“Irreligion”, John Allen Paulos

I have a crush on this book. It’s so neat and clever and pretty and fits nicely into any handbag – ok, maybe it’s the perfect accessory rather than a crush, but “Irreligion” is definitely a book any religious skeptic will always want around.

John Allen Paulos is a mathematician-atheist who has collected, like Dawkins, the most common arguments for the existence of God, and, like Dawkins, he refutes them one by one in a hugely entertaining way. Some of them I understood a lot better in the short and sweet form presented here, even though there is nothing original in them. Paulos’ witty style, spiced with personal anecdotes was a pleasure to follow and quotes like “much of theology [...] is a kind of verbal magic show” are worth remembering.

I cannot possibly badmouth the God Delusion, but at some time in almost any long-term (reading) relationship comes the point where you like to flirt with the cheeky book next door because it makes you laugh in unexpected places and gives you just what you needed in a lighter and quicker way.

“The Happiness Hypothesis” – Jonathan Haidt

Its title smacks of self-help and its bright yellow smiley-face cover made me hide it in public but The Happiness Hypothesis is a hugely interesting and pleasant book that I can’t stop talking about. Haidt promises to put “ancient wisdom and philosophy to the test of modern science” and covers a number of areas in philosophy, psychology, sociology and evolution.

Haidt’s one-sentence meaning-of-life answer I’ll leave for the reader to discover but it is not nearly as exciting as some of the happiness-related insights he shares along the way. My favourite idea, as all others derived from convincing psychological experiments, is that people are happiest in a “state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities”.

The author’s metaphor of choice for the way our minds work is that of a wild elephant (our urges and passions) with a semi-able rider (our reason). Our mind also has a nifty feature called the interpreter module that will fabricate often ludicrous explanations for our own behaviour when an experimenter tricks us into making subconscious decisions. We learn another few unpleasant things about how our brains work such as our negative bias: “bad is stronger than good”. When making decisions, one negative aspect typically outweighs several positive ones, such as in a relationship where “it takes at least five good or constructive actions to make up for the damage done by one critical or destructive act” or in preparation of a meal where “food is easily contaminated (by a single cockroach antenna), but difficult to purify”.

You can also find in this book the origins of disgust and how a sometimes healthy fear of bodily functions led to frankly ridiculous religious notions about the impurity of women; a vindication of gossip, which may have been the reason for the evolution of language and without which there would be chaos and ignorance because it “extends our moral-emotional toolkit”; and a recap of the Platonic idea for the origin of love.

Aside from the occasional common sense agony-aunt spin on, for example, different types of love, there is a nice chapter about Love and Attachments, in which Haidt equates passionate love with a dangerous drug: “People are not allowed to sign contracts when they are drunk, and I sometimes wish we could prevent people from proposing marriage when they are high on passionate love”.

The main messages to emerge from Haidt’s entertaining, clever and convincing research all sound true (if a little familiar) and are a great summary guide to becoming a happier person: Look after your social contacts, attempt to raise your base level of contentment in one of three equally effective ways (meditation, cognitive therapy or Prozac) and add variety to spice up your life. We don’t need to follow several religions’ advice to forsake all external pleasures as the right type can positively influence our happiness.

Maybe this is a bit of a self-help book but one that comes guilt-free for the skeptic as it provides adequate and refreshing scientific backup.

“Madame Curie”, Eve Curie

This is the second biography of a scientist I’ve read, this one written by a family member – Marie Curie’s daughter, who, incidentally, died at the age of 102 while I was reading this book. The close relationship between subject and author had all sorts of implications. Most noticeably, this is probably the most thorough and personal book about the double Nobel laureate anyone was ever likely to write.

Eve Curie, born when her mother was 37 and her father was to live only 16 more months, naturally mentions the scientific achievements of Madame Curie, and goes into great detail on her attitude to work, but the physiochemical ins and outs of the discovery of polonium and radium (or any other of Marie Curie’s works) are largely glossed over. Since I am not well versed in physics or mathematics this suited me fine and from the start I was taken captive by the life of the Polish student who adores her family and her country but is unable to pass the opportunity of studies in France.

I became engrossed as in a novel, waiting excitedly for the chapter entitled “Pierre Curie”, where the serious and hard-working heroine meets the love of her life. The love story between her parents is described tenderly by Curie and if not textbook romantic, it is certainly fulfilling and extraordinary.

It is odd and possibly intentional how the biography progresses when Pierre Curie dies in a traffic accident. Up to this point, Marie’s life was recounted chronologically and in minute detail, while afterwards her years blend into each other. Moods and events in the physicist’s life are described in a seemingly arbitrary order and her sorrow of having lost her husband is palpable.

Coincidentally I was reading this book while in Paris and found myself on an accidental secular pilgrimage: depressed at the street corner where Pierre died, enjoying the view in the street where Marie spent the last years of her life, and even unexpectedly found that their bodies had since been moved to the Panthéon, the resting place of the people France is most proud of.

Eve Curie’s arcane writing style (the book was first published in 1937) throughout evokes the admiration for her famous mother, without euphemising her flaws. Madame Curie is portrayed as a highly intelligent and motivated woman with no great natural skills for housework or personal friendships and no time for leisure. She raised her daughters sometimes controversially (the elder, Irène, also won a Nobel prize later, so her methods can’t have been all wrong) and scorned all publicity and anything that would distract her from science. Her religious views changed from Catholic, raised by a pious mother, to the view expressed in the following excerpt from a letter to her cousin.

“Let everybody keep his own faith, so long as it is sincere. [...] I respect sincere religious feelings when I meet them, even if they go with a limited state of mind.”

In fact, the many examples of Marie’s writing, her direct quotes and letters addressed to her, are among the highlights of the book. As a young woman she writes down the beautiful headstrong motto: “First principle: never to let one’s self be beaten down by persons or by events”. At the height of her undesired fame she points out to a journalist how “In science we must be interested in things, not in persons”, and this seems to sum up her character well.

Unusual events from Marie Curie’s life that I had never heard of include her friendship with the royal Belgian couple and her creation of an X-ray lab on wheels servicing military hospitals during the first World War.

Despite this intimate book, Madame Curie remains alien to me, she is unlike anyone I have met in real life. But maybe therein lay the appeal, for me and all those she inspired during her lifetime.

“Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code”, Matt Ridley

I enjoyed this book immensely! Biographies of brilliant people might be a completely untapped source of reading pleasure for me. Surely, a lot of it is due to Ridley’s easy style and entertaining anecdotes; I have only read his “Genome” and can’t remember how I felt about it, but I’ll definitely read more of his works in the future.

But what I loved the most was finding out about this astonishing man, who I always thought had stood in Watson’s shadow, which was apparently not the case at all.

I was so enamoured with Crick by half-way through the book that I was totally shocked by the revelations about his radical views (at least he held them in the 1960s and 70s) on races, eugenics and sterilisation of “genetically inferior” people. I don’t know what to do with this information and it seems like neither did Ridley. It is mentioned dutifully but the author doesn’t really take a position and maybe that is not the job of a biographer. As I uneasily read on about this man with the incredible imagination, admiration gained the upper hand again and by the end I cried when he dies.

The fact that Crick was a raging (yes!) atheist helped, of course, but the main reason for liking him is expressed in this last sentence of the epilogue: “He would have liked to find the seat of consciousness and to see the retreat of religion. He had to settle for explaining life.”

“A Devil’s Chaplain”, Richard Dawkins

This book for me was mostly a slightly embarrassing reminder of how tastes and opinions change. I had bought and read only some of the essays published in this book in 2002. My review of it was published in our college newspaper. I am too afraid to go back and read it in full, but I remember my dislike of Dawkins and pencilled notes in the book itself remind me how derogatory and one-sided I found the author and his book.

I have since come full circle on the Dawkins Appreciation Curve and embrace his justified arrogance and argumentative strength. This book is a great way to start into Dawkins’ writing as this collection offers essays on all his topics of interest and allows the reader to choose one or all to read up on in more depth.

Most of his arguments concerning religion are familiar to me now from the “The God Delusion” and some of his evolutionary viewpoints are probably better described in the books devoted completely to that particular topic. It was very interesting, however, to read the essays in the section on Stephen Jay Gould, Dawkins’ most publicised adversary. I’ve always wanted to know where their main conflicts lie and even though it’s still hard to grasp from a few forewords to books and book reviews, at least I gained a little insight.

One thing I still cringe about was the letter to his daughter on her tenth birthday, which concludes the book. Maybe I’m just not aware of the tone in which to address a child of that age, but this does not seem to be it. It is a mixture between oversimplification and a patronising voice on one hand, extremely abstract ideas and sentences on the other hand.

The eulogies and lament, predictably, brought a few tears to my eyes and I step a good bit away from my previous criticism of coldheartedness on hearing of the death of a close friend.

I do think, though, prompted by the letter to his daughter and his brief excursion into travel writing about a trip to Africa, that Dawkins should not meddle in styles of writing other than the one he has so obviously mastered: biting, fiercely intelligent, thought-provoking and awe-inspiring science writing.

I have now erased all my pencil marks.

“Why People Believe Weird Things”, Michael Shermer

I thought this book might fit nicely into my new-found love for denouncing idiots but it turns out Shermer is actually quite gentle as a Skeptic.

The first and second part of this book are very enjoyable as we learn about common characteristics of cults and movements like the Satanic panic of the 1980s and the witch hunts. The recovered memory scam, too, was really interesting to read about.

Unfortunately, these first parts are the only ones in which Shermer actually addresses the question posed in the title – the rest of the book he goes into his pet peeves in way too much detail.

Sure, the section on creationism was interesting but still slightly too long. It is nice, however, to see a bullet point style list of creationist “arguments” and a scientist’s replies. The arguments are known but nicely summarised.

The section on Holocaust denial is useful as I wasn’t aware of an organised movement of those pseudo-historians. My issues with this section are that a) it is much too detailed for anyone but other Holocaust historians – especially the section of biographies of some deniers screams “I’m a Holocaust scholar, this is what I know about”, rather than “this is what you should know about”, and b) it does not mention anywhere why it is that People Believe these Weird Things.

After reading and totally subscribing to Richard Dawkins’ “God Delusion”, I was also frustrated with Shermer’s attitude to religion – as a former born-again Christian he traipses around its perceived territory, advocating non-overlapping magisteria and giving a lot of what Dawkins calls undue respect.

In the last section, Shermer loses the plot and goes off on a tangent on some physicist with a religiously coloured theory of the universe. The Weird Thing is that Shermer himself now draws on arguments that I could only describe as pseudoscience to explain why this physicist (Frank J. Tipler) believes the things he does. His paragraphs on sibling position seemed especially far-fetched.

With this ironic note Shermer ends a book that started promising but got harder to read and less credible towards the end.

“The God Delusion”, Richard Dawkins

The book cover mentions that Richard Dawkins has recently been voted one of the top three intellectuals alive today and it just makes so much sense. He is effortlessly academic and challenging in his writing style, his arguments and his topics and were it not so desperately ironic considering the subject of this particular book, I would worship him.

Some years ago, on carelessly flicking through “A Devil’s Chaplain”, I got offended at Dawkins’ lack of tolerance for other people’s opinions but now I think I understand what he means when he argues that God is indeed a delusion and that religion deserves no undue respect, no tip-toeing around misconceived notions and no special status in matters of opinion. Dawkins covers it all here, all the angles from which religious zealots could possibly attack his arguments. Creationism is dealt with, but, refreshingly, does not become the main focus of the book as we move from the poverty of the agnostic stance to deconstructed arguments for the existence of God to the roots of religion and much more.

“What is the primitively advantageous trait that sometimes misfires to generate religion?” he asks, and this wonderfully irreverent tone continues throughout the book. While he sometimes seems to go out of his way to use words like “outbreak” or “infested” to show his view of religion as an unfortunate condition, this is probably done to desensitise people, or in his own words, raise the reader’s consciousness.

Dawkins brilliantly illustrates the ridiculous idea of deriving morality from scripture: if religious leaders argue that some passages of the Bible are symbolic, surely the decision of which parts those are and which are to be taken literally is just as easily made by an atheist as it certainly can’t be based on the text itself.

This book is necessary as a loud counterpart to too many religious fanatics, who apparently are finding a foothold in Britain, too.

The last chapter describes how science and a sense of wonder can easily replace and surpass religion as a source of consolation and inspiration. Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” and “The God Delusion” have made me realise that I could never be anything but an atheist and thanks to this book I have the knowledge to back it up and the feeling that this is a beautiful state of affairs.