"Good Without God" a Good Idea? "No," says Frank Bellamy

When I picked up this book, I didn't have high expectations. Even those expectations were not met. Greg Epstein's Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe disappointed me with its use of the sort of fallacious reasoning we nontheists routinely have to refute from religious people.

Epstein's basic philosophy is outlined in Chapter 3: "Why Be Good Without a God." There, he attempts a bad line of argumentation more commonly found in christian writing (the lowercase letter is intentional). First, he tells us that we all need one single, unified purpose of life. Then, Epstein lists many things that he doesn't consider his preferred purposes of for one reason or another. Finally, he tells us what he believes the preferred purpose of life is-and claims that it is the only life purpose that can satisfy our needs.

For Epstein, the purpose of life turns out to be dignity rather than god, but he uses the same reasoning as many christian leaders use. As a result, he makes two of the same errors they do. There's no reason to assume that we each need one single, unified purpose for life. One person may have many different purposes in his or her life. Interestingly, once the reader asks what dignity really is, it doesn't meet Epstein's own standard for a life purpose. Epstein never gives a clear definition of dignity, but every attempted definition consists of concern for one's self and concern for others. Both aspects are important, but combining them under the word "dignity" doesn't create a unitary purpose, especially considering that Epstein rejected each of them separately earlier in the chapter.

The book sinks to its lowest point in the chapter on pluralism. Epstein spends most of the section confusing the believer with the belief, a mistake which can only harm the cause of pluralism. Epstein opens the chapter by attacking what he alleges is the so-called new atheists' view of religious people: that they are poison and ought to be hated or destroyed. As anyone who has read books by these prominent atheist authors would know, none of them actually hold this view. Sam Harris' book is titled The End of Faith, not The End of the Faithful. Christopher Hitchens wrote that religion poisons everything, not that the religious are poisonous, as Epstein seems to attribute to him.

A couple of pages later Epstein commits the same error in the opposite direction, confusing dislike of humanism for dislike of humanists. As he puts it, "It is hard to like those who don't like Humanism, who don't like atheism, who would discriminate against me, who would be prejudiced." But one can dislike humanism while liking some humanists, just as many humanists dislike christianity while liking some christians. Pluralism isn't about forced respect for other people's beliefs; it's about being able to dislike other people's beliefs while appreciating the individual.

A troubling theme in Epstein's writing is his repeated attempts (including his decision to capitalize the word "humanism") to claim for humanism the same privileged status that religion has in American society. In an interview, he said "any protection that you are going to give to a religion under law you need to give us the same." One of the big purposes of the nontheistic movement, of having organizations and meetings, is precisely to undermine and ultimately abolish the privileged status of religion, not to adopt it for ourselves.

These are only a few of the misconceptions to be found in Epstein's book. But what makes Good Without God offensive to me is that unlike the "new atheists" (as he calls them), who do not claim to represent all secular people, Epstein has the arrogance to claim he speaks for you, me, and everyone else who does not believe in a god (see the subtitle). He clearly does not. I agree with PZ Myers, who said, "just as we can be good without god, we can also be good without rituals, good without sacraments, [and] good without priests and chaplains."