Why Science Does Not Disprove God by Amir Aczel

New Atheism is a movement that arose after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Proponents of the movement blame religion for nearly all the violence and disorder in the world, and they aim to eliminate it and any belief in God. Many New Atheism writers call upon science for proofs that there is no God, such as biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence M. Krauss. These arguments have been picked up by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennet and old-school atheist Christopher Hitchens.

Amir D. Aczel, a mathematician and science writer, argued that these authors misappropriated science for this purpose, sometimes misapplying it, misrepresenting it, or propagating misunderstandings. He presented his arguments in Why Science Does Not Disprove God.

Aczel’s perspective is very scientific, though he respects religion. He accepts the prevailing theories of cosmology that our universe began in the Big Bang. He accepts that evolutionary processes have produced higher and more complicated life forms from simpler ones though natural selection.

Aczel begins by addressing the archeological support for Biblical history. While he does not suggest that there is evidence of Biblical miracles, there is a lot of evidence supporting the historical narratives of the Bible. While New Atheism argues there is no archeological evidence to support the Bible, Aczel shows that there is abundant support for the history described in it.

Another popular argument of the New Atheists is that quantum theory demonstrates that the universe arose spontaneously out of nothing. Aczel describes how quantum theory actually shows that we cannot know some details about the earliest moments of the universe following the Big Bang and that it cannot at all address what was before the Big Bang. No theory of physics supposes it came from nothing. Some argue that it arose spontaneously, but it still occurred in due to physical process in a medium that existed before the universe, which itself raises many of the same questions of origins.

This points to the crux of Aczel’s argument. Science, math, and logic all point to their own limitations. There are huge unanswered, important questions in science, not the least of which is what is consciousness and how it came to be. We may not be able to answer such questions and there is certainly some knowledge that is not accessible to us. New Atheism proponents present science as having firm answers to these questions when it sometimes only has speculation or no real answers at all. Science may someday uncover some of this knowledge, but in can’t uncover all of it.

While he demonstrates that science doesn’t, and cannot, disprove God, he does not suggest that it can or will prove the existence of God. Aczel believes that God may be outside of what can be known through science, mathematics or even the human mind.

Aczel still has a great appreciation for science, and he wants others to appreciate it, too. His argument with New Atheism is that its proponents misuse science and misdirect people. He would rather we engage science for all the great knowledge it can bring us, not coopt it in a crusade against religion or a debate about God it may never be able to answer.

Why Science Does Not Disprove God is not written in a technical style. Most people should be able to understand it even if they have very little scientific education.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Little History of Science by William Bynum

Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck

The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark

Amir D. Aczel also wrote

Chance

Descarte’s Secret Notebook

Aczel, Amir D. Why Science Does Not Disprove God. New York: William Morrow, 2014.

Life's Matrix by Philip Ball

Water is a chemical essential to human life and culture, and it is possibly the oddest common substance. Physicist and science writer Philip Ball describes the nature of water, both scientific and cultural, in Life’s Matrix (originally published in the United Kingdom as H2O: A Biography of Water).

Ball begins at the very beginning—the big bang. Hydrogen, the simplest atom and most abundant element in the universe, appeared early in the universe. Oxygen is forged in stars and has become the third most abundant element. There is water in space. Ice seems to be common in the far reaches of the solar system. It has been found on the moon and stars and a few molecules appear in the cooler spots on the sun.

We have found no worlds yet that have as much liquid water as ours. The water cycle has shaped Earth. Our weather comes largely from the interplay of water and energy. Even the water locked up in the ice of our poles and glaciers shape the land, influence the weather, and affect the movement of heat, water and salt in ocean currents.

Ball tackles all phases of water, including a few exotic forms that only occur in extreme conditions created in laboratories. That water exists as vapor, liquid, and solid within the fairly narrow range of temperatures that are common on Earth make it unique. This is just one of its unusual properties. The structure of the water molecule is described in the book along with the physics that explain its behavior, to the degree that such things are even known.

Our understanding of water as a compound of hydrogen and oxygen is a relatively recent thing. For a long time, water was thought of as an irreducible element. This makes sense on some level. Water is essential to life as we know it. It is irreplaceable. From the perspective of living creatures, and in almost every culture, water is a fundamental material.

In the final chapter, Ball moves away from the hard sciences to culture, economics and policy. Water of the quality needed for drinking, and even the lesser quality needed for other things, is scarce and unevenly distributed on the planet. To take a serious look at water is to be drawn to issues of health and wealth. Growing population and changing climate will put increased demands on the available fresh water, and we need to consider how we are going to manage it. Ball takes a look at some of the hot spots.

The book is intended for a broad audience. I think it is probably more accessible to someone with some education in the sciences, especially chemistry or physics, but someone had a high-school level class in these subjects they should be able to follow along.

In addition, the book is 16 years old, so necessarily out of date in some respects. I suspect that much of the physics, chemistry and biology described is still sound. Similarly, there is unlikely to be discoveries in history that would seriously outdate the book, even in the interesting section on dead ends and “pathology” in water science.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Big Necessity by Rose George

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

Blue Revolution by Cynthia Barnett

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Elixir by Brian Fagan

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

Ball, Philip. Life’s Matrix: A Biography of Water. 1999. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Jones, Gerard.  Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book.  New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Reviewing Gerard Jones’ history of the comic book industry makes me feel like I’m pitching a new show to the cable networks.  It’s a little like Mad Men.  There is less suavity, but plenty of smoking, drinking, and womanizing.  There is room for some gratuitous nudity.  Many of the comics publishers came from got started in spicy pulps and nudie mags.  They were hustlers from the street, too, many with mob connections.  So we can have a touch of Boardwalk Jungle, though the violence is contained to the muscular fantasies of young men wanting to overcome a sense of powerlessness.  Of course, there may be comparisono to The Big Bang Theory, especially when you have scenes of young men working side-by-side at typewriters and drawing boards, helping and competing with each other.  Most aren’t geniuses, but plenty are awkward and pretentious.  It even has a great name: Men of Tomorrow.

The book is a mostly chronological look at the development of comics.  It starts with the pulp publishers.  As the pulps declined for various reasons of economics and taste, the comics rose their peak in World War II.  Patriotic superheroes were depicted punching Hitler in the face before America entered the war.  Superhero comics declined after the war, especially due to competition from television, though other genres did well.  Some of them, especially crime and horror, attracted the attention of reformers who wanted a clean and upright media safe for children and a culture longing for conformity and peace.  Comics found a new life as baby boomers came of age, partly because of interest in new dysfunctional heroes of Stan Lee and his collaborators and partly because cheap underground comics were exploring the youth counterculture.  Finally, comics became an almost mainstream medium, especially superheroes who successfully moved into film and other media.

There are almost too many people discussed in this book to mention.  Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz built a shady distributor of sex stories and porn into a pillar of a major media corporation.  Along the way, their conflict with Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster became the stuff of comics legend that occasionally broke into mainstream consciousness.  In many retellings of this story, Donenfeld and Liebowitz are demonized and Siegel and Shuster lionized.  Jones mostly resists this urge, treating the New York publishers with some fairness and showing how the cartoonists from Cleveland were the cause of some of their own trouble.  There is a host of other notables from trash publishing (Hugo Gernsback and Bernarr McFadden), organized crime (Frank Costello and Mayer Lansky), failed teachers and academics (Charlie Gaines and William Moulton Marston), and finally from comics (Charlie Biro, Bob Kane, Jack Cole, Jack Kirby, and many more).

Many of these people grew up in Jewish immigrant families.  Their successes and failures in the 1920s and 1930s, their readiness for war in the 1940s, and their search for an identity both American and Jewish in the postwar year reflects the journey of a larger community.  In addition to being a story of comics, it is a story of how Jews, immigrants, science fiction, and geeks moved from the edges of American society toward the mainstream—or maybe the mainstream widened to encompass them.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

American Splendor (Film)

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Google

Feeding the Fire by Mark E. Eberhart

Mankind is hungry for energy. The United States is a huge consumer of energy, and our lifestyle depends on it. This makes us, and other developed countries, vulnerable. The burning of fossil fuels is leading to a changing climate that could have many negative ramifications. Our dependence on foreign sources of fuel, especially oil, have embroiled us in wars oversees and made us uncomfortable allies with nations that do not share our values.

Chemistry professor Mark E. Eberhart suggests that we need a good energy diet. Unfortunately, after spending a couple of chapters of Feeding the Fire setting up the idea, he ends up having only a little to say about an energy diet in the final chapter of the book.

In between, however, he tells an interesting history of energy from the big bang to our age. He also provides a primer in thermodynamics aimed at an audience that hasn’t studied science or engineering. If the book had purported to be about that, I’d probably be speaking about it in glowing terms. If you’re looking for a book that explains energy and how it works that is written for an audience with little scientific background, this is a good option.

Though most of the book concerns itself with the dispersal of energy through the universe and the development of technology, the energy diet is mainly a matter of policy. The central element of Eberhart’s vision is an “energy-industrial complex” modeled on the way the U.S. military works with industry on the long-term development, delivery and reliability of technology. U.S. energy policy is so disjointed that in practice we have no policy, but with imagination and discipline (and arguably the setting aside of partisanship for matters of national security that transcend it) we could develop a comprehensive policy that gets our efforts moving toward a more secure, efficient and cleaner future. It doesn’t even need to be a perfect policy, just a commitment to take specific actions and set specific standards to make things better over time.

Eberhart has some specific recommendations, especially related to the development of electric vehicles and supporting technolgies. In the 12 years since Feeding the Fire was published, we’ve made some headway on many of them. This is in spite of the fact that we still do not have a comprehensive energy policy.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

The Computers of Star Trek by Lois Gresh & Robert Weinberg

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy

My Inventions by Nikola Tesla

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

Rust by Jonathan Waldman

Eberhart, Mark E. Feeding the Fire: The Lost History and Uncertain Future of Mankind’s Energy Addiction. New York: Harmony Books, 2007.

Interesting Stuff Oct. 8, 2010

The 10 Most Insane Jimmy Olsen Moments of All Time
25% of comics readers are old—really old
”Big Bang” nerd, hotty dated—difficult for KBR to pretend it’s interesting
Chris loves Spider-Man (so do I)
Darwyn Cooke takes down The Outfit interview
Elvira returns to TV with late night horror movie show “Elvira’s Movie Macabre”
Hotel Death Ray: If Dr. Evil had gotten his doctorate in Evil Architecture
-Hot Architecture: Vegas 'Death Ray' Singes Tourists
-Is new Vegas hotel too hot?
-Sunbather Singed by Shiny Hotel’s Reflected “Death Rays”
-Vdara visitor: Death ray scorched hair
Forget Katy Perry—Simpsons get muppetized!
In praise of M.O.D.O.K: Why gleefully goofy beats broodingly bad-ass
Interesting Stuff Sept. 21, 2010
More Hot Architecture: New L.A. concert hall raises temperatures of neighbors
Snarky commentary on bad comics journalism (which is till bad journalism)
Steve Thomas cartoon concert posters
Tony Curtis passes at 85
U.S. Water and Sanitation Aid: Millions of Beneficiaries Reported in Developing Countries, but Department of State Needs to Strengthen Strategic Approach

25 Audio and Video Reviews on Keenan’s Book Reviews

Though we concentrate on nonfiction books, Keenan's Book Reviews sometime reviews other media.  Here is a list of the latest audio and video products reviewed on this blog.

American Splendor

Bedlam

The Big Bang Theory

Boardwalk Jungle

Bride of the Monster

Godzilla

The Green Hornet

Isle of the Dead

Judge Dredd

Knight Rider

The Lone Ranger

Mad Men

Night of the Ghouls

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Walk Away the Pounds

First 10 Reviews