This is philosophy?

This is Philosophy is a new introduction to the subject by Prof. Steven Hales.  A reader calls my attention to the book’s companion website, which contains links to some lecture slides keyed to topics covered in the book, a dictionary of terms, exercises, and so forth.

I’ve got a little exercise of my own for the reader, which has three steps.  Here’s how it goes:

 Step 1: Read this blurb from the website:

The text’s scholarship is as noteworthy as its hipness. Hales clearly explains important philosophical ideas with a minimum of jargon and without sacrificing depth of content and he consistently gives a fair and accurate presentation of both sides of central philosophical disputes.

Step 2: Read this set of lecture slides on the cosmological argument, holding before your mind the highlighted words from the blurb while doing so.

Step 3: Try not to laugh.

Ha!  Knew you couldn’t do it!  Me neither.

Yes, my friends, it’s the “Everything has a cause” Straw Man That Will Not Die.  And no, things don’t get any better in the book itself, which Amazon and Google books will let you read the relevant pages from.  Hales hits all his marks with aplomb:

1. He assures us that the argument rests on the premise that everything has a cause.

2. He says that the argument is concerned to trace the series of causes back through time to a first moment.

3. He attributes this argument to Aristotle and Aquinas.

4. Naturally, he thinks “What caused God?” is a devastating objection.

5. He also tells us that there is no reason to suppose that a first cause would be God.

6. He suggests that the Big Bang theory shows that there is no need to affirm a divine cause.

In short, it’s a complete travesty.  If you’re looking for a 1,234^th pop philosophy regurgitation of all the tired caricatures of the cosmological argument rather than an account of what Aristotle, Aquinas, and Co. actually said, Hales really gives you your money’s worth.

If you’re someone to whom it isn’t already obvious how thoroughly Hales has ballsed things up, you might look at my post “So you think you understand the cosmological argument?”  If that piece is too polemical for you and you want something more politely academic, you might look at my Midwest Studies in Philosophy article “The New Atheists and the Cosmological Argument” or at chapter 3 of my book Aquinas.  (More on the cosmological argument can also be found here.)

I note that Hales also devotes considerable space to refuting what he calls “The argument from scripture.”  This is an argument to the effect that God exists because the Bible says so -- the obvious circularity of which can be pointed out in a single short sentence, though for some reason Hales goes on for pages about the subject.  I suppose this would be well worth doing in a philosophy book, except for the fact that I can’t think of a single person who has ever actually given the argument Hales attacks.  Perhaps These are Straw Men would have been a better title for his book.

I also notice that in his “Annotated Bibliography” Hales recommends Dawkins’ The God Delusion as follow-up reading.  Wrap your mind around that.  Kids, when you get done with this introductory book and you want to pursue these matters at greater depth, try Dawkins!

But hey, Hales’ book does have “hipness.”  So there’s that.