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I know it’s a cliche, but you guys rock. Seriously. I just got an email from the publisher informing me that the initial printing is sold out and that back orders are already in four digits.

I know most college graduates are very poorly educated. But one would think that even a maleducated individual might be able to discern the difference between an actual principle of logic and a well-known quote from a pop scientist:

I can now move on to logical principles that are easy to grasp that, since their discovery, have proven to be valuable tools in advancing the human condition just as assuredly as the wheel and fire have. One of these principles states that, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Any claim that contravenes the natural order is extraordinary.

First, our intrepid college atheist clearly isn’t aware that this “time-tested” principle of logic is merely a popular Carl Sagan quote. Ironically, one can just as conclusively “prove” the existence of God with another time-tested principle of logic from the same source: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

However, this “time-tested principle” actually appears to date all the way back to 1987 and a professor of sociology named Marcello Truzzi who founded the Skeptical Inquirer. Not only has it been markedly less useful to humanity than the wheel and fire, it’s entirely useless since it doesn’t define “extraordinary” with any useful metric. It is the intellectual offspring of David Hume’s oxymoronic statement that only a miracle can prove a miracle. So, even if David Hume had witnessed such a conclusive miracle-proving miracle, his only means of proving it to others would be to provide testimonial eyewitness evidence of the very sort that he previously claimed insufficient to prove what he now knows to be true.

However one may reaonably describe the “extraordinary claims” principle, “logical” and “time-tested” are not among the options. Nor has it proven to be useful to anyone other than atheists attempting to snow the insufficiently educated.

From the Publisher:

I’m delighted with the efforts of your bloggers to get the early buzz for the book. Hitting the top 100 is a great accomplishment and you sold out Amazon, so I’m anticipating a nice reorder from them. Great job!

As for me, I can only say well done and thank you. Thank you very much! And check this out:

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing Items Like This?

97% buy the item featured on this page:
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
3.4 out of 5 stars (85)

1% buy The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens
5.0 out of 5 stars (4)

1% buy Gastroanomalies: Questionable Culinary Creations from the Golden Age of American Cookery
4.8 out of 5 stars (13)

1% buy An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World’s Biggest Problems
4.2 out of 5 stars (314)

If TIA ever approaches LF’s lofty territory and they hit the same bestseller lists, that popping noise you’ll hear will be heads exploding all over the Internet. For that matter, I wonder which must puzzle Jonah more, his bestseller seeing crossover with an atheism book or a culinary one.

And familiarizes herself with an eminently fascinating tome:

I spent part of the day reading Vox Day’s new book, The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. You might know Vox Day from his blog and interesting take on feminist issues–he always has something provocative to add to that particular conversation and his book proves to be just as stimulating in regards to religion and faith…. The book is definitely thought provoking and worth a read if you are interested in the topic!

As you’ve probably seen from the post down the page, it didn’t take long for a clueless atheist – apparently a university professor in this case – to read her post and be inspired to perform irrational atheist tricks. One can only imagine how hysterical the guy’s response would have been if he’d actually read the book and encountered the line about “assuming that one equates education with pieces of paper collected from paper-selling institutions.”

UPDATE – Instapundit hasn’t read it yet, but reaches an accurate conclusion nevertheless: IN THE MAIL: Blogger Vox Day’s The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. Judging from the jacket copy, it’s not so much pro-God as anti-atheist.

I don’t want to be too hard on Mike, since he is clearly open-minded enough to give The Irrational Atheist a fair shake, at least in theory. And in fairness to him, there’s no shortage of Christians who will have a problem with the very first sentence of the first chapter. But since he wrote that he would welcome any arguments in response to his email, I shall grant him the same respect that I grant to all my critics, which is to say, I will post his argument in its entirety and respond to it with my usual reserve:

You lost my respect on the nineth paragraph of the preface. You showed your Bill O Rilley extreamist colors condeming the organization that helps protect peoples rights under the constitution. Namely the ACLU. Typical of traditional religious extreamist wanting to take away individual rights becouse it may not seem to follow your superstitions.You seem to hold so called historical traditions as automaticly right and should not be questioned or changed just because it may be flawed. Example AD and BC being changed. Maybe it was changed because it was just another Christian thing that made nonchristians think Christians were trying to make the world theirs.

While it pains me to have to repeatedly point this out to adults, people and organizations often say things that simply aren’t true. The ACLU does defend SOME Constitutional rights, however, it actually attacks those Constiutional rights which happen to conflict with its left-wing ideology. When is the last time that the ACLU defended the Constitutional Right to Free Association, for example? Also, I am a libertarian who is no friend of Bill O’Reilly, and I am a far more extreme advocate of individual rights than the ACLU has ever been in its most fevered dreams. It is unwise to leap to conclusions about a book based on the very first thing inside it that upsets your conceptual applecart. Regarding BC/BCE, as someone recently pointed out here, it’s pretty stupid to rename the epoch while still basing it on the supposed time of Jesus Christ’s birth. Of course, all the Year Ones of the various revolutionary calendars haven’t shown much staying power.

I think that was one of the main points of Sam Harris’s book.You seem to miss the main point. All belief in god is based on some ancient tradition and writings that the believer takes on blind faith to be true. The fact that there are many differient beliefs means everyone thinks the other is dead wrong.This seems to lead to war and other unreasonable disputes.Sure many nonreligious beliefs also lead to war and disputes but that just makes two wrongs.

I suggest that Mike read Chapter VII: The End of Sam Harris. Also Chapter V: Sam Tzu and the Art of War and Chapter VI: The War Delusion.

Religious doctrine is near impossible to get someone to comprimise on becouse they interpret thier belief to be the perfect word of god. I cant imagine a more dangerous recipie for disaster. This is why I think the whole theory of a god seems implausable.I think our concience our understanding of history,our open dialog of opinions to be weighed logicaly is our better hope for a peacefull and moral society.

If Mike can’t imagine a more dangerous recipe for disaster, I suggest reading Chapter III: The Case Against Science and Chapter XI: The Robespierre of Atheism.

Sure it will never be perfect becouse evolution didnt make us to be perfect.We only have the reality that has been delt us.Lets not waste time pretending and wishing there is something other than reality and start trying to solve problems based on hard facts and reason not someting somebody said his god said in an ancient book. I think blind devotion to something you cant really know for fact will always make your statistics twist and dance to mean what you want to try to prove the unprovable.You will allways will have a bias that cant be reasoned with.

This isn’t entirely unreasonable, but is more than a little ironic considering what comes next.

I have read all three of the books you are disputing and do agree with thier general ideas, but not all the ideas or details. To be quibling with the details you lose the main arguement! You even conciede this in the begining of the book! Your details look as bias as you say thiers are bias. Its all about the three hundred pound god in the room! If yor argument doesnt address the probabillity of god then your attack means nothing to me. I suspect you are only really trying to create that all important seed of doubt to the believers. We all know thats all they need. Your friends at fox news have perfected the he said she said seed of doubt to an art.

First, I have no friends at Fox News. Second, Mike has clearly forgotten what Dawkins explicitly states is the main argument of The God Delusion, which I refute in painstaking, step-by-step detail in Chapter VIII: Darwin’s Judas, in the process directly addressesing the probability argument which so interests Mike. (I note that “the main argument” of the other two books is not that which he believes it to be.) Third, Mike does a spectacular job proving my point about the fundamental irrationality of atheism. I am not saying the facts and details put forth by the Unholy Trinity are biased, I AM PROVING THEY ARE FACTUALLY INCORRECT. This means that the arguments they have made which are based on those facts are also incorrect. Mike is saying that he doesn’t care about the demonstrable flaws in the atheist arguments, he doesn’t care about the illogic involved, he only cares about the conclusion with which he concurs.

THIS IS NOT REASON, THIS IS INTUITION!

There are rational atheists. There are rational arguments for doubt and even for agnosticism. But as Mike demonstrates, there is no such thing as rational atheism and the sad truth of the matter is that most self-styled “rationalists” are far from “rational empiricists” and would be much more accurately described as “intuitionists”. Of course, this accuracy in labeling would make the fundamental weakness of their intellectual position patently obvious to all and sundry, so they attempt to coopt a title to which they have no right whatsoever.

The moral of the story: read, then critique.

I have zero interest in Hollywood, its products, its digital rights management schemes or its denizens. For those who feel otherwise, this would be your place to lament the late Mr. Ledger. Or, for that matter, the late Fred Thompson campaign.

Socrates Elegy admits what we’ve already concluded is obvious:

Mr. Day has accused me of being stupid, uneducated and not well-read. I do not deny that. But, on the other hand, I do not need to be smart, educated, and well-read to know that 2+2=4.

Very true. The problem is that the existence or non-existence of God != simple addition. If it were, then the discussion would not have continued for lo, these many centuries, nor would Messrs. Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens feel the need to write so many books about it. Nevertheless, I suddenly feel a deep sense of compassion – well, okay, a mild twinge of it – for SE, since it’s quite clear from the comments on Dr. Helen’s blog regarding her post on The Irrational Atheist that his maleducation is not his fault.

It seems SE has a professor named William, who wrote: “Vox Day’s essay is full of assumptions based on conceit, hubris and absurdity. You can watch his reasoning being taken down by one of my students on his blog. Rather amusing, really. Clearly not being one to examine the facts before leaping to a conclusion, Professor William rivals Sam Harris for an ability to combine certainty with logical incoherence. By way of example, consider William’s statement: “Good science never upholds tenets of ‘absolute certainty,’ but religious sure does, with out any supporting evidence.”

But even if “good science never upholds tenets of ‘absolute certainty'”, this says nothing about the point Professor William was supposed to be addressing, which is whether atheists rely on science with asolute certainty or not. Second, it’s abundantly clear that Professor William doesn’t understand what the term “evidence” means, as there is a great deal of legally admissible evidence for many religions. Perhaps he means “scientific evidence”, but that is far from the only kind of evidence, in fact, it is considered inherently weaker than many forms of evidence and for good reason due to its ever-mutating nature.

As everyone here knows, I did not stop calling myself a “forensic atheologist” due to Professor William’s student. I didn’t stop calling myself a “Japanese scientist because of SE either, in fact, I delight in my status as both a forensic atheologist and a Japanese scientist, such as it is. I have modified the sub-title accordingly, now that the book is available and the book cover is on display here.

What was truly amusing, however, was the way that Professor William first said that I am “lacking the intellectual integrity to stand up to an amateur critical thinker.” Then, when David pointed out to him that I did, in fact, possess the intellectual integrity to stand up to the aforementioned young man, Professor William promptly reversed himself in order to claim he found it amusing “that Vox Day would devote an entire lengthy post defending himself from the critique of my student.”

Of course, I wasn’t “defending myself”, I was mocking a nonsensical and incompetent attempt to judge a new 320-page book on the basis of a four-year old, 750-word op/ed column. And yet one can’t really blame SE, his actions were the natural result of receiving an “education” from an incompetent, hypocritical and intellectually dishonest professoriat.

Some conservatives will mourn the departure of the Tennessee Toad from the presidential race. I won’t, partly because I’m not a conservative, but mostly because Fred Thompson was as much a poser and a fraud as most of the rest of the field. I haven’t forgotten Sean Hannity covering for his slip-of-the-tongue that revealed his pro-abortion position – he’s not merely a Federalist on the issue, which is acceptable, but an opponent of STATE bans, which is not – nor did it escape my attention that he wasn’t much better on free speech than McCensorship himself.

That being said, his laid-back character would certainly have made for a better president than most of the remaining activists; if he wasn’t going to fight the leftward push, neither was he going to ban smoking like Huckabee, guns like Giuliani or single-handedly attempt to turn back the clock to 1950 in Detroit like Romney. Fred always looked better out of the race than in it, so don’t be surprised if more people eventually regret his departure than ever supported him when he was in it.

PZ complains that Christopher Hitchens can’t expect fair moderation:

t takes some confidence to charge into this: Hitchens will be debating Jay Richards (of the Discovery Institute), with Ben Stein as “moderator”, in an event sponsored by the Stanford IDEA club. The creationists are stacking the deck against him rather thoroughly.

You know, I don’t recall ever seeing PZ complain about a debate featuring a Democratic politician versus a Republican politician with the likes of Chris Matthews or Wolf Blitzer mediating….

As for the Hitchens-Richards debate, ye cats, I think I’d pay to avoid witnessing that debacle. I don’t know who Richards is and Hitchens knows less about evolution than PZ thinks your average creationist does. Of course, anyone who’s read god is Not Great is aware that Hitchens isn’t one to let his complete ignorance of the subject matter to slow him down in the slightest.

It’s increasingly understood that they’re far more inclined to marital infidelity than the average woman:

Over a five-month period, I talked to almost 100 middle-class professionals, both male and female, who confessed to being unfaithful. What was remarkable was that not one of the women said they felt guilty. And those who believed they might get emotionally involved tried to work out hard-headed strategies of dealing with it.

Women are always attracted to the top dog. This doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily going to do anything about it, but throw a woman into an office environment and she’s going to have an entirely natural desire to mate with the modern equivalent of the tribe leader, or his likely successors. Combine that with the necessary narcissism of a woman who puts her children and household behind her work priorities as well as the all-too-common female ethic of personal happiness uber alles and you have the perfect storm for marital infidelity.

A professional procurer knows who his customers are: He meets each applicant personally and over a drink or two finds out his or her needs and desires. He then provides three carefully chosen individuals at a time for them to chose from. His clients are wide-ranging. “I have all sorts of high-ranking professionals come to me and, recently, far more women. Many of my female clients are psychotherapists. I haven’t a clue why.

The unpredictable emotions of situational love and gamma male gigolos aside, I can’t think of a single rational reason why a man should intentionally elect to marry a woman who decides to seriously pursue a career. Wife and mother is a full-time occupation and a far more important one to society and the human race than 99 percent of what passes for the so-called careers of the full-time professional woman. No one of either sex can have it all, and a decision to become a professional woman is a very clear public statement of where a woman’s priorities are. (Hint: not you, not the children, not the family.)

There will always be exceptions, of course, and there’s certainly no shortage of non-career women who don’t wish to work but do so in order to support their families, but the fact that researchers are concluding that professional women’s marriages are inordinately likely to end in infidelity and divorce should come as no surprise, it is simply the logical probability.

I and most of my married male friends – highly educated and successful men to a man – have stayed away from career women. Unsurprisingly, there is not a single incident of divorce, separation or even infidelity in that social circle of which I am aware except the one guy who married a professional peer and found himself divorced within five years. I have four good female friends who are equally well-educated – the two with elite B-school MBAs have both been home with the kids for years, the two with the careers are both unmarried and childless.

This advice may sound terribly clinical, I know, but in truth it’s just the rational conclusion of applying logic and probability to the empirical data that’s available.