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671 of 735 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Review In Two Parts, June 19, 2005
This review is from: I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Paperback)
THE BOOK:
I am an agnostic who is looking for something to believe in. I have searched for years now, and generally am met with lukewarm explanations and radical fundamentalism from both camps. I am not self-righteous or pig-headed enough to categorically dismiss atheist or religious arguments simply because their tone bothered me, but it does get tiresome to be on the receiving end of what is usually more bitterness and dogmatic posturing than any kind of intelligent thought or reason.
Again, I'm talking about atheists as well as religious zealots.
Which is why I enjoyed this book so much.
This is a concise, well-crafted, thoughtful and thought-provoking piece of work. There is real insight to be gleaned from the pages, and although the sum total isn't what any open-minded person would call 100% convincing, it definitely gets much closer than anything else I've discovered.
There is much talk about this book setting up straw men to be knocked down, and although the book does do that on a few occasions, it is by no means what the ultimate premise is based on. In fact, although there were some sketchy arguments and hastily covered bases, and although there were explanations missing and topics omitted, I still felt, on the whole, that it was one of the more successful books I've read from either camp.
The tone (while every once in a while devolving into brief moments of snideness and cockiness) is generally quite intelligent and emotionally removed. There is little here that is bullying or smug, and for that I was grateful. It leant the text, with its vast array of debates and discussions, a snappy and no-nonsense delivery that helped elucidate the more hazily understood, philosophical explanations.
Although, in the end, I wasn't entirely convinced by the book, I was pushed much closer to being convinced than I have yet by any book, religious, atheistic, or otherwise.
THE CRITICS:
In the course of my research, I read the reviews and the comments made by consumers on Amazon.com in order to determine how best to spend my money. I don't want to buy an atheist or christian apologetic book if what I'm going to get is watered down theories and trite cliches.
At this point, I think it would be appropriate to point out that this is, in fact, a forum for discussing the merits of the product, and not the merits of the beliefs or arguments espoused within. I understand that it's hard to remove the deeper values of the work from the work itself, but it can be done. So, if, for instance, if you are an honest consumer, you can point out the cinematic brilliance of films like the Last Temptation of Christ in spite of what that film may or may not say about the religion you may or may not adhere to.
I was dismayed by how many inflammatory and rather pointless criticisms I found for this book. I'd never read it, but I could tell by the tone and stance of the reviews that they were reacting more out of indignation toward the subject matter than out of any knowledge of the text itself. One reviewer scorned the book for being written by David Limbaugh, when the man only wrote the forward. Another person decried the book for being "all about politics," when, as far as I could tell, there wasn't a word about politics, just beliefs or the lack of them.
If you are a critic of christianity, that's fine. Trust me, I understand your point of view. But your clumsily summarized view points and your indignant rebuttals do little to enlighten people who may be interested in buying this book. There are forums in which you can openly discuss and debate these topics, but this is not one of them. This is about saying whether or not the book is worth buying. Instead of doing that, most of you have instead attempted to explain your own beliefs, as if you want to write your own book in response to Christianity, but can't be bothered.
For someone such as myself, looking for intelligent and candid help with the question of Larger Purposes (or their absence), your poorly worded rants and emotional appeals -- especially those of you wearing your rage on your sleeve -- do nothing to help me. For future reference, if you really want to help someone like me understand your points of view, instead of typing out some sloppy summation or more key-worded dismissals (argument from ignorance! straw men!), perhaps you could actually RECOMMEND A DIFFERENT BOOK.
I am always on the lookout for some way to increase my knowledge of the world, and my knowledge of what that world may do to better explain the validity or non-validity of any religion. Unlike many of you, though, I haven't been convinced yet, either way. I read your reviews in the hopes that you may be able to point me down the same path that led to your own enlightenment of absolute certainty, but all most of you did was make vacuous complaints about the book and then insult people who might actually believe or buy it.
So, if you've come online to write a scathing review or to tear apart the praisers of this book, go right ahead. But keep in mind that your own viewpoints -- as right or wrong as they might be -- are less welcome than your criticisms of the actual book in question. And if you DO think you've got it all figured out, and if you DON'T think this book does, you could at least try to share that knowledge by pointing someone like me in the right direction, and by doing that without the same snobbish condecension that you sometimes find in the relgious believers whom you so adamantly decry.
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208 of 281 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Truth Is Marching On!, April 21, 2004
This review is from: I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Paperback)
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist" convincingly shows why atheism and other non-Christian views require a lot more faith than Christianity. Geisler and Turek build their case from the question of truth all the way to truth of the Bible. Along the way, in a readable and often entertaining way, they debunk relativism, agnosticism, atheism, Darwinism and New Testament liberalism. Their explanations of how the big bang, the design found in both the Universe and living organisms (like humans!), and morality point to God are worth the price of the book. I especially like the clarity they bring to the creation-evolution debate. Their point about how science is built on philosophy helps clear away much of the dust kicked into that often raucous debate. "It's not about the Bible vs. science or religion vs. science" they write, "but about good science vs. bad science." Geisler and Turek show that it's actually the Darwinists who are practicing the bad science. Darwinists rule out intelligent causes before they even look at the evidence. In doing so, they ignore observation-- the very foundation of science-- much as the opponents of Galileo once did. That's bad science built on bad philosophy. I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist has four great chapters that systematically show why the New Testament documents are telling the truth. The authors show why we can be assured that the documents were written within a few decades of the evens which they report and contain historically-confirmed eyewitness details. They also cite non-Christian writers, archaeology, and list over 30 characters found in the New Testament that have been confirmed by secular sources. But they are at their best when they point out how the New Testament story is an unlikely invention. After listing a series of embarrassing gaffes of the apostles, Geisler and Turek ask the reader, "If you were a New Testament writer, would you include these embarrassing details if you were making up a story? Would you write that one of your primary leaders was called 'Satan' by Jesus, denied the Lord three times, hid during the crucifixion, and was later corrected on a theological issue? Would you depict yourselves as uncaring, bumbling cowards, and the women-whose testimony was not even admissible in court-as the brave ones who stood by Jesus and later discovered the empty tomb? Would you admit that some of you (the eleven remaining disciples) doubted the very Son of God after he had proven himself raised to all of you?" Geisler and Turek don't have enough faith to believe it's a made-up story. Neither do I. This is an engaging and affirming book with a vast scope. I highly recommend it!
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26 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A wealth of evidence, mostly good., August 27, 2005
This review is from: I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Paperback)
I was pleasantly surprised at both the quantity and quality of the evidence Geisler and Turek presented in this book; I guess I was expecting "Young Earth" material and a repetitious gloss of points made by Josh Mcdowell. (I borrowed the book from a church so conservative you half expect a moat and a drawbridge as you walk in the door.)
Some points negative reviewers below make hit the mark, I think. One can criticize the tone at times; the authors do look to be "stacking the deck" a bit. (Though the writing is generally good, and the illustrations are often amusing, and add clarity to the points they reference.) Like some other readers, I found the biology a bit spotty, (the astronomy a bit better), and some arguments from philosophy too abstract to persuade fully. For instance, how can illness be a result of the fall of man, when fossils deformed by sickness can be found from millions of years before human beings existed? It is also true that one must discuss chemical evolution to refute the idea that life arose through natural processes. (For a really first-rate and respectful discussion of this issue in depth, see Rana and Ross, Origins of Life: Biblical and Evolutionary Models Face Off.) Geisler and Turek follow C. S. Lewis in taking a philosophical approach to miracles, asking in effect, "Could miracles happen if God exists?" But it seems to me that the better question is, "Do miracles, in fact, happen?" I think an empirical argument for miracles much strengthens the case for Christianity: for many people, including me, the Bible seems more credible because they have seen evidence that miracles do in fact happen.
But all in all, the authors have crammed a rich feast of mostly telling evidence for the Christian faith into the book's 400 pages. Many of the points they offer, even on science and philosophy, are effective. And the "historical Jesus" section (140 pages) is excellent. Either the skeptics who claim there is nothing new in this book have read a lot more than me (and reading books for and against the Christian faith is both my hobby and vocation), or they have overlooked some of the good stuff here.
And looking over their criticism, I think the latter is more likely. Several critics assume that Christian faith means "a firm belief in something for which there is no proof," or that religion "tells us to ignore reason and accept faith." Having just completed a historical study of Christian thought on faith and reason from the 2nd Century to modern times, I would argue that this is not at all what Christians usually mean by faith. In fact, as physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne points out, faith in the Chrisitian sense is arrived at by means rather similar to scientific hypothesizing. Another critic implies that the Big Bang is popular among laymen, but not scientists. Nonsense. Another complains that Geisler and Turek describe Buddhism, Hinduism, and the New Age as "pantheistic," though Buddhism can be atheistic, and Hinduism polytheistic. Actually, the authors say "some forms" of Buddhism are pantheistic, and (page 198) Hinduism is "pantheistic and polytheistic."
The authors and their critics are however both wrong in overlooking theism in non-Western cultures. Geisler and Turek describe Confucianism as "atheistic," though Confucius himself believed in God, as did his most important, and many later, disciples. Theism is also common in other non-Western cultures. (See chapter 9 of my Jesus and the Religions of Man.) The almost universal awareness of God is one evidence against the claim, also advanced below, that theism is some kind of a subjective cultural accident.
Finally, another critic claims that none of those who wrote the New Testament personally saw Jesus. Actually several of the authors of the New Testament say they did, and (despite radical criticism) there is good reason to think they did. (See my Why the Jesus Seminar can't find Jesus, and Grandma Marshall Could, for an in-depth rebuttal of such modern criticism.)
G. K. Chesterton said that an open mind, like an open mouth, is meant to be "closed on something solid." If you are just looking for reasons to gripe, you can probably find things to criticize, even to mock, here. But if you are looking for solid truth in which to sink your cognitive canines, and are willing to consider evidence for the Christian faith, you can find a lot of good evidence in this book (and elsewhere) that deserves a careful taste-test.
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