John Allen Paulos is a professor of mathematics at Temple Univ. His 1989 bestseller Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences was greatly enjoyed by a mathematician friend who gave me this book to review. Amazon.com lists over 20 books by Paulos in English.

Michael Shermer (the Skeptical Inquirer founder) gives this review: “For years John Allen Paulos has been our guide for reading newspapers, playing the stock market, and understanding what all those graphs and charts and formulas really mean. ... Now he has turned his rapier wit to the grandest question of all: Is there a God? Those who are religious skeptics will find in Paulos’s analysis new ways of looking at both old and new arguments, and those who believe that God’s existence can be proven through science, reason, and logic will have to answer to this mathematician’s penetrating analysis.” To me, it seems overall that Paulos approaches things in a semi-serious vein (this seems to be the attractiveness of some of his other books).

My friend specifically asked me to compare this book to John Hick’s 1964 The Existence of God (book 226), which he recently read after I reviewed it. Hick approached existence as a philosopher, whereas Paulos’ arguments are from math and logic. As expected, neither found proof of a scientific nature, but Hick sheds much insight on the failed proof efforts through history. John Allen Paulos’ book is too brief and self-limited to come anywhere close to John Hick’s depth.

Paulos discusses four “classical” arguments – First Cause, Design, the Anthropic Principle, and the Ontological Argument. He then discusses four “subjective” arguments – Coincidence, Prophecy, Subjectivity (Faith, Emptiness and Self), and Interventions. For Subjectivity he seems to me to be like a 2-D Flatlander confronted with a 3-D world he cannot imagine, thus showing he restricts himself to a “scientism” worldview (that only proofs based upon science, reason and logic can be real proofs). He last discusses four “psycho-mathematical” arguments – Redefinition, Cognitive Tendency, Universality, and Gambling. Gambling excepted, this was his unconvincing psychoanalysis of various types of religion-based delusion.

In his last chapter – Atheists, Agnostics, and Brights – Paulos did recognize the term “Bright” as pretentious or worse. [This (to me insulting) new word for atheists is the self-image of very aggressive atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens.] I suggest you read John Hick, not Paulos, to study why such “scientism” existence proofs fail to prove or disprove anything. But mature faith does not fail.