Ethics For Unbelievers: a Ten-Point Plan

James Miller, A Better Ten Commandments: A Guide To Living With, and On Purpose

Over 130 years ago, Friedrich Nietzsche postulated that a new philosophy was dawning, a moral structure without recourse to God. But Nietzsche punted on what that philosophy actually looked like. Ever since, unbelieving philosophers great and small have attempted to step into that gap, but their philosophies have generally suffered terminal vagueness, lacking a firm foundation. They’ve mostly offered bromides like “Live Well” and “Be Creative.”

Entrepreneur James Miller becomes the latest to join this chorus, and his moral philosophy is remarkably good. His code, though sometimes suffering the broad generalities that plagued Camus and Russell, nevertheless provides a framework people can use to live a fulfilling and meaningful life, without turning to higher powers. Though a believer myself, I find plenty to like about Miller’s slim, plain-English philosophy. But it isn’t really Ten Commandments.

In his introduction, Miller gives a brief autobiographical precis, including how he came to disbelieve conventional religion, and explains his reasoning process. He pooh-poohs Moses’ original Top Ten because rigid obedience to concise laws creates moral contradictions—a conclusion that wouldn’t surprise theologians from Augustine to Bonhoeffer. Modern, pluralistic society needs more elastic ethics, responsive to today’s difficult moral throes.

Yeah, probably.

Then Miller disparages Moses’ Commandments as “common sense.” That’s problematic. I’ve read sociologists like Duncan J. Watts, who agree that common sense seems obvious mostly because we already know the answer. Though unbelievers could seriously dispute stuff about graven images and keeping the Sabbath, laws about murder, theft, and adultery need to be written down because some people need them spelled out, in black and white.

Okay, laying that trepidation aside, what do Miller’s actual “commandments” look like? Pretty good, actually. Exhortations like “Be the Best Version of Thyself,” “Find Perspective,” and “Cultivate a Rational Compassion” make admirable life goals, especially as Miller unpacks exactly what he means. Dedicated opponents could nitpick Miller’s precepts for contradictions, of course, but that’s true of all moral codes, religious or secular. Miller’s code is malleable enough to encompass difficult conditions.

James Miller

My problem isn’t Miller’s precepts; it’s his reasoning. Moses’ Commandments represent a floor. God supposedly declared these ten standards as a bottom standard below which we cannot sink, and still call ourselves His people. Levitical law works upward from that, creating more intricate rules about why we can’t eat shellfish, razor our beards, or weave cloth from two fabrics. Moses’ Commandments are bottom-up reasoning.

Miller’s Commandments, by contrast, represent top-down reasoning. His Commandments are well-meaning goals we should strive toward, but he requires justification for why they’re important, or what they even mean. The justifications he provides are quite good, drawing on an impressively catholic selection of Eastern and Western philosophy, different religions, science, and more. His reasoning is well-supported, yet somehow never quite finds its floor.

Anyone who’s ever had or worked with children knows it’s possible for obstreperous two-year-olds to lapse into an infinite regression of “But Why?” Adults do something similar when pushing moral boundaries, coming up with reasons why fusty ethics don’t apply in my situation. Parents eventually fall onto the “just because” argument, and religions do much the same, declaring that God unilaterally forbids murder, theft, and adultery, just because, so shhh!

Miller implicitly accepts some moral floor exists somewhere. Early on he writes: “Of course, no rule is perfect, so I must insist on a few caveats. If being the best version of yourself includes unethical or unsustainable behaviors, this rule doesn’t really pan out.” Literally, that’s on page two; versions of this thinking get repeated periodically throughout. So ethics and sustainability exist beneath Miller’s given Top Ten. What, then, are they?

I can’t really say. Though Miller accepts a Platonic ideal of goodness exists somewhere, it remains abstract beneath his standards. Therefore his standards, good though they are, remain beholden to some foundation, somewhere, which we still hope to discover. Without an absolute bottom line, Miller’s “commandments” remain subject to “But Why?” thinking which could literally regress infinitely. That’s how social corruption works. We must draw the line eventually. What does that line look like?

I still don’t know.

Miller provides a workable second-tier moral code without reliance on religion or divine revelation, I’ll give him credit. Readers who already have some idea what ethics and sustainability mean to them could apply his principles productively. But his moral floor remains vaguely defined, the problem which has plagued skeptical philosophers since at least David Hume. Miller provides a good moral framework, admittedly. But it’s too soon to call them Commandments.

Harry Potter and the Absence of God

Dan Vyleta, Smoke: a Novel

This novel commences with a late-night kangaroo trial in the toilets of an elite British boys’ school. Combining the worst of church confessional with Maoist self-critique, it pits vice-ridden youth against a completely virtuous head boy. We know his complete virtue because his wholly white clothing lacks stain. He asks pointed questions, many frequently hurtful, to expose any concealed sins, which lesser boys reveal when their bodies emit visible Smoke.

What Philip Pullman did for Narnia, Dan Vyleta here does for Harry Potter, essentially reconstructing the story without the original’s moral certitude and Christian backbone. Though this story lacks out-and-out wizardry—Vyleta’s worldview forbids characters to impose their will on reality—the parallels are undeniable, and profound. Though Vyleta won’t displace J.K. Rowling’s cultural primacy, he crafts an engaging, smart counter-narrative, and a fun, thoughtful fantasy besides.

Young Thomas Argyle, orphaned scion of a disgraced minor aristocrat, Smokes like nobody before him. In this world, every sin creates Smoke from human flesh, a malodorous vapour making secret vices visible to everyone. But where others have wispy Smoke, color-coded according to their sins, Thomas’ sin is thick, black, and undifferentiated. He’s something new, something unprecedented. And that scares the squeaky-clean, self-contained nobles of Smoke-drenched England.

Vyleta’s trio of protagonists are almost-perfect mirrors of the Potterverse trio. Where prophecy heralds Harry Potter’s heroic triumph over certain evil, science predicts Thomas’ slide into irrevocable vice. His sidekick, Charlie Cooper, is intellectual but lacking direction; he takes orders from Thomas because he needs purpose that Thomas’ passion provides. They’re joined by Livia Naylor, not book-learned, but blessed with acquired rectitude and bloodless adherence to rules.

All three must unlearn years of adherence to England’s moral strictures. This isn’t easy. They venture outside England’s well-manicured gardens in pursuit of truth, a journey that leaves them trapped in a coal mine, wandering London streets, and finally traversing that triumph of early-industrial England, the London sewer grid. No mystic caves or enchanted castles for these heroes. They must traverse the soot-stained infrastructure that British aristocracy seeks to hide.

Dan Vyleta

The dust-flap copy implies our protagonists encounter a Matrix-like conspiracy that everything they think they know is lies. That proves an ultimate subplot, one never really resolved (perhaps Vyleta’s saving something for the sequel). Rather, the story pits three intrepid heroes, blessed with more grit than information, against a massive bureaucratic machine that performs backflips to keep sin from England’s doorsteps. The result is altogether darker, and more morally ambiguous.

Issues of trust arise: who can our youthful protagonists trust when power is distributed unjustly? Schoolmasters have unvoiced personal agendas. Churchmen have no particular theology, mainly worshiping the forms of order. Even Lady Naylor, Livia’s mother, a mentor to young Thomas, keeps secrets with especial aplomb. She has knowledge our heroes need, and dominates them by withholding it strategically. Is she Dumbledore or Voldemort? We never can really tell.

Our heroes have entered a domain which Anglo-American anthropologist David Graeber calls “total bureaucratization,” that state where instruments of control are so comprehensive, they become invisible, and thus unquestionable. Science, religion, education, government, and industry all maintain cantilevered secrets. In Rowling, we generally know characters’ motivation from their actions. Vyleta assumes powerful people lie to disguise their intentions, clothing themselves in false righteousness, a painful lesson for our high-minded students.

If anything, this novel’s greatest enemy is absolute thinking. At various points, the young heroes attack various enemies, an ever-shifting pinwheel of antagonism, never fully grasping the bureaucracy that actually threatens them. In Rowling’s world Voldemort’s evil is never questioned; only how to defeat him is. Vyleta suggests “evil” is a useless umbrella term. The youths never doubt their own rightness, and adult wrongness, even as their mission wildly vacillates.

It isn’t accurate to call Vyleta’s world atheistic. This story isn’t Godless, just lacking in certitude. God joins countless other institutions in becoming a pervasive “maybe,” less important to England’s self-proclaimed holy than rectitude. These characters never abandon the language of religion, accurate for Victorian England, but gradually outgrow the illusion of certainty. Burgeoning surety of purpose prompts the characters to abandon reliance on transcendent verities.

This novel isn’t fast beach reading. It requires an investment of time and mental energy. Despite its young heroes, it isn’t YA fiction; it appears targeted, rather, at adults who previously embraced Rowling’s Joseph Campbell-ish “hero’s journey.” It makes an interesting companion volume, a friendly but uncompromising debate partner challenging Rowling’s staunchly conservative moralism. Vyleta here becomes one of fantasy’s truly good new voices.

Death in a Lifeless Place

Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

The receding tide at the Loney, a desolate stretch of beach along Morecambe Bay in Lancashire, England, reveals the gruesome remains of a murdered child. A nameless London recluse recognizes the place, and the body, from his boyhood, when his aggressively devout Catholic mother made annual pilgrimages to a nearby holy well. Our narrator, Smith, has buried his secrets for forty years, but knows everything will spill now. So he has to control the narrative.

Andrew Michael Hurley’s first novel, published in Britain in 2014 and making its global debut, comes with a laudatory cover blurb from Stephen King. No wonder, since it’s essentially a Stephen King novel: superficially a horror thriller, it actually encompasses the consequences when childhood traumas rear their ugly heads in adulthood. It also addresses misplaced beliefs and human inability to comprehend the world objectively, common King themes. It’s a King novel with a Limey accent.

Throughout his life, Smith has been his older brother’s caretaker. The brother’s named Andrew (coincidence? I think not), but everyone calls him Hanny. Mute and perpetually childlike, Hanny communicates in sign language only Smith comprehends. Hanny’s parents, Mummer and Farther, along with several fellow London parishioners, make an annual pilgrimage to the Loney, hoping holy well water will make Hanny whole. This despite the evidence it hasn’t yet, which has pushed Smith into nihilistic malaise.

Though presented as a thriller, this book is principally a family drama about religion. Our narrator struggles—or, more accurately, fails to struggle—to reconcile his mother’s deeply held beliefs with the evidence that life is a meaningless mechanism. But it also encompasses families’ difficulty communicating the most significant topics. Mummer and Farther, Smith, Father Bernard, and the parishioners share their concern for Hanny. They just talk past one another translating that concern into action.

Every year, the parishioners visit the Loney’s holy well on Easter Monday, force-feeding Hanny supposedly sacred water that consistently makes him gag. They occupy the same late-Victorian rental property, visit the same pre-Reformation church, pray the same prayers. The persistent ritual gives their lives shape; for them, ritual comes first. But Smith notices the ritual produces no measurable results. Early on, he seems ambivalent about belief and practice, though this eventually lapses into outright unbelief.

Andrew Michael Hurley

However, from page one, we know something the characters cannot know in the midst of events: Hanny really gets healed. He becomes voiced and sociable; eventually he becomes a married Anglican priest in a prestigious London parish. While Mummer and Farther hope Hanny’s voice gets restored, we wonder how, and by whom. Mummer, whose faith lapses into abusive fanaticism, hopes God will intervene. We wonder who comes wearing God’s face. Her future is our past.

While the urbanized, middle-class parishioners occupy their rental cottage, praying, locals notice and resent their presence. Taking the visitors’ presence as an affront, they find ways to insinuate their way into the house, extracting information from the parishioners while disclosing little themselves. Very Straw Dogs. Like many places in Northern England, pre-Christian traditions survive in Lancashire, dressed in sacramental drag. As sweaty local rituals encircle the clean, pious Londoners, we brace ourselves for the confrontation.

There, ultimately, is where this novel flails. If Hurley stuck with his strongest components, the brutal collision between faith and evidence, he’d have a powerful novel. Smith describes his parents’ willful blindness in excruciating detail, though later chapters imply Smith has his own blinders he’s worn so long, he’s forgotten they’re there. These parts really sing. However, he foreshadows his supernatural thriller elements so long, they’re an ultimate let-down, especially since they mainly happen offstage.

Hurley writes best not about the demonic, but about how humans conjure their fears into reality. He throws characters onto their own devices and lets them struggle. Both faith and unbelief appear as human attempts to impose meaning on the universe, which both prove equally unsatisfying. People struggle to communicate, understand, see, but are circumscribed by the evidence of their senses. Either way, we must make the Nietzschean journey through nihilism to find our meaning.

This novel has enough, in its struggles between faith and senses, to energize deep, inquisitive readers. Smith’s attempts to understand his family, couched within his failure to understand himself, make for deep reading. But audiences seeking the big, final Stephen King-ish conflagration will find his distant supernatural elements ultimately unsatisfying. Read this novel for its quiet, internal struggle, not its apocalyptic showdown. Because the former more than makes up for the lack of the latter.

The Wandering Jew Redux

Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return: A Memoir

Shulem Deen found his home among the New Square Hasidim in his teens.They provided him everything a good Hasidic boy wants: acceptance, family, guidance, home. But not answers. Moving into adulthood, embracing an arranged marriage and a lifetime of Torah study, he found millennia-old dogma unsatisfying. And when modernity intruded upon his obstinately unchanging community, his boyhood faith slipped away. So one day, amid ordinary ritual and family life, Shulem Deen found himself expelled.

Hasidim, like Shakers or the Amish, draw admiration and scorn in equal measure from outsiders for their exceptional devotion, besides their rejection of modernity. But like Amish, Hasidic communities are independently governed, and each population enjoys (if that’s the word) unique standards stemming from tradition and reason. Deen’s community, the Skverers, founded by Ukranian exiles during Stalin’s purges, are so conservative that, in Deen’s telling, even other Hasidim find their insularity and single-mindedness forbidding.

Nevertheless, Deen recounts a conversion experience so passionate, it’s hard to doubt his one-time sincerity. Raised among diverse Hasidic communities in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Deen stumbled across the Skverers accidentally, almost lazily. Once there, however, he discovered a people deeply unified behind shared customs, profound mutuality, and Daniel-like refusal to accomodate this world’s influences. Deen elegantly captures Emile Durkheim's assertion that religion emerges, first, to unify the people; God appears in religion, if He does, only subsequently.

What they’re unifying into matters, though, in ways Deen initially misses. The Skverers share an appalling fear-based ethic: fear of outsiders, fear of heterodoxy, fear of their own flesh. As Deen describes the events preceding his wedding, observant readers will feel afraid for him: he lacks vocabulary to identify his own body parts by name, and his elders deliberately obfuscate factual knowledge. Deen’s community so fears change, that any frank discussions produce reflexive primal terror.

This includes important faith-based issues. Though Deen, like all observant Hasidic men, spent years studying Mishnah and Talmud, records of Judaism’s great historical debates (rather than studying, say, algebra or job skills), the Skverers consider all debates closed after Maimonides died. When Deen’s modern experience differs from historical precedent, he cannot manufacture pat explanations. Worse, modernity’s three great temptations—AM radio, a library card, and the Internet—increase Deen’s questions. Blind faith no longer suffices.

In Deen’s description, moving outside faith lacks Richard Dawkins’ beloved Road-to-Damascus conversion to secular clarity. Instead, dawning unbelief is scary, trapping Deen outside his beloved community, lost in modernity’s solitary, nihilistic hinterlands. Lacking the experience secular peers obtained decades earlier, modern life becomes fraught. Deen must negotiate such minefields as job hunting, making friends, and building a life without community support. Meanwhile, his ex-wife demands the kids remain Hasidic, permanently dividing him from his children.

Religious memoirs, including memoirs of agnosticism, never really describe situations as they existed. Deen crafts moments to expose how the Skverer community attracted and embraced him, then how it failed to encompass his growing needs. Therefore, we cannot read Deen’s account as objectively describing what happened. People, including his rebbe, wife, and children, become essentially characters in Deen’s arc; life’s sloppy, chaotic events get reorganized into a plot. Deen admits structuring events into a story.

Within those confines, Deen describes the terrors that accompany losing faith. When one’s community prizes uniformity of thought above all else, knowledge becomes sinful, so we share Deen’s stolen thrill of reading children’s encyclopedias at the public library. When one’s community cultivates a fortress mentality, besieged by vast worldly wickedness, discovering like minds outside undercuts everything else, so when Deen discovers conservative Christians on AM radio feel persecuted, too, he realizes his people aren’t unique.

But where modern necktied atheists proclaim secularism as onerous religion’s antidote, Deen learns, discovering himself means leaving others behind. Though forced into an arranged marriage, he loved his wife, and cherished his children. But they didn’t share his journey. When the Skverers expelled deen, his family tried following him, but ultimately couldn’t. They belonged among their people. He didn’t. Modernity, like religion, requires embracing important ideas, and those who do, must abandon those who cannot.

A Jewish friend tells me ex-Hasidic memoirs have become real hot commodities recently. Though outsiders frequently lump all Jews together, Judaism in today’s society is as fragmented as Christianity, and while some seek religion’s nourishing community, others reject its burdensome bonds. That’s why this book succeeds, because it ultimately isn’t about Shulem Deen. It’s about us, and the frightening, ambiguous, transcendent questions we face daily. In today’s turbulent world, can we ever know certainty again?

Man Talking To God Talking To Man

Bruno Latour, Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech

Try this thought experiment: can you believe and not believe simultaneously? Now notice your speech, your morphology, your interior monologue. How do your faithful and rational sides communicate? French sociologist Bruno Latour attempts exactly this, unpacking human religious motivation and linguistic intent, arriving at some unexpected conclusions. Though not everyone will embrace his dense, theoretical discursus, his conclusions are remarkably timely and revealing.

The Apostles commenced their missions when, on Pentecost, they spoke to everyone in their own language. Latour loves Pentecostal imagery, because it demonstrates an outward orientation: we speak to others, we don’t force them to conform to us. Supposedly. Too often, though, adherents and agnostics alike would freeze language in amber, compelling everyone to speak our language, never speaking theirs. We kill language by separating it from its audience. Then we act offended when others walk away.

Latour attempts to bestride the debate, seeking not any facile resolution, but to define the terms. He perceives the struggle between religious and secularized language as essentially contested: that is, the sides take definition from the debate, and therefore cannot win, since resolution robs them of meaning. To communicate with others, we must sacrifice certainty for context. All truth becomes a lie, Latour says, when we try to fix meanings decisively.

This approach requires all readers, believers and unbelievers alike, to sacrifice sacred cows. Latour uses important philosophical concepts in unconventional ways: his definition of “God” will make most theists squirm, and his definition of “belief” runs almost diametrically counter to Bentham and Locke’s usage. He thus implicitly rejects both anti-modernist beliefs in linguistic continuity, and Enlightenment belief in temporal triumphalism. Latour doesn’t let us consider any concept unquestionable or sacrosanct.

By prodding religious language from both ends, Latour uncovers a profound gap between how devout and secularized people use seemingly interchangeable language. Specifically, he contends, religious language doesn’t have what secularized ontology would call “meaning.” That is, we don’t use liturgy to transfer literally knowable information; we use liturgy to transform ourselves. Arguers straddling today’s religious divide get frustrated, because they don’t realize the same vocabulary serves incompatible purposes.

Bruno Latour

Apparently, Latour considers this conclusion subversive, to believers and skeptics alike. Maybe it is, to readers unfamiliar with contemporary philosophy. Latour conflates ideas familiar from authors like Foucault and Bonhoeffer, in a way that more highlights previously unrecognized concurrence than really adds anything new. Basically, he spotlights what seasoned readers didn’t realize they already knew. (Lacking either bibliography or index, it’s hard to say how deliberate Latour’s coevality is.)

Yet it explains contemporary American religious trends. While many Protestant and Evangelical churches embrace Enlightenment rationality, or some derivative thereof, several centuries late, many rank-and-file believers defect to Catholic and Orthodox worship, citing specifically the experiences’ antiquity. And though Latour’s approach treats “religion” and “Christianity” synonymously, it explains the Pagan resurgence, purporting as it does to restore humanity’s oldest, most undiluted worship practices.

Latour attempts to analyze religious discourse from a complete outside perspective, neither believer nor smug academic atheist. He pursues complete agnosticism, meaning he tries to avoid allying himself with any existing religious (or irreligious) doctrine. Thus, he describes attending Mass and following the liturgy without investing any belief in it. He purposes to discuss religion without recourse to God. He thinks this “shocking,” but I’ve read Émile Durkheim.

He achieves this putative agnosticism sometimes better than others. He treats religious credulity more fairly than, say, Freud. His approach invites comparison to Durkheim and Giambattista Vico, and more recent thinkers like John Polkinghorne and Stephen Jay Gould. But his mask periodically slips, permitting glimpses of a limp demi-Marxist undercarriage, laced with open distaste for anti-modernism. He avoids that annoying postgraduate password, lumpenproletariat, but only just.

This book sets new benchmarks for the expression “not meant for everyone.” Latour eschews such conventions as chapter breaks, and organizes his ideas in free-association panorama, meaning he runs 174 pages without letting readers pause to collect their thoughts. His dense école normal prose requires extreme dedication. Take copious notes; you’ll consult them often. Only truly resolute readers should undertake this book, and only with great forethought and caution.

Yet for Latour’s intended readers, this intriguing thought experiment will undoubtedly encourage spirited debate and much-needed introspection. It will force marked re-evaluations of dogmas and golden calfs, of both sacred and secular belief. Nobody will embrace Latour’s conclusions altogether, but most honest readers will recognize themselves in his polemics. Once we own our limitations, and only then, we become able to speak across the divide.

Godless Dogma

PZ Myers, The Happy Atheist

With this title, I expected perhaps somebody enjoying a half-drunken night of sacred cow-tipping, somebody more like Billy Connolly, Dave Barry, or John Cleese perhaps. But this guy isn’t remotely happy. He’s chastising everybody who ever raised his hackles, an apparently long list (though he’s squishy with actual names). I once sat beside a guy excoriating his ex-wives at a bar. Myers reminds me of that.

In his first chapter, Myers promises not to regurgitate “the common atheist line” and claims that, confronted with religious absurdities, he has only one reasonable reaction: “I have to laugh.” These pledges don’t even reach page thirty before he starts painting everybody with one broad brush, and reciting laundry lists of grievances. Even his grievances have a numbingly familiar timbre. C’mon, PZ, don’t just paraphrase Richard Dawkins!

Myers seemingly promises one book and delivers another. He offers an irreverent, playful critique of America’s facile religious discourse, something even many True Believers would welcome today. But once you start reading, Myers repeatedly works himself into demonstrative indignation and starts reciting predictable adjectives about how awful theists, particularly Christians, really are. He doesn’t distinguish moderate theists from outliers, nor respect his opposition enough to even lob new or innovative accusations.

Around the one-third mark, I realized Myers doesn’t have many proper nouns in most essays. Myers confronts a rolling panoply of opponents, mostly vague (“Christians say...” or “Some have accused me...”). Sometimes he names his opponent, like British religious writer Karen Armstrong or “burn-a-Koran” nut Terry Jones. But in most of his thirty-four short essays, he rails against abstract, nebulous foes making weird anti-intellectual statements.

The only opponent he quotes at any length is Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Convention. He cites Bible verses out of context, a technique beloved by atheists and evangelicals alike to make the Bible say something it doesn’t say. He offers artfully trimmed excerpts from blog comments and e-mails he received while trying to inflame controversy. (If you do something provocative to bait religious nuts, can you really claim victory because religious nuts act provoked?)

But overall, Myers doesn’t quote those he refutes. He presents straw-man arguments about some conveniently nameless theist, or he caricatures specific opponents’ beliefs. It’s like watching Fox News misrepresent the Democratic Party, or hearing Fred Phelps mock gays and secularists. Audiences wonder: why would anybody believe such claptrap? Reality replies, nobody really believes that burlesque. Nobody worth your energy, anyway.

Therein lies the trap. If you don’t know your opponents, you needn’t address them where they are now. Myers makes the same mistake as evangelists like Bob Larson and Brother Jed, drawing sweeping conclusions about people he hasn’t met and understands in only one context. These conclusions justify long, rambling invectives claiming that those who disagree with him are “irrational,” “infantile,” “smug,” or his particular favorite, “stupid.” After the first chapter, he makes no distinctions, applying his labels with giddy abandon.

I blame the format. These essays began life as entries on Myers’ blog, where intrepid readers can find many of them verbatim. But Internet writing rewards short attention spans, surface-level reading, and pat answers. Blogs, including this one, attract audiences that share the author’s core suppositions, and reward writing that whips ideological fellow-travelers into high dudgeon. They don’t much encourage deep investigation or intellectual diversity.

Myers repeatedly starts to address some important topic, something deserving of his time, that theists have historically elided or failed to explicate. Sometimes, he raises questions I’ve seen in authors as disparate as Albert Camus, Isaac Asimov, and Cynthia Ozick; other times, his questions come seemingly from nowhere and take me by surprise. I nod vigorously, thinking: yes, this will surely justify this entire book.

Then Myers consistently stops. Perhaps he gets tired. Perhaps he thinks his point proven by dint of having raised it. More likely, because he’s courting an Internet audience that already agrees with him, the topic requires no further unpacking. But I want more from a book! I want the ramifications, the caveats, the full extension of Myers’ argument. Myers makes intriguing promises, but I just feel ripped off.

Science and philosophy give us good reasons to treat atheism seriously. Christopher Hitchens, Bertrand Russell, and Sigmund Freud offer very good criticisms that theists have preponderantly failed to answer. They made fun, enlightening reading, too. But Myers resembles the Archie Bunker of atheist dogma, berating anybody who doesn’t agree and claiming victory when they stop fighting. This atheist isn’t happy, and he isn’t enlightening either.