Divinity of Doubt: The God Question
By Vincent Bugliosi
Vanguard Press
338 pages $26.99
In the history of America’s courtroom dramas, few names stand out more prominently than that of Vincent Bugliosi. He captivated the nation's imagination with his relentless prosecution of the Charles Manson clan and his subsequent graphic, gripping retelling of the horrific bloodbath in his best-seller “Helter Skelter.” In a later volume (“Outrage”) about O.J. Simpson, he questioned how a just God could allow Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman to die and yet permit their murderer to go free.
The reaction he received to that statement from hundreds of readers prompted him to explore in depth the age-old conundrum: “If there is a God, why does He allow evil?” He even addresses the futility of prayer with this bold statement: “For the life of me, I still don't understand why humans pray.”
His latest work stands apart from the recent spate of anti-God polemics because it represents the perspective of an agnostic. However, the author's shaky and untenable premise declares that atheists proclaim with as much certainty that God doesn't exist as theists confidently acknowledge the reality of His existence. One wonders just how he arrived at that unwarranted conclusion, especially since he chooses to buttress his rash position by quoting Richard Dawkins, the world's foremost atheist. In his book “The God Delusion,” Mr. Dawkins cautiously, scrupulously entitles one of his chapters: “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God.” Is Mr. Bugliosi's grasp of English grammar so deficient that he fails to recognize that the adverbial qualifier “almost” effectively demolishes his own argument that Mr. Dawkins, as the leading spokesperson for almost all atheists, is typically expressing 100 percent certainty of his wholesale rejection of a supernatural deity? If he had bothered to consult the writings of America's leading atheist, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, he would have learned that she repeatedly reiterated that although she could not prove that God didn't exist, she insisted on living her life as if He didn't.
Far too much of this tome covers overly-familiar terrain and offers a mere rehash of topics treated better and more thoroughly by other writers: Biblical anomalies, a comparative survey of the world's leading religions, the main differences between Protestant and Catholic Christianity and the abysmal failings of the Catholic church (the Inquisition, the sale of indulgences, the war on science, corrupt and immoral popes, complicity in the Holocaust, the cover-up of its world-wide sex abuse scandal and its intractable stand on condom use even in AIDS-ravaged Africa).
In one of the most informative chapters of the treatise, he examines the controversy of morality without religion, which, to many minds, constitutes an oxymoron. He argues quite persuasively that although religion needs morality, morality does not need religion. The evidence he submits boggles the mind.
He cites a recent study published in the online journal “Evolutionary Psychology” in July, 2009, entitled: “The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity Upon Dysfunctional Psychosociological Conditions” in which 155 unimpeachable sources were used regarding 17 first-world nations all rated on their degree of dysfunction based on homicides, incarcerations, suicides, abortions, infant mortality, life expectancy, marriage duration, divorce, alcohol consumption, corruption, income disparity, poverty and income levels.
The findings: The U.S., ranked as the No. 1 most religious nation, also ranked No. 1 as the most dysfunctional of all. The least dysfunctional was Norway (7th in a list of the least religious) followed by Denmark (3rd in a list of the least religious) and Sweden as No. 3 ( No. 1 as the least religious of all). These indisputable statistics reveal a clear corrrelation between religioisty and dysfunction. They offer peer-reviewed proof to counter the tired and tiresome but still-prevailing fallacy that people cannot conceivably be moral without religious underpinnings.
The polemicist summarizes his worldview by saying: “When I hear theists and atheists pontificating on how they know God does or does not exist, I can only smile at the irrationality and, yes, vanity of the notion.” So for him, agnosticism remains the only sensible and intelligent middle path. Yet, paradoxically and schizophrenically, he only harbors some doubt about a generic supreme being that might have been involved in a First Cause at the same time that he categorically expresses no reservations whatever that the Christian God cannot logically exist because of the conflicting and contradictory images of Him in the Old vs. the New Testament. The former prosecutor self-identifies as an agnostic. Madalyn Murray O'Hair would call him a fence-sitter.
Mr. Akerley may be contacted at benakerley@aol.com
