Jason Rosenhouse has many talents, but he’s particularly good at reviewing books.  He takes hold of a book like a dog grabs the postman’s leg:  he worries it, chews on it, and doesn’t let go until he’s gotten everything he can from his mastication.  Over at EvolutionBlog, Jason has just posted part I of his review of Why There Almost Certainly is a God, Keith Ward’s response to recent atheist attacks on faith.

I’ve read several of the anti-new-atheist books that Jason mentions, including the execrable God and the New Atheists, by John Haught.  And, like Jason, I haven’t found much substance in them.  While uniformly decrying atheists’ lack of theological sophistication, they offer no substantive response to our most trenchant critique: there is no evidence for any divine being, or for the fact claims of any faith.  Absent that evidence, theologians and faitheists can argue until they’re blue in the face, but we still won’t consider that a “response.”

According to Rosenhouse, Ward doesn’t succeed any more than the others, although he gives it a game try:

Ward’s book is the best I have seen on this subject, and he is worth reading if just for the clarity of hs prose (not something you can count on from either philosophers or theologians). Surely if there were a convincing case to be made on behalf of the reasonableness of traditional religious belief Ward would be the one to present it. That he did not do so is telling us something about the hopelessness of the enterprise. . . .

[much critique snipped]

. . . Throughout the book Ward tries very hard to pretend that he is just building a purely logical case for God based on what we know of the world and on some reasonable extrapolations and assumptions. But the more you read the more you realize he is just rationalizing ideas he wants dearly to believe. There is no sound basis for going from, “Something must exist eternally and necessarily,” to “That something must be an omnipotent being.” Having made that leap, there is absolutely no basis for thinking that being is omnibenevolent. Having made both leaps, he then dutifully tries to explain why the sheer relentless awfulness of human and animal existence does not pose a challenge for his theory. He wants to create room for religious revelations, so he invents a lot of argle-bargle about what God would or would not do, and simply ignores the enormous harm that has been done by God’s unwillingness to communicate clearly what He wants from us.

In short, he is making it up as he goes along.

Part II is forthcoming (Jason is not an exponent of short reviews!)