Evidence of God's existence would remove the need for faith, and with it all those meritorious benefits of faith-based belief. From a religious point of view, that can only be a good thing. Whoever you are, whatever you believe, you have to admit that there are zero bomb-proof arguments for or against the existence of God. Some people will be delighted and encouraged by the conclusions that the author shepherds us towards, but religious people, agnostics, free-thinking philosophers and even open-minded atheists (I know there are some) will be disappointed. So, that whole chapter is devoted to semi-dismissing some of the weaker arguments FOR the existence of God. Condescendingly, he tells us here that believing in God is reasonable, but wrong. This is the paragraph that first alerted me to the fact that the author is not neutral, but wants us to think he is. This isn't even an example of one of his most impenetrable paragraphs. But at the end of the chapter, the restless spirit of reflection will cause us to look at that view as well.' Look at the nice long words he uses. They can take some comfort from the tradition in theology that the more unlikely a belief is to be true, the more meritorious is the act of faith required to believe it.

Some readers may feel threatened by this. To quote page 151: 'To jump the gun a little, I am going to present a fair number of reasons against supposing that anything recognizable as religious belief is true. It's hard to know for sure when you find yourself unable to read so much of it. At least, I think that's what he was doing. I started with the God chapter and it soon became apparent that the author is trying to prevent the reader from 'thinking' for themselves, by subtly peddling his mildly atheistic viewpoint. Therefore, the only way to find employment as a modern philosopher is to construct confusing answers for the unanswerable questions in order to hide the fact that, essentially, they have nothing new to say. It seems to me that modern philosophers have all reached the conclusion that the big questions have already all been answered as well as they are ever going to be. Time and again I found myself re-reading sentences several times until I concluded that I couldn't get what the author was trying to say, before moving on to the next sentence, with some amount of hope that the previous sentence wasn't important anyway. Pitched as an introduction to philosophy, this book is actually very heavy going.

Blackburn philosophy