The Impossibility of God - Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier
It is often argued that you can’t prove a negative and therefore atheism is a position without a proof. This book is a ruthless response to such claims, not proving that God does not exist, but rather that God cannot exist for a multitude of reasons.
The Impossibility of God is a compilation of thirty-four articles published over the last half-centaury by twenty-four different authors, containing arguments for the impossibility of the existence of God.
The book divides the papers into five main categories of arguments against the existence of God.
The first contains definitional disproofs of God, arguing that the definition of God includes contradictions, and therefore such a God cannot exist.
The second section of the book includes deductive evil disproofs of the existence of God. These arguments are arguments against the existence of God based on contradictions between attributes that God is supposed to have and the existence of evil.
Doctrinal disproofs of the existence of God make up the third category in this volume and these are arguments that examine contradictions between an attribute of God and a specific religious doctrine or teaching about God.
The fourth category of arguments is that of multiple attribute disproofs, and contains arguments that conclude that God can not exist based on contradictions between the attributes of God.
The final section contains arguments that reveal contradictions within a single attribute of God.
This book is a provoking read for the casual atheist seeking greater certainty and great resource for the active atheist apologist alike, although a general knowledge of formal logic is required for some (but not all) of the arguments. If you are new to apologetics this is not the best book to start with as these papers were not written for the layman, that is not to say that there are none among them that would be of benefit to the beginner apologist, to the contrary there are several essays which are quite easy to grasp and require very little technical understanding to be appreciated, but the book as a whole will be of far more use to someone more experienced and educated in reasoning.
