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The Penultimate Curiosity: How Science Swims in the Slipstream of Ultimate Questions
When young children first begin to ask 'why?' they embark on a journey with no final destination. The need to make sense of the world as a whole is an ultimate curiosity that lies at the root of all human religions. It has, in many cultures, shaped and motivated a more down to earth scientific interest in the physical world, which could therefore be described as penultimate curiosity.
These two manifestations of curiosity have a history of connection that goes back deep into the human past. Tracing that history all the way from cave painting to quantum physics, this book (a collaboration between a painter and a physical scientist that uses illustrations throughout the narrative) sets out to explain the nature of the long entanglement between religion and the ultimate and the penultimate curiosity.
These two manifestations of curiosity have a history of connection that goes back deep into the human past. Tracing that history all the way from cave painting to quantum physics, this book (a collaboration between a painter and a physical scientist that uses illustrations throughout the narrative) sets out to explain the nature of the long entanglement between religion and the ultimate and the penultimate curiosity.
494 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2016
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167 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 12, 2018
An excellent survey of the history of the relationship between science and religion down the ages. This book shows that the two don't have to be enemies - in fact throughout most of history science has swum in the 'slipstream' of religion. Apart from its fascinating text, the book also has lots of pictures, which has got to be good! And it's written by two Oxbridge graduates who really know what they are talking about.
July 26, 2024
the wild Amazone
Tour de Force
I bought this intending to skim it (as I do with almost all books) but ended up reading it cover to cover. It’s a tour de force of the history of religious expression and scientific inquiry. If there’s any book that shows these two things are deeply intertwined and not “non-overlapping magisteria,” this is it.
In fact the book shows that religious, spiritual and metaphysical aspirations leap constantly ahead of scientific inquiry, feeding it questions, inspiring it and giving it problems to solve.
The short chapters are like salted peanuts: You say to yourself “Just a few more…” and then find yourself consuming the whole bag.
This is a book that surely took 10-15 years to write and a lifetime of reading and scholarship to research. It’s a synthesis of literally hundreds, maybe thousands of books and sources. In fact it’s difficult to name other books whose background material is more extensive.
One candidate might be “COSMOSAPIENS” by John Hands, which is an equally ambitious work. It wasn’t until midway through the book that I noticed that the rather small font endorsements on the back are from some of the top European thinkers in the world today - Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, George Ellis and others. This is no lightweight piece of scholarship.
This book begins with ancient cave paintings in France and voyages through ancient religious and cultural history. The first 100 pages of the book is a mini-encyclopedia of religious anthropology. Then the authors turn their attention to the ancient Greeks and Romans; then medieval history and the middle ages and the renaissance. In chapter after chapter, you get backstory that few people have ever heard.
Latter parts of the story appropriately center around Oxford. I for one had not realized the great role which specifically Oxford scholars have played in the history of science.
The quotes are amazing in quality and quantity. I underlined many sections of this book and bent the corners of many pages. Science has become so large and all encompassing that it’s become easy to dismiss the fact that science always follows religious and metaphysical intuitions. But then it also reshapes them, because once something is known, you can’t un-learn a truth.
The sections around page 300 detailing the overlaps between Babylonian and Biblical history are especially fascinating. And the authors always give attention to the anxiety that religious clerics feel about having their ideas and traditions vetted by scientific inquiry.
The authors take great pains to make clear the both scientific truths and religious interpretations are provisional, must be held loosely and with an open hand. They show that both sides often fall prey to dogma, but the authors illustrate this without ever getting preachy or self righteous.
This, I think, is the key to the book’s transparency and readability. All too often, people writing on this subject get on some soap box and start railing. But Wagner and Briggs never succumb to this. There’s not a trace of polemic. One can sense their humility in attempting to grasp these big questions.
But because they do this, what you get is an amazing history of science. In fact if this were the only history of science book you ever had, you could do a lot worse. They string together a chain of events from ancient history to the present in a way that’s most impressive.
The “conflict thesis,” the assertion that science and faith have always been at war, has only been around for 150 years and was largely a fabrication by John Draper and friends. If you read this book, which spans 100,000 years of history, you’ll easily see that this is not true. What you’ll see instead is that the two approaches have wrestled with mostly the same questions the whole time.
Given the scope and breadth, it’s remarkably easy to read. The page format is relaxing, there are ample illustrations and footnotes, and this book has absolutely none of the triumphant or self-congratulatory tone that is often so off-putting in science / religion books.
Excellent job, gentlemen. This is a labor of years of love and research. The exquisite care shows - and puts to rest one of the greatest urban legends of our time, the idea that science and religion are at war with each other. The truth is, man is at war with his prejudices and ignorance, and we must balance curiosity and empiricism with humility. Quoting from the book:
“Blaise Pascal had written that ‘we burn with desire to find a firm foundation, an unchanging solid base on which to build a tower rising to infinity’, but science could not provide that foundation.”
In the same vein, James Clerk Maxwell wrote:
“I think that the results that each man arrives at in his attempts to harmonize his science with his Christianity ought not to be regarded as having any significance, except to the man himself and to him only for a time, and should not receive the stamp of a society. For it is the nature of science especially those branches of science which are spreading into unknown regions to be continually…”
Biologist Gary Fugle, author of "Laying Down Arms to Heal the Creation-Evolution Divide" says there is no single place in nature or science where you can draw a dotted line and say "see, on this side here is nature, and this here on the other side is God." It doesn't work that way. In their own fashion, Andrew Briggs and Roger Wagner have expressed this idea well. This book is a big bridge in the science-faith divide.
Perry Marshall
/////
A powerful argument that religion in general and Christianity in particular have and should help science.
If you wandered round our leading universities* and asked people at random "Has religion, specifically Christianity, helped or hindered scientific progress?" and "Are science and religion compatible or is it one or the other?", I think you would get a largely negative reply. Yet, as the authors of this brilliant and profoundly thoughtful new book point out, the historical and indeed philosophical evidence points in the opposite direction. The leading metaphor which is used again and again is of scientific curiosity and research "slipstreaming" like a cyclist in a peloton or a flock of geese in a "V' formation, with the lead impetus coming from religious motivation. Hence the intriguing title of the book. The ultimate question is something like "How did the universe come into being, is there a God, what is the meaning (if any) of life?" and the penultimate curiosity and question is "How does the universe work?".
[* Despite their amazing and indeed prodigious research Mr Wagner and Professor Briggs for some strange reason seem to have missed the last 30 years of rankings of the top UK universities. Curiously, they seem to be labouring under some understandable if misguided "dark blue" bias. No doubt the true facts will be corrected in subsequent editions!]
In a tremendously learned overview of the history of religion and scientific interaction the authors cover in a rich and imaginative way a whole series of historical characters, some of which are completely new for me. We start with cave paintings, the oldest form we know of art, which were seized on by atheist philosophers as expressing "art for art sake" but on closer analysis turned out to be deeply religious. Anthropologists confirm that even the most obscure and remote societies have complex and refined belief system. Moving on, Greek thinkers are sometimes portrayed as atheists and certainly they were sceptical of the local Greek mythology. But teachers like Xenophanes taught of a greater divine reality -" God is one, greatest amongst the gods and men, in no way like mortals". The famous Socrates said at his trial "Gentlemen I owe a greater obedience to God than to you". These thinkers pulled with them questions of how everything worked and especially mathematics, the language of science, together with astronomy and other scientific disciplines.
Moving on to the Christian Era, the writers show that while there were some like Tertullian who famously (and wrongly in my view) said " We have no need of curiosity since Jesus Christ" the large majority of the early church fathers took the opposite view. A completely new Christian thinker who is drawn fascinatingly and had a huge impact on science was Philoponus. Trained in the great cultural centre of Alexandria his thinking on annotation and research had a huge long term positive impact on scientific thinking. This continued in the Islamic world after the conquest of North Africa and in fact the West is indebted to Muslim thinkers and scientists for preserving much of the Greek thinking and scientific research which was lost after the fall of the Roman Empire in the Christian West
It would be overkill to try and cover every example given, suffice it to say that for me, the evidence is very clear that many of the leading scientists over the years were strongly motivated by Christian belief and that the two quests - to know God and understand how God made the universe and how it works - helped each other. The authors don't try and white wash some attempts to apply whatever the reverse of a slipstream effect would be. Possibly the best known example of all was the attempt by some elements of the Catholic hierarchy (though not all) to silence Galileo's attempts to demonstrate that the earth revolves round the sun not vice versa. And its fair to say that in other cases the church apparatus did squash or at least not encourage scientific exploration. But what is much more important is how the devout scientist in multiple cases was filled and encouraged by his faith to push science forward.
One final example will suffice. Michael Faraday, perhaps the preeminent physicist of the C19 is well known for his famous if eccentric religious devotion. Less well known is his contemporary and first ever Cambridge Cavendish Professor of Physics, James Clark Maxwell, who discovered electromagnetism and then brought light electricity and magnetism into a single unified theory. In line with Kepler and Galileo he argued that "It is our ability to discern the shining in the mind of God which proves that the human mind is the work of God." There is a splendid story about the inscription over the doors of both the old (not surprising - Maxwell) and new (very surprising) Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory - ‘The works of the Lord are great; sought out of all them that have pleasure therein’ (Psalm 111 v2)
This excellent and well written book also reminds us that the very concept of "religion" and "scientists" are C17th and C19th innovations so for most of history the rigid barriers between faith and science and at times the hostility we see today, were completely absent. there was a unified quest for knowledge and the two sides of the coin helped not hindered each other
Let me leave the final summary of the thesis to Wagner and Briggs. They argue that religion especially Christianity contributed the following:-
1. The idea of a single beneficent rational agency whose rationality could be both expressed in mathematics and read in creation
2. This agency is not identified with anything within the universe but gives to the whole a law like character
3. Truth is not the exclusive property of any single civilisation
4. Truth cannot be imposed by force but involves the duty of individual investigation and experiment.
The first two are concerned with what God is and the second with who God is. Francis Bacon put it neatly - the two leading motives driving scientific enquiry are "the glory of God and the relief of mans estate".
Finally, I recommend the book as it's very accessible to the non scientist. As a humble (?) historian I never found the science in the book was over my O Level Maths Physics and Chemistry. It's also far from hagiographic. Even the devout if somewhat unorthodox believer but truly great Isaac Newton had his faults, ruthlessly suppressing and excluding other researchers in "his" fields and engaging in a PR campaign to discredit his rivals. These scientists were like all of us far from perfect but their search for the penultimate question was greatly aided as they were flying in the slipstream created by the ultimate question - who made the laws that they discovered in the first place?
jeremy marshall
Tour de Force
I bought this intending to skim it (as I do with almost all books) but ended up reading it cover to cover. It’s a tour de force of the history of religious expression and scientific inquiry. If there’s any book that shows these two things are deeply intertwined and not “non-overlapping magisteria,” this is it.
In fact the book shows that religious, spiritual and metaphysical aspirations leap constantly ahead of scientific inquiry, feeding it questions, inspiring it and giving it problems to solve.
The short chapters are like salted peanuts: You say to yourself “Just a few more…” and then find yourself consuming the whole bag.
This is a book that surely took 10-15 years to write and a lifetime of reading and scholarship to research. It’s a synthesis of literally hundreds, maybe thousands of books and sources. In fact it’s difficult to name other books whose background material is more extensive.
One candidate might be “COSMOSAPIENS” by John Hands, which is an equally ambitious work. It wasn’t until midway through the book that I noticed that the rather small font endorsements on the back are from some of the top European thinkers in the world today - Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, George Ellis and others. This is no lightweight piece of scholarship.
This book begins with ancient cave paintings in France and voyages through ancient religious and cultural history. The first 100 pages of the book is a mini-encyclopedia of religious anthropology. Then the authors turn their attention to the ancient Greeks and Romans; then medieval history and the middle ages and the renaissance. In chapter after chapter, you get backstory that few people have ever heard.
Latter parts of the story appropriately center around Oxford. I for one had not realized the great role which specifically Oxford scholars have played in the history of science.
The quotes are amazing in quality and quantity. I underlined many sections of this book and bent the corners of many pages. Science has become so large and all encompassing that it’s become easy to dismiss the fact that science always follows religious and metaphysical intuitions. But then it also reshapes them, because once something is known, you can’t un-learn a truth.
The sections around page 300 detailing the overlaps between Babylonian and Biblical history are especially fascinating. And the authors always give attention to the anxiety that religious clerics feel about having their ideas and traditions vetted by scientific inquiry.
The authors take great pains to make clear the both scientific truths and religious interpretations are provisional, must be held loosely and with an open hand. They show that both sides often fall prey to dogma, but the authors illustrate this without ever getting preachy or self righteous.
This, I think, is the key to the book’s transparency and readability. All too often, people writing on this subject get on some soap box and start railing. But Wagner and Briggs never succumb to this. There’s not a trace of polemic. One can sense their humility in attempting to grasp these big questions.
But because they do this, what you get is an amazing history of science. In fact if this were the only history of science book you ever had, you could do a lot worse. They string together a chain of events from ancient history to the present in a way that’s most impressive.
The “conflict thesis,” the assertion that science and faith have always been at war, has only been around for 150 years and was largely a fabrication by John Draper and friends. If you read this book, which spans 100,000 years of history, you’ll easily see that this is not true. What you’ll see instead is that the two approaches have wrestled with mostly the same questions the whole time.
Given the scope and breadth, it’s remarkably easy to read. The page format is relaxing, there are ample illustrations and footnotes, and this book has absolutely none of the triumphant or self-congratulatory tone that is often so off-putting in science / religion books.
Excellent job, gentlemen. This is a labor of years of love and research. The exquisite care shows - and puts to rest one of the greatest urban legends of our time, the idea that science and religion are at war with each other. The truth is, man is at war with his prejudices and ignorance, and we must balance curiosity and empiricism with humility. Quoting from the book:
“Blaise Pascal had written that ‘we burn with desire to find a firm foundation, an unchanging solid base on which to build a tower rising to infinity’, but science could not provide that foundation.”
In the same vein, James Clerk Maxwell wrote:
“I think that the results that each man arrives at in his attempts to harmonize his science with his Christianity ought not to be regarded as having any significance, except to the man himself and to him only for a time, and should not receive the stamp of a society. For it is the nature of science especially those branches of science which are spreading into unknown regions to be continually…”
Biologist Gary Fugle, author of "Laying Down Arms to Heal the Creation-Evolution Divide" says there is no single place in nature or science where you can draw a dotted line and say "see, on this side here is nature, and this here on the other side is God." It doesn't work that way. In their own fashion, Andrew Briggs and Roger Wagner have expressed this idea well. This book is a big bridge in the science-faith divide.
Perry Marshall
/////
A powerful argument that religion in general and Christianity in particular have and should help science.
If you wandered round our leading universities* and asked people at random "Has religion, specifically Christianity, helped or hindered scientific progress?" and "Are science and religion compatible or is it one or the other?", I think you would get a largely negative reply. Yet, as the authors of this brilliant and profoundly thoughtful new book point out, the historical and indeed philosophical evidence points in the opposite direction. The leading metaphor which is used again and again is of scientific curiosity and research "slipstreaming" like a cyclist in a peloton or a flock of geese in a "V' formation, with the lead impetus coming from religious motivation. Hence the intriguing title of the book. The ultimate question is something like "How did the universe come into being, is there a God, what is the meaning (if any) of life?" and the penultimate curiosity and question is "How does the universe work?".
[* Despite their amazing and indeed prodigious research Mr Wagner and Professor Briggs for some strange reason seem to have missed the last 30 years of rankings of the top UK universities. Curiously, they seem to be labouring under some understandable if misguided "dark blue" bias. No doubt the true facts will be corrected in subsequent editions!]
In a tremendously learned overview of the history of religion and scientific interaction the authors cover in a rich and imaginative way a whole series of historical characters, some of which are completely new for me. We start with cave paintings, the oldest form we know of art, which were seized on by atheist philosophers as expressing "art for art sake" but on closer analysis turned out to be deeply religious. Anthropologists confirm that even the most obscure and remote societies have complex and refined belief system. Moving on, Greek thinkers are sometimes portrayed as atheists and certainly they were sceptical of the local Greek mythology. But teachers like Xenophanes taught of a greater divine reality -" God is one, greatest amongst the gods and men, in no way like mortals". The famous Socrates said at his trial "Gentlemen I owe a greater obedience to God than to you". These thinkers pulled with them questions of how everything worked and especially mathematics, the language of science, together with astronomy and other scientific disciplines.
Moving on to the Christian Era, the writers show that while there were some like Tertullian who famously (and wrongly in my view) said " We have no need of curiosity since Jesus Christ" the large majority of the early church fathers took the opposite view. A completely new Christian thinker who is drawn fascinatingly and had a huge impact on science was Philoponus. Trained in the great cultural centre of Alexandria his thinking on annotation and research had a huge long term positive impact on scientific thinking. This continued in the Islamic world after the conquest of North Africa and in fact the West is indebted to Muslim thinkers and scientists for preserving much of the Greek thinking and scientific research which was lost after the fall of the Roman Empire in the Christian West
It would be overkill to try and cover every example given, suffice it to say that for me, the evidence is very clear that many of the leading scientists over the years were strongly motivated by Christian belief and that the two quests - to know God and understand how God made the universe and how it works - helped each other. The authors don't try and white wash some attempts to apply whatever the reverse of a slipstream effect would be. Possibly the best known example of all was the attempt by some elements of the Catholic hierarchy (though not all) to silence Galileo's attempts to demonstrate that the earth revolves round the sun not vice versa. And its fair to say that in other cases the church apparatus did squash or at least not encourage scientific exploration. But what is much more important is how the devout scientist in multiple cases was filled and encouraged by his faith to push science forward.
One final example will suffice. Michael Faraday, perhaps the preeminent physicist of the C19 is well known for his famous if eccentric religious devotion. Less well known is his contemporary and first ever Cambridge Cavendish Professor of Physics, James Clark Maxwell, who discovered electromagnetism and then brought light electricity and magnetism into a single unified theory. In line with Kepler and Galileo he argued that "It is our ability to discern the shining in the mind of God which proves that the human mind is the work of God." There is a splendid story about the inscription over the doors of both the old (not surprising - Maxwell) and new (very surprising) Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory - ‘The works of the Lord are great; sought out of all them that have pleasure therein’ (Psalm 111 v2)
This excellent and well written book also reminds us that the very concept of "religion" and "scientists" are C17th and C19th innovations so for most of history the rigid barriers between faith and science and at times the hostility we see today, were completely absent. there was a unified quest for knowledge and the two sides of the coin helped not hindered each other
Let me leave the final summary of the thesis to Wagner and Briggs. They argue that religion especially Christianity contributed the following:-
1. The idea of a single beneficent rational agency whose rationality could be both expressed in mathematics and read in creation
2. This agency is not identified with anything within the universe but gives to the whole a law like character
3. Truth is not the exclusive property of any single civilisation
4. Truth cannot be imposed by force but involves the duty of individual investigation and experiment.
The first two are concerned with what God is and the second with who God is. Francis Bacon put it neatly - the two leading motives driving scientific enquiry are "the glory of God and the relief of mans estate".
Finally, I recommend the book as it's very accessible to the non scientist. As a humble (?) historian I never found the science in the book was over my O Level Maths Physics and Chemistry. It's also far from hagiographic. Even the devout if somewhat unorthodox believer but truly great Isaac Newton had his faults, ruthlessly suppressing and excluding other researchers in "his" fields and engaging in a PR campaign to discredit his rivals. These scientists were like all of us far from perfect but their search for the penultimate question was greatly aided as they were flying in the slipstream created by the ultimate question - who made the laws that they discovered in the first place?
jeremy marshall
December 14, 2017
Are science and religion enemies, each seeking supremacy over the other? Or do they simply look at the same thing from different, perhaps complementary, perspectives? In this fascinating, wide-ranging book, Wagner and Briggs propose a very different relationship than either of these options.
From the earliest days of prehistory, as much as a hundred thousand years ago, there has been an interplay (or entanglement) between religion and science, with each pushing and prodding the other to think more deeply about their inquiries. From there the authors trace the dramatic story of the interaction of science and religion from Athens to Alexandria to Italy to Oxford.
The story of this well-illustrated book begins with cave paintings discovered in recent decades showing religious impulses. Yet the mixing of pigments needed to create these paintings show rudimentary science in the service of religion--but also that religion pushed our science further so faith could express itself. Likewise the new discipline of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) investigates how and how long religion has been fundamental capacity of the mind, like language.
While the authors offer ample attention to the giants--Aristotle, Galileo, Newton--we learn of the contributions of many other lesser-known but important figures. There is the story of two men (one Christian, one pagan) who studied in Alexandria and whose arguments continued to be played out for a thousand years. We learn of the contributions of Muslim philosophers and of Robert Grosseteste ("Large head"). Aquinas, the Bacons, Pascal, Maxwell and many others all receive their due. Not only do we get a wonderfully told story of a slice of the history of western thought, we see how religious and scientific concerns continually spurred each other on.
One of the most helpful and nuanced sections of the book concerns 19th-century archeological discoveries that uncovered the context in which many Old Testament books were written. In the ancient myths of Mesopotamia, humans were created as slaves. In Genesis they are made in God's image as his vice regents. Instead of a multitude of warring gods seeking to destroy the nuisance of humanity with a flood in an act of arbitrary despotism, the one creator God judges the world for having ruined itself. Instead of an ark being the subversion of a rival god, it is God's own provision of rescue. Similar to the work of John H. Walton, Briggs and Wagner suggest that the Bible can be seen at least in part protest literature against harsh and cruel worldviews.
Yes, there was rancor and animosity between opposing characters in this long drama of science and faith. Arguments abounded on whether new scientific discoveries contradicted the Bible (or Aristotle!). Was science seeking to go beyond penultimate curiosity (which extends to the limits of the visible world)? What implications did the theological thoughts regarding ultimate curiosity have on science?
Yet the authors want us to view these quarrels through the lens of a slipstream. We know geese do not fly in a fixed V-formation but that each goose takes its turn at the front, so the others can have an easier time flying behind it in its slipstream. That is, they contend, how religion and science interact. Each helping the other despite their differences.
From the earliest days of prehistory, as much as a hundred thousand years ago, there has been an interplay (or entanglement) between religion and science, with each pushing and prodding the other to think more deeply about their inquiries. From there the authors trace the dramatic story of the interaction of science and religion from Athens to Alexandria to Italy to Oxford.
The story of this well-illustrated book begins with cave paintings discovered in recent decades showing religious impulses. Yet the mixing of pigments needed to create these paintings show rudimentary science in the service of religion--but also that religion pushed our science further so faith could express itself. Likewise the new discipline of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) investigates how and how long religion has been fundamental capacity of the mind, like language.
While the authors offer ample attention to the giants--Aristotle, Galileo, Newton--we learn of the contributions of many other lesser-known but important figures. There is the story of two men (one Christian, one pagan) who studied in Alexandria and whose arguments continued to be played out for a thousand years. We learn of the contributions of Muslim philosophers and of Robert Grosseteste ("Large head"). Aquinas, the Bacons, Pascal, Maxwell and many others all receive their due. Not only do we get a wonderfully told story of a slice of the history of western thought, we see how religious and scientific concerns continually spurred each other on.
One of the most helpful and nuanced sections of the book concerns 19th-century archeological discoveries that uncovered the context in which many Old Testament books were written. In the ancient myths of Mesopotamia, humans were created as slaves. In Genesis they are made in God's image as his vice regents. Instead of a multitude of warring gods seeking to destroy the nuisance of humanity with a flood in an act of arbitrary despotism, the one creator God judges the world for having ruined itself. Instead of an ark being the subversion of a rival god, it is God's own provision of rescue. Similar to the work of John H. Walton, Briggs and Wagner suggest that the Bible can be seen at least in part protest literature against harsh and cruel worldviews.
Yes, there was rancor and animosity between opposing characters in this long drama of science and faith. Arguments abounded on whether new scientific discoveries contradicted the Bible (or Aristotle!). Was science seeking to go beyond penultimate curiosity (which extends to the limits of the visible world)? What implications did the theological thoughts regarding ultimate curiosity have on science?
Yet the authors want us to view these quarrels through the lens of a slipstream. We know geese do not fly in a fixed V-formation but that each goose takes its turn at the front, so the others can have an easier time flying behind it in its slipstream. That is, they contend, how religion and science interact. Each helping the other despite their differences.
June 23, 2025
Several months ago a friend suggested I check out “Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion”, a very readable and at times entertaining book by someone who works at a Catholic think tank. Perhaps it was via footnotes there or other voyages in text, but “The Penultimate Curiosity: How Science Swims in the Slipstream of Ultimate Questions” found its way into my reading list and while both books tackle a very similar theme, the surprisingly cozy and long-lasting relationship between science and religion, the areas covered and the angles of attack differ.
In the other book, a (presumably) devout Catholic who also is a big fan of the history of science. Here, until proven otherwise, a less openly religious artist co-writing alongside a professor of nanomaterials at Oxford who are more interested in scientific history. There, mostly from the Renaissance to the present. Here, all the way back to cavemen times to our current day. (Lastly) There, how religion and science intermingled and here, the never-ending quest of “why?” though later on the ‘slipstream’ of both books do start to entangle, but with little overlap.
Thus, the biggest “why?” on my mind going in: is this book going to tread new ground or will I be experiencing some amount of deja vu? In fact, “why?” seems to be the key difference between these two books for in Magisteria, it was mainly about “who?”. Mind you, both books are really good and if anything, they can be seen as excellent companion pieces. Even more so, reading both (plus the many other books that tackle the ‘entangled histories of science and religion’) can enhance one’s own understanding greatly of our world. Zeroing in on “ The Penultimate Curiosity”, most of it is not a difficult read even for those who have weak scientific foundations. If you’re a curious person, you will be at home here.
As for its clever sub-title, taking its cue from the slipstream, knowledge and the pursuit of it—curiosity for the sake of it—seems to follow a leader; sucked in that small vortex, advances seem to happen quickly before perhaps slowing down again for awhile. Within nature, it’s the flock of resting birds suddenly bolting in the sky and flying away in a familiar V pattern (and interestingly, this is both the book’s reasoning for that sub-title and yet its proven not entirely accurate near the end). With humanity, think competitive cycling; touch the sun (the lead cyclist) and a pileup may happen. Icarus could learn a thing or two.
One issue—and a small one at that as the book overall is an easy to digest historical survey on human curiosity—is that aforementioned “why?” later on does become more of a “who?” Thus, what I saw at least in Magisteria was first done here given this book came out first though thankfully there is not that much crossover. Nevertheless, while it’s understandable that it may be impossible for one book like this to cover everything, given the focus is the never-ending quest for knowledge in ways that still respect the theological backdrop of mankind, there was one person whose absence became all the more glaring as the book went from 17th into 18th centuries: Spinoza. Beyond that, the camera does move eastward for a bit to cover Islam’s Golden Age, the peregrination ends there and a much-needed Asian focus remains elusive.
---Notable Highlights---
An interesting rabbit hole is unearthed:
“If the waterfall dance was evidence of something like ‘primate spirituality’, then tool use was evidence of something like ‘primate technology’. Could the discovery that chimpanzees could contemplate nature suggest a parallel to ‘proto-religion’ in early human beings? Could the discovery that they could use tools to manipulate nature suggest a parallel to Palaeolithic ‘proto-science’?” (p. 41)
When Young Earth Creationists think everyone in the past took the Bible literally:
“In discussing the Genesis account of Creation Philo (20 BCE – 50 CE) argues that while some of the details are ‘symbolical rather than strictly accurate’ these are not merely ‘fabulous inventions’ but means of making ideas visible: ‘shadowing forth some allegorical truth’.” (p. 108)
Just a Thursday for Isaac Newton:
“In 1664 Newton had read Descartes’ Geometry and proceeded in astonishingly short space of time to absorb almost the entire canon of mathematics as it existed at the time. From there he went on to develop his own techniques. ‘I was’, he later wrote, ‘in the prime age of my invention’, and developed first a method of finding the exact gradient of a curve (known as differentiation) and then a method of finding the area under a curve (now known as integration). Applying these methods (which Newton called ‘fluxions’ and Leibniz ‘calculus’) to the planetary motions, he was able to obtain a mathematical value for the force exerted by an object completing a circular motion.” (p. 269)
In the other book, a (presumably) devout Catholic who also is a big fan of the history of science. Here, until proven otherwise, a less openly religious artist co-writing alongside a professor of nanomaterials at Oxford who are more interested in scientific history. There, mostly from the Renaissance to the present. Here, all the way back to cavemen times to our current day. (Lastly) There, how religion and science intermingled and here, the never-ending quest of “why?” though later on the ‘slipstream’ of both books do start to entangle, but with little overlap.
Thus, the biggest “why?” on my mind going in: is this book going to tread new ground or will I be experiencing some amount of deja vu? In fact, “why?” seems to be the key difference between these two books for in Magisteria, it was mainly about “who?”. Mind you, both books are really good and if anything, they can be seen as excellent companion pieces. Even more so, reading both (plus the many other books that tackle the ‘entangled histories of science and religion’) can enhance one’s own understanding greatly of our world. Zeroing in on “ The Penultimate Curiosity”, most of it is not a difficult read even for those who have weak scientific foundations. If you’re a curious person, you will be at home here.
As for its clever sub-title, taking its cue from the slipstream, knowledge and the pursuit of it—curiosity for the sake of it—seems to follow a leader; sucked in that small vortex, advances seem to happen quickly before perhaps slowing down again for awhile. Within nature, it’s the flock of resting birds suddenly bolting in the sky and flying away in a familiar V pattern (and interestingly, this is both the book’s reasoning for that sub-title and yet its proven not entirely accurate near the end). With humanity, think competitive cycling; touch the sun (the lead cyclist) and a pileup may happen. Icarus could learn a thing or two.
One issue—and a small one at that as the book overall is an easy to digest historical survey on human curiosity—is that aforementioned “why?” later on does become more of a “who?” Thus, what I saw at least in Magisteria was first done here given this book came out first though thankfully there is not that much crossover. Nevertheless, while it’s understandable that it may be impossible for one book like this to cover everything, given the focus is the never-ending quest for knowledge in ways that still respect the theological backdrop of mankind, there was one person whose absence became all the more glaring as the book went from 17th into 18th centuries: Spinoza. Beyond that, the camera does move eastward for a bit to cover Islam’s Golden Age, the peregrination ends there and a much-needed Asian focus remains elusive.
---Notable Highlights---
An interesting rabbit hole is unearthed:
“If the waterfall dance was evidence of something like ‘primate spirituality’, then tool use was evidence of something like ‘primate technology’. Could the discovery that chimpanzees could contemplate nature suggest a parallel to ‘proto-religion’ in early human beings? Could the discovery that they could use tools to manipulate nature suggest a parallel to Palaeolithic ‘proto-science’?” (p. 41)
When Young Earth Creationists think everyone in the past took the Bible literally:
“In discussing the Genesis account of Creation Philo (20 BCE – 50 CE) argues that while some of the details are ‘symbolical rather than strictly accurate’ these are not merely ‘fabulous inventions’ but means of making ideas visible: ‘shadowing forth some allegorical truth’.” (p. 108)
Just a Thursday for Isaac Newton:
“In 1664 Newton had read Descartes’ Geometry and proceeded in astonishingly short space of time to absorb almost the entire canon of mathematics as it existed at the time. From there he went on to develop his own techniques. ‘I was’, he later wrote, ‘in the prime age of my invention’, and developed first a method of finding the exact gradient of a curve (known as differentiation) and then a method of finding the area under a curve (now known as integration). Applying these methods (which Newton called ‘fluxions’ and Leibniz ‘calculus’) to the planetary motions, he was able to obtain a mathematical value for the force exerted by an object completing a circular motion.” (p. 269)
September 3, 2017
If Richard Dawkins' God Delusion is too much strong meat for you, try this travelogue through the history of religions and beliefs.
It will leave you with slightly more of a sense that mankind needs religious belief to give meaning to our world and to calm our unease about what we don't know. But the pursuit of power in the name of a Higher Being when in fact that higher being is pursuit of power itself still comes through as much as it does with the title from a confirmed atheist such as Dawkins.
I like this kind of book because it challenges thinking processes by pushing the boundaries of what is rational. Is faith as the root sustaining most religions (just now I cannot think of a religion which does not depend on faith) what remains when pure rational thinking meets its own boundaries?
I have written this before getting to the end of Penultimate Curiosity (shame on me!) as part of a mid book set of impressions. I wonder what will emerge when / if I reach the end.
It will leave you with slightly more of a sense that mankind needs religious belief to give meaning to our world and to calm our unease about what we don't know. But the pursuit of power in the name of a Higher Being when in fact that higher being is pursuit of power itself still comes through as much as it does with the title from a confirmed atheist such as Dawkins.
I like this kind of book because it challenges thinking processes by pushing the boundaries of what is rational. Is faith as the root sustaining most religions (just now I cannot think of a religion which does not depend on faith) what remains when pure rational thinking meets its own boundaries?
I have written this before getting to the end of Penultimate Curiosity (shame on me!) as part of a mid book set of impressions. I wonder what will emerge when / if I reach the end.
December 2, 2017
Ah, this was not an easy read for me. I have a decidedly unscientific bent of mind. And the words and concepts in this book were the equivalent of mental burpees every morning. But I’m glad to have read it, and I wish that the authors had put the epilogue at the beginning of the book, because their conclusions really establish the framework of the whole concept of the penultimate curiosity, and it took me a while to even figure that basic concept out.
The book traces the history of religious beliefs and scientific discovery and how they intersect. It is a fascinating, lengthy history lesson and one I feel I should probably reread, now that I grasp the gist of what they’re saying. I would recommend this book to students and lovers of abstract thought and philosophy. And homeschooling parents. And big thinkers. Ok I’m not sure I’m actually any of these things, so maybe you can read this no matter who you are. ;)
The book traces the history of religious beliefs and scientific discovery and how they intersect. It is a fascinating, lengthy history lesson and one I feel I should probably reread, now that I grasp the gist of what they’re saying. I would recommend this book to students and lovers of abstract thought and philosophy. And homeschooling parents. And big thinkers. Ok I’m not sure I’m actually any of these things, so maybe you can read this no matter who you are. ;)
September 4, 2018
Whether or not one agrees with every assumption or conclusion, this is a fascinating journey through the history of philosophy, religion, and science.
A thought provoking and relevant book. I’ve never read anything like it.
A thought provoking and relevant book. I’ve never read anything like it.
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