book Review

 

This computational biologist crunches the data to investigate why humans "are prone to the feel the illusion of God's presence". Examining evolutionary theory, John C. Wathey looks at the hard-wiring that underlies spiritual and religious emotions. He explains that his sequel will tackle mystical experience, while this first volume disenchants readers who may be caught up in unverifiable beliefs, and who may assume that the call of the ineffable or intangible belongs only to humans in nature. 

Instead, "belief appears to be a completely natural, neurobiological phenomenon". Wathey compares religion to language as a cultural universal, to which our make-up predisposes us, and one that our cultural exposure shapes into a particular expression of our faith. This may or may not be a personal God. But, Wathey confronts the problem at the heart of such a being in the Western monotheistic tradition, as well as in certain Hindu sects. Cruel judge or loving presence, the Almighty in this dual manner rules over 80% of the world's faithful.

In his phrase, Wathey grabs the elephant in the room by his tusks. He draws from his own experience for a religious encounter, according to his definition, which happened to him as an adult and as a non-believer. Devoid of spiritual content, this event nonetheless matched the parameters for an otherworldly intrusion. This puzzle drove him, raised Presbyterian, to write The Illusion of God's Presence. He wonders why so many naturalistic definitions of faith avoid accounting for the believer's subjective experience.

He labels such a situation as a by-product of "a human neo-natal survival instinct" built on an "infant's innate neural model of its mother". Born with a "circuitry" as a bond and as dependence, the adult version normally lies dormant. But, under stress, this innate model triggers religious belief through religious experience. A certainty that God exists as a presence is felt. Prayer, linguistically, replaces an infant's cry for this comforting maternal being. Humans relate this to their previous cultural model of a spiritual deity. This may account for the persistence of the feminine in so many spiritual conceptions, sexual obsessions, compulsions to pray, and the tilt of women to believe more.

Basing his concepts on biology, sea turtles, gulls, or rhesus monkeys (to name a few), Wathey offers precedents for innate cognition. Our conceptions of God may be supernormal stimuli which fill a God-shaped vacuum (adapting Francis Collins' metaphor) with emotion and cognition. Wathey reckons that God's presence as humans sense it is "largely innate" on a neural basis. The detail as Wathey's argument continues may overwhelm the less biologically fascinated among readers, but the documentation and the evidence, sifted thoughtfully, should enable audiences to support the author.

Wathey advances beyond Freudian theories to critique a dual personality model of a God, who as Roger Finke and Rodney Stark determine, operates successfully within a religious organization by a theology "that can comfort souls and motivate sacrifice". He inserts testimony from a follower and survivor of Jim Jones' People's Temple as a powerful cautionary tale about the dangers of credulity. 

Most of this book investigates, however, not the social but the neural root of the biological causes nurturing religious beliefs. That comfort of a personal caregiver clashes with the demands by a formalized authority. Wathey argues in Part Two that a two-dimensional approach explains why a religious or spiritual emotion persists. Cognitive theories are also biologically based, but only this dogged dual-root system delves deeper, he asserts.

In the last third of this narrative, Wathey shifts from the "why" to the "how", as neuroscience begins to include behavioral, psychometric, and twin studies. Wathey integrates these to start to scrutinize the "sensation of God's presence". Wathey avers that this may be an "accidental consequence" of evolution. A "trick of the brain" may endure in human adults, that another being exists, who may bring us love and comfort. For many grown-ups, religious emotion resembles addiction, while certainty without proof characterizes faith. For "in the light of biology, God is a spiritual phantom rather than a supernatural spirit". Born with a longing for this being, many humans craft this desire into a being. Those who believe tend to increase their offspring and pairing with mates similarly inclined reinforces mutual trust as adherents of a particular cultural manifestation of this "universal" formulation. Wathey left this reviewer wanting more, but after all, a second book is in the works.

Concluding, Wathey welcomes personal implications. He particularly urges his readers who have become uncertain about their own faith to face these scientific findings bravely. He examines mind-body dualism, the hope of immortality, and our duty to care for our earth. Rather than theological bickering or "irrelevant moral imperatives", Wathey reminds us of our humanism and our hubris. "We have eaten of the tree of knowledge, and no God had to cast us out of our earthly paradise as punishment. We are trashing it ourselves." Leaving behind fear or hope in the imaginary, John C. Wathey in this erudite, engaging study guides readers towards a secular ethics aimed at reducing our numbers and easing our impact upon "the web of life that is our real creator". (New York Journal of Books 1-11-16; excerpt 2-5-16 via Salon on "God is Not a Prude".)

Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age": Book Review

The first half of this massive 2007 study by a Canadian philosopher has appeared as Gifford Lectures, the prestigious Scottish series which since 1888 has featured leading thinkers discussing "natural theology." In the third and fourth paragraphs of his preface, Taylor admits the sketchiness of much of what follows, and his determination nonetheless to map out a vast intellectual terrain, in hopes others will fill in the blanks. While the results may frustrate those who find his habitual enumeration and his tendency to go two steps forward and one step at least back, as he zig-zags across the past five centuries, and while the prose leaves one wishing for the grace of his predecessor at the Lectures, William James, it nonetheless represents a formidable achievement that kept me thinking, annotating, and reacting.

As Taylor does often, one must sum up his argument by his own numbers.
David Ewart paraphrases Taylor's three stages of secularism thus:

1. "The first stage is characterized by the withdrawal of the religious world-view from the public sphere. This is the result of much more than just the rise of scientific world-view. This is the disenchantment of the cosmos. Secularism is the move from the enchanted reality to the de-enchanted reality - this freed science to follow its own trajectory. In an enchanted worldview science, politics and religion all shared the same world view. When that enchanted world-view disappeared science became free to follow its own rationale.
2. The second stage is seen in the decline in personal religious practice and commitment. This is a individual's withdrawal from the community. People shift the source of meaning away from external 'eternal' sources to more personal choices.
3. The third stage is the most recent development, which has caused a fragmentation of our ideas of social order. This is the shift in the culture away from assuming Religious Faith is the norm, or the default expectation of how to live your life. Faith is now one option among many. This is society living in a universe which has no central point around which it revolves."                 

Some of this, of course, is familiar. Max Weber's theory of "disenchantment" as driving secularism inspires Taylor's first parts of his schema. But he denies "subtraction theory" as the fullest explanation for why people don't believe like they used to. Simply saying religion retreated as science advanced leaves us wondering about the contested turf, for the same pre-modern landscape did not exist, for two worldviews to fight over. Instead, since 1500 or so, Taylor accounts in part three of his stages for the key difference making his analysis fresh. He shows how a "buffered" sensibility in modern people supplanted the "porous" reception of impacts and influences which characterized our forebears. They saw themselves as open to the spirits for better and worse; the divine bulwark of intercession and protection helped people withstand trouble and attain reward. A "buffered" identity keeps us at a distance; we can no longer be "naive," whether believers or skeptics, in a system where the "cosmos" ordered by God or gods becomes a "universe" which includes us, but removes most contemporary adherents from the nearby intercession and interference of an intimate divine presence.

This hefty narrative stumbles along. Taylor keeps glancing ahead and then looking back as he tries to progress. He does not translate all of the French and German he cites. Some thinkers or scholars are not credited except by surnames. Taylor presumes erudition on his audience's part, so academic references may lack context or introduction. Quotes may not be integrated or identified clearly. Endnotes are uneven: they can provide valuable insight, or they can be terse and formulaic; the reader of the text proper, from that alone, may have no idea which without checking out each enumeration. Sharper editing would have improved this. This thesis did not need a hesitant, repetitive elaboration.

However, it gets easier halfway in. The Victorian doubters (even before Darwin, and this is Taylor's point proven, for it was not as if one day evolution shoved aside faith for believers) such as Carlyle, Arnold, and his niece, novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward (the last in a novel about a clergyman's unease with his creed and his replacement of a messianic Jesus-as-God with an ethical figure as a model) emerged on behalf of those unable to countenance childlike faith. This era's gradual slip, starting with these intellectuals, from confidence in religion to grudging or fuller conviction in modernism means that the Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment and Romanticism, and political- economic changes in the "North Atlantic" (his term for "the West") had to precede "science" as we know it. That transition and reorientation sets us in a universe edging on darkness, rather than an ordered cosmos full of light.

The conditions for "human flourishing" alter any modern believer or non-believer's reception of the religious messages we inherit. Taylor in his later chapters considers the difficulties of the therapeutic (human-potential movement, therapy, transformation from within) and transgressive (anti-humanist, Nietzschean, revolutionary) responses to religious hegemony, as neither to him satisfy the yearning. This inner longing persists no matter if the conditions for religion fade, and while Taylor never appears to question his own Catholicism or the reality of the Incarnation, he examines how the opposite, an "excarnation," has weakened the ability of many believers or skeptics to handle the needs of the body, from which we have become detached, dismissive, or destructive. He looks with caution at regarding only what Jesus taught and not what Christ did, and while Taylor's faith persists a priori, I would have liked the professor's insight into why this is so for him; this appears to limit the applicability of his lessons to non-Christians. Whatever one's identity, Taylor locates the loss of the "equilibrium" most of us need between fervor and denial; if not religion as we've known it, he reckons desire for the transcendent beyond existential limits or hedonistic immersion may endure.

He suggests that poetry, as in Jeffers, Hopkins, or Péguy, might heal the divided contemporary consciousness. He applauds church reform, but he also sympathizes with those who find, whether they themselves believe, in a weaker cultural impact for this force. Younger people are losing "some of the great languages of transcendance," and "massive unlearning is taking place" in consumerism.

In conclusion, neither "exclusive humanism" nor the Nietzschean revolt against restrictions convince Taylor. His drifting final section passes intriguing terrain. Part 5:17 has a great survey of how Christianity incorporated violence into its purportedly peaceful preaching, and death and sexuality earn attention in this chapter. But that ends not with a bang but some whispers about two stories we share. "Intellectual Deviation" tracks our cultural evolution away from medieval religious conformity imposed by a clerical elite and then upon a post-1500 community freed from "priestcraft" but a regimen insisting on communal piety, into "the rise of a culturally hegemonic notion of a closed immanent order". "Reform Master Narrative" required all to be 100% Christian, but this discipline discouraged many. The elite looked to Providential Deism as a halfway point to a mechanical model that broke away from the need for a Creator, and by the Victorians, this began to spread into the middle classes. While many adhere to fundamentalism and obedience today (an aspect under-examined in what is admittedly a rambling study and one far too long as it is), Taylor combines the theoretical ID with the RMN mass phenomenon explanations as two influences making up the "social imaginary" we all agree has replaced in the North Atlantic civilization the state-clerical polity. This prepared the way for Darwin (Marx and Freud are barely mentioned!) and the massive shifts in contemporary mindsets. Out of this two-track path, we emerge. So, we can "explain religion today."

(The above appeared with my reduced summation of the Ewart enumeration at Amazon US 1-2-15.) P.S. The Divine Conspiracy provides a pdf (search at the site) of Taylor's introduction and of Chapter 10 "The Expanding Universe of Unbelief."

Lex Bayer + John Migdor's "Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart": Book Review

If you don't believe in God or gods, what then? Stanford humanist chaplain Migdor and his colleague, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Lex Bayer, offer a reasonable, calmly argued, and philosophically constructed set of Ten "Non-commandments" aimed to guide the growing numbers of non-believers along a straightforward path.

The first five emerge from atheist tenets based on observable reality to distinguish truth from false claims. Data and evidence derive from what can be tested and what is open to verification, correction, rejection, or acceptance. Basically and unsurprisingly, the authors establish that truth-claims about divine existence fail to explain why one manifestation is to be proven among myriad competitors past and present, and they offer a stimulating analogy to a "religious lottery" (50). A secular spin on Pascal's wager, this game of chance means no believer in this life can be sure that his or her choice will "pay off" as opposed to competing versions of a deity or gods. Religion is redefined as a "set of starting assumptions" rather than truth-claims able to be verified. God, the authors assert, is an assumption rather than a belief. (53) "Beliefs are simply inserted into a space left empty by a lack of effort." (136) Strong words in a generally genial study. However, Bayer and Migdor roll out a logical response that confirms that belief in an unseen presence with the names we are most familiar with is no different than that which insists elves or Thor or Babalú must exist.

There may endure a "high level of confidence" among atheists (whom they align more or less with humanists and agnostics early on if with some slight delineation) that God may not exist. But the writers also agree with Richard Dawkins' 6.9 (who ranks himself on his scale, 7 as total non-belief) that the odds are stacked against divine existence. Still, logically total certainty can never be claimed.

The second half of this brief book articulates the humanist comfort gained when one acts to increase the well-being and happiness of others, and so ensures more contentment for one's self. No facile reduction to Utilitarianism, yet this asserts a thoughtful consideration of how we may treat each other better. I found the tone shift here, as a more relaxed, expansive attitude appeared to replace the rigor of the preceding section. I was not sure if one author took charge of one part more than the other, or if the subject matter created its own mood, but it was noticeable from the start of the ethical portion.

Overall, this is very readable. I expected a refutation of the classic ontological arguments of Anselm, the teleological and cosmological ones of Aquinas, the argument from design by Paley. But no trace of these terms, or even Primum Mobile or uncaused cause, watchmakers or a 747 in a junkyard can be found. So, this may fit the needs as the authors encourage of more of a self-study book for those needing reflection and direction towards a more articulate type of non-belief. Two pages are included so you can make up your own tenets to mull over, for in this process, the authors find their own rationales have been tested and made stronger. I like the conversations they have with each other that show how one person's range of subjective views build up one's moral standards. They refuse any universal objective set of morals can be defined. I wish more depth had been given to the common challenges to this, and in the "Common Religious Objections" to some of the venerable theorems for God's existence. For, these will be faced by nearly anyone tackling this in conversation or debate with Christian believers. Only one medieval thinker is mentioned. Cleverly, Ockham's Razor is applied to advance the logical preference for the simplest explanation for what we observe, God-free.

Bayer and Migdor favor reasonable interactions, to strengthen community, and a just, rational society. They turn to the case of the Boston bomber who hid under a boat and wrote on its hull a literally "unintelligible" scrawl justifying in the name of Allah the immoral action perpetuated by "heinous acts" such as the bombers carried out. (117) This haunting comparison reminds readers of the irrational motives which continue to attempt to rally people in a supposedly advanced century to take on outmoded and illogical rationales to perpetrate violence upon those outside their own belief system. Such fanatics chant the name of one of the many competing versions of God or gods which Migdor and Bayer seek to prove as false. (Amazon US 12-11-14; Vote for beliefs; author's website)

Pillar of Fire

Two headlines shared last Sunday's New York Times' front page. On the left, the feature: "Brooklyn Fire Kills 7 Children, Worst Toll in City Since 2007." The subheading: "Orthodox Family's Sabbath Hot Plate Cited." On the right, with a giant snapshot of a beaming "slightly built teenager with an easy smile" it documented "From Minneapolis to ISIS" as it told of a son of Somalians who chose "a Young American's Path to Jihad, and to Syria." I considered both, signs of what faith does to people.

The story of the Sassoon family, the father a Sephardic immigrant from Israel who emigrated to join his wife's New Jersey family, is sad. The mother and one daughter escaped, but their children and siblings perished. The father, at a religious conference, did not therefore hear of their fate until after Shabbos ended. Many neighbors or friends also had no knowledge until after their observance ended.

A blech, or tin plate, is often placed on top of a range to keep food warm. In the 90-year-old house, this caught fire in the kitchen, and then spread via the stairwell up to trap the family above. A "pillar of flame," firefighters concluded, shot up to be a manifestation of death, for a young, devout family.

Abid Nur's story, as he changed from shooting hoops to posing in the desert with a Kalishnakov, demonstrates another form of devotion to a desert religion's ancient code. He started to post threats of doom on social media, and then suddenly sneaked off, after perusing the 50-page online guide to jihad the Islamic States disseminates as to how to throw off Turkish border guards and prepare citified jihadists. Nur got some supplies, such as Nikes, at the local mall before going off to join the enemies of the West. His partner was caught, and the FBI plans to use him to dissuade other youths.

I thought of the "pillar of flame" and remembered another way fire works. On the stove, at the tip of a rifle, the power of the orange burst can kill as well as comfort, blast as much as it warms or heats a meal to keep the family content and happy, not wanting to eat a day-old plate of tepid fare. In Exodus, the divine presence marks the way for the Hebrews with a cloud by day and fire by night. The Wiki entry labels this as theophany--how God shows to us. The Sassoons and Nur (the surname is associated with a wealthy Iraqi business family, surely one that has very few remaining in that Islamic nation as ISIS continues ethnic cleansing; the latter name means "light" in Arabic) both seek that force. They craved its revelation, one by leaving America to go back to a holy land, the other by leaving the hallowed and contested desert to come to a big city. Which found what they sought?

John Calder's "The Theology of Samuel Beckett": Book Review

As Beckett's British publisher, John Calder has much in common with his friend: a despair at human folly, disgust at our stupidity, and dismay at the God who won't go away despite our diligent efforts to flee or fight Him. Expanding his argument from The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett (2001), Calder refuses to reduce Beckett to an existentialist paragon, but for Calder, Beckett comes close: he's 99% of the way there. The difference lies in "perhaps"; that qualifier allows Beckett's persistent dismissal of the divine to keep its slight saving grace. For, Calder insists, one's loss of faith need not produce a loss of interest in God. Beckett shows us this obsession by his quest.

Pursuing this theme throughout Beckett's life and works, this very short study relies on familiarity with many decades of his oeuvre. Often, Calder skims over the texts themselves, assuming we can recall the actual scenes and quotes as well as he does. While aimed at those already engrossed in Beckett, and convinced that his and his subject's cold eye cast on his fellow humans and their purported Creator will be shared by their audience, Calder for all his fulminations against American triumphalism, religious fundamentalism, and capitalist (or socialist) indifference to environmentalism remains an accessible, if acerbic, guide to the highlights of Beckett's later work. Calder shifts his previous book's scope forward to Beckett's post-1960 period.

Analogous to Beethoven's career, Beckett, in Calder's model, shakes free of a dominant predecessor. He leaves behind imitation, fear, and anguish, to enter a spiritual stage that elevates the secular genius and liberates one's self. As Mozart, so for Joyce: the two B's had to outlive their mentors and forebears long enough to hear their own voices, and let them sing in works that still daunt today's audiences. Calder places both talents within a stoic, defiant stance against conformity and creators.

He begins by balancing Beckett in a dualistic stance, between "a nostalgic belief and the rejection of belief". After his marginalized early poetry and fiction, his harrowing period working for the French Resistance, and his fame after the prose trilogy and Waiting for Godot, Beckett drew the attention of academics whom Calder figures had exhausted the texts of Joyce. Leaving behind death and afterlife as explored in his works "in terms of childhood devotions", Beckett "invented his own afterlife in imagination". What this "agno-atheist" conjures up, for Calder, reveals Beckett's characteristic concerns revealed or evaded by ambiguity, defiance, resignation, hope, austerity, and pessimism.

While Calder seeks to explicate how Beckett channels his later concerns into his novella Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) and his prose piece Worstward Ho (1983), the depths of these ambiguous works, despite Calder's elucidation, remain occluded. He does not dredge these up out of their murky substrates to scrape off all their muck, but they dazzle him. The first has God destroy His creation all over again. The second plumbs evolution into dim eternity. Calder regards these overlooked texts with awe, chastising professors for ignoring them. One delves into creation's elimination, as God reverses His deeds; the other suggests Gnostic malevolence. The long shadow of Irish reaction to "dark" visions, Calder reasons, shrouded even later texts within themselves, as their creator refused full revelation.

God-like, Beckett in Calder's view retreats as did God in Genesis. Beckett's humor recedes, too, making these later, astringent writings less popular among academics. While from my own published research into the purgatorial and into the Buddhist traditions drawn upon by Beckett (enriched by the publication of his correspondence the past few years, which Calder draws upon now and then), the amount of direct gleanings seems slim, this reviewer agrees that Beckett clouded in suggestion many of his references. Reminding me of Shakespeare, ambiguity permeates Beckett's works, which evade facile explication. Calder in turn nods to not only the usual influences such as Dante's settings and Schopenhauer's indifferent but world-generating will here, but in passing (much less than the publisher's blurb lets on) to Milton and to Darwin. More research needs to be done to tease out these connections. Calder assumes nearly no scholars have applied religious contexts to Beckett, but again from my experience, this appears easily refutable from a fair scan of the voluminous concentration given over to the study of Beckett, who seems now to rival his predecessor Joyce in this regard.

Calder convinces, however, that Beckett applies Schopenhauer's ideal of a purposeless, amoral will unconsciously forcing all towards its emergence. Uncredited here, Thomas Hardy's musings of a similar generation of the universe by a dumb vegetable come to my mind. In terms of a non-theistic conception of how this slow, grumbling universe may rumble forth without a Creator, while Calder repeats his 2001 assertion that Murphy (1938) shows many Buddhist themes at work, he does not support this with any sustained examples from it. Beckett's recently published letters fail for me to provide any direct backup for this period as revealing specific Buddhist contexts for that novel.

Rather, his nod to Schopenhauer appears a likelier inspiration, for through that German philosopher in the early nineteenth century, a prototype of quasi-Buddhist concepts filtered into Europe, if in advance of scholarship that placed Buddhism more firmly in its proper setting. All the same, speaking of origins, as Calder reminds us, Beckett's pre-1950 fiction had not shaken off the impacts of his bourgeois Irish Protestant upbringing. His reluctance to do this had to wait until after his mother's death. Calder pulls out the ghostly presences she and others left in Beckett's mid-century writings. Alluding to his own conversations with Beckett, Calder implies this maturity was long delayed.

That freedom came late. Even in Beckett's long life, there was not much time for this to bear fruit. Calder harps upon the exigencies of any human's short span, and he laments the increasing fragmentation of knowledge in an Internet era enabling easier plagiarism, and less originality. His constant theme, one Calder emphasizes Beckett embodies, is the "enclosing of the enquiring mind in a small space". The loss of faith may be accepted logically, but not emotionally. In reticence, Beckett countered this lack with generosity and kindness in personal and often anonymous actions. Calder laments his friend's capitulation to coma and slow decline before his 1989 death, but Calder ends this thoughtful monograph affirming Beckett's affinity with Beethoven, aspiring toward a secular heaven. (PopMatters 4-10-14)

Peter Watson's "The Age of Atheists: Book Review

If neither science nor religion suffices, how do we get past our present impasse? Do we lament our lack of progress, or welcome possibility? Seven years to the day, I finished this after the same author's "Ideas: A History of Thought from Fire to Freud."  Both hefty works share this veteran journalist and now intellectual historian at Cambridge's dogged devotion to rational thinking over supposition, and the view, as his 2006 book concluded, that our human perspective is better suited to watching our world pass by and act out as if we peer at a zoo rather than a monastery. He acknowledges the scientific mission to dissect and pin down all that we observe, yet he nods to the atavistic tendency embedded within many of us to yearn for transcendence. That impulse, his new book agrees, will not fade soon, but the twentieth century charted here (although starting with Nietzsche towards the end of the nineteenth) celebrates the triumph of evolution, the breakthroughs in physics, the insights of psychology, and the wisdom of philosophy, art, literature, and communal engagement which enrich our current times and allow us so much liberty.

"Ideas" took me a month of evenings to study, given its 740 pages and 36 topical chapters, book-ended by a substantial introduction and conclusion, to chart the multi-millennial span of civilized endeavor. By contrast, I fairly raced through about 540 pages of the present book, which I highlighted (on a Kindle advanced copy, which had its flaws in format) in eighty-five instances that show my engagement with its provocative exchanges, cover roughly 125 years; Watson has also written (unread by me) "The Modern Mind" (2001) about the twentieth century, so I wondered how much of that third big book overlapped with "The Age of Atheists."

"Ideas" anticipates many of the newest book's themes. Progress continues despite those who fear it. The brain battles those who fear it. Meaning beckons but floats out of our grasp. Science discovers more only to ponder ultimate questions to pursue. Unsurprisingly, William James' pragmatism and Max Weber's sociology return, prominently among the hundreds of thinkers summarized and paraphrased here. That is both Watson's skill and this book's necessary limitation: he quotes and cites nimbly, making recondite concepts accessible. Yet, this popular touch and the breadth required to survey so much as an historian with his own biases and predilections may leave the specialized reader frustrated that his or her pet theory or favorite thinker suffered by its few pages meted out per topic.

That caveat addressed, an inevitable result of a one-volume book able to be held in two hands, this presentation conveys a firmly Western-centered, by-now familiar point-of-view. Nietzsche remains its driving force, and his fervent denial of a divine presence outside of the alienated, defiant human imagination reverberates through mavericks as diverse as Lenin and Joyce. Watson recognizes that German iconoclast's insanity, even as he roots for this raw challenge to Christian hegemony which encouraged his subjects, American and European rebels who rejected God and welcomed inquiry.

Watson's investigation roams as widely as one expects for an historian tracking modernity's slow march away from credulity and comfort found in the ethereal or emotional, to where more and more of us wind up today, in the post-modern predicament of a worldview where neither cold science nor warm faith eases the loss of grand meaning or ultimate purpose which many contemporaries lament. 
He addresses, as an early example of his wide-ranging bent, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart's assertion that charts richer nations' secularization offset by declining birthrates, whereas poorer nations' perpetuation of belief-based systems as a solace for suffering and privation leads to a more populated humanity with "existential insecurity" which overall is becoming more, not less, religious.

Secular proponents, therefore, must contend with sociological explanations for belief, as well as psychological ones. Atheism, Watson finds, may be in the ascendent among the cohort he supports, but a growing sense among developed nations and educated societies of pervasive personal and social disenchantment reveals that consumerism cannot assuage the longing for meaning deep within us. William James agreed that religion emanated from what Watson phrases as "born of a core uneasiness within us" and that for many, faith was seen as the solution. Replacing that with the inspiration of music, the escapism of art, the thrill of scientific discovery, the plunge into sex or drugs, drove many in these chapters to attempt to fill up their empty souls with a spirit energized by bold possibilities.

The usefulness of religion, for James, might be succeeded by the vocabulary of reason; others who followed his suggestions looked to fields as different as dance or fashion to apply more daring experiments. Stories we tell ourselves, as Watson portrays Richard Rorty's model, move beyond the transcendental to the empirical and experiential narratives and scenarios which ground themselves in the body. Watson presents the Swiss art colony at Anscona, the critical faculties generating doubt as explored by Stefan George, and the Symbolist poetry of the early century as settings within which ecstasy might sustain itself, as generated within a movement breaking down distinctions between individuals and between concepts so as to release a mystical jolt, or a disorienting confrontation. These encounters, which would engender the cult of the body and the New Age or therapeutic trends which would return with the "religion of no religion" at Big Sur's Esalen in the 1960s, carry a charge that Watson credits by way of many current approaches in which we treat and regard each other.

George Santayana mused: "There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval by discerning and manifesting the good without attempting to retain it." A common sentiment among those Watson favors, as resignation to mortality and the impossibility of knowing the secrets behind all of creation appears to gain pace as the century's wars and brutalities weaken rational explanations. Impotence to change human nature contends against discontents driven to improve the human condition. Freud represents the latter contingent: Watson credits him for the dominant shift in modern times, "which has seen a theological understanding of humankind replaced by a psychological one".

Watson observes intriguing indicators of this shift, across the creative spectrum. The cover illustration of Georges Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon at the Island of La Grande Jatte" (1884-1886) depicts people not worshiping, but picnicking and promenading. One couple, dressed in black, appear to be looking on, "from the (moral?) higher ground" at the crowds "enjoying themselves in very secular ways, most with their backs turned". Additionally, this French painting continues a tradition of "public contemplation" as its many figures reveal serious play. This happens despite a breakdown on the canvas of perceived or imposed order into a teasing shimmer of reality manifesting itself more subtly. The satisfaction for the viewer emanates in impressions "as a web of tiny, distinct stillnesses".

Revolutions and conflicts darken chapters; from the Soviet triumph, "one propaganda poster posited 'prayers to the tractor' as alternative ways to produce change and improvement in the community". Watson emphasizes the substitution of idolatry and worship within totalitarian societies and parties. He also notes that religion was not eradicated in many regions of the U.S.S.R. except by elimination of believers during Stalin's purges. An underlying message persists: belief will be a fallback for humans caught in difficulties, and faith may be wired into human nature despite rational powers.

Rilke sought in the foreknowledge of death that which appears to distinguish humans from other mammals: a direction to guide searchers towards a sense that mortality "drives the plot of life". He recognized that consciousness itself, as Watson puts it, may be "a crime against nature". Why evolution may have embedded within humans the powers of song, the aleatory, musical ability, or a sense of beauty, as well as a tendency in many to interpret phenomenon as supernatural, sparks some of the liveliest later chapters. Suffice to say that many arguments arise, and as many suggestions.

Virginia Woolf's often-quoted observation that around "December 1910" a change happened, so that "reality was no longer public", accompanies modernist plunge into the interior response rather than the recording of the focused, outward observation. The loss of confidence in a shared vision and the gain in conviction that a personal reaction conveyed the spiritual experience that whirled within the intimate sphere and not in the emptying cathedral propels the writers and creators Watson introduces. Oscar Wilde sums up the leap forward: "It is enough that our fathers believed. They have exhausted the faith faculty of the species. Their legacy to us is the skepticism of which they were afraid." Kafka throws up "the sediment left by the great monotheisms: that the mind of God can never be known, we shall never solve the mystery of God because God is the name we give to the mystery itself". (Watson astutely footnotes, if half the book away, an apposite aside that St. Augustine had a similar opinion.)

Through Chabad and Beckett, Salman Rushdie and The Doors, Philip Roth and Theodore Roszak, Boris Yeltsin and Timothy Leary, as the second half of the century progresses, Watson explores the impacts after the purported death of God within academia, theological disputes, and popular culture. He delves into less-familiar texts such as the forgotten bestseller Joshua Liebman's "Peace of Mind" (1946) to prove how the post-WWII merger of religion with psychology enticed clergy into roles as counselors, and how this promoted the therapeutic rather than theological cure across America. Such a range of references and examples accounts for much of the bulk of this book, but its contribution towards an accessible account from which a patient, intelligent, and reflective reader will benefit greatly cannot be diminished. Predictably, those immersed in a particular school of thought may cavil at the generalizations and judgments Wilson must convey by such compression given three-dozen chapters. However, the documentation he provides and the stimulation he generates merit respect.

Countercultural chronicler Roszak, to whom Watson gives welcome and lengthy attention, repeated José Ortega y Gasset's reminder: "Life cannot wait until the sciences have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready." An urgency boosts these late-century sections. Their pace quickens as Watson weighs dozens of competing or compatible attempts to forge a third way, apart from the calculated certainties of a stolid scientific method or the fervent claims of a fundamentalist religious precept. Roszak, following Roth and Beckett for Watson in mapping a humanist response looking hard at death if perhaps a bit more softly at mortality, laments the "boundless proliferation of knowledge for its own sake" and the exclusion of many seekers who cannot enter this closed system, and who find themselves alienated as democratic culture weakens.

Watson encourages in his closing chapters those who strive to build meaningful structures by which ecological imperatives and economic equality might co-exist. He rejects those who by faith in a better life to come justify the rape of the earth and the pain of its inhabitants. He accepts that science may not provide comfort for those who, however irrationally, search for truth and beauty beyond what can be calculated or purchased. Mark Kingswell's philosophical rejoinder to a capitalist culture "based on envy, and advertising, the main capitalist means of 'selling' consumerism, works by 'creating unhappiness'". Happiness, if God is removed from the window through which we view Watson's earlier model of the zoo vs. the monastery, may emanate from a rejection of what for many people in Western society supplants or supplements fading religious belief: the "pathography" (he credits Joyce Carol Oates for this coinage) of the dysfunctional, confessional, survivor-strutting meta-narrative that has drowned out the traditional monotheistic, and arguably I may add, modernist world-views today.

Ronald Dworkin may speak for many of his colleagues in the seminar or clinic: "Philosophers used to speculate about what they called the meaning of life. (That is now the job of mystics and comedians)." Thomas Mann cautioned that the concept of "one overbearing truth" has been exhausted. Jürgen Habermas directs us to look not above for answers but to listen to each other, for communication may produce critical meaning, and within an informed public sphere, guidance can be generated. Watson finds truth in pragmatism. "We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands."

Few will choose this enriching and rewarding removal from reality TV and manufactured distraction, along the course mapped in these heady pages, to a sobering path of self-awareness of our fragile presence surrounded by darkness and mystery. Fewer choose Kafka over Chopra, and fewer may finish this book than the latest novel by even Oates herself. But those who persevere will glimpse in Watson's closing chapters spirited and moving testimony by wise professors and writers exchanging their versions of what Sartre phrased as "lyrical phenomenology": what Watson calls "the sheer multiplicity of experience as the joy of being alive". This quest for meaning may endure, parallel to or divergent from science. This search embraces a persistent appreciation that beyond facts hovers that which may forever suspend itself apart from our perception, no longer named God, still ineffable.  (Edited in RePrint at PopMatters 3-28-14 as "'The Age of Atheists' Considers That Beyond Reason or Science, Our Quest for Meaning Endures" and a second time to Amazon US 2-19-14)

Edmund Gosse's "Father and Son": Book Review

In 1907, this "study of two temperaments" dramatized religious convention opposed to rational modernism. Edmund's father, Philip Henry Gosse, ran a Plymouth Brethren household. His wife died of cancer, and the son movingly documents her own demise, drawing from her diary, and enriched by his own recollections. After she dies, at twilight, he seeks his father's embrace: "I used to turn my face up to his, patiently and wonderingly, while the large, unwilling tears gathered in the corners of his eyelids." While the severity of his parents' attitudes has been challenged by scholars of Edmund's dramatic and eloquent narrative, the power of the clash of tradition and innovation at intimate levels during the mid-nineteenth century's encounter with Darwin's revolutionary theory can be felt.

As a naturalist, Philip tried to reconcile the new doctrine, arguing in the book "Omphalos" that as Adam added a navel thanks to God's intervention, so His plan allowed for fossils embedded to look as if a more antiquated cosmos had been intended from the beginning. Philip thought his argument would reconcile atheists and believers, but he was shattered when his book met with dismissal and was ignored. He popularized the Devon tide pools, and Edmund recalls with bittersweet detail the wonders that the shores once held undisturbed in his youth--until his father's studies and illustrations convinced many others to visit the beaches, and to ruin the fragile ecosystem irreparably.

Therefore, in its environmental as well as creationist themes, you can see the relevance a century later of this account. He describes the Victorian conventional mindset well. "People would, for instance, go on living over a cess-pool. working themselves up in an agony to discover how they had incurred the displeasure of the Lord, but never moving away." He also engagingly portrays the shift to an "extreme" Puritan and fundamentalist sensibility as he and his father--soon with a stepmother--live in a hamlet in Devonshire. There, away from the city, the foibles of trust in those deemed upright and righteous turns sad, or subtly satirical. A spinning top or a plum pudding, the word "Carmine" all loom large in the young child's mind, and can terrorize as deviations from the approved mentality.

While he's precociously allowed to be baptized before adulthood after being grilled by the elders, he finds the "mechanical address" and empty language of his prayers a telling revelation. Like a pot that surrounds an already growing plant, he feels as if he's trapped, and tries to grow up around the suppressing weight of the pattern imposed. He grows apart from the faith of his father, and in the final section breaks away as a maturing man from Philip. "The incidents of human life upon the road to glory were less than nothing to him," a man of belief.

Seeking a truer criterion of "moral justice" than that of the Christian Judge, Edmund refuses to sanction an Almighty who would condemn millions for "a purely intellectual error of comprehension." So, individualism, the ability to think for himself, takes control. He refuses to compromise, and no truce, he concludes, could have been acceptable between son and father. (Read  via Project Gutenberg for the Kindle. Amazon US 11-9-12.)

Laurence Cossé's "A Corner of the Veil": Book Review

Very elusive, fittingly or ironically, about the actual proof of God that floors a few Casuists (read: Jesuits) and a French prime minister during the year before Y2K. The Parisian setting is underused, the characters probably stand ins for politicians or pundits that the original audience might recognize, and the tone's droll as you'd expect. Linda Asher's translation captures the worldly-wise ambiance of the original, I assume, and the results entertain.

Able to be perused (small size, big margins) in a single evening, the plot naturally keeps you guessing. As to the proof, the idea that God the Father is exposing Himself by imposing Himself upon man via Christ and the Spirit so people figure out (presumably) that the divine "becoming" permeates all of God's creation sums up the gist of the daring breakthrough. The difficulty is that Laurence Cossé teases us as she does the characters who try to penetrate the mystery of the document's contents. She, too, lifts up the veil's corner but she refuses to let us peek. We must watch others look inside.

This distancing, while it makes sense for her revelations, or their lack for the reader, may please some who wish like some in the pages not to know it all. The advantages of doubt articulated by prominent figures make for an intriguing meditation. I never thought of the shift that would happen if people could know God and how that might diminish rather than increase goodness.

You get some discussion of this scenario as the advisors in elite clerical and state realms battle over the social impacts of this proof. Cossé appears to believe that people would generally favor frugality and compassion, but she along with certain figures warns that brutality and cynicism could grow as "everything is permitted" in the calculating eye of some determined dissenters. I think she gives people too much credit for the positive aspects of a revelation like this, for in a secularized era, it seems many would not fall for this message from above, if theorized by one from below.

It may be a nod to popular sensibilities, but I am unsure the plot needed the thriller aspects that it enters later on. A Corner of the Veil reminded me in its substance, however coyly, of the Jesuit French maverick Teilhard de Chardin's immanent concept of the Incarnation entering the cosmos and the mentality of all created lives and souls. Curious why nobody among the learned mentioned this vision from a bold predecessor who met with his own censure from the powers that be. (Amazon US 5-20-13)

Christian Wiman's "My Bright Abyss": Book Review

Diagnosed on his thirty-seventh birthday via a “curt voice mail message” with cancer, Christian Wiman confronts his fate, his drift from his West Texas Baptist small-town upbringing, and his decision to revive his “latent” faith, conscious of all its confusions and ambiguities. After twenty years a poet, he analyzes in these spare essays his seven years living with bone marrow transplants, and with his two twin daughters and his wife, as he faces down pain and as he examines belief.

Mr. Wiman warns early on: “if you have believed at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived — or have denied the reality of your life”. His life has been a wandering one; he mentions moving forty times in fifteen years. While little of his background or subsequent profession emerges from the few facts he chooses to share, he shares much about his thoughts on death, mortality, and divine presence, or the lack of such when examining the impact of his prognosis. 

The essays, which an acknowledgement notes were published in some form in eleven different publications, may stray from the themes of modern belief. Yet, for all its dispersion, this book roams around a central concern for a contemporary Christian. For one schooled in modernism, and for one committed to the craft of literature, Mr. Wiman contemplates the predicament of those raised after post-modernism, who prefer to believe in -- or argue over -- a good book more than the Good Book. 

Borrowing Paul Tillich’s phrase, Mr. Wiman posits that art replaces death as the “ultimate concern” today. Whereas for Dickinson, Stevens, Beckett, and Camus, a transcendental absence beckoned, for more recent writers, post-modernism “sought to eliminate death in the frenzy of the instant, to deflect it with irony and hard-edged surfaces in which, because nothing was valued more than anything else, nothing was subject to ultimate confirmation or denial”. Certainly, “ultimate” hovers as a telling term here, as Mr. Wiman urges a fresh way “to imagine ourselves in and out of death”, even if “the old religious palliatives” such as the Christian idea of heaven certainly appear inadequate. 

Citing Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mr. Wiman finds a congenial if chilly voice: “The God who lets his love in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually.” 

Yet, like dew, his own faith rests as he awakes some days, full of promise. Then “it gets burned off in the rising sun of anxieties, ambitions, distractions”. Such honesty offers readers skeptical of faith-claims and inspirational bromides a brisk, sobering series of reflections on a mature acceptance of faith affirmed cautiously. 

Alienation permeates many of these short chapters. They may stay calm or they may turn edgy. Language, lies, his calling as a poet, frustration, and death as our inevitable sentence: all crowd these pages with a serious look at faith. “Faith is the word faith decaying into pure meaning.”

After tenderly commending the love and support given by his daughters and his wife, Mr. Wiman in his chemotherapy-induced pain realizes: “It was God straining through matter to make me see, and to grant me the grace of simple praise.” The final chapter of these accessible, yet learned, meditations tries to avoid the tone of an elegy. Still, its author admits, “the very things that have led us to God are the things we must sacrifice”. 

Recommended for readers who prefer poetry and criticism to platitudes or self-help texts, this memoir suits an audience able to balance intelligent insight with open-minded possibility, as a talented poet challenges his own and our verities. (4-20-13 to New York Journal of Books)

Nathan Schneider's "God in Proof": Book Review

Not yet thirty, this "millennial" journalist ponders reason and faith. He combines his personal quest with a philosophical investigation from the Greeks to the Internet. He reminds us of the Latin root for proofs; probare derives from probing, the testing of the evidence, rather than a compulsion to settle the dispute. The distinction, lost in English, clouds what Nathan Schneider's own perspective seeks to clarify as his rationale: the quest matters more than any empirical truth-claim. 

With a father who drifted away from Judaism for a skeptical outlook and diligent medieval research, and a mother who left Christianity but looked to a guru for comfort, Mr. Schneider, coping as a teen with his parents' breakup, characterizes his generation's pull away from religious convention; individual ambitions contend against cultural solidarity. An editor at Killing the Buddha (an online "religion magazine for people made anxious by churches"), the author speaks for many Westerners eager to sample from exotic or indigenous as well as European or Middle Eastern traditions, and he neatly mingles reflection with analysis. He even doodles diagrams or cartoons along a few pages, as if a professor wanting to relate arcana to his class in quirky, engaging terms, as if fearful of coming across as too earnest. For those coming for the first time to advanced concepts, he offers tables and indexed appendices charting ideas or thinkers as more accessible data.

For instance, an "incomplete list of proofs" classifies about fifty variations on for/against theories as cosmological, dialectical, historical, ontological, phenomenological, sociological, teleological, or transcendental. Certainly this broadens the usual range of what the textbook I teach Comparative Religions from must sum up in paragraphs for but three summary proofs. As a popularization of recondite argument, God in Proof mingles accessible explanations with a reporter's fresh outlook. Anselm, Augustine, and Aquinas as expected all appear; but this stretches from "A" for a website from Atheists of Silicon Valley to "Z" for Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Nathan Schneider blends a chronological tour of theories into his own maturation smoothly. The ancients parallel his childhood wonder; theological debates by Spanish Muslims and Arabic-speaking exile Maimonides merge with reflections from Mr. Schneider's college course in Islam and his father's attenuated Judaism. For a high school independent study project, Mr. Schneider managed to stay three weeks in a Virginia Trappist monastery, where his own doubts, he finds, long precede his visit. A monk confides: "'Well, of course, Nathan,' Benedict told me. 'We all doubt. We question.'"

With the early modern thinkers, the shift in the search pivots from God to the self as the starting point. "God's existence was a reality for each person to discover." Leibniz, Spinoza, Pascal (too rapidly examined), Locke, Kant, Hume, and Hegel follow Descartes' pioneering innovation. As a philosopher, he peered forward and into the intellect by logic, rather than following the vertical gaze of the theologian who guided the intellect up until aligning with the soul, to heaven by the human.

The parallel of the historical search for proofs, from here on, must diverge from his analogy with his life, as he enters his twenties. Uncertainties loom and verities fade as his coming of age models in  miniature the evolution of contemporary thought. While an adolescent conversion to or away from God often "sets the mood, or stirs the muck", affirmative or negating proofs tend to be fabricated by these same thinkers in middle age. The author's cautious conversion during college to Catholicism contends against his doubts, and his fluent if sometimes too compressed investigations of what others think about God play off his summations of the increasingly assured humanist challenges to theology. Science enters to tip the scales, and "growing pains" of the modern mentality reverberate with Mr. Schneider's personal explorations of the varieties of verifiable arguments for or against God.

As he quotes Richard Dawkins: "Darwin made it possible to an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Arguments crediting a Creator with the world He designed could be replaced by those which shut religion out of natural evolution. Yet many in the past century and a half reconcile a less literal take on Scripture with Darwin's theory. Mr. Schneider peers askance at creationism, intelligent design, and a fervent Turkish version of insistent attempts to equate creation to art, with God as the only artist.

Dawkins' cocky neo-atheism introduces a chapter about "human progress and divine absence". Previous debates concentrated on manufacturing better proofs for God. Exposure to global cruelty and cultural diversity, explanations for nature that don't include God, and common experiences such as Mr. Schneider's with "mixed marriages and religious shopping sprees" mean that not only seekers but believers may increasingly turn restless. Whether God exists turns a question bold enough to ask.

Christian philosophers, emboldened by the "free-will defense" of Alvin Plantinga, rally against the secular majority in academia, and they respond boldly. As with the case of Anthony Flew, who famously has been claimed by his friends late in his life to have turned back to a qualified, careful theism, contemporary scholars labor against prevailing skepticism. Mr. Schneider offers a patient, sympathetic ear to their counterarguments, although he admits they remain very much in the minority.

Compared to their American colleagues with Christian convictions, British professors in the philosophy of religion such as Oxford's Richard Swinburne simplify. He posits "an infinitely intelligent, immaterial God" as a more probable metaphysical solution for our intricate universe. Whatever side of the Atlantic, funding comes for such endeavors from the "bigger-than-the-Nobel Templeton Prize and the multibillion dollar John Templeton Foundation" founded by an American WWII profiteer turned globalizing investor and British citizen, knighted for his philanthropy. Grants for "humility theology" emphasizing spirituality in places such as medical school and projects convening physicists alongside theologians convince many "that the existence of God can be a respectable question for science after all".

Fine-tuning the universe with the Big Bang theory--or weighing it against a multiverse in one Templeton sponsored meeting--encourages those funded by its grants. Mr. Schneider notes how such "undecidability" in the interpretations quantum physics and dueling cosmologies debates resembles "ultimate truth" as popularized by an eccentric range of New Age as well as scientific contenders. This soundbite crowd may marshal evidence as if based on "the ink blots in a Rorschach test".

Justin Barrett, an American psychologist, proposes another pattern for our recognition: evolution to detect a rustle and assume a tiger behind the bush, and a God behind the stars. This "hyperactive agent detection device" resembles a suggestion propounded in Hume's Natural History of Religion over two centuries ago. Barrett's studies for three years at Oxford garner assistance from a nearly four million dollar "cognitive science research grant". Sparked by such synergy, a "proof industry" booms.

In my own native terrain, Southern California, Nathan Schneider fingers the "cutting edge" of America's "mass-media marketing and celebrity apotheosis" sharpening Christian truth-claims against the New Atheists slashing advances in the past decade. He notes that Dawkins (along with Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens) tends towards rushing past "the proofs for God's existence" so "to be finished as quickly as possible". Stretching out what seems an eternal conflict,  apologetics sideshows debating against rationalists fill lecture halls. "It brings in the ambivalent, the undecided, the apathetic, and the true believers alike. If nothing else, it's a good show."

Blogs and YouTube sustain this energy, on both sides. At the Evangelical Philosophical Society's conference, Mr. Schneider shrinks from "apparently flawless steps that human reason inclines towards a God who is so pathetically like ourselves". Nathan Schneider patiently sifts through many steps and stands, unsurprisingly, to pause near the end to reflect in typically clever, yet honest, humble fashion. "The unexamined life is not worth living, nor the unexamined God worth believing. I remain, thank God, no less than ever a question to myself, and God remains a question for me." (6-3-13 to New York Journal of Books)

Karen Armstrong's "The Great Transformation": Book Review

I heard here the same sympathetic tones as her "Buddha" in the Penguin Lives series, which I reviewed 3/08 on Amazon US, or her short studies of Muhammad and Islam. I wanted to compare this to Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God," Rodney Stark's "Discovering God" and Nicholas Wade's "The Faith Instinct" (all reviewed by me in 2011): they explain the hard-wired or embedded models for religious evolution from varying perspectives of economics, markets, and the sciences.

Well, Armstrong does not base her study on any model other than a history of ideas one. Not by diffusion, not by memes, not by franchises, her ambitious survey links China, India, the Middle East, and Greece by a shared shift away from ritual and top-down imposition of belief into a gentler, kinder compassion emanating from self-criticism, introspection, responsibility, and carried into action stressing social justice and practical cooperation. Certainly, this echoes our own times with their progressive bent, and such scholars as Armstrong favor this slant, aimed at a broad audience.

As in her "History of God" and her works on the Buddha and Islam, she packs a lot of learning gleaned from solid research; she tends towards popularizing and summing up scholarship for a wider readership rather than pushing her own original insights. She also leans towards generous sympathy, as in her closing section on Islam. Wright, Stark, Wade advance their own theories more than she does. We need such hefty works as these to inform us of how ancient many ideas we search out in religious traditions today have been, and how often they are suppressed or compromised given the counter-trends (Wright tends to emphasize these) towards doctrinal conformity and social control by these world-shaking religious powers, allied with political clout. Bigotry, as she closes her book elegantly reminding us, can emanate from secular as well as religious fundamentalism. Instead, we all need to look inside ourselves, do right, and share responsibility. Armstrong stresses the turning away from violence and prejudice, and she seeks Karl Jasper's "a pause for liberty," non-violence, and the Golden Rule in her study of the Axial Age, extending here to encompass ca. 900-220 BCE.

She carefully narrates an immense amount of data and stories. Her strength lies in the vignettes that enable her to loosen up on the recital of names and dates, and to allow some room to look into mentalities. For instance, the Greek new wine festival in spring turns eerie in her depiction of Anthestera; Amos finds himself overtaken, not pleasantly, by the prophecy he channels of Yahweh; Psalm 82 shows the "kenosis" or emptying that prophets embodied to advance justice and which would be revived by Paul to promote Jesus' mission; Yajnavalkya's formulation of "karma" and "atman" enhance his simple lesson to his son of salty water; Plutarch's fragment #168 of the moments before death is compared with the loss of consciousness by the ecstatics (~"stepping out"): those caught up in the Eleusinian mysteries into "entheos"--"within is a God." (187)

I found myself less taken by the Chinese entries, but Mozi's logical, moral challenge to Confucian "family ties" as insufficiently transforming for a wider society and Zhuangzi's "Way of Heaven" earn notice. Eventually, that empire learned the virtues of syncretism and inclusion. Still, after so many warlords, enforced order, massacres, and contention, the Chinese chapters did not catch fire as often; they seemed grimmer than even the Homeric interludes full of fury, half-celebrating the warrior, half-hinting at the folly of such mortal combat compared to the wonders of a treasured earthly life. India's yogins and Samkhya gain wonderful exposition, and we glimpse how the Vedic tradition blurred into a breath meditation that appears to go back to very remote Aryan times.

So much is only glimpsed; as with the often shadowy Greek rituals, Armstrong tells what we can puzzle out, but the dots cannot always be connected given the lack of evidence, despite the diligence of her and her scholarly colleagues. But, as with the reformation by the Deuteronomists and biblical chroniclers during the Judean kingdom's success and the Assyrian and Babylonian incursions, what we have learned lately about the truth of how the Hebrew Scriptures came to be arranged to make Moses and the Exodus "backdated" for issues six hundred-odd years later in an embattled homeland,  makes for useful reading. So does the moral of Ashoka's good intentions to build a peaceable empire, the "bhakti" yoga renewal, or rabbinic Judaism's "profound reticence" in theology and mysticism.

Armstrong does not strive for a stirring turn of phrase; she prefers a steady exposition. Still, elegant moments linger. Of the renewal in the Holiness Code by the P-writer of scripture in exile: "Babylonia could be a new Eden, where God had walked with Adam in the cool of the evening." (181) "Aristotle had no ambition to leave Plato's cave." (327). Of the Buddha's shock at "four disturbing sights" before his awakening: "Once the suffering that is an inescapable part of the human condition has broken through the customary barricades that we have erected against it, we can never see the world in the same way again. Gotama had allowed the knowledge of 'dukkha' to invade his life, and his quest could begin." (275-6) Like Socrates or Confucius, the Buddha represents for Armstrong the paradigm of the Axial Age by "enhanced humanity"--he stood for an archetype of "a place apart" separate from but at one with our world. "Suffering shatters neat, rationalistic theology." (398)

A few spot-checked references puzzled me; I often consulted end citations. For instance, I cannot tell if Armstrong translated to use in her narration excerpts of the Pali texts for Buddhist sayings or if her "version" is taken from other renderings. She refers to the "nothing" definition of God by "later monotheists" via her "History of God" book but the note offers no pagination. She sums up Platonic absolute beauty as an eternal form well, yet (at least at first mention) she gives no textual context.

However, I gained knowledge from Armstrong's careful arrangement of vast material. Four-hundred pages, as dense as they can be for a topic meriting close attention, manage to compress information into an accessible overview for the patient inquirer. It's pitched at a reader who must be willing to ponder its elevated contents as well as absorb its perspectives. While it does of course leap between four settings during each of its thematic chapters, with not much discussion of why ideas erupted when they did, as opposed to what they were, mystery remains, perhaps appropriately for this elusive topic. It's not a facile presentation, and this only confirms its appeal for a reader who's open-minded (the original meaning of "skeptic," as she defines it). (Amazon US 4-27-12)