Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "religion"

Oxford, W. H. Freeman , 1992

Author of a widely used 1978 text in physical chemistry, P.W.Atkins treats the lay reader with marvelous English in describing the wonder he sees in all that was learned at that time—about time, space, the origin of the universe, dimensionality, and why mathematics works.

His understanding of complex systems and their emergence from chaos drive his thesis that we can understand creation and will, eventually, describe its beginning in terms so accurate that our religious concepts will no longer be necessary.

Unfortunately, this kind of presumption has driven the recent split between science and people of institutional faith, so that the honest, invaluable approach of science—which leaves all conditions open to additional evidence and testing—is lost, as is the awe scientists feel for the complexity they find in nature.

Since this book was published, there has been a growing awareness of the several sources of unpredictability in complex systems. Ilya Prigogine called the choices at chemical bifurcation points “irreducible randomness.” Unpredictable phenomena may arise when many agents interact in nonlinear ways, which is nearly everything, from our bodies to electrical grids.

Atkins, however, neglects the concept of mind as the unpredictable emergent activity of our extremely complex brain with its 86 billion neurons, each with up to 10,000 connections. But his most egregious error is his failure to recognize the difference between science and religion. As Jeffrey Lockridge puts it so eloquently in Grasshopper Dreaming, science explores and suggests how things work, while religion invests in questions that ask why things are as they are, including the universe and our lives. What is our purpose or reason for being, the meaning of life itself? Science doesn’t ask those questions.

An Alien’s Quest The Archives of Varok series will be expanding soon, and the fourth book, Shawne: An Alien's Quest will make them even more difficult to shelve. I can't in good faith call them Science Fiction, because the aliens placed in our solar system (as much as I love these dear old friends) are tools to help me explore some realistic human problems. Here are the one-phrases that encapsulate the themes:
THE VIEW BEYOND EARTH--Self-actualization and personal growth
THE WEBS OF VAROK--
A picture of a steady state economy, its requirements and vulnerabilities.
THE ALIEN EFFECT--
Current human denial and challenges.
AN ALIEN'S QUEST--
Personal integrity and the meaning of existence.
THE UNHEARD SONG--
Dealing with communication problems and overpopulation stress (A history of the ellls encountering varoks for the first time.)

And here are the updated log lines and summary:
THE ARCHIVES OF VAROK
A series of five books set in a realistic mid-to-late 21st century,
in which Earth discovers sympathetic but challenging neighbors
who reflect a critical overview of human civilization.

What Is It All About? Book club and discussion topics:

Book 1- THE VIEW BEYOND EARTH—How would dispassionate Others view us?

Book 2-THE WEBS OF VAROK—What must we do to insure a satisfactory future?

Book 3-THE ALIEN EFFECT—Are we headed for extinction or can we evolve into something better?

Book 4-AN ALIEN'S QUEST—How can we find Meaning, when our lives are driven by unpredictable complexity?

Book 5-THE UNHEARD SONG (coming in 2017)—Inescapable certainties: to secure the future all populations must communicate and hold to steady numbers.


So is this Sociology? Psychology? Women's fiction? Literary fiction? (I don't think so.) YA or Adult? Action? Philosophy? Religion? What?