Sans mercy

Anthony Sacramone publishes a very positive review of The Irrational Atheist at First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life:

Just when atheists thought it was safe to enter the public square, a book like this comes along. The Irrational Atheist by Vox Day is not a work of Christian apologetics. It is, instead, a merciless deconstruction of atheist thought—or what passes for thought. That’s the gimmick, if you will, of the book: Day does not accept a single assertion made by any one of the “Unholy Trinity”—Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens—without first pinning it to a sheet of wax as in a seventh-grade science class, dissecting it until there’s nothing left but a case for anti-vivisection legislation.

I’m delighted with the review, especially with the attention paid to what I’ve always felt was the more significant aspect of my rebuttal of the false religion-war link, namely, the near-complete silence of the classics. However, I should probably make three small clarifications. I made a mistake in the first print-run that’s already been corrected, because Harris doesn’t actually assert “that most suicide bombers are Muslims”, he instead claims that one can almost bet one’s life on the probability of a suicide bomber being Muslim. And this is indeed true, if you believe that it’s a reasonable bet to gamble your life on a 58.6 percent probability. Also, the relevant statement from Dawkins which led to my citation of the Goldilocks-calculating mathematician isn’t “any God capable of fine-tuning the universe”, (a statement Dawkins also made), but rather any God capable of making the calculations necessary to fine-tune the universe. The difference is small, but significant to my rebuttal of Dawkins’s argument.

As for God’s sovereignty, I don’t dispute it at all, I merely dispute the omniderigiste’s tortured interpretation of the word “sovereignty”. But I have no problem whatsoever with the many Christians who are skeptical of my theological speculations, that’s precisely why they are labeled as such in the book, and in any case, they are largely tangential to my case against the New Atheists.

Thanks to Chad the Elder of the good Fraters for letting me know about it. And congratulations to Richard Dawkins for choosing an excellent time to cash in before everyone realizes how completely his credibility has been shot. I don’t begrudge him the money in the least, after all, if his next book is worth $3.5 million, I figure I can make a pretty reasonable case that mine should be worth around five times that.

CodeMonkey Ramblings also posts a very nice review. I’m sure all those atheists terrified by Harris’s Extinction Equation will simply adore his metaphor:

For a book of its size, the Irrational Atheist manages to do a lot of damage to New Atheism. Think of it as the polemic equivalent of putting a city-killing nuclear bomb in a suitcase. If anything proves the intellectual weakness of the New Atheist movement, it’s the fact that a single book which is only about 300 pages, can manage to jump from one member of the leading clique after another and deftly annihilate them in such a small amount of space.