The great overall impression I get of David Wolpe’s Why Faith Matters is one of laziness. There are no grand sophistries or crazy ideas, but there’s also a lack of any serious attempt to answer the atheist writers he’s supposedly responding to. A few examples early on are striking, but as the book wears on it becomes part of one boring pattern. The blandest example is the failure to mention the nasty parts in the Bible, including the orders to commit mass murder and declarations that unbelievers are damned. Religious violence is discussed in a stance of huhwhat? innocence of the thought that any actual doctrines might inspire it. Eventually he gets around to mentioning that the Bible seems to say that rebellious children should be killed, and use this as a case in point for his hermeneutic principle that if there seems to be a problem in the Bible, there isn’t one, so be as free as you need to in reinterpreting the text. While de facto Orthodox Christians do the same, Wolpe provided a nice reminder that Judaism has a tradition of doing this with particular chutzpa. (Studying Spinoza right now, and one of Spinoza’s big goals in his Theological-Political Treatise was to attack this aspect of Maimonides’ writings.)

The discussion of the fine-tuning argument is similar, completely ignoring Dawkins’ objections. A maybe example is Wolpe’s attack on physicalism, whose high point is a quote from Doug Hofstadter’s _The Mind’s I_ on the metaphysical status of haircuts and their relationship to the world of physics. This is used to boost the credibility of the idea of a non-physical God. This raises a question which Wolpe never really answers: does he think God’s nature is analogous to that of a haircut? If so, Wolpe isn’t using the word “God” the way traditional theologians have, his disagreement with the atheists is illusory, and shame on him for not paying attention to attempts by Dawkins to clear up those pseudo-disputes between atheists and liberal theologians. The same goes for this little gem from Wolpe:

[Atheists] take their cue from Bertrand Russell: “We were told that faith could move mountains, but no one believed it; we are now told that the atomic bombs can remove mountains, and everyone believes it.” What Russell deliberately neglects is that faith _does_ move mountains, but not in the way explosives do. Faith works through human beings and its power is illustrated daily in countless lives.

Has Wolpe then given up on the idea of a God who can actually move mountains, by himself, and not just as an idea in people’s heads.

The one other point worth mentioning is Wolpe’s ill-informed attacks on evolutionary psychology. The low point when Wolpe objects that in the modern world, successful people don’t have lots of kids. The reason for this, though, is obvious: the conditions we live under are different than the ones we evolved under. Would Wolpe seriously think that men should have evolved to love going to sperm banks and be uninterested in having sex with women who are on the pill? The reason successful people don’t have lots of kids is because of birth control and social incentives not to, and if there’s any genetic component to the exceptions to the rule, there’s a good chance we’ll see counter-adaptations evolve.