As an atheist, I have an instinctive dislike of texts like this. I’m not sure what they’re for. I don’t need reassurance about my atheism, I’m not interested in converting theists, and I don’t feel any need to justify myself to them.
I don’t identify as a New Atheist, though I enjoy much of their writing. Dawkins is a good author. Sagan and Hitchens were excellent. If someone wanted to explore atheism, those are the writers I’d recommend.
Atheism isn’t a club you join. It doesn’t automatically give you a community or a shared outlook. I’m just as likely to like or dislike a fellow atheist as a theist. Atheism isn’t enough to make us part of the same ‘tribe’.
Which is why atheism will never win the imaginary war some theists think we’re waging for people’s hearts and minds. Outside of a few New Atheists, we just don't care that much about what other people believe.
I agree with everything you wrote, except for author recommendations.
Evangelical / radical / extremists [anything] are annoying, and to me, the most annoying among them are militant atheists. They're a tiny minority, but give the vast majority of atheists (just as with radical Muslims, and in some circles, overly-evangelical Christians) a bad name.
More to the point, if you wanted to convert people, this is really not the way to do it. A text like this is basically pandering to atheists while treating non-atheists like complete idiots who need to be talked down to. It establishes the supremacy of atheism by using childish arguments ("Bambuti Pygmies" believe in a rainbow snake god, therefore my belief system is better than yours) and it's downhill from there. Dawkins does the same thing: he's a good writer, but he's often fighting strawmen.
A good starting point is to ask why some renowned philosophers and scientists, often our intellectual superiors, hold the belief we think is dumb. They might be wrong, but if your only explanation is "superstition", you're probably not trying hard enough. One particularly interesting point is that in some domains, such as truth or morality, it's harder to ground good beliefs and dismiss awful ideas if you're just anchoring to the physical realm.
Also, the style of peppering every sentence with citations as a way to show intellectual superiority is really silly ("I bet you can't produce this many citations for your views"). Chapter 4 has 141 citations. Chapter 5 has 191. Am I to believe that the author read them all? This is not Wikipedia; if your argument is good, it should stand on its own merit.
> Dawkins does the same thing: he's a good writer, but he's often fighting strawmen.
Even Dawkins' fellow atheists think his (and Hitchen's) writings are dumb: e.g., Terry Eagleton has written quite a bit on their position.
> Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.
In the same review of The God Delusion, Eagleton writes "Nor does [Dawkins] understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us."
That doesn't sound like something an atheist would say.
There is a fantastic response to both quotes in the comments section of the LRB article where Eagleton's review was published.
Terry Eagleton charges Richard Dawkins with failing to read theology in formulating his objection to religious belief, and thereby misses the point that when one rejects the premises of a set of views, it is a waste of one’s time to address what is built on those premises (LRB, 19 October). For example, if one concludes on the basis of rational investigation that one’s character and fate are not determined by the arrangement of the planets, stars and galaxies that can be seen from Earth, then one does not waste time comparing classic tropical astrology with sidereal astrology, or either with the Sarjatak system, or any of the three with any other construction placed on the ancient ignorances of our forefathers about the real nature of the heavenly bodies. Religion is exactly the same thing: it is the pre-scientific, rudimentary metaphysics of our forefathers, which (mainly through the natural gullibility of proselytised children, and tragically for the world) survives into the age in which I can send this letter by electronic means.
Dawkins built his pop career on taking apart religious beliefs, so this seems like an odd response. He obviously wants to spend time on the beliefs of others. He just chooses to attack the ones that are easy to attack, often focusing on things that are closer to folklore than academic positions of theologians. It's like disproving Santa Claus. Yeah, you can do it, but maybe it's not as profound as it seems.
It says it offers an atheist perspective, but surely there are many atheist perspectives. I would have thought that the perspectives of say Richard Dawkins, Mussolini, Mao and Bertrand Russell are very different?
This points to another issue -- for many adherents of the big, well-known religions, there's really only their co-religionists and not. Does the particular type of disbelief really matter as much as the fact of not believing -- eg, for, say, a hard-line Christian fundamentalist, is there really a difference between an Atheist, a Jew, and a Catholic?
A weird thing I've noticed about a lot of "anti-atheist" arguments, or even "theist vs non-theist," is the presumption that it's about a specific kind of theism. But even if one were to grant, for the sake of argument, theism, surely that doesn't bring the sides any closer to agreeing on whatever specific type of theism is being propounded?
What you say is often true of fundamentalist American evangelicals, but that is an extreme example and it is not true for traditional Christians. For example, Catholics regard protestants as fellow Christians, and Anglicans regard Catholics as fellow Christians. They will attend each others services - and Anglicans allow any Trinitarian Christian to receive communion at their services. All the major churches recognise each others baptisms. Churches of different denominations will do many things together. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (its official statement of beliefs) is very clear that Muslims and Jews are worshippers of the same God.
Edit: I want to add that a lovely and inspiring example of this are the statues of modern martyrs about the west door of Westminster Abbey. They include Catholics, a Lutheran, a Baptist, and others as well as Anglicans.
> A weird thing I've noticed about a lot of "anti-atheist" arguments, or even "theist vs non-theist," is the presumption that it's about a specific kind of theism.
Depends whose arguments you listen to. I think there are many others.
I have also noticed that atheists are particularly keen on arguing against Christianity, and not just in countries where Christianity is the biggest religion.
> But even if one were to grant, for the sake of argument, theism, surely that doesn't bring the sides any closer to agreeing on whatever specific type of theism is being propounded?
If you agree on theism (as opposed to atheism, deism, dualism, pantheism or something else). You have almost certainly agreed on an awful lot. Almost all theists believe in an omniscient, omnipotent loving creator. Of course you might disagree about a lot too, but that is a lot of common ground.
Possibly, but if someone wrote "A Christian perspective on life" I would intepret that as offering a Christian perspective on life as opposed to say a Buddhist perspective on life, or a Muslim perspective on life, or even an atheist perspective on life.
Its also called "The Atheist Bible" not "An Atheist Bible".
I'd suggest "Why I am not a Christian" (1927), by Bertrand Russell, instead.
This is the logician's analysis of religion.
A useful book today is "The Righteous Mind" (2025), subtitled "Why good people are divided by politics and religion". This is a psychologist's view of what value scales people run on, and how this interacts with religious belief. I'm not going to summarize. The author has a web site, but the book is better.
There are few atheist "churches" as well. I know someone who founded one. An interesting case was how they got into hot water with the local black community after they bought a bunch of "Maybe God Doesn't Exist?" ads and put them on buses that go through that community. They met with few church and community leaders and decided that maybe on that particular routes they shouldn't put those ads on.
I'm not taking any sides here, but this sentence is tautological.
If the world (I'm assuming that's the reference here) is not a creation, it wasn't created and therefore had no creator. If it is a a creation, it was created by somebody.
It is indeed not natural for a creation to not have a creator, because that would directly contradict with the usual definitions of these words.
However, all that does not prove anything about the world, universe or anything else, because the world is not necessarily a creation in the first place.
> If the world (I'm assuming that's the reference here) is not a creation, it wasn't created and therefore had no creator. If it is a a creation, it was created by somebody.
It should be noted that the Big Bang Theory was first theorized by a Catholic priest:
It was not wholly accepted 'scientifically' that the universe had a beginning before empirical evidence started rolling in. The theologian Thomas Aquinas (being a Christian/Catholic) thought it did, but could not show logically that it did; Aristotle (to take one example) believed that the Universe had no beginning and had always existed:
Even with an eternal universe, Aristotle still concluded that it had a Unmoved Mover (post is to Part IV in a weblog series, but there are links to earlier parts in it):
»With more than 700 pages, 300 illustrations, 500 inspirational quotes, 1700 references, and 1500 cross-references, the Atheist Bible is one of the largest works on atheism, and, quite possibly, the largest monograph on the topic. The book is licensed by the author, Fabian M. Suchanek, under a Creative Commons Attribution license. See the legal conditions at the end of the book.«
I would expect an Athiest Bible not to appeal to gods. From the section about Truth:
"
Theories
Persephone and the seasons
As a motivating example for our study of truth, let us consider a story from ancient Greek mythology (inspired by a TED talk by British physicist David Deutsch1). To explain the seasons of summer and winter on Earth, the ancient Greeks had the following story: Hades, God of the Underworld, kidnaps Persephone, the Goddess of Spring, and negotiates a forced marriage contract, requiring her to return regularly, and lets her go. Each year, she is magically compelled to return to him. And when she does, her mother, Demeter, Goddess of the Earth, is sad, and makes it cold and barren.
"
I think you misread that fragment. The story was invoked as an example of something that's "obviously" false (partly due to appeal to gods), but also impossible to prove false (partly due to appeal to gods). The chapter is about avoiding this kind of explanations for worldly phenomena.
It's a great example of a negative feedback system having an oscillatory solution without the right damping applied. And it's pi out of phase in the southern hemisphere.
As someone who once heavily identified as atheist, I find I can no longer even read things like this. I'm not on-board with religion either. What I've found is that defining yourself as being against something isn't particularly healthy or helpful in your day-to-day life. Perhaps I was doing atheism incorrectly or something.
But for sure I was a happier person when I decided that I sure as hell didn't know what was going on so probably no one else did either and walked away from that part of my identity. Its nicer to be uncertain, I think. It certainly is easier!
Given most the contents of Chapter 8, "Proofs", it would probably be better titled as "Evidence". There's only one place they actually mention a proof (in the 'technical' sense of the word), §8.7.4 "Ontological argument". Theologians/philosophers (even theists) have criticized Anselm's variant:
> The lesson is not that Anselm’s argument is unsound so much as that it presupposes knowledge (i.e. of God’s essence) that we cannot have. Moreover, the idea that reason points us to the existence of that than which there can be nothing greater is something Aquinas himself endorses as long as it is developed in an a posteriori fashion, as it is in Aquinas’s Fourth Way.
> Science cannot (yet) explain what caused the Universe to come into existence. Adherents of the Abrahamic Religions argue as follows: Everything is caused by something. Therefore, the Universe must also have been caused by something, and this first cause of the Universe is God.
"Everything is caused by something." No. Just no.
For §9.2.2, "How do you explain the soul?", see perhaps:
> Fortunately, there is a rather simple explanation for why we should follow basic moral rules. Would you like to live in a lawless society where people can kill and plunder as they wish? Probably not. The majority of your compatriots think similarly. Therefore, the majority of your compatriots, as well as yourself, presumably, follow the moral rules of your society. That is all that is needed for the explanation of moral behavior.
This is question beginning: they say "people should live morally" but do not say what it means for something to be moral. They should perhaps look into Alasdair MacIntyre's books After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. If they want a system which is non-theistic, see perhaps MacIntyre's Dependent Rational Animals.
More generally, Chapter 9 ("God of the Gaps") should perhaps be rewritten after better understanding the non-strawman variants of the cosmological argument:
If they want to cover (logical) proofs, there should be sections discussing Aristotle, Plotinus, Leibniz (who starts at the Principle of Sufficient Reason), etc:
TL; DR: the author(s) of this work should perhaps go through the literature a bit more and write a bit less about straw men. (I've edited this post multiple times as I've worked/skimmed through document, and there are more errors (§5.2.3, §10.1.2) and gaps (§1.2.6) that I could mention to this already too long post.)
As an atheist, I have an instinctive dislike of texts like this. I’m not sure what they’re for. I don’t need reassurance about my atheism, I’m not interested in converting theists, and I don’t feel any need to justify myself to them.
I don’t identify as a New Atheist, though I enjoy much of their writing. Dawkins is a good author. Sagan and Hitchens were excellent. If someone wanted to explore atheism, those are the writers I’d recommend.
Atheism isn’t a club you join. It doesn’t automatically give you a community or a shared outlook. I’m just as likely to like or dislike a fellow atheist as a theist. Atheism isn’t enough to make us part of the same ‘tribe’.
Which is why atheism will never win the imaginary war some theists think we’re waging for people’s hearts and minds. Outside of a few New Atheists, we just don't care that much about what other people believe.
In my view, texts like are primarily a vehicle for self-evangelism and establishing ones own belief in contrast to the believing tribes.
I agree with everything you wrote, except for author recommendations.
Evangelical / radical / extremists [anything] are annoying, and to me, the most annoying among them are militant atheists. They're a tiny minority, but give the vast majority of atheists (just as with radical Muslims, and in some circles, overly-evangelical Christians) a bad name.
This specific text has a lot of errors too.
More to the point, if you wanted to convert people, this is really not the way to do it. A text like this is basically pandering to atheists while treating non-atheists like complete idiots who need to be talked down to. It establishes the supremacy of atheism by using childish arguments ("Bambuti Pygmies" believe in a rainbow snake god, therefore my belief system is better than yours) and it's downhill from there. Dawkins does the same thing: he's a good writer, but he's often fighting strawmen.
A good starting point is to ask why some renowned philosophers and scientists, often our intellectual superiors, hold the belief we think is dumb. They might be wrong, but if your only explanation is "superstition", you're probably not trying hard enough. One particularly interesting point is that in some domains, such as truth or morality, it's harder to ground good beliefs and dismiss awful ideas if you're just anchoring to the physical realm.
Also, the style of peppering every sentence with citations as a way to show intellectual superiority is really silly ("I bet you can't produce this many citations for your views"). Chapter 4 has 141 citations. Chapter 5 has 191. Am I to believe that the author read them all? This is not Wikipedia; if your argument is good, it should stand on its own merit.
> Dawkins does the same thing: he's a good writer, but he's often fighting strawmen.
Even Dawkins' fellow atheists think his (and Hitchen's) writings are dumb: e.g., Terry Eagleton has written quite a bit on their position.
> Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Eagleton#Dawkins,_Hitche...
In the same review of The God Delusion, Eagleton writes "Nor does [Dawkins] understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us."
That doesn't sound like something an atheist would say.
There is a fantastic response to both quotes in the comments section of the LRB article where Eagleton's review was published.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lungi...Dawkins built his pop career on taking apart religious beliefs, so this seems like an odd response. He obviously wants to spend time on the beliefs of others. He just chooses to attack the ones that are easy to attack, often focusing on things that are closer to folklore than academic positions of theologians. It's like disproving Santa Claus. Yeah, you can do it, but maybe it's not as profound as it seems.
That is why the burden of proof lies with the people claiming Santa or gods are real.
> Atheism isn’t a club you join.
Correct, it's all the others who have formed some sort of absurd club and demand recognition.
The burden of proof is on them. Let them produce the proof without coercion.
I knew a guy who asked me if I wanted to "unbaptism" with him for a couple of $100...
I just told him he got it all wrong. He never got it...
It says it offers an atheist perspective, but surely there are many atheist perspectives. I would have thought that the perspectives of say Richard Dawkins, Mussolini, Mao and Bertrand Russell are very different?
This points to another issue -- for many adherents of the big, well-known religions, there's really only their co-religionists and not. Does the particular type of disbelief really matter as much as the fact of not believing -- eg, for, say, a hard-line Christian fundamentalist, is there really a difference between an Atheist, a Jew, and a Catholic?
A weird thing I've noticed about a lot of "anti-atheist" arguments, or even "theist vs non-theist," is the presumption that it's about a specific kind of theism. But even if one were to grant, for the sake of argument, theism, surely that doesn't bring the sides any closer to agreeing on whatever specific type of theism is being propounded?
What you say is often true of fundamentalist American evangelicals, but that is an extreme example and it is not true for traditional Christians. For example, Catholics regard protestants as fellow Christians, and Anglicans regard Catholics as fellow Christians. They will attend each others services - and Anglicans allow any Trinitarian Christian to receive communion at their services. All the major churches recognise each others baptisms. Churches of different denominations will do many things together. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (its official statement of beliefs) is very clear that Muslims and Jews are worshippers of the same God.
Edit: I want to add that a lovely and inspiring example of this are the statues of modern martyrs about the west door of Westminster Abbey. They include Catholics, a Lutheran, a Baptist, and others as well as Anglicans.
https://www.westminster-abbey.org/history/explore-our-histor...
> A weird thing I've noticed about a lot of "anti-atheist" arguments, or even "theist vs non-theist," is the presumption that it's about a specific kind of theism.
Depends whose arguments you listen to. I think there are many others.
I have also noticed that atheists are particularly keen on arguing against Christianity, and not just in countries where Christianity is the biggest religion.
> But even if one were to grant, for the sake of argument, theism, surely that doesn't bring the sides any closer to agreeing on whatever specific type of theism is being propounded?
If you agree on theism (as opposed to atheism, deism, dualism, pantheism or something else). You have almost certainly agreed on an awful lot. Almost all theists believe in an omniscient, omnipotent loving creator. Of course you might disagree about a lot too, but that is a lot of common ground.
The first chapter covers this topic.
Sort of, but I think what it offers is a secular humanist perspective.
Probably why it says "an" atheist perspective, not "the" atheist perspective
Possibly, but if someone wrote "A Christian perspective on life" I would intepret that as offering a Christian perspective on life as opposed to say a Buddhist perspective on life, or a Muslim perspective on life, or even an atheist perspective on life.
Its also called "The Atheist Bible" not "An Atheist Bible".
I'd suggest "Why I am not a Christian" (1927), by Bertrand Russell, instead. This is the logician's analysis of religion.
A useful book today is "The Righteous Mind" (2025), subtitled "Why good people are divided by politics and religion". This is a psychologist's view of what value scales people run on, and how this interacts with religious belief. I'm not going to summarize. The author has a web site, but the book is better.
> I'd suggest "Why I am not a Christian" (1927), by Bertrand Russell, instead. This is the logician's analysis of religion.
The logician who attacked strawman arguments:
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2014/02/an-exchange-with-ke...
There are few atheist "churches" as well. I know someone who founded one. An interesting case was how they got into hot water with the local black community after they bought a bunch of "Maybe God Doesn't Exist?" ads and put them on buses that go through that community. They met with few church and community leaders and decided that maybe on that particular routes they shouldn't put those ads on.
Why remove them? It's not illegal to offend people. Sometimes it's good to think about things that make you uncomfortable.
It's also reasonable to not want to antagonize your neighbors in the spirit of being neighborly
definition from chapter 1.. cut and paste:
"A person rejects belief in the supernatural...This position is commonly known as atheism....
A person takes no specific stance towards the belief in the supernatural.. This point of view is commonly referred to as agnosticism....
The supernatural is anything existing outside the natural world...
A god or deity is a supernatural being or spirit worshiped as having power over nature or the fate of humans...
Religion is the worship of a god or the supernatural...
The Dawkins Scale:
Level 1: Strong theism. 100% probability God exists. ...
Level 2: De facto theism. Very high probability God exists but short of 100%...
Level 3: Leaning towards theism. Higher than 50% probability that God exists but not very high
Level 4: Completely impartial. Exactly 50% probability that God exists....
Level 5: Leaning towards atheism. The probability of God’s existence is lower than 50% but not very low....
Level 6: De facto atheism. Very low probability that God exists, but short of zero. ...
Level 7: Strong atheism. 100% probability God does not exist..... ""
vel 4; and my mother at level 4 or 5 but at times 6 or 7..
I'm not seeing "whether God exists or not is irrelevant".
Same, If god decided to show that it exists, I wouldn't start praying or worshipping it. I'm not into that kind of self-demeaning behavior.
>A person rejects belief in the supernatural
A creation with no creator is pretty supernatural.
I'm not taking any sides here, but this sentence is tautological.
If the world (I'm assuming that's the reference here) is not a creation, it wasn't created and therefore had no creator. If it is a a creation, it was created by somebody.
It is indeed not natural for a creation to not have a creator, because that would directly contradict with the usual definitions of these words.
However, all that does not prove anything about the world, universe or anything else, because the world is not necessarily a creation in the first place.
> If the world (I'm assuming that's the reference here) is not a creation, it wasn't created and therefore had no creator. If it is a a creation, it was created by somebody.
It should be noted that the Big Bang Theory was first theorized by a Catholic priest:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître
It was not wholly accepted 'scientifically' that the universe had a beginning before empirical evidence started rolling in. The theologian Thomas Aquinas (being a Christian/Catholic) thought it did, but could not show logically that it did; Aristotle (to take one example) believed that the Universe had no beginning and had always existed:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_of_the_world
Even with an eternal universe, Aristotle still concluded that it had a Unmoved Mover (post is to Part IV in a weblog series, but there are links to earlier parts in it):
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/11/first-way-part-iv-casca...
> A creation with no creator is pretty supernatural.
Just because something is not understood, or understandable, doesn't mean it's supernatural.
So everything according to that is supernatural then so what is the difference between Gods and whatever..
If everything that exists needs a creator then Gods of any kind would then need a creator. There is an infinite loop there.
»With more than 700 pages, 300 illustrations, 500 inspirational quotes, 1700 references, and 1500 cross-references, the Atheist Bible is one of the largest works on atheism, and, quite possibly, the largest monograph on the topic. The book is licensed by the author, Fabian M. Suchanek, under a Creative Commons Attribution license. See the legal conditions at the end of the book.«
I would expect an Athiest Bible not to appeal to gods. From the section about Truth:
" Theories Persephone and the seasons
As a motivating example for our study of truth, let us consider a story from ancient Greek mythology (inspired by a TED talk by British physicist David Deutsch1). To explain the seasons of summer and winter on Earth, the ancient Greeks had the following story: Hades, God of the Underworld, kidnaps Persephone, the Goddess of Spring, and negotiates a forced marriage contract, requiring her to return regularly, and lets her go. Each year, she is magically compelled to return to him. And when she does, her mother, Demeter, Goddess of the Earth, is sad, and makes it cold and barren. "
I think you misread that fragment. The story was invoked as an example of something that's "obviously" false (partly due to appeal to gods), but also impossible to prove false (partly due to appeal to gods). The chapter is about avoiding this kind of explanations for worldly phenomena.
It's a great example of a negative feedback system having an oscillatory solution without the right damping applied. And it's pi out of phase in the southern hemisphere.
"The Atheist's Bible: An Illustrious Collection of Irreverent Thoughts" by Joan Konner is much more humorous.
> Chapter 17:Islam > Discusses the Muslim worldview. (For security reasons, this chapter is not available here.
Ok, then.
Islam can't stand up to five minutes of scrutiny, so they intimidate and kill to enforce it.
Level 1: you travel across Europe to shoot up a French newspaper or a Muslim who is saying they are not level 1.
[dead]
Boring. I was hoping for something as exciting as the Atheist Hymnal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmwAD7nHqaY
Dunno, this has that familiar stink of someone trying to use dogma to control the thoughts of people.
The same kind of people who invent certifications for agile software development, always spelling it with a capital 'A'.
As someone who once heavily identified as atheist, I find I can no longer even read things like this. I'm not on-board with religion either. What I've found is that defining yourself as being against something isn't particularly healthy or helpful in your day-to-day life. Perhaps I was doing atheism incorrectly or something.
But for sure I was a happier person when I decided that I sure as hell didn't know what was going on so probably no one else did either and walked away from that part of my identity. Its nicer to be uncertain, I think. It certainly is easier!
isn't it weird that "bible" has a meaning of a fundamental reference book
yet ironically is completely made-up often with incredibly few facts known at the time
"knowledge" as a frozen snapshot in ancient history
bending everything backwards to its naive reference point
and it would be one thing if it was just harmless entertainment
but instead used to manipulate and control all of civilization
Given most the contents of Chapter 8, "Proofs", it would probably be better titled as "Evidence". There's only one place they actually mention a proof (in the 'technical' sense of the word), §8.7.4 "Ontological argument". Theologians/philosophers (even theists) have criticized Anselm's variant:
> The lesson is not that Anselm’s argument is unsound so much as that it presupposes knowledge (i.e. of God’s essence) that we cannot have. Moreover, the idea that reason points us to the existence of that than which there can be nothing greater is something Aquinas himself endorses as long as it is developed in an a posteriori fashion, as it is in Aquinas’s Fourth Way.
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/11/anselms-ontological...
Of course in §9.1.2 we have this howler:
> Science cannot (yet) explain what caused the Universe to come into existence. Adherents of the Abrahamic Religions argue as follows: Everything is caused by something. Therefore, the Universe must also have been caused by something, and this first cause of the Universe is God.
"Everything is caused by something." No. Just no.
For §9.2.2, "How do you explain the soul?", see perhaps:
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/214350794-immortal-so...
For §9.2.5, "Why should people behave morally?":
> Fortunately, there is a rather simple explanation for why we should follow basic moral rules. Would you like to live in a lawless society where people can kill and plunder as they wish? Probably not. The majority of your compatriots think similarly. Therefore, the majority of your compatriots, as well as yourself, presumably, follow the moral rules of your society. That is all that is needed for the explanation of moral behavior.
This is question beginning: they say "people should live morally" but do not say what it means for something to be moral. They should perhaps look into Alasdair MacIntyre's books After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. If they want a system which is non-theistic, see perhaps MacIntyre's Dependent Rational Animals.
More generally, Chapter 9 ("God of the Gaps") should perhaps be rewritten after better understanding the non-strawman variants of the cosmological argument:
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/07/so-you-think-you-un...
If they want to cover (logical) proofs, there should be sections discussing Aristotle, Plotinus, Leibniz (who starts at the Principle of Sufficient Reason), etc:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35592365-five-proofs-of-...
As well as perhaps Thomas Aquinas:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6963088-aquinas
TL; DR: the author(s) of this work should perhaps go through the literature a bit more and write a bit less about straw men. (I've edited this post multiple times as I've worked/skimmed through document, and there are more errors (§5.2.3, §10.1.2) and gaps (§1.2.6) that I could mention to this already too long post.)
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