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Among modern authors I find Rabbi Harold Kushner’s books, particularly When Bad Things Happen to Good People and Who Needs God to be highly readable, reasonable, and respectful of the reader’s intelligence (although he is definitely a theist, most atheists and nontheists would find these works quite palatable). In the final chapter of Who Needs God, entitled “Why Is God So Hard to Find?,” Kushner answers the question by admitting the human nature of religion: “Religion is first and foremost the community through which you learn to understand the world and grow to be human.” If God is absent, it is “because we have stopped looking for Him.” The implication of both statements (to me anyway) is that God exists in our minds and religion is the product of human culture.

In the arena of biblical studies, a subject not under my purview (with the exception of my analysis of the “Bible Code” in Chapter 5), the best place to begin is with the world-renowned biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? His book on The Disappearance of God is a fascinating read on the changing role of God from the early books of the Hebrew Bible to the later. Finally, his 1999 book, The Hidden Book in the Bible, puts forth a cutting-edge and potentially very controversial re-editing of the Old Testament in which Friedman pulls out of numerous books what he believes to be a continuous narrative, written by one author, that he calls the “first prose narrative.” Reactions from the biblical scholarship community remain to be seen. There are a number of other excellent authors in this field as well. Burton Mack’s The Lost Gospel and especially his Who Wrote the New Testament? are particularly good; the latter is particularly strong in giving cultural context to the construction of the New Testament. Randel Helms’s Gospel Fictions and Who Wrote the Gospels? give a good perspective on these four books from a professor of literature who analyzes them as he would any important text in Western literature. Tim Callahan, the religion editor for Skeptic magazine, has written two splendid books that are at once comprehensive and well written: Bible Prophecy: Failure or Fulfillment? and The Secret Origins of the Bible. Callahan is especially good about cutting to the chase of an argument and exposing both its strengths and weaknesses. I have learned a lot in reading these works, especially about the antecedents to the Bible, most of which are shrouded in mystery and almost never discussed.

Finally, there is no excuse for not going to the primary source, and that is the Bible itself. To that end, my research has been greatly aided by several outstanding reference guides recognized by Bible scholars to be the very best places to begin a more thorough analysis of the good book (and available through any religious bookstore): The Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, The Anchor Bible Dictionary, The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, The Interpreter’s One-Volume Commentary on the Bible, The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, The Oxford Companion to the Bible, The Literary Guide to the Bible, and The Jerome Biblical Commentary. For adding these to the Skeptics Society Research Library, and for keeping our analyses on religious and biblical matters on a professional level, I am grateful to Bruce Mazet.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

Click here For complete poll results see Skeptic, 8/1: 16.

Click here Barrow, J. D., and F. Tipler. 1988. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. vii.

Click here Dyson, F. 1979. Disturbing the Universe. New York: Harper and Row.

Click here Davies, P. 1999. The Fifth Miracle. New York: Simon and Schuster, p. 246.

Click here Meyer, S. C. 1999. “Word Games: DNA, Design, and Intelligence.” Touchstone, 12 (4): 44–50.

Click here Hawking, S. 1996. “Quantum Cosmology.” In Hawking, S., and R. Penrose. The Nature of Space and Time. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, pp. 89