This is the second entry in my reviews of Dawkins’ fleas. At some point, dear readers, I promise I will find more intelligent critics of Dawkins to review–indeed, I’ve read them. But this isn’t a review of such a critic.

Ravi Zacharias’ The End of Reason, a book directly focusing mostly on Sam Harris’ work, gets off to a bad start. It’s a short thing, well under 200 pages, but the first ten or so are consumed by Zacharias going on about how the new atheists are nasty, intellectually bankrupt people who are always saying mean things about other people. The allegations of intellectual bankruptcy are completely promissory: Zacharias will show how they’re intellectually bankrupt, but first he has to tell you about how mean they are.

Eventually, he launches into some arguments for the existence of God, starting with the cosmological argument, then the argument from design. I wasn’t sure how either of Zacharias’ versions of these arguments were supposed to work, though at a couple points I thought I saw interesting vague clues as to what he was supposed to have in mind with the cosmological argument, and his design argument hammered the God/chance false dichotomy. I was about to write the book off as even worse than Chris Hedges’ contribution to the anti-atheist literature (see previous entry in this series), but I did get a slight return by seeing the ways Zacharias abuses language: for example, he reports as saying that Harris’ view of the problem of evil is that we fail to see a “moral order” (Zacharias’ words) in horrible things, and then that if there is no moral order, we cannot call anything good or evil. This is a simple equivocation between two meanings of “moral order”: a supernatural force for good and objective moral facts. We get some of the “atheism is…” game, including an accusation that Sam Harris is a materialist, in spite of Harris’ expressed sympathy for non-material views of the mind.

Perhaps the most interesting moves, though, involved “meaning,” “purpose,” “answers,” and “alone.” If there is no God, Zacharias claims, then there is no “meaning,” “purpose,” or “answers” in life, and we are “alone.” All of these claims would be very puzzling taken literally: The word “second,” in the first sentence of this post, clearly has meaning. The chair I’m sitting on clearly has a purpose. The question “what is one plus one?” clearly has an answer. I just got done eating lunch with my girlfriend, and am now sitting in class with a bunch of classmates, so I am not alone. These sections of Zacharias’ book seem best understood as not doing any logical, truth-apt work, but rather just trying to associate him self with nice connotation words, and trying to associate his opponents with nasty connotation words.

There was one especially disgusting part of the book: Zacharias’ opportunistic, inconsistent show of solidarity with Islam. He occasionally complains about what nasty things Harris has said about Islam, but never really makes clear why Harris’ claims are wrong (again, there seems to be little more than a reliance on not so nice words). Then he finally gets around to attempting an explanation, and in effect dares Harris to give his talks in Muslim countries, hinting Harris would not come out “unscathed.” This amounts to defending thugs on the grounds that they are thugs, to treating power as its own justification. Worse, Zacharias uses similar dare-Harris rhetoric to argue that Christianity is better than Islam because of its greater tolerance. Comparing these two passages, I don’t know what to make of them, except to wonder if different ghost writers were used for the two sections.