This is from Stephen’s SIN post. i have posted an excerpt. Check out the rest here.
A while ago the well-known Christian apologist and blogger Randal Rauser posted a very long review of my book Believing Bullshit on his blog. You can find Rauser’s review here.
While making a few nice comments about the book, Rauser was generally very negative. He posted the same review on the amazon page for my book and gave the book just two stars.
A negative review is fine, of course. However, Rauser’s review is academically poor (it was written in haste, I suspect).
Such is the length of Rauser’s review that I didn’t at the time have time to go through all of it, line by line, pointing out the numerous misrepresentations, muddles and errors that it contains. I told Rauser I would get round to responding.
I still don’t have time to respond to Rauser’s entire review in detail. But, being on sabbatical, I have devoted a couple of hours to dealing with points Rauser made regarding just the first chapter of the book.
Were Rauser’s review more academically robust and interesting, I might have devoted the many more hours required to respond to the rest of it. But the review is poorly argued, and in any case I suspect no one will bother reading the many thousands of words of commentary I would have to produce to deal with the entire thing properly.
The first chapter of Believing Bullshit examines the dubious way mystery is often appealed to defend belief systems, especially supernatural belief systems (religious and non-religious). Rauser picks up on a later section of the chapter on the problem of evil and the way in which mystery is sometimes appealed to by theists in order to try to deal with that problem. …
