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A review by amber_lea84
A Skeptic's Guide to Faith: What It Takes to Make the Leap by Philip Yancey
Did not finish book.
DNF 145. I'm usually against rating books I haven't finished, but I'm willing to make an exception here because I think the author demonstrated an unacceptable level of dishonesty. I feel so disrespected as the reader that I don't feel I owe it to the author to keep reading before declaring it no good.
I feel I should start by saying I’m not sure who the intended audience is for this book. Based on the title and description it seems as if it’s written for people who are kinda religious but not really too sure where they land, but it very much reads like it’s written for moderately conservative Christians who want to be convinced to be even more religiously conservative...but not like those other religiously conservative people who scared the daylights out of all of us as children. NOT THEM.
So if you hand this book to an atheist, they’re going to be like wut.
I’m definitely not the intended audience but I will read anything because I like to understand where people are coming from.
So like I said, a lot of Yancy’s arguments bother me because they’re extremely dishonest. I didn’t write down every example, but I do have a representative example of what I mean: he’s anti-divorce, and he writes about how kids from divorced families are far more screwed up than kids from families where the parents stay together, and then he says EVERY sociologist agrees. EVERY.
I actually majored in sociology and took a marriage and family course in college, and what screws kids up the most is parents who stay together for the sake of the kids but wouldn't be together otherwise. That’s what the data supports. It's definitely a contentious topic but most sociologists agree that kids fair the worst around parents who don't get along. But he does this a lot, where he acts as if he’s quoting facts and statistics and then says “everyone who knows anything about this agrees.” It created a sense that I couldn’t trust anything he was saying. He completely wrecks his own credibility.
Despite this, I really like Yancy’s writing style. He tells lots of stories, gives a lot of examples, and pulls lots of references from other works that are really interesting. It's shame he felt the need to be manipulative because I genuinely like his writing. There's no need to mislead people about the facts but he kept doing it over and over.
Hilariously, I felt like Yancy's metaphors often worked against his points. Like when he gave the example of the people seeing real life ships through a big fire on the shore and thinking the ships were a vision in the fire, and thus not realizing very real ships were approaching. Yeah, that’s an example of people not being able to see reality because they believed in mysticism. But in Yancy's mind the ships are supposed to be God, and the people can’t see what’s in front of them because they are fooled by what they think they know. It was a weird stretch that overlooked the most obvious interpretation. But this seems to be Yancy's style. What's real or obvious isn't important, only supporting the point he's trying to make...even if it's not really working.
I think Yancy got caught up in trying to pigeonhole large groups of people into all thinking one way, and he thinks if he can disapprove one thing he claims they all think he can discredit EVERYTHING they think. The problem is, you can’t make sweeping assumptions about what people think. So you can’t disprove what one evolutionary psychologist thinks and make me question all I think I know about science, because I already agree that evolutionary psychology is stupid.
He clearly finds frustration in the fact that he can’t win arguments this way, and he thinks that’s further proof that something is wrong. As if we SHOULD all agree. But that’s ridiculous because not even all Christians agree and are guided by the same principles, as he demonstrates by pointing out he's not like other Christians. Welcome to free will and the limitations of the human mind, I guess.
I don't know. I don't know why I thought I would get something out of this. I'm dumb.
I feel I should start by saying I’m not sure who the intended audience is for this book. Based on the title and description it seems as if it’s written for people who are kinda religious but not really too sure where they land, but it very much reads like it’s written for moderately conservative Christians who want to be convinced to be even more religiously conservative...but not like those other religiously conservative people who scared the daylights out of all of us as children. NOT THEM.
So if you hand this book to an atheist, they’re going to be like wut.
I’m definitely not the intended audience but I will read anything because I like to understand where people are coming from.
So like I said, a lot of Yancy’s arguments bother me because they’re extremely dishonest. I didn’t write down every example, but I do have a representative example of what I mean: he’s anti-divorce, and he writes about how kids from divorced families are far more screwed up than kids from families where the parents stay together, and then he says EVERY sociologist agrees. EVERY.
I actually majored in sociology and took a marriage and family course in college, and what screws kids up the most is parents who stay together for the sake of the kids but wouldn't be together otherwise. That’s what the data supports. It's definitely a contentious topic but most sociologists agree that kids fair the worst around parents who don't get along. But he does this a lot, where he acts as if he’s quoting facts and statistics and then says “everyone who knows anything about this agrees.” It created a sense that I couldn’t trust anything he was saying. He completely wrecks his own credibility.
Despite this, I really like Yancy’s writing style. He tells lots of stories, gives a lot of examples, and pulls lots of references from other works that are really interesting. It's shame he felt the need to be manipulative because I genuinely like his writing. There's no need to mislead people about the facts but he kept doing it over and over.
Hilariously, I felt like Yancy's metaphors often worked against his points. Like when he gave the example of the people seeing real life ships through a big fire on the shore and thinking the ships were a vision in the fire, and thus not realizing very real ships were approaching. Yeah, that’s an example of people not being able to see reality because they believed in mysticism. But in Yancy's mind the ships are supposed to be God, and the people can’t see what’s in front of them because they are fooled by what they think they know. It was a weird stretch that overlooked the most obvious interpretation. But this seems to be Yancy's style. What's real or obvious isn't important, only supporting the point he's trying to make...even if it's not really working.
I think Yancy got caught up in trying to pigeonhole large groups of people into all thinking one way, and he thinks if he can disapprove one thing he claims they all think he can discredit EVERYTHING they think. The problem is, you can’t make sweeping assumptions about what people think. So you can’t disprove what one evolutionary psychologist thinks and make me question all I think I know about science, because I already agree that evolutionary psychology is stupid.
He clearly finds frustration in the fact that he can’t win arguments this way, and he thinks that’s further proof that something is wrong. As if we SHOULD all agree. But that’s ridiculous because not even all Christians agree and are guided by the same principles, as he demonstrates by pointing out he's not like other Christians. Welcome to free will and the limitations of the human mind, I guess.
I don't know. I don't know why I thought I would get something out of this. I'm dumb.