An Intelligent Person's Guide to Atheism

This book rotates your perspective on a/theistic debates. The book is self-consistent, but Harbour's use of the word "worldview" may confuse readers from different backgrounds. You know a word can have more than one definition, so bear with me while I walk through this. Here I write "worldview(0)" to represent what Harbour means. Imagine yourself in the middle of a desert that represents the original state of ignorance we are born into. Imagine you have a compass but no map. We can choose a direction to walk, like north, or east, or a combination like northeast. This is what Harbour means when he writes Spartan versus Baroque, and meritocratic versus monarchical. He pairs the possible combinations into "Spartan meritocracy" and "Baroque monarchy" to serve as compass directions (or basis vectors), not that anybody walks along either direction exactly. In practice, everyone chooses different proportions of each (like northeast), and we may change direction from time to time. Given a choice of compass direction, a person can start walking and collect some literature and/or music, some religion and/or science, and whatever else along their way to make sense of the world. Depending on their worldview(0), they might collect some science (as Harbour calls science the child of Spartan meritocracy on page 65). Now that we come to science, I write "worldview(1)" to represent what many other people mean by "worldview". For example, the Brights say their worldview is naturalistic. But Harbour writes on page 10, "a good Spartan worldview... would not say what there is, nor would it say what there is not. All it provides is a set of methods....". Yet the naturalistic "worldview" of the Brights *does* involve hypotheses about "what there is" and "what there is not", so what does Harbour mean? Harbour's book is self-consistent, we just need to see how the word "worldview" means different things to different people: -- A worldview(0), as Harbour means it, is like a compass direction, a finger pointing to the horizon, your way *how* you go about learning. Where Harbour writes "worldview" his background is linguistics, where he consistently means a worldview(0) is a factor in forming your mind and defining your thinkable thoughts. You might not see your worldview(0), like you might go through most of a day without seeing your eyes. Candidate worldviews(0) could be "Spartan meritocracy" and "Baroque monarchy" as two examples orthogonal to each other. Harbour personally favors a "Spartan meritocratic" worldview(0). -- A worldview(1), as many other people mean it, is more of an assembled object, a set of specific hypotheses, a template you hold up to see if the world matches, a shelving system for your garage or your closet. One person's worldview(1) might involve the naturalism of the Brights. Another person's worldview(1) might involve Rick Warren's belief in a creator-god who has a plan for you. Another person's worldview(1) might involve

This book is particularly good on stating "two visions" to understand reality: one Dogmatic and the other Meritocratic. The first is an Absolute Baroque Monarchy and the second a Spartan Meritocracy. The absolutists do not demonstrate anything at all, while the meritocratics behold a view of the world "if and only if" it is demonstrated. In the first kind of vision one finds religion, in the other, science. Read it, and you will find the conclusions very clear, un-dogmatic and ready for any additional questions to be answered.

Insightful and simply stated. It puts the debate between atheism and theism in a whole new context. Must read for anyone, atheist of otherwise.

This is an excellent book. Mr Harbour avoids the traditional -and very tired- arguments for and against the existence of God and instead discusses two distinct worldviews that we can adopt as we attempt to explain things. He shows that one is better suited to finding true answers, and atheism follows from that worldview. In this sense atheism is 'superior' to theism. The approach is new, original and extremely convincing. I didn't really like Mr Harbours writing style, so in the end I wasn't able to 'read it in an afternoon by the pool'. Mr Harbour is a scientist and not a novelist though, and this doesn't stop me from giving it 5 stars, it is an excellent book.

This is The Economist magazine (Nov. 10th, 2001) review of this book: "Despite its title, Daniel Harbour's "An Intelligent Person's Guide to Atheism" is not so much an explanation or history of unbelief as a powerful piece of advocacy for rejecting the religious attitude altogether. Mr Harbour does a strong job of defending atheism against some of the secondary charges that have been levelled against it-such as the complaint that atheistic political regimes have turned out to be worse than religious ones, or that atheists, if they follow through on what they believe, are bound to be amoral. But he also, and this is the core of his book, makes a positive case for the rational superiority of unbelief. Starting from the sound premise that we know much less than we would like to about all sorts of things, Mr Harbour, an Oxford University graduate in mathematics and philosophy and now a student of linguistics at MIT, argues that we ought to aim for a world view that is a "Spartan meritocracy" rather than a "Baroque monarchy". A Spartan approach, in his sense, endorses as small a set of assumptions or theories as possible; and a world view that is meritocratic is one in which beliefs are maintained only if they stand up to criticism and the test of evidence. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are, by contrast, in his view, Baroque monarchies. Taken as beliefs, they are teeming nests of unwarranted assumptions that are not required to pass any tests of merit, but are maintained largely because they are found in scripture or accepted by tradition. Much of his reasoning will be familiar to the devotees of anti-clerical writers such as Voltaire or openly godless ones such as Russell, but the overall structure of his approach is new. As Mr Harbour has a great deal of ground to cover in a mere 143 pages, many of the arguments are compressed, and his style of writing is not polished. But, with its powerful and wide-ranging arguments against theism of all kinds, Mr Harbour's short book, nevertheless, makes what may be the most powerful case available to the widely held but strangely silent creed of atheism."