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Books: The God Confusion - Why Nobody Knows The Answer To The Ultimate Question

Is being agnostic the only logical philosophical path?

The God Confusion: Why Nobody Knows The Answer To The Ultimate Question

by Gary Cox

(Bloomsbury, £12.99)

Marxist Alain Badiou in his book Philosophy For Militants explains the discipline as either a school of knowledge or a transformatory discourse that seeks a revolution in our existence.

Gary Cox seems to reside within the former sphere and this philosophical case for agnosticism has two distinct advantages for the interested layperson.

Cox doesn't try to trick us into an overly elaborate intellectual maze by saving his eventual conclusions until right at the end. He's absolutely upfront about the philosophical flaws of both theism and atheism from the outset.

There is no philosophical stance worthy of the name, he argues, that could lead the practitioner to anything other than an agnostic viewpoint about the existence of God.

A lucid and engaging critique of the philosophical flaws in each of the main thought systems that seek to prove God's existence emerges. Cox then chops each to bits, slicing effectively through the wood of these "proofs."

Rather than plunging into critiquing each one, he carefully devotes the opening chapters to his own carefully selected consideration of the theoretical characteristics of God and various sociological, psychological and political explanations of the origins of the idea of a supreme deity.

Cox devotes far fewer pages to debunking atheism but still concludes that such certainty is philosophically untenable.

Although refusing to endorse an outright static scepticism as a response to agnosticism, Cox seems bemused as to what his conclusion means for society as to the right and wrong behaviours identified by the major religions' interpretations of what each defines as God.

Such a lack of precision is unsatisfactory - echoing Marx's call for philosophers not just to interpret the world but to change it, what does this mean for the practising agnostic in addressing the current issues of today? Cox is relatively, and frustratingly, mute at this point.

Paul Simon

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