Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused and Illusory World of the Atheist [Paperback]

Rabbi Moshe Averick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 11, 2011

A powerful and compelling presentation that reclaims the intellectual high ground for the rational believer in God in the 21st Century. Using razor-sharp logic, a rapier wit, and irony-laced humor, Rabbi Averick exposes the gaping flaws in atheistic ideology in general, and in the modern "militant atheism" of writers like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, in particular. Talk show host and best-selling author Dr. Diane Medved (The American Family) put it this way: "If you've ever felt bullied by schoolyard atheists like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, I have good news...your big brother, in the person of Rabbi Moshe Averick, has just stepped onto the playground!" "A compelling read...Rabbi Averick has dramatically spiked the ball back into the court of the non-believer." -DR. EDWARD PELTZER, Senior Research Specialist, Ocean Chemistry (California)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A compelling read...Rabbi Averick has dramatically spiked the ball back into the court of the non-believer." --DR. EDWARD PELTZER - Senior Research Specialist, Ocean Chemistry (California)

"Very persuasive, often amusing, and rich in ready-to-rumble argument and insight." -- MICHAEL MEDVED - syndicated talk-radio host and bestselling author

"Rabbi Averick turns the tables on atheists by exposing the irrational faith-based nature of their "reasoning"...he effectively dismantles the atheists' assertions that Science can provide satisfactory materialistic answers." --DR. RICHARD WEIKART - Professor of History at University of California-Stanislaus and author of, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany

About the Author

Rabbi Moshe Averick was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem in 1980. For the past three decades he has taught spirituality, theology, and religious philosophy in the United States, Canada, and Israel. He lectures regularly at university campuses on the topic of atheism and belief in God. He currently lives in Chicago and is the proud father of eight children and an ever growing number of grandchildren. Learn more at RabbiMaverick.com

Product Details

• Paperback: 268 pages
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 1St Edition edition (January 11, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1456445944
• ISBN-13: 978-1456445942
• Product Dimensions: 0.6 x 8.4 x 5.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #894,215 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars I enjoyed his point of view, humorous. November 21, 2012

By JoeJensen

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Basically, the author makes a good case against atheism. He give many examples of the impossible fantasies required to believe life evolved from random chemistry. He relies on the latest science on the subject of bio chemistry and origin of life research.
His arguments are logical and peppered with humour.
He makes his case very well.
Good book.

132 of 199 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars An appropriate title for a book that is complete nonsense itself February 27, 2011

By Steven D. Ahlquist

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Some books give you an embarrassment of riches, some are just embarrassments. This book is the latter. Rabbi Moshe Averick's response to the recent spate of "New Atheist" books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and all is an unfortunate collection of poor critical thinking and straw man arguments. The first chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book, when Averick plucks a few lines from various atheist authors, puts them together into an argument no reasonable person would make, and then criticizes the argument.

Averick puts his straw man argument in the first chapter under the heading "Reality Check Please." First, Averick claims that atheists believe that "objective reality life has no meaning, purpose or value" and uses as his example Freud, Stephen Weinberg and William Provine. Of course, non of these men ever said that life has no purpose. Averick finds that conclusion to be "implicit in [their] worldview."

Averick's next claim is that atheists "find inspiration for humanity in the fact that we are all related to ground worms." For this rather odd claim he uses Christopher Hitchens, who was ruminating on the idea that Darwinian evolution provides a means by which to consider all life on Earth as being related, including us mammals and "ground worms and other creatures."

These are the first two steps in a five point argument that Averick is making, and we can see quite clearly how dishonest this approach is. The first line rewrites and freely interprets three different atheists to produce a statement that none of them said, or would admit to believing. (If a quote were available from any of them, why not use it?) The second line grabs a metaphorical rumination from a completely different person, and uses that as line two of an argument.

This is a straw man argument. I know that Rabbi Averick understands the concept of a straw man argument, and I know that he realizes that using such tactics is both dishonest and intellectually valueless. But unfortunately, he continues this for three more points.

Avericak claims that an "inescapable implication of [an atheist's] worldview is that" racism and democracy... are equally insignificant, [and] 'stupid'..." This he also takes from Hitchens, falsely, and applies it to all atheists.

This is the way the entire book goes. Poor thinking piled upon poor thinking. It's not only his thinking that is confused. He has trouble with simple facts. He uses the long debunked story about the 34 witnesses who did nothing as they watched Kitty Genovese stabbed to death in 1964 to make a completely unrelated point about cognitive dissonance. (A term Averick should take the time to learn.) A quick look at Wikipedia would have told him that the Genovese story has been debunked, and major sociology texts have removed or modified their accounts in the light of new evidence.

In Chapter 2 Averick lays out the ground rules for arguing his case for a creator God. Of course the rules are set to favor his personal theological views, and have little to do with critical thinking. For instance, he asks this question "Do you trust your senses, your mind, and your brain, to give you accurate data with which to interface with reality? Please answer yeas or no. There are no other options."

This is a tactic that wouldn't pass muster on a grade school playground, never mind in a free debate on the nature of reality. Averick wants you to choose yes, that you do trust your senses, and to an extent, I agree with him. But it is not a simple yes or no question, is it? There are plenty of times our senses can be fooled. We see faces in rock formations and clouds, even when we are sober. When drunk, the reasonable person does not drive a car, because he realizes that he can't trust all his senses. Optical illusions trick our eyes, and we need instruments to fly airplanes through clouds. In fact, humans are not very good at discerning reality at all, at least not on a macro or micro scale. No human can observe electrons or black holes directly.

To simply force someone into a "yes or no" answer on this question is nonsense. Cognitive neuroscience is beginning to show us hundreds of ways in which our senses and our minds can be fooled. Perhaps Rabbi Averick's fervent belief in God is an example of his mind being fooled. Yes? or No?

Moving on to the core of the book, three chapters on the Origin of Life, and how, since it is impossible for life to come from non-life without a creator, there therefore must be a creator, we get more of the tortured logic, straw men and ad hominem attacks Averick seems to favor. His favorite victim in this section seems to be Richard Dawkins, who Averick admits has never claimed to be an expert in "origin of life" science. Averick is also not an expert in this area, by his own admission, so we are presented with an unusual case of a non-expert criticizing a non-expert or his views. Dawkins has claimed that even though science cannot yet show how life came into being on a lifeless planet Earth, he's sure that science will one day provide some answers. This somehow angers Averick, who insists that science have all the answers right now, or give up and admit that God did it.

This gets at one difference between Religion and Science. Science can comfortably say "We don't know the answer, we're still trying to figure it out" whereas religion always has an answer at the ready: God did it.

Chapter four begin with a wholesale attack on scientists. Not on "science" as a means of answering questions of a scientific nature, but on scientists. Averick seems to feel that scientists need to be taken down a peg, because of their confident, cocksure ways. He goes on for quite some time, pointing out that scientists are no better or worse than the rest of humanity, and that they have all the same faults as any other humans. While this may true, it is hardly relevant to anything. Critiquing scientists says nothing about science, in the same way that critiquing Jews says nothing about the core beliefs of Judaism.

Again, I have to assume that Averick knows that all this verbiage is just wasted effort. It adds nothing to his point, it simply attacks, ad hominem, the character of scientists, and says nothing at all about the nature of science. If I don't assume intellectual dishonesty on his part, I have to assume that he's intellectually lacking, and I'd rather believe he's being deceitful rather than stupid.

Not understanding the limitations of science seems to be Averick's biggest error. He believes that science should at some point abandon science and jump to supernatural explanation when, in his opinion, there is no scientific explanation possible. Rabbi Averick loves to tell stories to illustrate his points. Let me try one.

Imagine a man who wants to be a great painter. He decides to paint his masterpiece, but despite his skill, he can't quite produce a work of art that completely gets his point across. In frustration, he gives up, and hires a man to stand in the gallery next to his painting and explain what he was trying to say to anyone who looks at his failed masterpiece. In this way the man gets his point across, but he is not a painter anymore. He has abandoned his brushes and canvas, and forsaken the point of the exercise. Not only is he a poor painter, he has given up being a painter at all.

When Averick asks scientists to abandon science in favor of supernatural explanations, he is asking them to do the same thing. Just because science does not have an answer, does not mean it will not one day have one. 1000 years ago man could not fly. It was impossible, and no one could imagine the science that would make it so. But a man would not have been wrong to say that one day science might find a way to let us fly.

I am running long here, but to adequately do justice to this mess of confusion and ignorance that Averick has passed off as a book would take a book in itself, and it would not be a book worth writing, because I think Averick's work is obviously the work of someone who, by his own admission, was "experiencing [a] slightly manic and frenetic state of mind... as [he] wrote this book."

His final chapters deal with morality in an atheistic world (dealt with in the works of Dan Barker and Greg Epstein) and the problem of evil in a universe in which God exists. His philosophical acumen is again found wanting, as he recycles arguments that were tired in the ancient world. In discussing the atheist view of a non-created, purposeless universe, Averick writes, "I don't think I would be going out on a limb by opining that the universe described... is not a universe that would inspire the average person to jump for joy (it might however, inspire him to jump off a tall building.)"

This, I believe, gets at the heart of Averick's mental disconnect. He has a lot invested in the idea of God's existence, and cannot stand the idea of a Godless universe. As a result, he will use any argument or tactic to convince himself and as many people as he can that there is a God, no mater how dishonest, illogical or plain silly his arguments have to be. I really wish I had not bought this book. It adds nothing to the debate, and the arguments it advances have been better made by more worthy theologians.

45 of 71 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Jewish Response to the New Atheists February 19, 2011

By Fritz R. Ward TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

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Rabbi Moshe Averick offers a new perspective to the recent debates on the new atheists. Unlike other volumes, which have explicitly defended Christianity, or in the case of David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion more credibly argued the scientific pretensions of atheists are actually another variant of religion, this little book attempts defends a belief in God as rational, and suggests the alternatives posed by today's atheists are unconvincing. Indeed, Averick gives multiple illustrations showing that what new atheists lack in intellectual coherence is made up for by their pompous declarations of a certainty they do not possess. Nonsense of a High Order is not a defense of any particular religious tradition, but astute readers will see in this book an insistence on clearly phrasing objections and arguments that rabbinical students learn early at any yeshiva. Needless to add, Averick finds that the new atheists fall woefully short in this regard.

Averick offers several objections to the arguments of the new atheists. In the first instance, he finds that their reliance on Hume or Darwin to defend atheism is woefully inadequate. Indeed, for the most part neither author really addresses the main arguments for the existence of a deity. Averick concedes the case that Darwinian thought "explains" the diversity of life on Earth, but then notes, as most honest defenders of Darwin will, that it cannot explain the origin of life itself. After reviewing the "scientific" literature, Averick notes there is good reason to believe no naturalistic explanation will ever be forthcoming. Claims to the contrary amount to little more than statements of faith. Hume's argument, however, fairs even worse. Hume had suggested that the argument from design only applied to objects that we know humans can design. Since we know little of life or the universe, we cannot, Hume argued, make a design inference. But in fact, as Averick notes, we do design artificial limbs, and even hearts, so regardless of whether or not Hume was able to make a design inference, we certainly can.

The bulk of the book however does not deal with Darwin or Hume, both of whom are cited mostly as an example of atheist handwaving. Instead, Averick rightly focuses on the claims the new atheists make about human nature. Philosophers since at least Descartes have argued that we infer the existence of the spiritual world and God from our own spiritual nature. Atheists are at pains to deny this aspect of human nature, but their claims are unconvincing. Attempting to reduce our consciousness, our experience of ourselves, to a physical or material phenomena simply does not pass the common sense test. Yes, it is true that scientists can provoke certain experiences by probing a living brain. And indeed, we can, as Averick notes, promote certain experiences by damaging other parts of the body as well. But the question is, who is the "I" or the person who experiences memories and foresight. No materialist explanation is possible, and indeed, we all, even the atheists, take this spiritual aspect of our lives for granted. (How else do we explain the passion with which atheists try to "convince" us that we do not have free will? They and we both know their arguments presume an ability to chose and weigh evidence.) Finally this book examines the question of morals and morality. Here again, the materialist claims of the new atheists are hopelessly muddled and unconvincing.

In the final analysis, Averick is suggesting not merely that the atheists are wrong. He is actually arguing that their claims are literally nonsense. The science and philosophy they bring to their defense does not in fact address the issue. Their claims about human nature are not only wrong, but they themselves do not, in their everyday lives, act on their claimed beliefs. Their arguments are in fact so confused as to suggest that they have some underlying psychological issues, not a coherent argument against God. I suspect Averick is right. My own atheist years were more of a childish rebellion against perceived authority than a serious intellectual response to religious thought. Atheism is an easy out for those who do not wish to address the serious issues life offers. And it is amazingly easy for a trained rabbi to dissect these arguments and present them for what they are. Anyone with an interest in (genuinely) rational thought will find reading this book a valuable exercise.