The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism.(SHELF LIFE)(Book review)

Try to imagine the Summa contra Gentiles as written by Keith Olbermann, and you will have some idea of the tone and style of The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (St. Augustine's Press, 299 pp., $27). The book's author, Edward Feser, is an immensely talented Aristotelico-Thomistic philosopher, and the pages he devotes to explaining the proofs for the existence of God are as clear, cogent, and convincing as any I've ever read (and I've read many).

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Now, about the tone. Many right-wingers will delight in much of Feser's angry and abusive invective: Richard Dawkins is "a writer of pop science books who evidently wouldn't know metaphysics from Metamucil." "Where philosophy is concerned, Richard Dawkins evidently knows about as much as Richard Dawson." "There are no greater vulgarians" than secularists. A particular student is "a shallow and sophomoric jackass." The denial of final causality is "bulls**t." The authors of recent atheistic bestsellers are "mental and moral midgets" and "charlatans." And so on.

Now, I have endured my share of verbal abuse at the hands of angry propagandists for the New Atheism, so I can certainly understand Feser's desire to pay them back in their own coin. But his decision comes at a cost: There are readers to whom I would very much want to give this book, because, e.g., it explains splendidly just how convincing the unmoved-mover argument really is and how the distinction between essence and existence in things means that the principle of causality remains unassailable (despite centuries of unsupported proclamations to the contrary). But will these readers get past the first paragraph of the preface, where Feser suggests that legislating a right to gay marriage is analogous to declaring a donkey to be a horse? This is the debating strategy known technically as "leading with one's chin": There are ...