Well delivered but incomplete and rosy: 2.5 stars.
Julian Baggini's Very Short Intro to Atheism is written with clarity. He states his views clearly and never leaves the reader in any question as to what he's arguing for. This is worth mentioning because it is actually no small feat. Further than this, Baggini structured the book effectively, both in terms of his big picture flow of the book and secondly by always stating his specific points and concluding each chapter with a summary of the arguments. These characteristics made the book easy to read. Secondly, he does an admirable job of making his subject matter accessible, and so he showed his capability of delivering within the spirit of the Very Short Introduction Series.
Baggini begins (Chapter 1) by explaining what atheism is. He paints atheism as a positive belief, and this sets the scene for the next few chapters as it allows him to justify and explain his atheism before completing the more negative task of arguing why religious belief is mistaken, which he doesn't do until Chapter 6. In Chapter 2, Baggini claims that strong evidence supports atheism but only weak evidence can support theism. He argues that human nature and consciousness are completely biological, and that this strongly supports the naturalist, and therefore atheist, view. He argues that naturalist explanations are incredibly successful and that "The class of unexplained phenomena is unlikely to contain anything that will come to be explained in supernatural terms". This is a wide reaching chapter, as Baggini makes further positive arguments before taking on the claim that atheism is a faith position, and arguing against those who would use Pascal's Wager to justify belief.
In Chapter 3, Baggini starts by arguing for the separation of morality and religion, saying that we shouldn't see them as inextricably linked. He explores three frameworks for understanding Godless morality, and draws insights from them all. Meaning and Purpose is the subject of Chapter 4, and it can be summarised by the statement "Life is what you make it". Chapter 5 sees Baggini trace atheism back to naturalists in the 6th century BCE, and then in it's modern form, from the enlightenment forwards as a wholesale belief system in the marketplace of ideas. In Chapter 6 he turns to the deconstruction of the justification for religious belief, as he considers the merits of arguments for God's existence. In Chapter 7 he concludes by discussing humanism and praising the realism of atheism as a means of facing the world.
So, why only 2.5 stars? It's because Baggini's book is both incomplete and overly rosy. He admits at the start of Chapter 7 the fact that it's inevitable that much will be left out, given the brevity of the book (interestingly, this book is much shorter than many of the others in the VSI series- I just received 8 and this was the shortest). I understand this and so admittedly it must be factored in as I pin Baggini down on my charge of incompleteness.
In the earlier chapters, I found myself frustrated that Baggini didn't even mention any of the best anti naturalist arguments. Given his view that naturalism justifies atheism, this was disappointing. I was also dismayed with his lack of discussion on the point that many religious believers and religious belief systems are completely comfortable with naturalist explanations (and the different, but related point that many religious academics and philosophers of science believe God provides a better justification for the entire scientific enterprise than does naturalism), and thus that there's significant disagreement about whether many of Baggini's points provide much support for atheism at all, let alone strong support. It may be fair for Baggini to claim that space contraints kept him from responding to objections, and that he was simply trying to put forward a brief, summarised, positive case. Nonetheless, he could've easily made his entire discussion more well-rounded by mentioning those obvious objections and why he believes they fail. This would've only taken a small amount of space, yet would've made this book much more effective at it's aim of showing why one should be an atheist.
So, in making this criticism I will focus on the one glaring example where the arguments put forward are unequivocally and definitively incomplete. That is, Chapter 6. He refers to "The Cosmological Argument" when in actual fact there is no such thing- there are three broad forms of cosmological argument that together are given the family name "Cosmological Arguments" only because they are similar in their reference point- the cosmos. Baggini presents the design argument as the "watchmaker" argument given by Paley centuries ago, when scientific findings in the past 50 years have completely revolutionised the discussion on this argument. Now, it is true that most religious believers do not base their faith on natural theology, but nonetheless, since he's presenting and critiquing arguments for God's existence, he is at least obliged to mention the ones that modern Christian apologists and philosophers consider the most persuasive, such as modern renderings of the Kalam and Leibnizian Cosmological arguments or the fine tuning argument. I am aware of his statement in Ch 7 that he didn't want to mention sophisticated defences of theistic belief, but I'm not saying that is necessary. (I suspect he had in made some of Plantinga's philosophically dense ideas such as reformed epistemology). I'm asking him to merely lay out a more forceful argument, instead of laying out an ancient strawman.
The second criticism was that he falls prey to the very thing he shows awareness of in the introduction, by painting an overly rosy picture of atheism. Some of the ideas perpetuated by the figures who have paved the way for modern day atheism- Nietzsche, for example- are darker than the picture of atheism that Baggini presents. Atheism is in it's infancy, as Baggini notes, but he pays little attention to dark atheist ideas, or to the fact that atheism has arisen in societies heavily influenced by Christian belief. Baggini would have you believe that atheism is a knight in shining armour, waving the torch of rational thinking alight and ridding us of superstition. But where will atheism really lead people in the future? Caution is required, because as John Dickson observed: Any kind of life is logically compatible with atheism.
Baggini's picture didn't make enough room for the darker side of atheism, and thus he ends up being guilty of the very thing he foresaw in his own introduction. As he admits in Chapter 7, "the atheism described in this book really is a form of humanism". He even says he sees positive atheism and humanism as "coterminous", but the problem is that he simply doesn't give any justification for thinking this! And considering that it's such a huge part of the framework within which he describes and justifies atheism, this is a huge oversight. In other words, given the position of naturalism- nature is all there is- that Baggini subscribes to, many "logical" views of the world and ways of living are possible. And many of them are much bleaker than Baggini's polite and tolerant outlook, so I'm not sure he has a right to commandeer atheism by painting it in such a positive light. Perhaps Baggini is, as we all are, a product of his times.
By balancing out the strong readability and the clarity with which Baggini wrote with the two main criticisms I've levelled at the book, I give it 2.5 stars.
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