Review: Sense and Goodness without God by Richard Carrier
This book is truly a gift to the secular community. Whereas most atheist books focus solely on tearing down theism, this book focuses mainly on building up a new worldview based on the idea that all things have natural causes and that all there is to be learned is found in nature. For instance, in The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins addresses the question of morality by simply saying (and presenting evidence for the proposition) that wherever our morality comes from, it ain't from God. In contrast, Carrier takes the high road and actually presents an excellent, rationally defensible system of morality which makes no reference to God (He talks about this in this video and I have written about it here). In another example, Carrier refutes the fine tuning argument by showing that there are reasonable, well evidenced, less-assuming alternatives to the God Hypothesis such as Chaotic Inflation Theory and Smolin's Cosmological Natural Selection Theory. Although the second chapter of the book is a bit tedious (having to do with what we mean with our words) and the chapter about beauty seemed unnecessary, this book is overall very excellent and should be on the bookshelf of every atheist, every philosopher, and every other person with a general interest in religion. In fact, 'Sense and Goodness' along with 'Atheism Explained' are really the only two books one will ever need to read about atheism: The latter refutes nearly every argument for the existence of God and the former builds up a new, more beautiful, more rational worldview in place of theism.
Richard Carrier's Writings on Internet Infidels
