A review that I had of the book (it wasn't a great one in many ways and wasn't entirely compehensible) did give the memorable line, 'The reader gets to simultaneously experience the birth of a mind and the creation of a god.'
I nearly put that in my PD for the semester. It wasn't exactly what I saw as happening, but was close enough for jazz or government service. This might have been the bit that started that line of thought.
“Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it – an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis – it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.”“That was written by Simon-Pierre Laplace,” David told me. “Philosophers refer to the thing that could do all that as Laplace’s Demon. Some think that it’s a good description of God. You do realize that is one way of looking at the thing they are trying to build, don’t you?” he asked me. “They’re building a God-game where the humans won’t get to play the God.”