How to Be a Good Atheist
by Nick Harding
Oldcastle Books, £10.00, ISBN 978-1-8423-237-2

The title of Nick Harding’s book How to Be a Good Atheist, could mean morally good or effective. What is offered covers what ‘atheism’ means, a brief history of it, a justification, and an attack on religion. It is a short (160 pages) addition to the current spate of anti-religious books by Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, etc. It is very clear and readable, though there are some stylistic and grammatical slips.
He seems to agree with the view of some writers, that there are five subsets of atheism: dogmatic, sceptical, critical, philosophical and speculative. I would rather see a spectrum, ranging from mere absence of belief in God or gods, to either a denial of their existence, or the view that since there is neither evidence nor logical argument in favour, and rather good reasons against, a negative result is the only tenable conclusion. There is a chapter on “What is wrong with religion?” – essentially, that it relies on faith – although Harding points out that some religions have no gods. His history of atheism is clear if necessarily very condensed. There is a spirited defence of atheism against the usual silly attacks, e.g. it is just another faith, lots of bad people like Hitler have been atheists (he wasn’t, and in any case it is irrelevant), atheists cannot be moral, if we lose religion we lose all our finer qualities, love, art, music, etc., we all “really” believe in God but atheists won’t admit it, and so on.
The book ends with some famous atheists, a glossary, and twenty-odd ‘must-have’ books for atheists, inevitably leaving out= many favourites. A short list of useful addresses sadly omits The Freethinker (“the voice of atheism since 1881”). It’s often a pugnacious book, throwing punches in all directions, but a lot of them score. It ought to be in every secondary school. Fat chance.

In God We Doubt: Confessions of a Failed Atheist
by John Humphrys
Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99, ISBN 978-0-340-95126-2

John Humphrys, fierce political interviewer and question master of Mastermind, interviewed representatives of the three main monotheistic religions, the Chief Rabbi, the Archbishop of Canterbury and a Muslim academic, in the radio series Humphrys in Search of God.
The huge response got him thinking, and this book is the result. He tells us that he was brought up a Christian and prayed every day for most of his life, began to doubt, but cannot shake off the idea that there is Something There – hence his title and sub-title (the latter raised fears that it was an I-was-wicked-but-found-God story, so I was glad to find it isn’t). He raises questions of the kind which have troubled people for centuries, in his case from Aberfan to Beslan, asking why God let them happen – the dreadful difference being, as he says, that while Aberfan was an accident, Beslan came about through deliberate action.
The recent spate of anti-religion books by Dawkins, Hitchens et al. gives him much to chew on, and he chides the fiercer critics of religion who insist that all religious belief is delusion, quoting Archbishop William Temple: “If you talk to God you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia”.
Cargo cults, Pascal’s wager, Bertrand Russell’s teapot and the problems presented to Christians and Jews by the repellent parts of the Old Testament appear, as in Dawkins. Believers’ sometimes baffling logic gets some stick. Humphrys was assured that God alleviated the suffering caused by the 2005 Kashmir earthquake by holding off the snows; why didn’t he simply prevent the earthquake? Similarly, Dawkins asked why, if Our Lady of Fatima saved the Pope’s life after the assassination attempt, as he said, she didn’t simply stop the attempt. Humphrys tells of attending a Billy Graham meeting with a friend. The car broke down on the way. He lightly suggested God didn’t want him to go, and his friend said it was the Devil. The Mensa study showing an inverse relationship between intelligence and belief, and the fact that few members of the Royal Society believe in a personal god, are more significant than Humphrys maintains.
Humphrys’ statement that “by any civilised standards many Sharia punishments are barbaric” is particularly appropriate since I read it at the time of the fuss over the Archbishop of Canterbury suggestion that some aspects of Sharia might come to Britain. Humphrys is witty, with some nice jokes about discoveries of the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, Jesus’s bones or tomb, or “that he had a brother or a son who played in defence for Bethlehem United”. And he says Tony Blair may have converted to Catholicism by the time his book is read – the man’s a prophet! Someone should tell him that the alien in Alien burst out of John Hurt’s chest, not Sigourney Weaver’s, that there is no actor called Leonard DiCaprio, and that Kate Winslet played a first-class passenger in Titanic. And this book’s (highly reputable) publishers should be ashamed for omitting an index.

The Satanic Scriptures
by Peter H. Gilmore
Scapegoat Publishing, $15.95 (pb), ISBN 13:978-0-9764035-9-3

The content is not what the casual reader might expect from the title and look of the book. Peter Gilmore is no Mocata, providing instructions on sacrificing virgins and summoning up Beelzebub. There would be no point as far as he is concerned because we are our own gods, and despite the theatrical religious trappings, Gilmore propounds a secular creed.
Magus Gilmore is the heir to Anton LaVey, founder of The Church of Satan (CoS), and the Scriptures comprises a collection of essays mostly reprinted from The Black Flame, the news-stand Satanic magazine which Gilmore founded. The result is somewhat unstructured and repetitive, but entertaining.
Many of the essays are devoted to fending off misapprehensions by aspiring Satanists of what the CoS actually is and how one should live the lifestyle. A key topic is whether Satanism is related to Fascism. It is nothing like it (despite using a Fascist-style system numbering years from the foundation of the Church in 1966), because Fascism subordinates the individual to the collective, whereas Satanism is individualistic.
In fact, a herd mentality is anathema to Gilmore. His epicurean philosophy is based on an egotistical view of the world in which “rational self-interest” is the foundation of the Satanist’s actions. Ultimately he is a right-wing libertarian and it is not surprising that Ayn Rand is name-checked. There is a photograph of him with LaVey in leather jackets and sporting guns – Gilmore’s is bigger, oddly – looking like a pair of wannabe survivalists.
However, despite the attitude of fearless non-conformity there is something comfortingly suburban about Gilmore’s doctrine of enhanced self-esteem. He comes over as a nice chap, a musicologist and animal-lover. Clearly there is no biting the heads off chickens in the Gilmore household. He expounds a way of life attractive to teenage boys with large collections of heavy metal CDs and black T-shirts, but no girlfriends. Mums may worry about what is going on upstairs but society is never going to be under threat.

Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction
by Thomas Dixon
Oxford University Press, £7.99 (pb), ISBN 978-0-19-929551-7

The author is a historian, and he promises “an informative and even-handed account of what is really at stake” between science and religion. In 150 pages, it is informative and on the whole even-handed. But it is an introduction to some of the well known controversies, rather than to basic issues between science and religion. Nowhere does he tell us what he understands by these terms. Religion in particular covers a large range of activities, not all shared by all creeds. It is effectively limited here, as he acknowledges, to Christianity and Islam, which differ from many others. The main controversies dealt with are Galileo, how God interacts with nature, if at all, evolution, creationism, and morality. Dixon rightly stresses that there is never a simple fight between the scientific goodies (or baddies) and religious baddies (or goodies). And that the controversies are invariably entangled with social, political, economic and other factors.
He is also right that they are likely to continue. Even-handedness can lapse into relativism. For example, in his conclusion Dixon says: “From within a particular world view or ideology, certain maxims will seem fundamental and unalterable: for a Muslim, the truth of the Quran; for a Christian, the fact of the resurrection; for an atheist, the purely human nature of all moral codes”. But “seeming” is not all there is to it. And Occam’s razor, I suggest, separates the first two from the third. There is ample evidence that moral codes exist and that humans make them. There is no equivalent evidence for the other two, or for an additional non-human source of morality. Atheism is not another belief, but an absence of belief. I suggest also that neither science nor religion is an agent.
There are scientifically or religiously disposed people, who may be opposed or in agreement or, very often, confused. And insofar as science and religion are entities, they are not the same kind of entity. Such issues need to be sorted, if only briefly, before describing particular conflicts. Otherwise we cannot understand what is “really at stake”. The book ends with ten pages of suggested further reading. In short: good, but could be better.

Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear
by Jan Bondeson
WW Norton, £18.95, ISBN 039304906X

As a claustrophobic, I wasn’t looking forward to reading this book, But Jan Bondeson’s skeptical account of the myths behind live burials is so fascinating that I couldn’t put it down.
Anyone who has shuddered at Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial” will not be reassured to learn that this terrifying story reflected a common Victorian fear. Before modern medical science, it was not always easy to determine death. Urban myths of live burials abounded. There was the prematurely buried pregnant woman who gave birth in her coffin six feet underground, the aristocratic lady who woke in her tomb to find a grave-robber chopping her hand off, the man who was buried alive in his family vault and survived for years by eating rats … and many more.
To combat this, Victorians invented a range of coffins with ingenious alarm mechanisms, so that anyone buried alive could summon help. Germany instituted “waiting mortuaries” where corpses were kept until putrefaction set in, at which point it could safely be assumed that they were dead. Not surprisingly, neighbours complained about the smell. But were people buried alive? Bondeson is skeptical.
Such cases are mercifully rare. No-one ever woke in a “waiting mortuary” – though there are at least two modern cases of people waking in a hospital morgue. The book is compulsive reading and demolishes many myths. But I still think I‘ll specify cremation in my will.

Confessions of a Rabbi and Psychic
by Shmuley Boteach and Uri Geller
Robson Books, £16.95, ISBN 1861054106

This book is presented as a series of letters between Geller and the founder of the L’Chaim Society in Oxford, who is also the author of Kosher Sex and a former Times Preacher of the Year. To this reader, the contents lack the authentic, discursive tone of true correspondence and sound more like journalism. Why should two men who meet often and “talk day and night” feel the need send each other letters so full of ponderous “philosophy of life”-moralising and autobiographical detail? It has all clearly been written with an eye to prompt publication.
Only when both men talk about their childhoods does the book become remotely interesting. Both come from relatively poor backgrounds, with cold or absent fathers and parents who eventually divorced, and both seem to have had a difficult adolescence.
When Boteach remarks that “from an early age, I have been conscious of my desire for recognition“ you feel that this is true of both men and is a core part of their friendship. Hence the relentless, back- slapping mutual admiration and name dropping that so disfigure parts of the book.
As for the “extraordinary revelations “ that are promised, your life would have to be dull indeed for anything either man says to be even an ordinary revelation. Boteach is quite interesting on the origins of Judaism and Old Testament interpretation but has nothing new to say to, or about, Geller. For the rest, I would guess he is recycling the sort of brisk (but not always entirely helpful) things he says to his Oxford students.
Does Uri Geller finally reveal the origin and nature of the paranormal powers that have astonished the world? Sadly not, though he takes every opportunity to remind us that he does, in fact, possess such powers. The world’s greatest destroyer of cutlery still won’t tell us why we need all those bent spoons.

The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution
by Pierre Baldi
MIT Press, ISBN 0262025027

This is an excellent survey of contemporary trends in molecular biology and biotechnology, including cloning, now a front-page issue for humankind as well as sheep. Baldi discusses the ethical and social implications of such developments by systematically presenting the technological context, especially computers, to explain what he calls fiction science.

A distinctive feature of his approach, and a very eyeopening one, is his back-of-the-envelope calculations, more properly called order-of-magnitude physics, which help the reader cope with the bewilderingly large numbers involved. These figurings are part of the main thrust of the book, which concerns the ways in which our traditional notions of self are undermined, re-drafted or trashed by the calculable possibilities confronting us. Thus, he reckons, “the external self is a relatively easy to define quantity. It can be estimated to lie within a comfortable range of 10^18 bits, a size undoubtedly within reach of computer storage technology.”

When Baldi writes about music, a matter of professional interest to this reviewer, he strangely omits to make such calculations, preferring instead to speculate about manipulating genes to extend our auditory range, to get around “the boredom of twelve-note melodies”. Yet, as John Barrow recounts in The Artful Universe, Mozart once wrote a combinatorial waltz offering 2 x 10^11 possible waltzes, while Harvard’s David Mutcer programmed a synthesizer to create 8850 possible melodies. Baldi opines that performing musicians will be phased out in a century or so, in favour of some kind of global mega-system, but kindly offers us another job: playing the genome so that our pattern-recognizing skills could help identify gene regions.

No need for musicians to feel victimized, though: “Human intelligence is a relatively recent phenomenon, only a few thousand generations old, and it has not been doubling its capacity at each generation, as computers do. One day it might be viewed as a historically interesting, albeit peripheral, special case of machine intelligence.”

Paul Taylor