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The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates

par Howard Bloom

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974277,725 (3.5)2
God's war crimes, Aristotle's sneaky tricks, Galileos creationism, Newton's intelligent design, entropys errors, Einstein's pajamas, John Conway's game of loneliness, Information Theory's blind spot, Stephen Wolfram's New Kind Of Science, and six monkeys at six typewriters getting it wrong. What do these have to do with the birth of a universe and with your need for meaning? Everything, as you're about to see.… (plus d'informations)
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This book was interesting, but it really didn't explain away all of my questions in the overall narrative. Early on in the book, Bloom tells us that "we" either some character or himself was born in 1943, disbelieved in God and all of this various stuff. Maybe I am stupid, but I wanted to know who he was talking about. I did like the book, but many times it jumps around and I felt like I was reading Gravity's Rainbow.

The overall thesis of the book seemed to be that human beings as a group undergo paradigm shifts of thought spurred on by certain individuals. These paradigm shifts establish new patterns and modes of thought that people train themselves to see. As a side note, Bloom is a good story teller. He takes threads of ideas and weaves them together into a whole narrative.

What does Bloom even talk about? Well first off, take the Babylonians. They split the circle into 360 degrees right? Wrong. Apparently, the Babylonians didn't have a concept for the idea of an angle as we know it now. They had remarkable skills in arithmetic, and used tables to shorten the time it took to collect taxes; multiplication tables, but that was all they did. Sure, they had a name for a load of grain, and could imagine a representation of some land as a drawing on a clay tablet. They thought that the sky was flat, though, represented in their thought processes as a ceiling to a room. This limited their thinking to a certain set of symbols. The reason was this; their mythology had declared that Marduk took this giant she-beast monstrosity, Tiamut(his spelling not mine), and ripped her in half, using one half to make the Earth and the other half for the Sky. This image representation lasted for the culture of the Babylonians and was quite pervasive. Thus, they did not think of the sky as being a wheel or a great sphere or whatever.

As it just so happened, most of the people that established the current paradigm were people like Aristotle and Plato, Euclid and Einstein. Aristotle established a mode of thinking that lasted for centuries, the syllogism and deductive logic. From this came the basis of all of the science we use today. Euclid set up the Elements. The most famous printed material after the Bible for centuries. And it pervaded the thoughts of men. Now he did not invent these axioms, but he set it up in such a manner that it was preferable to use his book over those of his rivals. That is another theme.

Take Einstein for instance. He didn't invent any of the stuff that he formulated. It was there in the open, waiting for someone to weave the threads together. Einstein was just the kind of guy that looked outside the box and set axioms on their heads.

The last thing is that complex things can arise from simple rules. Bloom repeats this a lot too, but it does hold true. Repetition and iteration are pretty powerful things when they are done many times. The examples that stick out to me are Conway's Game of Life and the Mandelbrot Set. Although they are established by simple rules, you can get some really fascinating and unpredictable behavior from it.

So we don't really get to the answer of "The God Problem," but it was really interesting and enjoyable nonetheless. ( )
  Floyd3345 | Jun 15, 2019 |
Wow...Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything meets Cecil B. DeMille ("Then came the really big stretch. The stretch beyond sanity. The stretch that translates from one medium to another. The stretch that Leonardo made. The stretch to metaphor. The stretch from water to light.")

Bloom wrapped a tremendous amount of history, knowledge, speculation and conclusions into a tome. It's quite readable, but I don't know that he'll convert anyone. Readers might want to try Lawrence Krause's A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing for a physicist's take on the matter.

Recommended if only for the stunning amount of reference material cited.
( )
  Razinha | May 23, 2017 |
In Brief: I enjoyed Bloom's premise and the ideas he set forth, although I can't share his enthusiasm.

What I Didn't Care For: The style in which this book was written became tedious after a few hundred pages. I don't fault Bloom for his enthusiasm but the constant repetition (doubtless done for effect and, if I were being charitable, for thematic resonance) grates on the writer in me.

There were some issues with the argument presented here. While I am personally enchanted by the same thoughts of unity and emergence that drive Bloom, I am less convinced by the specifics of his argument. The philosophical idealism I am attracted to (which started with Plato, ran through Spinoza's panpsychism and Leibniz's rationalism before reaching a zenith in Hegel) is, to be frank, kooky by my own admission. I like the idea for what it implies, but I am the first to admit that I cannot support it on strong grounds, certainly not compared to the naturalism which my pragmatic side cannot ignore.

I see threads of this trajectory in Bloom's argument, though where Hegelian thought eventually lead to Marx (and the Left's eventual realization that the dialectic was a dead end), Bloom seems to arrive at a parallel justification for modern-day ideals of liberalism and capitalism. Applying teleological arguments to history is always a dangerous proposition, more likely the benefit of hindsight and confirmation bias than a true "story of history". To be fair, Bloom does acknowledge this in the final chapter (although, perhaps predictably, ideals win out over criticism).

For an Idea Book, I don't see this as terribly problematic, but it is worth mentioning that, scientific arguments aside, this is a book on metaphysics and the true nature of reality. As a consequence, it is subject to all the same criticisms that have faced Hegel and other forms of idealism: namely, how do we prove it? Can we prove it? Are these even questions for science to answer?

Regarding the how, I am reminded of Karl Popper's reservations with Freud and Marx, which eventually led to his famous definition of science as falsifiable conjectures. It was not the power of psychoanalysis and Marxism to explain that was in question; it was the fact that they could explain everything, without exception. While Popper was careful to note that non-scientific ideas were not invalid, it was hard to see how they could qualify as scientific. So it was with Marx, so it remains.

As for the latter question, I think that emphasizing science as the only appropriate tool to understand reality is misguided (especially if we restrict this to current science), and here I have a much deeper objection to Bloom's specific claims of anthropomorphism. Viewing the universe through a human lens is expected and, in some sense, unavoidable; I can forgive that, but I do have real concerns about the proposed *nature* of the humanity that Bloom proposes to map to universal laws (or vice versa). To treat the fundamental categories of nature as operating on notions of attraction and seduction and competition is hasty, at best, and even if we grant this argument, it is by no means clear that this is a total account of terrestrial life, let alone human action and behavior. Indeed one could easily construct a counterargument based on alternative interpretations of evolutionary theory alone, to say nothing of philosophical traditions that do not emphasize the limited set of subject-object relations taken for granted in Western (particularly American) thought.

While I am sympathetic to Bloom's desire for unity, we're treading on perilously non-scientific ground here, and we should accordingly be cautious in making claims to truth, enthusiasm notwithstanding. On that same note I would have preferred a deeper and more nuanced look at the philosophical assumptions underlying the interpretation of the scientific account of nature.

The Good: This is a big book, in ambition as well as page count, and that will always capture my sense of wonder. Bloom clearly did his research here, as attested by his formidable collection of notes spanning a range of disciplines across the history of humankind and the universe.

Even though my pragmatic side encourages restraint and my ideals conflict with Bloom's particular interpretation of the natural world, there is much to think about here and I do appreciate the larger attempt to explain how we get "something from nothing".

Overall: Whether or not Bloom succeeds in making his case is up to the reader. I didn't find myself entirely persuaded by the specifics, although I can't help but appreciate the larger argument. ( )
  chaosmogony | Apr 27, 2013 |
On the one hand, this may be a book of staggering genius. On the other, it is tediously wordy and a major condensation would make it easier for the nonscientist, nonmathematician to understand. Ostensibly, Howard Bloom makes an argument from an atheist viewpoint for the cosmic equivalent of a spontaneously combusted universe without the helping hand of a prime mover, god or superscientist in the sky. The argument is quite persuasive although the most convincing bits are buried more than halfway through the book.

If the book is seen as a romp through the history of scientific inquiry and the development of mathematics, that's where it is most fascinating, to this reader at least. And for the literarily inclined, who knew that Herbert Spencer, George Eliot and her paramour Henry Lewes, Thomas Carlyle, William Makepeace Thackeray, Horace Greeley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Huxley and John Stuart Mill all frequented or actually lived at the house of one John Chapman, publisher of the newly launched Economist, and they all knew each other and contributed to one of the many slices of the history of science which make this book so interesting aside from and in addition to the central thesis. ( )
2 voter Poquette | Jan 6, 2013 |
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God's war crimes, Aristotle's sneaky tricks, Galileos creationism, Newton's intelligent design, entropys errors, Einstein's pajamas, John Conway's game of loneliness, Information Theory's blind spot, Stephen Wolfram's New Kind Of Science, and six monkeys at six typewriters getting it wrong. What do these have to do with the birth of a universe and with your need for meaning? Everything, as you're about to see.

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