“God is a grand illusion powered by faulty thinking patterns, superstition, and suggestion. This illusion is easy to foist upon people who are unable to think critically….” That, in a sentence and a half, is Marshall Brain’s judgment in this 2014 book. “It seems like Christian believers are separated from the world of rational thought,” he contends. Indeed, “typical human beings…are not very good thinkers at all.” So it is that, “We should educate people away from religion, because religion acts as a huge reservoir of irrationality, superstition, and sloppy thinking.”
This book, one reader declares, “teach[es] critical thinking, and then applies it to theism.” In so doing, Brain “actually manages to do something incredible: he proves that God doesn’t exist.” Hah, insists another reader: “Brain fails in this book to prove that God is imaginary.” Read it, and decide for yourself.
The author—whom Carolina Country magazine once pictured as “the famous brainiac”—is best known as the originator of HowStuffWorks.com; he founded it in 1998 as a hobby. The website is said to offer “clear, objective, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world around us actually works.” Nine years later, Discovery Communications bought it for $250 million.
How “God” Works: A Logical Inquiry on Faith
By Marshall Brain
Sterling Publishing, 2014
