Customer Reviews

An Intelligent Person's Guide to Atheism

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This is a thoughtful, well argued book, which approaches a timeless subject from a different angle. Rather than seeking to prove or disprove Old Testament claims, Daniel Harbour argues that theists and atheists have diametrically opposed ways of looking at and explaining the world. Atheism, he says, is a natural result of having a 'Spartan meritocratic' world view. 'Spartan' means starting with as few theories as possible to explain phenomena. 'Meritocratic' means that all theories (even our initial hypotheses) can be changed in the light of new evidence. This contrasts with a 'Baroque monarchical' world view -- 'Baroque' meaning highly elaborate explanations of phenomena (for example, various creation stories), and 'monarchical' meaning that such theories are not allowed to be changed even in light of new knowledge and better understanding.

Harbour in effect argues that a rationalist, scientific approach is the best way to determine the truth. This is an inherently more satisfying and useful way of thinking about human origins (indeed, the origin of everything) than theistic explanations which aren't subject to testing or analysis.

The book draws on a wide range of disciplines from physics and mathematics to chemistry and history as Daniel Harbour builds his case. His writing is dispassionate and convincing and he deals particularly well with the argument from design and the argument from first causes in presenting his case. There is a long and not entirely relevant section dealing with the impact of religion and democracy. Harbour argues that theism is inherently dangerous in democratic societies because successful democracies are built on Spartan and meritocratic worldviews. One doubts this will be well received in the United States! But Harbour's arguments are well worth thinking about. As rationalism increasingly becomes a universally accepted way of thinking surely that means that organised religion must be pushed further to the political margins?

The one drawback to this study is Harbour's rather laboured and mechanical writing style. Parts of the book read a bit like undergraduate essays -- but we could all wish for such intelligent undergraduates! Harbour is likely to produce much better work in the future, but this, his first book, is very well worth reading.

Harbour articulates what I have long felt: That revealed religions are cluttered with arbitrary and useless beliefs and information that people could just as easily live without. (For example, why should anyone rational care about the genealogies in the Bible full of unpronounceable names, like the conflicting ones given for Jesus in the gospels of Matthew and Luke?) His distinction between "Spartan meritocratic" and "Baroque monarchic" wordviews states exactly what is wrong with the whole premise behind a "revealed" religion, since it is undeniable that one's chances of hearing about it are a function of history and geography. Children learn about Jesus (or Krishna or Muhammad, for that matter) in the same way they learn about Harry Potter, which demonstrates that there is nothing in the natural world which implies the truth of these made-up stories.

The Spartan meritocratic worldview, by contrast, leads to discoveries that in principle anyone could make just from following his own inquiries into reality. Harbour points out that a mathematician in Japan came very close to discovering a key insight of the calculus at about the same time that Newton and Liebniz were working on it in Western Europe, even though the two societies might as well have existed on different planets in the late 17th Century. So it's not surprising that people in many different parts of the world have developed philosophical outlooks that sound somewhat like modern Secular Humanism, ranging from Confucianism in ancient China and certain philosophical schools in India all the way to Hellenistic Stoic and Epicurean philosophy. Secular Humanism, unlike revealed religion, has a better claim to the title "perennial wisdom" because it is implicit in a rational study of the world.

I was especially struck by Harbour's argument that theists' best shot at deriving a god from a parsimonious and plausible set of assumptions came and went with Descartes' philosophical program in the 17th Century. Descartes' argument for a god also implied a theory of physics that just happened to be falsified by Newton's spectacularly successful alternative model. Descartes' candidate for god therefore fell by the wayside along with his physics. If theists haven't been able to come up anything better in the last 350 years or so, maybe they should take the hint and give up on the god business.

Daniel Harbour doesn't actually discuss whether God exists or not. The crux of his argument is that religious beliefs are a manifestation of one's larger world view, of which he describes two models: the "Spartan Meritocracy" where things are only accepted as truth after being conclusively proven, and the "Baroque Monarchy" which assumes that received wisdom is true even in the face of contrary evidence. His discussion of these worldviews and their effects on society is very interesting.

My frustration with the book is summed up in the first paragraph:
"I shall not try to prove atheism true nor theism false. Rather, I want to show that atheism is 'superior' to theism." In the realm of science and empirical testing, a premise that can be demonstrably proven is more valuable than one that is purely theoretical. And in Harbour's view, all theories of God remain in the realm of the unproven -- "it is a fact about God that he [sic] has never proved Himself a viable cog, nut, or bolt in any theory of how the world is." This one sentence dismissal of the whole question of God's existence is the cornerstone of Harbour's entire argument -- because God's existence has not been "proven", belief in Him is merely speculative and therefore "inferior" to atheism.

I often feel that Christians make good arguments for why their beliefs are comforting, but not necessarily why they're true. In the same way, I feel that Harbour has convincingly demonstrated the "superiority" of a skeptical worldview. But this does not make it true.

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The Economist, Friday 9 November 2001

Despite its title, Daniel Harbour's "An Intelligent Person's Guide to Atheism" is not so much an explanation or history of unbelief as a powerful piece of advocacy for rejecting the religious attitude altogether. Mr Harbour does a strong job of defending atheism against some of the secondary charges that have been levelled against it-such as the complaint that atheistic political regimes have turned out to be worse than religious ones, or that atheists, if they follow through on what they believe, are bound to be amoral. But he also, and this is the core of his book, makes a positive case for the rational superiority of unbelief.

Starting from the sound premise that we know much less than we would like to about all sorts of things, Mr Harbour, an Oxford University graduate in mathematics and philosophy and now a student of linguistics at MIT, argues that we ought to aim for a world view that is a "Spartan meritocracy" rather than a "Baroque monarchy". A Spartan approach, in his sense, endorses as small a set of assumptions or theories as possible; and a world view that is meritocratic is one in which beliefs are maintained only if they stand up to criticism and the test of evidence.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are, by contrast, in his view, Baroque monarchies. Taken as beliefs, they are teeming nests of unwarranted assumptions that are not required to pass any tests of merit, but are maintained largely because they are found in scripture or accepted by tradition. Much of his reasoning will be familiar to the devotees of anti-clerical writers such as Voltaire or openly godless ones such as Russell, but the overall structure of his approach is new. As Mr Harbour has a great deal of ground to cover in a mere 143 pages, many of the arguments are compressed, and his style of writing is not polished. But, with its powerful and wide-ranging arguments against theism of all kinds, Mr Harbour's short book, nevertheless, makes what may be the most powerful case available to the widely held but strangely silent creed of atheism.

This is The Economist magazine (Nov. 10th, 2001) review of this book:

"Despite its title, Daniel Harbour's "An Intelligent Person's Guide to Atheism" is not so much an explanation or history of unbelief as a powerful piece of advocacy for rejecting the religious attitude altogether. Mr Harbour does a strong job of defending atheism against some of the secondary charges that have been levelled against it-such as the complaint that atheistic political regimes have turned out to be worse than religious ones, or that atheists, if they follow through on what they believe, are bound to be amoral. But he also, and this is the core of his book, makes a positive case for the rational superiority of unbelief.

Starting from the sound premise that we know much less than we would like to about all sorts of things, Mr Harbour, an Oxford University graduate in mathematics and philosophy and now a student of linguistics at MIT, argues that we ought to aim for a world view that is a "Spartan meritocracy" rather than a "Baroque monarchy". A Spartan approach, in his sense, endorses as small a set of assumptions or theories as possible; and a world view that is meritocratic is one in which beliefs are maintained only if they stand up to criticism and the test of evidence.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are, by contrast, in his view, Baroque monarchies. Taken as beliefs, they are teeming nests of unwarranted assumptions that are not required to pass any tests of merit, but are maintained largely because they are found in scripture or accepted by tradition. Much of his reasoning will be familiar to the devotees of anti-clerical writers such as Voltaire or openly godless ones such as Russell, but the overall structure of his approach is new. As Mr Harbour has a great deal of ground to cover in a mere 143 pages, many of the arguments are compressed, and his style of writing is not polished. But, with its powerful and wide-ranging arguments against theism of all kinds, Mr Harbour's short book, nevertheless, makes what may be the most powerful case available to the widely held but strangely silent creed of atheism."

Daniel Harbour's An Intelligent Person's Guide to Atheism gets off to a good start, because he argues that atheism needs to be read against the backdrop of a broader, more inclusive worldview. This is an an entirely reasonable position. But the problem is that Harbour not only fails to really explain what that worldview is (presumably it's naturalism), but uses misguiding metaphors to contrast it with the theistic worldview. Atheism looks at reality from a "spartan" perspective, theism from a "baroque" perspective, says Harbour, and he will return to this vocabularly tediously throughout the book. All he seems to mean is that atheism doesn't unnecessarily complicate explanations and theism does. But there's little effort on his part to demonstrate the truth of these two claims, nor to justify his claim that the former is a better worldview. In Chapter 3, he claims that the spartan worldview is objective, broad, predictive, and utility-laden. But his discussion here seems to be utterly and curiously innocent of understandings of science other than the hypothetical-deductive model.

This is representative of most of Harbour's discussion throughout the book. His arguments tend to be either sketchy and rambling, or they fail to nail the lid on theism's coffin as he assures us they do. His discussions of arguments for God's existence, for example, are especially weak, as if he can't bring himself to take them seriously long enough to grapple with them. In speaking of design the ignores the argument from the anthropic principle. In dealing with cosmological arguments, he utterly ignores the kalam argument. His discussion of the ontological argument is particularly weak, ignoring as it does contemporary defenses such as Hartshorne's and Plantinga's, and resting content with Kant's old existence-isn't-a-predicate counter-argument.

I realize that Harbour's book is intended as a primer on atheism, and that there's only so much one can do in such a context. But there are other quite fine primers out there that accomplish much more. Julian Baggini's Atheism: A Very Short Introduction and David Ramsey Steele's Atheism Explained come immediately to mind.

Insightful and simply stated. It puts the debate between atheism and theism in a whole new context. Must read for anyone, atheist of otherwise.

This book is particularly good on stating "two visions" to understand reality: one Dogmatic and the other Meritocratic. The first is an Absolute Baroque Monarchy and the second a Spartan Meritocracy. The absolutists do not demonstrate anything at all, while the meritocratics behold a view of the world "if and only if" it is demonstrated. In the first kind of vision one finds religion, in the other, science. Read it, and you will find the conclusions very clear, un-dogmatic and ready for any additional questions to be answered.

This is an excellent book. Mr Harbour avoids the traditional -and very tired- arguments for and against the existence of God and instead discusses two distinct worldviews that we can adopt as we attempt to explain things. He shows that one is better suited to finding true answers, and atheism follows from that worldview. In this sense atheism is 'superior' to theism. The approach is new, original and extremely convincing.

I didn't really like Mr Harbours writing style, so in the end I wasn't able to 'read it in an afternoon by the pool'. Mr Harbour is a scientist and not a novelist though, and this doesn't stop me from giving it 5 stars, it is an excellent book.

This books tries hard to approach atheism from a new perspective, and at first it's refreshing. But after a while, it just doesn't go anywhere. The metaphors and analogies are vague and overly theoretical, and Harbour's sentence structure can get rambling and confusing at times. This is intended to be a beginner's guide, but "What Is Atheism?" by Douglas E. Krueger does a far better job of outlining the arguments in a clear and concise way.