The Science of God

[seekingferret]

I'm halfway through Gerald Schroeder's The Science of God, a re-read since I first read it when I was fifteen. I sent a copy to marginaliana in December for Yuletide bookswap, and bought myself a copy since I realized fifteen years is a long time and my feelings about the topics Schroeder explores have changed quite a bit in those fifteen years, so it was probably worth a re-look.

The post I will be posting when I finish the book is already over 3,000 words. And I still have half the book to go. I have a lot of things to say about this book.


H is for Homicide by Sue Grafton

A little uncharacteristic for the series- a little higher on actual detective work than G, but G was atypically low on detective work itself. Raymond Maldonado is probably the series's most compelling villain so far, though, with Pat Usher from B is For Burglar being the only reasonable competition. Neither of these statements is really a spoiler, which I think testifies to the powerful realism of the Kinsey Milhone books. These are not Agatha Christie-esque elegant whodunnits, they are not stories in which secrets unravel at the proper application of brainpower. They're stories about the intersection of people and crimes, which is to say the intersection of people and desire. And so when you meet someone who seems like a bad apple in a Kinsey Milhone story, the odds are pretty good they're a bad apple.

Comments

[liv]

I'm really interested in your responses to Schroeder; I heard him speak once and found him difficult to respect. He seemed to be doing something I dislike in either scientists or religious teachers, namely using a lot of obfuscating jargon and mystifying his topic. The take-home seemed to be, you're too stupid to understand advanced physics, so just trust me that it proves Torah to be true.

[seekingferret]

Hmm... I don't think my take home is quite the same as yours, but I'll be interested to see your response to my post. Frankly, I think both relativistic physics and Kabbalah are naturally full of obfuscating jargon, and I think they are both extremely mystifying topics, so I don't find it objectionable to treat them as such when talking to a popular audience. My bigger problem is that Schroeder presents to a mass audience as if you could learn what the hell the Ramban was talking about in his commentary on Bereishis 1 in a one hour lecture if you're willing to take his word for some of the details. But the devil is in the details!

It was a very important book to me when I was fifteen and looking for Jewish approaches to the questions the big popular science books were tackling, but that was always how I saw it- as presenting approaches to consider, not presenting proofs of the Torah's truth. Now that I'm looking for more sophisticated approaches to the same questions, I'm finding that going to the primary sources is a much more difficult process that is much more rewarding, because Schroeder minimizes so much of the actual complexity of his program.

[liv]

That makes sense; I got the impression that Schroeder was basically doing the Jewish equivalent of Christian "apologetics", which I have little time for, I don't really care whether Bereshit is compatible with 20^th century understandings of physics. If he's more talking about Nachmanides in the context of relativity, and he's over-simplifying rather than purporting to prove anything, I'm much more interested. I will look forward to your long post about the book!

[seekingferret]

I mean, yes, Schroeder is absolutely doing the Jewish equivalent of Christian apologetics, but that's not the same as doing Christian apologetics. Nobody needs to prove that a literal reading of Bereishis is compatible with 20th century physics since virtually no Rabbi ever has claimed that a literal reading of Bereishis means anything at all.

The big popular science works I read throughout my childhood- A Brief History of Time, Wonderful Life, The Blind Watchmaker, The Elegant Universe, etc... were all based on a dogmatic materialism that I ultimately found (and still find) unsatisfying. The Cambrian Explosion that Wonderful Life is about challenges Gould's assumptions about how evolution works- he's not sure what to replace his theory with, but he knows with certainty that it will be a materialist explanation even though all materialist explanations have thus far failed. And look, obviously if a materialist explanation of the Cambrian Explosion does turn up, that won't itself be a challenge to God's existence, so I'm not bothered by the supposition so much as I'm bothered by the certainty. God's nonexistence is an axiom, not a supposition, in the popular science texts that Schroeder is challenging. And in a lot of senses, The Science of God is a book created by those other books, a book with a kind of Jewish apologetics that only exists because Richard Dawkins is out there writing sloppy and bigoted atheist apologetics, and a book with a lot of the same limitations and faults as the books it is challenging.