Vincent Bugliosi's Divinity Of Doubt

[Patrick Degan]

Former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has a new book out, Divinity Of Doubt, in which he takes to task both theism and atheism on the way to make the case that agnosticism is the most logical and moral position to base one's philosophy of life upon.

In his attack on atheism, Bugliosi does expose weaknesses in the cases put forth by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, today's three "star" atheist writers. However, it seemed to me that Bugliosi was guilty of putting forth the same defective argument he accuses Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins of doing: namely attacking atheism by attacking its advocates' arguments against religion. He does not really demonstrate how atheism is a logically deficient argument and seems at times to fall back upon attacking strawmen rather than addressing the actual issue. In examining Hitchens, he refers to his defective cases for the war in Iraq and the impeachment of President Clinton to demonstrate arbitrary and sloppy reasoning on Hitchens' part, but both of these issues are utterly irrelevant to the issue of Hitchens' arguments regarding religion or the logic of atheism. He dismisses in one stroke the empirical arguments which rebut the existence of a creator god of any sort. Further, he bases his attack on atheism by the writings of these three and a rejection of the writings of Feuberach, Freud and Camus, declaring all of them to be evidence that atheism is based upon intellectually weak supports. But this ignores the fact that atheism has been argued from many different standpoints, both scientific and philosophical, for the past several thousand years and is based on more than simple negation of theism or religious belief.

At one point, Bugliosi, who by his own admission is not any sort of scientist, nonetheless finds that he apparently can quite confidently state:

But apart from science, I have problems with the Big Bang theory. For one thing, I simply cannot even begin to imagine how at some tiny point in time and space, some microorganism, or what have you, self exploded and created the universe, though I obviously am in no position to challenge this theory…But I do know that whatever they are, they are something, and that is the big problem. It would seem that no one can actually believe that the Big Bang exploded out of nothing, completely empty space, which would be an impossibility. It had to have exploded out of something. And no matter how small or subatomic that something is, the question is who put that something there? If it wasn’t the creator, and how did it come into existence? Remember, nothing can create itself because if it did, it would proceed itself, an impossibility.

Nevermind that this is not the way Big Bang theory is currently constructed. Here, he seems to be falling back upon both a strawman and an appeal to incredulity to challenge a theory he admits he doesn't have the qualifications to challenge. Bugliosi also seems generally ignorant of the fact that scientific arguments for a wholly naturalistic view of the universe go back at least as far as Democritus of Abdera. He is almost certainly ignorant of how this question was dealt with by Carl Sagan in his television series Cosmos, and without his having any particular theological axe to grind:

If the general picture, however, of a Big Bang followed by an expanding universe is correct, what happened before that? Was the universe devoid of all matter and then the matter suddenly, somehow, created out of nothing? How did that happen? In many cultures, the customary answer is that a god, or gods, created the universe out of nothing. But if we wish to pursue this question courageously, we must then ask the next question: where did God come from? If we decide this is an unanswerable question, why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that God always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe always existed? There was no need for a creation, it was always here. These are not easy questions. Cosmology brings us face to face with the deepest mysteries, with questions that were once treated only in religion and myth.

In short, Bugliosi seems to paint the entire argument for atheism as one springing from simple emotional rejection of religion and ignores the philosophical arguments by which God is a meaningless term and the scientific arguments by which God is a redundant term and therefore wholly unnecessary to explain the natural world. At least that was what I got from my own reading. He would have done a lot better to argue that agnosticism is the better position to take since it is the less absolute of either alternative and offers at least a position that does not seem so spiritually barren as atheism or intellectually barren as theism as defence for his worldview and to have done a lot more research than what he apparently devoted to the subject. As it stands, his arguments against atheism are every bit as cartoonish and sloppy as what he accuses Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins of in their writings, and shade toward ignorance at best and dishonesty at worst. He should have been capable of better than that.

[kc8tbe]

Thanks for the synposis. Is the book actually worth reading, or is it the self-satisfying literary exercise in cognitive masturbation that it sounds like?

It's worth pointing out, also, that Richard Dawkins (among other prominent atheists) has maintained for some time that he is agnostic. An agnostic who leads strongly toward disbelief, yes, but not someone who is 100% certain that no gods exist.

[Singular Intellect]

You can be an agnostic atheist or agnostic theist. I fail to see how agnosticism is a 'third position' to begin with.

[mr friendly guy]

Most probably because they interpret that since agnostics say God is unknowable, therefore the logical conclusion is to be undecided, which becomes the "third position". Which of course, the conclusion has so many logical flaws in that conclusion one can steer an aircraft carrier through it.