Customer Reviews

Creation Revisited

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WOW!

This review is biased, because for about ten years, I've considered this the best book I've ever read. In fact, I bought two copies for my friends and gave mine away. I'm here to find a used copy of this elegant masterpiece.

And that's not because it told me any *facts* about biological or cosmic evolution that I didn't already know, it's because Creation Revisited brings all the disparate elements together to gives the reader "the big AHA!".
Adkins starts off with "I'm going to take your mind on a journey". Well, he got THAT right.

He presents a tree of reasoning, beginning with the leaves and proceding to the shocking root.

The "leaves" are elephants. Adkins: "Our belief in elephants needs no explaination. We can see them lumbering across the plains".

But where did the elephants we observe come from? Adkins is (putatively) willing to believe that God made them. BUT... God didn't need to make ALL the living elephants. He only had to make the parents of the ones we see.

He goes on to suppose that God is a "lazy" God, who only bothers to create things which can't arise naturally (like the elephants we see
having come from their parents). He takes this back to the first mammals, to life per se, and to the big bang.

It turns out that God really didn't have to do ANYTHING AT ALL, and even HE can be eliminated. The "root" of the tree is exactly: nothing. Zero.

The final chapter, after that revelation, is about the mathematics of clouds of theoretical points. It alone is worth getting the book for.

=======

Since my writing pales in comparison to Dr. Adkins', I'm afraid that this simplistic summary of his book will induce you NOT to buy it.

Buy it.

Buy it and buy copies for any of your friends who want to understand what's REALLY going on.

In this little book, the author takes us on a journey of mind to the view that nothing cannot be understood, and therefore, ultimately, there is nothing to explain. It is a delightful journey, given the simple and direct writing style of the author. I was attracted from the very beginning, and in the end, I was not disappointed.

At the outset, the author says that a great deal of the universe does not need an explanation by argument from design. It can be understood as natural results of evolution. Having thus left the vast majority of phenomena to the appropriate scientific disciplines, the author comes down to the essential fabric of the universe: Why is there space? Why is there time? Why is there matter? Why are there forces? Why are there physical laws? And even why is there mathematics? The author cogently leads us to imagine that all these can come into existence out of nothing. Not every detail is presented. The author admits that a comprehensive theory awaits future completion. But he does erect an entire conceptual framework with clear contour.

It is gratifying to know that the issue has been so well thought out. It is more gratifying that Atkins did such a good job in elucidating it and its possible answer for the general audience. It is most gratifying to suspect that his line of reasoning may be on the right track to a full account of that ultimate question of humanity: Why is there something rather than nothing?

'Creation' refers to creation of the Universe in this reference. Atkin writes, "...elephants, and things resembling elephants, will in due course be found roaming through the countryside...the details of the processes involved in evolution are fascinating, but they are unimportant: competing, replicating molecules with time on their hands will inevitably evolve." While this may be an overly simplistic view of the conditions necessary to evolve creatures as complex as elephants, the purpose of Atkin's book is to try to simplify everything as much as possible so that the creation of space, of dimensions, of time and of matter from nothing can be understood. Atkin indeed feels he has accomplished these goals, as is written on the last page, "...fundamental science may be almost at an end, and might be completed within a generation...that is not to say that science as a whole need ever sleep. There are extremely difficult and important questions, such as those concerning the details of biological function...when we have dealt with the values of the fundamental constants by seeing that they are unavoidably so, and have dismissed them as irrelevant, we shall have arrived at complete understanding. Fundamental science then can rest. We are almost there. Complete knowledge is just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across the face of the Earth, like the sunrise." This reference is easy to read, and introduces the reader to complex subjects in cosmology and physics. While the reader may view Atkin's theory of creation with some speculation, the language of this reference is poetic and convincing.

period.

("Hitchhiker's guide" is the best fiction,and 2001 is the best movie).

I've bought 4 copies of Creation Revisited so far and sent them to my friends, well-marked with underlines in the text and comments in the margins. I wrote my own subtitle under the name of each chapter.

I'm SO sorry to see it out of print.

He starts off his logic tree with the leaves: "some things need no explaination. Elephants, for instance".

But god didn't have to create ALL the elephants. he only had to create TWO...

Atkins then moves along this logical tree to it's root, the MINIMUM that god must have started with, the minimum which must exist.

The ending, the root of the tree, is a suprise, but I'll TELL you:

The entirity of the universe consists of: exactly NOTHING. There isn't actually anything at all. If you can percieve EVERYTHING at once, you understand that NOTHING WHATSOEVER has to exist or ever have existed, or exists now, to explain the universe, including elephants.

There only APPEARS to be "something" (i.e. anything, e.g. elephants) because we can only percieve PART of the universe.

This is a TRULY AMAZING book.

I salute you, Peter Atkins!

--d

Rather than point out all of the logical absurdities and contradictions(which this forum doesn't provide space for anyway), let me direct you to a response by Oxford professor Keith Ward. See his book God, Chance & Necessity for a respectful, brilliant and humorous dissection of the incredible number of logical fallacies in Atkins book. Ward may not be entirely correct, but he thoroughly demonstrates the problems in Atkins theory.

1. These attempts at synthesising, now out of date, scientific positions though interesting in themselves, say nothing about the existence or nonexistense of God. You can see Dr Atkins publicly humiliated in a debate on this point in a video tape entitled The evidence for/against the existence of God. It is moderated by William F Buckley. At best this is an argument for non believing agnosticism, not atheism. It is often amazing to see the extent to which a recognised expert in one field can be such a novice in another. This shouldn't even be a debate. This position has a formal name and is a very old, and well debated one. The cause of his humiliation in the video debate mentioned is ultimately, I think, his inability to recognise his limitations. He actually admits on the tape he knows very little about theology, yet fires head long into the most well trod ground of theological thought.

2. The problem with his ultimate thesis is that no major religion claims that God can be proven scientifically. So it is not clear what point he thinks he is making, except to disprove his own, rather primitive, conception of how God works in the world. In fact, catholicism, for example, claims exacly the opposite. If the existence of God could be scientificaly proved much of the doctrines regarding faith and revelation would make no sense. No major faith rests on a the argument that there is some natural phenomena which proves scientificaly the existence of God, and all are very happy with the idea of Science being able to completely explain the natural world from it's begining to it's end. You should read the late Harvard professor, and agnostic, Stephen Jay Gould, among a host of others, on this point.

3. As a side note, he is also mistaken in thinking he is making a scientific argument in this book. It is pure philosophical speculation. There is nothing wrong with this, many wonderful books are based entirely on philisophical speculation, except when you start to not be able to tell the difference between speculation and science.

As has always been the case, atheists still have not answered the assertion that the universe was created, and therefore has a cause. Dr. Atkins struggles with this point when he tries to explain how the universe could come into existence, uncaused out of nothing. He writes "Now we go back in time beyond the moment of creation to when there was no time, and to where there was no space." At this time before time, he imagines a swirling dust of mathematical points which recombine again and again and finally come by trial and error (against the well-established Second Law of Thermodynamics, or Law of Entropy) to form our space time universe.

This is pop-metaphysics because it is a made-up explanation wtih no scientific evidence supporting it. And it's self-contradictory because it assumes time and space before there was time and space.

Fact is, every scientific discovery has supported the Big Bang theory....the universe had a beginning and it's running on a finite amount of energy that will one day be exhausted. For further research, consider the following scientific discoveries lending credence to the universe having a beginning:

1. The Second Law of Thermodynamics - The most established Law of Science as we know it....everything we've learned about our world depends on this constant. The universe is running out of usable energy...and nature tends to bring things to disorder. Leave anything alone and, with time, it will fall apart. This is a huge problem to materialists who say the universe is eternal and has always been. The universe must have begun sometime in the finite past. It would have run out of energy by now if it had been running from all eternity.

2. The universe is expanding - In the late 1920's Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding from a single point. If we could look at a recording of history in reverse, we would see all matter collapse back to a point of nothing. This in particular is a huge stumbling block for Dr. Atkins...as his "nothing" was actually comprised of mathematical points. It would be interesting to hear his explanation of how those points came into existence.

3. Radiation from the Big Bang was predicted and recently affirmed. Arno Penzias and Robert Homdel won a Nobel Prize for finding this radiation on their Bell Labs antenna. Google it to learn more.

4. Galaxy ripples found and infrared photographed by COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) support the Big Bang's prediction of ripples caused by the explosion. The ripples show that the explosion and expansion of the universe was precisely tweaked to cause just enough matter to congregate to allow galaxy formations, but not enough to cause the universe to collapse on itself.

5. Eintstein's Theory of General Relativity - The theory has been verfiied to five decimal places, and demands an absolute beginning for time, space, and matter. They are interdependent...you can't have one without the other.

In short, materialists' claims that natural forces are responsible for the creation of the universe are self-defeating because natural forces...indeed all of nature....were created in the Big Bang.

That's the end of this book. Can't these atheists come up with something to contradict the Book of Genesis? Might be a BIG reason they can't.

A much better read on creation....I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, from which many of these poinits have been extracted.