Science and the Search for God [Paperback]

Review - "Science and the Search for God"

As a boy, I often pestered my grandmother for answers to the Great Mysteries - "What came before time," "Who made God," "What's outside the universe." She said I'd just have to wait until I got heaven to find out. Then, she promised, I could just walk up to God's throne and ask him. In other words, don't worry about it.

At some point, I simply started putting the two incompatibles - science and God - into separate mental compartments. Not willing to accept religious stories as serious explanations for life, yet equally unwilling to renounce some kind of godly First Cause as responsible for life, it seemed better to keep the matters mentally, and emotionally, apart.

The Reverend Gary Kowalski, minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington, Vermont, makes a good argument that such segregation isn't needed. In "Science and the Search for God," the author gives us a gentle and gracefully written book in which he contends that faith and science should coexist on friendly, non-exclusive terms. "There is no reason that science should make us blind to the sacred in its prolific expression," he writes, "God is in the details - the lavishness and extravagance that bless every niche, nook and cranny of creation..."

It seems to me that I can live very nicely with that. I view as unarguable that wiggly creatures are our ultimate ancestors. But on the other hand I regard the mind as something far more than an evolutionary happenstance. Kowalski's book suggests the two views aren't contradictory, that the intellect that requires the former can live perfectly well with the faith that supports the latter.

Furthermore, Kowalski strengthened this reader's belief that religious faith doesn't require credence in the concept of a vengeful God, one who spends his time calculating the balance between our rights and our wrongs. Instead, we can see God as Life and Love, an altogether healthier way at looking at things we can't add up mathematically, but that a great many of us certainly suspect. I highly recommend this life-affirming book.

Jerrold M. Packard
Author, American Nightmare - The History of Jim Crow (St. Martins Press, 2002)

This book is a rich mixture of fascinating science packaged for the lay reader, nuggets of spiritual writings by top flight scientists, contributions to science by men of the cloth, and a broad array of theological exposition. This composite is held together with personal stories and bits wisdom from Gary Kowalski, a Unitarian Universalist (UU) minister, and served up in an informal conversational style. It is a wonderful antidote to the science versus religion meme flowing today.

One of the subtexts is an arc of history which starts before there was a schism in knowledge between religious beliefs and scientific knowledge. Gary Kowalski would like to see the arc come back to a conversation about the big questions that involves all free thinkers. I am also a UU and very comfortable with science. I am comfortable with atheism, but, you can never prove a negative assertion. My current fascination is how much wiggle room do we need to make the gods possible. If Reality was just the 3 dimensions plus time, one cold claim that there was no mystery and that God could not exist. But Gary walks thru many several corners of science - what came before the big bang, the uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics the seem to leave some room for mystery. This sense is reinforced by scientists. An example is the J.B.S. Haldane quote "the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we CAN suppose". Many longer wonderful passages by the likes of Einstein, Feynman and Schrödinger.

Two chapters really spoke to me: one on the Gaia hypothesis and the other on process theology. While process theology feels very real whenever I can wrap my mind around it, it can be a little vague. A bit like the force or a giant magnet pulling us towards our best selves. The Gaia hypothesis is much more tangible. It is that the earth has many aspects of being a superorganism.

The exposition of the Gaia hypothesis starts with some personal reflections of "old time religion" and several references to feminist authors and perspectives of the earliest fertile mother earth deities. A bit later comes the Greek goddess of Gaia. James Lovecraft, who worked NASA and JPL to consider if there is life on Mars wrote the book: Gaia: a new look at Life on Earth. While this is a great chapter, it is the one place I was disappointed. Why not go ahead and propose that the biosphere really is a superorganism. And bring in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin here instead of saving him for the the book's conclusion where he is an example a of deeply spiritual man of science. de Charin proposes that all consciousness participates in the noosphere. This idea just got a shot in the arm by the latest on consciousness research in which Christof Koch muses about de Chardin's noosphere. Just gotta mention Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Earth.

A headline today prompted me to come back and write this review. The title of the article in the journal Science is "Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief". This book is for those people who want to think analytically about their religious beliefs, not for people who want packaged answers. The title is Science and the Search for God. I think Gary Kowalski would encourage us to keep searching and thinking no matter how comfortable we are with our beliefs or disbeliefs. And in the book, he ably leads the willing seeker.

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