The book is a well written book. It is useful and accessible with a bit of extra effort, to an average, educated reader. My son, 21 year old student of mathematics, read it and told me that he liked it, understood it well, including the way of argumentation, even a more difficult chapter on modified St. Thomas Aquinas way of demonstrating God's existence. And he has only basic understanding of philosophical concepts. The book is a plausible answer to major question of today's challenge our society faces, in these violent and volatile times: how to have a friendly, constructive but sincere and solid religious argument in public square. The book is for believers and non-believers, agnostics, outsiders, the seekers, the skeptics.
I will focus on 3 themes in this book which attracted my attention:
a) the preconditions of constructive, civilized dialogue about fundamental questions of a man that have been asked over centuries and continue to be important : on God's existence and ways to demonstrate or negate this claim, relation between reason-science- and faith, moral good and evil, and other fundamental questions of humanity (existence of objective truth, sense of life and death, evolution vs creation).
b) Argument on God’s existence based on modified St. Thomas way of proof
c) References to the Bible as regards approach to truth and seeking truth
Now, let me focus on the first one. How to argue about religion ? This is very interesting part illustrating to what extent we have departed from reason-driven, civilized discussions on fundamental questions of humanity and went towards reductionist and subjective “paragraph 22” killing true dialogue
The author rightly believes that his call for argument on religion, is not encouraging religious conflict but contrary. The more we care for rational (based on reason) exchange of ideas around matters related to religion, ethics, etc., "the more peaceful our increasingly roiled culture will be." If we do not discuss with open minds and respecting reason, then we open room (or we keep it open) for polarized, biased and unconstructive quarrels and cultural wars. The author convincingly and gently argues that faith is not contrary to reason, in fact faith needs reason and is based also on reason (fides quaerens intellectum, St. Anselm). Sound and fair dialogue on fundamental themes of humanity, like religion, God's existence is in opposition to so called scientism. Scientism differentiated by the author from science (a way of orderly and methodical discovery of the truth of the world using specific methods with all their advantages and limitations), reductionist view (positivism in science, scientism) that assumes that the only reliable way of cognition of reality is through empirical science. In other words that all knowledge is reduced to the scientific form of knowledge. The author indicates that this epistemological reductionism is prevailing these days, especially among younger people.
The author interestingly deals with common trend in postmodern society, which is a focus on tolerance or toleration, especially regarding of religion, ethics which goes in parallel with the push for the radical privatization of religion, the relegating of faith to the arena of interiority and its practice to the level of a hobby. This trend contributes substantially to elimination f real debate and openness of society and pushes towards polarization and eruptions of frustrations due to lack on natural safety buffer such as civilized and reason respecting discussion without presumptions and biases, so often present even in university debates. This is well illustrated and discussed.
Another obstacle the author discusses to sound and constructive argumentation, discussion on religion is rampant voluntarism which is rejection of objective truth and claim that every view (including even straight forwards measurable features of reality) are subjective decision of a man. In the minds of many intelligent people in academia, students in US campuses people who hold such view, even objective measures like gender, race, and even height are not objective states of affairs but a function of subjective desire. The author shows dangers of such approach to the open-minded, reason-based discussion and seeking of truth.

The remaining parts of the book are equally interesting. One of them provides an example of the open minded approach to the fundamental question on God's existence based on St. Thomas Aquinas and his methods the quaestio disputata (the disputed question), which was a public debate, a lively and sometimes raucous intellectual exchange between masters and disciples.

All in all a small, inspiring, and worth reading book. The title is somewhat misleading as the book is more about How to argue about religion and how to establish civilized, reasons driven argument then on argumentation for religion, with exception of the chapter on the proof on God’s existence.

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Rating	4.6 (314 ratings)
Price	$13.85
Category	Atheism

Arguing Religion Hardcover