I am collecting reviews of Faith versus Fact (sadly, there haven’t been many so far), and will eventually call attention to both the good ones and bad ones. I won’t try to refute the bad ones—I learned from Nick Cohen not to answer critics), but I think that if I highlight good ones, it’s only fair to call attention to the bad ones. But first let’s have a good one: Brother Jeffrey Tayler’s review in Saturday’s Atlantic, “Can religion and science coexist?” (free link).

Tayler is of course an atheist—and antitheist—which means that I have at least a chance of getting good marks. (I don’t expect to get a single good review from a theist.) And, fortunately, he liked the book and gave a pretty good summary of its contents. Tayler does note that the Pope has somewhat redeemed the Church with his global warming encyclical (which, he claims, lessens the force of my argument that religion makes at least a minor contribution to global-warming denialism), but Tayler neglects to mention that Pope Francis’s solution, which puts the burden on consumers rather than corporations—and totally exculpates population control—is evasive, impractical, and fails to deal with the damaging Catholic dogmas about contraception.

Tayler’s review makes two points that I want to elaborate on. First, he says this:

If there’s a subject Faith Versus Fact could have dealt with in more depth, it’s the question of how people, once shorn of faith, should perceive religion’s astonishing cultural heritage, from literature and music to art and architecture. He only briefly touches on art in the context of its unsuitability as a means of ascertaining truths about the objective world because, he writes, “it lacks the tools for such inquiry.” Works of art “can move us,” he writes, “even change us, but do they convey truth or knowledge?” But he does offer telling asides about his own reaction to such things, to demonstrate that he has a heart, and isn’t just a “cold scientist.”

I suppose the first bit makes a fair point, but I neglected the issue of religious art for two reasons. First, although the artistic heritage of religion is wide and rich, ranging from Leonardo’s paintings to Chartres to “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” I have NO IDEA whether, had religion never appeared, artists would have filled the lacuna with equally inspiring nonreligious works. There probably would have been no cathedrals, but art has been secular for a long time, and I find it hard to believe that medieval artists or later musicians wouldn’t have exercised their talents and impulses on secular topics, as did the early Dutch and Flemish painters like Frans Hals or Johannes Vermeer. I’d be interested to hear what readers think about this.

But the main reason I didn’t deal with this issue is that it was irrelevant, or largely irrelevant, to my theses: those involving the competing epistemologies of faith versus rationality in judging what’s true about the cosmos and the life within it. Just as I avoided passing judgment on whether religion has at times been good or bad for society, so I avoided speculating on whether art would have been better or worse without religion. Those issues, while intriguing, are hard to settle and, in truth, tangential to the aim of my book.

Tayler ends his review this way:

Faith Versus Fact could serve as a primer for nonbelievers wishing to present their case to the faithful as well as an aid for doubters struggling to resolve theistic dilemmas themselves. Atheists might hope that it could challenge believers by picking apart arguments for religion’s merits and veracity. But as his book demonstrates, and as the reactions to previous atheistic polemics by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens have proved, it’s unlikely to dissuade those whose faith is strongly grounded. Science might be based on a foundation of rational thought and trial-and-error, but the roots of religion lie in something much more incalculable, and thus much harder to counter.

Indeed, he’s right: hard-core religionists are hard to persuade (but not impossible, as Dawkins’s “Converts Corner” attests). And the arguments of faith, however, wonky, are recalcitrant to reason. But not impossible! Tayler himself writes weekly anti-theist columns for Salon that, of course, are even more “unlikely to dissuade those whose faith is strongly grounded.” But I suspect that both Tayler and I, as he implies above, are aiming at both the doubters and those who haven’t yet been brainwashed by believers.

And a nice tw**t from Tayler:

Tayler also told me that his review was the most active piece on the front page of the Atlantic, which surprised me. But, sure enough, as I write this on Sunday afternoon, there are already 1043 comments—and the piece was published just yesterday. I read down as far as the second comment (below) and stopped:

Dostoevsky was, of course, referring in The Brothers Karamazov to the notion that there can be no morality without God—a common view of the benighted. But whether Dostoevsky actually believed this himself is a matter of dispute. 

So far Faith versus Fact hasn’t been widely reviewed, which I find a bit puzzling (and hope it will be remedied); but here are three reviews that appeared recently.

1. The Chronicle of Higher Education: The review, by the religious scholar Timothy Beal, is called “Fundamentally atheist,” so you know what it’s going to say. It is, of course, that I don’t understand the nuances of religion and conflate all faiths as some form of fundamentalism.

Unfortunately, Coyne’s impressive ability to explain evolutionary biology and other scientific research and theory contrasts dramatically with his unacceptably simplistic understandings of religion generally and theology specifically, especially as it relates to what really is at the heart of the religion-science debate, namely the Bible and biblical authority.

I love Beal’s ending, which accuses me of not only preaching to the choir (seriously? Aren’t there people on the fence out there; and aren’t religious books even more susceptible to such an accusation? And where, exactly, did the metaphor “preaching to the choir” come from?), but also of trying to ruin his academic field! My emphasis on the butthurt below:

That said, I suspect understanding is not the goal of Faith Versus Fact. Its aim appears to be more polarizing, and that makes good market sense. Righteous refutations from the religious right will create buzz, and the growing choir to whom Coyne is preaching will rush to buy the book. After all, it’s been a while since Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great (Twelve, 2007).

If Coyne’s book succeeds, and I believe it will, it will prove that not only academic biblical studies but also the academic study of religion generally can safely be ignored. Those of us in those fields are used to being dismissed as irrelevant by mainstream popular culture, as well as by fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals. But by a highly acclaimed university scholar and public intellectual? That’s depressing.

Poor Dr. Beal: under assault by a scientist! But he’s wrong about my views. Of course I have no objection to the academic study of religion—as an human-produced phenomenon that’s been of immense importance in history. In fact, I just recommended Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, a popular but academic study of religion, as a good introduction to understanding where religion comes from. (I also recommend Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained, though neither of these books really explains the origin of religion in an airtight way.) And I’ve read a fair amount of stuff about how the Bible was put together: historical reconstruction of the scriptures—a field that’s often fascinating. What I object to are academic studies of theology that are anything more than historical accounts of human thought, and to studies which have any aim of understanding the divine. As Dan Barker says, “Theology is a subject without an object.” Thomas Jefferson was right when, as chairman of the commission for laying out the University of Virginia, he wrote this:

“In conformity with the principles of our Constitution, which places all sects of religion on an equal footing… we have proposed no professor of divinity … Proceeding thus far without offence to the Constitution, we have thought it proper at this point to leave every sect to provide, as they think fittest, the means of further instruction in their own peculiar tenets.”

In other words, teach your doctrine in your churches, not in the public schools and universities.

2. The Humanist, review by M. Dolon Hickman. This is a positive review, for which I’m grateful:

I loved this book. I loved Coyne’s premise, I loved his conclusions, and I loved the way he presented his case. Though I have previously encountered certain items of Coyne’s evidence, he makes even the familiar seem new, by arranging facts in unexpected ways, by teasing out unseen trends in the data, and by placing known answers against new sets of questions. He demonstrates a rare talent for presenting complex thoughts in a style that is fresh, approachable and entertaining. And while the book walks readers through a very thorough and well-researched series of arguments, the tone is consistently friendly and non-combative. Finally, Faith vs. Fact is chockfull of memorable zingers that should help amateur debaters keep Coyne’s arguments against religious accommodationism on tap.

I would recommend this book to anyone with even a passing interest in science, atheism, or humanism. It is also certain to be of value to activists, social workers, health care workers, teachers, lawyers, and, indeed, anyone who regularly encounters the undue influence of quasi-scientific religious thought.

3. The Independent gave the book a positive review, which surprised me. Written by Brandon Robshaw (a writer and Ph.D. candidate at The Open University), it’s gratifyingly called “Faith vs. Fact by Jerry A. Coyne: A perfect candidate to replace the late Christopher Hitchens.” Several readers sent me the penultimate paragraphs:

No doubt this book will attract the spiteful ire that defenders of faith have already directed at atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. But the ad hominem nature of that ire suggests a certain insecurity.

Jerry Coyne is the perfect candidate to replace the late Christopher Hitchens as the fourth Horseman of the New Atheist Apocalypse.

This is all very flattering, but of course nobody, much less me, can replace Hitch (please don’t contradict this in the comments!), and I have no pretensions to do that. If anyone is a candidate for the Fourth Horseperson, it’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But the next-to-last paragraph is right on: negative reviews of books by the New Atheists often reflect not only insecurity, but jealousy.

By the way, if you’re reading the book and find errors or typos, please email them to me. I’ve already accumulated a dozen, which will be corrected in the next printing and in the paperback.