Daily Excerpt: How to Argue with an Atheist (Brink): Arguing in Circles
Excerpt from How to Argue with an Atheist available online and from msipress.com/shop INTRODUCTION: Arguing in Circles It is not how long the book is, but how long the book sticks in the mind of the reader. My contention is sure to be controversial: atheism is an addiction. According to the national opinion polls, between two and twenty percent of American adults identify themselves as atheists (depending upon how the question is phrased). The fact that there are so many millions of atheists (or so few, if you look at it proportionately) says nothing about the existence of God, but only about human nature. I am going to suggest a broader, more sweeping definition of atheism: behaving as if God does not exist . Since the time of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, all of us have, at least on occasion, behaved in this way. In that sense, we are all recovering atheists. One afternoon at the beginning of the semester, a student came by my offic