Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon May 25, 2020 1:14 pm
I'm familiar with that anthology, and in fact have read a great many Atheist essays and treatises -- not merely the "lightweights," but the alleged "greats" like Nietzsche, Hume, Marx and Freud, and the more modern ones, like Mackie, Wielenberg and Buckley. So I'm going to offer you a good read too -- it's short, it's good-natured, it's readable, and even some Atheists have read it with enjoyment. It's called "The Atheist Who Didn't Exist," by Andy Bannister.
Do you have a link to download the full book.
I managed to download a reference with Chapter One and another giving a summary of each argument.
Generally Andy Bannister approach [while attempting to be humorous] is essentially very immature and of no substance to undermine the views of non-theists.
In Chapter One, Bannister merely attack the separate phrases within the Slogan [related to Richard Dawkins'
The God Delusion.],
“
There’s Probably No God.
Now Stop Worrying and
Enjoy Your Life”
instead of the whole argument provided by Dawkins in his book The God Delusion.
Bannister obviously did not read The God Delusion seriously else he would not have made the following mistake.
For atheists like Richard Dawkins, God does not exist, right?
"The Atheist Who Didn't Exist," page 17
Richard Dawkins is not a pure atheist but an agnostic, i.e. he is a 1/7th theist as he distinctively explained his position in his book.
This is why Dawkins made the reservation;
There’s Probably No God i.e. 6/7th confidence there is no God.
Here is another of his silly and superficial counter argument;
Chapter 2 The Scandinavian Sceptic (or: Why Atheism Really is a Belief System)
The argument goes this way: atheism is a disbelief in God, and therefore one does not need to give reasons for it. The idea lying behind this is that atheism is purely negative, the mere absence of belief, and it is only positive beliefs for which we need to provide reasons.
So is atheism purely the absence of belief, a wholly negative claim? Well,
certainly many atheists seem to think so.
For example, listen to the late New Atheist Christopher Hitchens: Our belief is not a belief. [Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great, London: Atlantic Books, 2007, p. 5.]
The first problem is that the statement “Atheism is just non-belief in God”
proves too much. What do I mean?
Well, if this claim is true, consider what it entails.
It would mean, for instance, that my cat is an atheist, because she does not believe in God.
Likewise potatoes, the colour green, Richard Dawkins’s left foot, and small rocks are all atheists because they, too, do not possess a belief in a deity of any kind.
The above is very immature and silly to critique merely one statement from Hitchen and ran with it into silliness.
Bannister should have read Hitchens' book and understood [not necessary agree] with Hitchens' full views and counter Hitchens views from a total basis rather than from a cherry-picked statement.
I suggest you don't recommend such books, I prefer the those that are intended to be more serious arguments.
In any case, to me God is an illusion and an impossibility to exists as real, thus whatever argument for God is a non-starter in terms of reality.