Science and Religion

The Science of the Dogon: Decoding the African Mystery Tradition

by Laird Scranton

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"Science of the Dogon may take a central place in the libraries of ancient knowledge buffs. With tremendous clarity and humility, Laird Scranton unveils an elegant notion. It seems too deep to be fully appreciated in our time, and yet it seems crucial."

Publisher: Inner Traditions | More reviews: amazon.com

The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story

by Brian Swimme

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"I personally found this book both extremely inspiring and enjoyable to read. Swimme's method of unveiling the truth about advertisments and consumerism and how they shape our veiw of reality is ingenious. At the same time, the book takes you on a scientific journey of the universe that incorporates feelings of mystical awe and wonder that many books fail to acomplish. I have read everything from Fred Wolfe to Brian Greene. However, Swimme envokes a deeper feeling of appreciation for science, the workings of our universe, and humanity in general. All his books, especially this one, have something new to say and add a human touch to science that is long overdue. This is definitely not your run-of-the-mill new age book and I recommend it to anyone who is passionate about preservation of the environment or just plain curious about new ideas concerning reality and the world we live in."

Publisher: Orbis Books | More reviews: amazon.com

Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

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"An astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, where he serves at its world-famous Hayden Planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson has written a popular account of the evolution of the universe: its past, present, and future--from its beginning with a big bang to its ending with a whimper.

In Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries, Tyson sees the universe "not as a collection of objects, theories, and phenomena, but as a vast stage of actors driven by intricate twists of story line and plot."

Each of the book's 42 chapters first appeared, in one form or another, on the pages of Natural History magazine under the heading "Universe" and span the 11-year period of 1995 through 2005. In spite of modest editing of the essays, there remains some overlapping and repetition of information.

Tyson divides his work into seven sections: "The Nature of Knowledge," "The Knowledge of Nature," "Ways and Means of Nature," "The Meaning of Life," "When the Universe Turns Bad," "Science and Culture," and "Science and God."

He discusses, respectively, the challenges of knowing what is knowable in the universe, the challenges of discovering the contents of the cosmos, the challenges and triumphs of knowing how we got here, all the ways the cosmos wants to kill us, the ruffled interface between cosmic discovery and the public's reaction to it, and when ways of knowing collide.

Tyson introduces a diverse company of actors who perform on the universal stage: galaxies, solar systems, stars, quasars, black holes, supernovas, planets, moons, comets, asteroids and meteorites. These cosmic thespians emerge as a strange, bizarre, mind-boggling, awesome and dangerous cast of characters.

Along the way, we meet some of the big names in the history of astrophysics: Nicolaus Copernicus, whose De Revolutionibus (1543) placed the Sun instead of Earth at the center of the known universe; Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, who extended the Copernican revolution; Sir Isaac Newton, whom Tyson calls "one of the greatest intellects the world has ever seen," and whose Principia (1687) described the universal laws of gravity; Albert Einstein, whose special theory of relativity (1905) and general theory of relativity (1916) postulated that space-time is warped in the presence of massive gravitation fields; Max Planck. the founding father of quantum mechanics; and Werner Heisenberg, proponent of the infamous uncertainty principle.

A recent speculation about how the universe works is string theory, which seeks to unite the apparent contradiction between how the macrocosmos works (determinism) and how the microcosmos works (indeterminism). Like many of the quandaries that baffle physicists, the jury is still out on string theory.

Tyson is deeply committed to the scientific method. He is an empiricist, pragmatist, skeptic and, one suspects, an agnostic. In "The Perimeter of Ignorance," the final section of his book, Tyson fulminates against the 17th- and 18th-century view of a "clockwork universe" and its modern version, "intelligent design," which is itself a disguised version of so-called Creation Science.

Far from being a clockwork universe, Tyson argues, the cosmos is actually a chaos. "The invisible light picked up by the new telescopes," he writes, "shows that mayhem abounds in the cosmos: monstrous gamma-ray bursts, deadly pulsars, matter-crushing gravitational fields, matter-hungry black holes that flay their bloated stellar neighbors, newborn stars igniting within pockets of collapsing gas . . .galaxies that collide and cannibalize each other, explosions of supermassive stars, chaotic stellar and planetary orbits."

One doesn't have to venture into the outer reaches of space to find such mayhem: "Our cosmic neighborhood--the inner solar system--turns out to be a shooting gallery, full of rogue asteroids and comets that collide with planets. Occasionally, they've even wiped out stupendous masses of Earth's flora and fauna. The evidence all points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent, and hostile one."

Tyson's conclusion? "Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. . . . It doesn't belong in the science classroom." He deplores the prospect that we Americans might just sit in awe of what we don't understand, mesmerized by a pious allegiance to "the God of the gaps," while our science and technology loses ground and we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before.

Tyson comes across as having an excellent grasp of the current state of astrophysics, cosmology, chemistry, and other scientific disciplines, and, except for a few dense passages, he conveys his knowledge clearly to the nonspecialist, often doing so with ingratiating humor and wit."

Publisher: W. W. Norton | More reviews: amazon.com

Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society

by David Sloan Wilson

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"It has become inescapable to see ourselves as having evolved for group living. In "Origins of Virtue," Matt Ridley described the overall situation admirably well, and concluded that selfish organisms can evolve mechanisms that exploit the advantages of living together in groups, so long as those mechanisms don't sacrifice too much for the individual. The great fountain of selfish gene imagery, Richard Dawkins, once wrote that Ridley's book could well serve as a followup to "The Selfish Gene" as applied to human beings. So there is little doubt that even a theory based on "selfish genes" can be seen as explaining behavior that takes advantage of living in groups. David Sloane Wilson first acknowledges that traits which promote us to sacrifice ourselves "for the good of the group" are unlikely to spread in a population. He find great value in fields like evolutionary psychology for finding innate human psychological traits that promote individual reproduction and survival. However, he also takes a thought provoking look at important transitions in evolutionary history and finds that under certain special conditions, individuals become united and begin to function in a very real sense as a larger organism. Genes become united into chromosomes, cells become organisms, organisms become hives. None of this is new so far of course. What is unique is the claim that some of these transitions cannot be explained without having some form of competition between groups whose traits are widely divergent. The basic problem is that behavior that allows one group to fare better than another must also allow the individuals to survive and reproduce within their own group. So self-sacrificing behavior that makes a group of berzerkers unbeatable in battle against other groups has a hard time taking root _within_ the group of berzerkers unless it also serves them there. Wilson claims that the bias against seeing selection occurrring at multiple levels, especially by the way genetic fitness calculations are averaged, prevents most biologists from seeing "group selection" when it does occur. He then proposes that the missing piece is human moral systems themselves, which provide mechanisms that lower the cost of behavior "for the group" in terms of individual fitness. For example, social controls such as rewards and punishments are known to strongly foster cooperation even though cooperation is very fragile otherwise. We have tended to see this either in terms of individual self-determination or entirely in terms of social pressure. Wilson's view allows a middle ground, of innate traits which social controls can leverage powerfully to produce cooperation. Wilson's main point is that such traits probably require a multi-level selection theory to explain. Wilson uses scholarly study of religion from a variety of fields to illustrate how human behavior shows evidence of forming groups as adaptive units in the evolutionary sense. This was an idea that was proposed by Darwin (thus "Darwin's Cathedral") and seen as fundamental by many social scientists, but was roundly rejected for the difficulties it brings into population models of evolution. In addition, the recent critiques often brought to bear on social science sometimes tend to see social science concepts such as those of Emile Durkheim as something needing to be slashed and burned rather than just seen in a new light. Wilson takes a new look at Durkheim's functionalist view of society and the various critiques of it, and finds plenty of archaic ideas, but also notes that the central theme of religion serving to unify human groups remains out of the ashes. In Darwin's Cathedral, Wilson compares his view of religion as something that unifies human groups with the competing views of religion as a collection of arbitrary Gouldian "spandrels" or byproducts of evolution, the view that religion is a form of catchy imagination, and the Dawkinsian view that religious beliefs are mental parasites, and makes his case very well. He is very careful in his analysis and pulls from a wide range of scholarly material to make his case that, provided we are very careful about how we measure Darwinian fitness and very careful not to look for group selection where behavior can be explained otherwise, we can explain aspects of human behavior that simply can't be explained in terms of inclusive fitness for the genes of our relatives or even by playing games of reciprocal altruism. Wilson makes many of the same points as Pascal Boyer does in "Religion Explained," but seems to tie things together more neatly with his theoretical framework. Since he is not limiting himself to psychological adaptations that solely promote individual survival and reproduction, Wilson has the added flexibility to pose adaptations for punishment and reward that serve social ends, which makes for much more elegant and powerful theory that explains a wider range of phenomena such as the tendency of human beings to see themselves readily as members of groups, their willingness to punish defectors, the the joy most of us get out of finding that we've helped someone else.The only problem with this book is that Wilson takes on too much of a task here for one slim volume. The data on human religion is massive. I'm reminded of Frazer's classic "Golden Bough" and how virtually no one has ever actually read it all the way through in its single highly condensed volume, much less the dozen or so volumes he originally wrote. And yet he makes his point. Wilson also makes his point, and then draws from the massive data but seems to suffer in trying to navigate it all. He spends a lot of time looking at Calvinism from various angles for example. Everything he reviews seems to help him support his theory of religion as adaptive and unifying, but there is so much more to look at that in the end it feels oddly incomplete. This is wonderful interdisciplinary theoretical work that deserves much more followup than a single person can possibly give it."

Publisher: University Of Chicago Press | More reviews: amazon.com

Revised Duncan's Ritual Of Freemasonry Part 2

by Malcolm C. Duncan

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Publisher: Lushena Books | More reviews: amazon.com

Darwin's Gift: to Science and Religion

by Francisco Ayala

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"Professor Francisco Jose Ayala, who once trained for the Catholic priesthood, clearly and concisely explains Darwin's ideas about natural selection and evolution by common descent, concepts as central to our understanding of biology as atomic theory is to chemistry or relativity is to physics, in "Darwin's Gift: To Science and Religion". This is Darwin's gift to science. Ayala also shows how Darwinism is not only compatible with Christianity, but actually helps to glorify the majesty and grandeur of God by contributing to our understanding and appreciation of the material world while absolving God, a perfect being or concept, of the imperfections of His creations. This is Darwin's gift to religion.

Put another way, Darwin reconciled the existence of evil with a benign God by showing how all living things developed naturally, without any supernatural guidance, from previously living things, i.e. evolution by common descent. Darwin may have removed God from the daily workings of the material world, but by doing so, he brought us out of the dark ignorance of supernaturalism into the light of reason and placed God in a more exalted realm at the center of our continued moral strivings and quest for meaning and values.

As of this writing, no search features have been provided for this book, so the table of contents is reprinted below to give some indication of the scope of this book.

Chapter Title Page
1 Introduction 1
2 Intelligent design: the original version 15
3 Darwin's revolution: design without designer 27
4 Natural selection 49
5 Arguing for evolution 79
6 Human evolution 95
7 Molecular biology 117
8 Follies and fatal flaws 137
9 Beyond biology 161
10 Postscript for the Cognoscenti 181

"Darwin's Gift" brings clear explanations of the science, history and theology of Darwin's revolutionary idea to the general public, who, judging by the results of some recent polls, are sorely in need of some education on all three fronts. Otherwise, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, people with outdated eighteenth century ideas will continue to influence the unwary and ignorant, to the detriment of us all."

Publisher: Joseph Henry Press | More reviews: amazon.com

The Physics of Christianity

by Frank J. Tipler

Average Rating:

"Tipler's ideas are again mind-blowing, as they were with the Physics of Immortality. Some issues I have with it, though:

1) His main flaw, is the amount of certainty he gives to his sentences. When you research what he's talking about, you see that the facts, as they are, are much more questionable than what he leads you to believe.

For example, he says that the Shroud of Turin is consistent with XX males. IF the Shroud of Turin is the real burial shroud of Christ, and IF it is consistent with XX males (the only reference on the internet to this fact comes from Tipler), then, maybe, it gives us evidence. But he doesn't use correct qualifiers. (Qualifiers are words like "perhaps".) He states them as flat fact, which casts doubts on his entire book. A good scientist will always qualifies his statements with words indicating the degree of confidence he has in them.

2) He tries to gain a patina of scientific-ness by using big, complicated words, and, perhaps intentionally, explaining things in a confusing fashion. I took a quarter of quantum physics, and have read some books on it since I graduated from college, so I have a moderate understanding in the field, but even when Tipler is explaining things I already know, I find myself becoming confused by his explanations. He really needs to take a class on how to put together better analogies.

3) He has a very cockeyed idea of what his reader needs to have defined for him. For example, after the following line, "More precisely, the uncertainty principle says that the product of the uncertainty in the position of a particle multiplied by the uncertainty in its momentum must always be greater than Planck's constant divided by 4pi." he could have chosen to define a lot of different things. Planck's constant, or where the 4pi came from (or why its even important), or what uncertainty means. Instead, of all things, he defines *momentum* (the product of mass and velocity)! He's either intentionally being obtuse, or he's really got an odd idea of who is going to be reading his books.

4) His illustrations suck. He uses illustrations for things that don't need illustrations (like full page ones showing how waves constructively and destructively interfere), but doesn't show diagrams for much more complicated things that he tries to describe using convoluted sentences.

5) Quantum Physics is the new magic. I've noticed from hanging out on philosophy forums online, that Quantum Physics is the new magic. There's a quantum theory of consciousness, quantum this, quantum that. Everything can be proven with Quantum Physics. So some places have a sort of Godwin's Law that you can't use Quantum Physics as proof of anything -- unless you yourself have a strong background in the subject. Of course, this doesn't quite apply, as Tipler is a mathematical physicist, but his writings certainly remind me of all the Quantum Physics-as-magic posts I've seen written online.

So why did I give it four stars? Because it *is* interesting, and if you can work through the above issues, it will make you think, whether you agree with him or not, and many of his points do seem to be right. I've long considered the singularity that started the big bang to be the First Cause which philosophers have long talked about, even in arguments predating Christianity.

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Update:
After reflecting on the book, I'm less happy with it now. Essentially, his argument is incoherent. His claims contradict themselves and each other. For example, he claims the following:
1) Multiple universes is true -- in fact, there are infinitely many universes, containing all randomly possible events.
2) A certain law of physics requires actions on the parts of intelligent life to hold true.
3) We have free will
4) The universe was designed to support life.

I've written a longer discussion on this, but suffice it to say that the four statements above are obviously in contradiction. If we have free will, then how can a law of physics require us to perform a certain act (destroying baryons in the universe)? Indeed, it implies we have to do it. But if the many worlds hypothesis is true, then in some universes we *don't* perform the action. But that means his interpretation of a law of physics is only true in some worlds, but not in others. But something which is logically true must be true in all universes (it's actually the definition of logical). Therefore, by definition, his interpretation is illogical. How can he say our universe was designed to hold life, when he claims with the many worlds hypothesis that there are an infinite number of universes, all randomly rolled? We just happened to end up in one suitable for holding life. It's the direct opposite of the strong anthropomorphic principle. How can he say we have free will, when we're really just randomly doing deterministic behaviors (which is determinism, not free will)? How can his interpretation of a law of physics even make sense when it requires intervention on the part of intelligent beings to hold true?

The list of contradictions in his arguments I put together is actually quite long. As a result, I think it's better as 3 stars than 4. It is still mind expanding to read, for atheists and theists alike."

Publisher: Doubleday | More reviews: amazon.com

The Order of Things

by Father James V. Schall

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"First, full disclosure: I have long been a fan of Reverend Schall.

This ambitious book, in under 250 pages, tackles many of the biggest questions surrounding our existence and our obligations. In a time of atheist chic, Rev. Schall takes a serious look at why things are the way they are. He weaves together many classic ideas from Plato to Aquinas to Tolkien and Lewis. And, his writing is accessible to someone without a philosophy degree, but merely a deep curiosity about existence and reality.

Counterintuitively, the author starts with the macro perspective -- The Orderly and Divine -rather than starting, like Lewis' "Mere Christianity" at the personal level. As his focus narrows, the higher-order ideas and lessons wrap neatly around the more personal.

An absolutely delightful read. The material is not easy, but is presented in clear and enjoyable prose. The greatest challenge, however, is less in the understanding of Rev. Schall's points than in the acceptance of them in one's life."

Publisher: Ignatius Press | More reviews: amazon.com

Chemistry Of Essential Oils Made Simple: GOD'S LOVE MANIFEST IN MOLECULES

by David Stewart

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"This thorough, easy to read, eloquent book provides an unmistakable glimpse of God's love for each of us as evidenced even in something as tiny as molecules and the basic elements of creation. Scripturally based, Dr. David Stewart's book blends science and religion, chemistry and a deep love for God, in such a way that entertains and inspires, while it educates and answers questions about how essential oils work, why they work, and the profound healing effects available to us through prayer, faith and God-created essential oils. Offering wonderful annecdotes of scientific discovery, an exceptional index, cross-referenced and cross-indexed tables of botanical names, common names, chemical compositions, and much more, this is a must have reference for anyone interested in essential oils."

Publisher: N A P S A C Reproductions | More reviews: amazon.com

Biblical Case for an Old Earth, A

by David Snoke

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"People of all persuasions, conservative, liberal, and skeptic, will find this book useful as a carefully reasoned exposition of what the Bible actually *says*.

All too often, we bring modern presuppositions to the Bible and misunderstand it. For example, we see the word "earth" and immediately imagine a globe seen from outer space. That was not part of the ancient Hebrew mindset. On that basis, Snoke argues convincingly that the Bible says Noah's flood was local (it covered "the land," not the entire planet). Also, the creation story in Genesis 1 is clearer if we understand that it describes the appearance of things seen by a person on the ground, not an aerial or outer-space view.

Snoke is very conservative; he does not accept Darwinian evolution at all. His conservatism makes the book all the more useful because he obviously is not trying to impose Darwinism or anything else onto the Bible. He is just trying to read it in the light of present-day knowledge of history, archeology, and physical science.

He does a good job of disposing of fundamentalist folklore. Young-earthers often add to the Bible a remarkable assortment of notions not explicitly taught there, such as the vapor canopy theory, an assortment of miracles associated with Noah's Ark, and so forth.

He also makes an interesting observation about the "appearance of age" theory (that God created the earth with the appearance of age). Suppose God created Adam miraculously with a 30-year-old body. That would make sense because in order to exist, Adam had to exist at *some* stage of physical maturity. But if God had created Adam with 30 years of false memories, that would make God a deceiver. In the same way, it does not seem plausible that God would create the universe with spurious evidence for huge numbers of specific prehistoric events, from supernovae down to the life and death of individual animals.

In passing, he remarks that it is a breach of scientific ethics for young-earthers, presenting themselves as scientists, to take their claims directly to popular audiences, often with church sanction, without submitting them to any kind of expert criticism (even from their allies). He also suggests a possible reason for widespread ancient belief in dragons: a few dinosaur skeletons must have been found, and recognized as reptiles, at various places in ancient times.

In short: This book is very strong on logic in a field where shoddy reasoning is common. It is the best exegesis of Genesis 1-2 that I've ever seen."

Publisher: Baker Books | More reviews: amazon.com