102 of 123 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
I Believe in God; I Believe in Science; I Do Not Believe in This Book, May 8, 2006
This review is from: The G.O.D. Experiments: How Science Is Discovering God In Everything, Including Us (Hardcover)
I believe in God. I believe in Science. I do not believe in this book.
I very much appreciated Dr. Gary E. Schwartz's 2002 book, "The Afterlife Experiments." Schwartz's warm and sparkly personality came through. My reader's affection for him makes this review all the harder to write.
The first paragraph of "The G.O.D. Experiments" is a keeper. Schwartz asks, "Imagine that there had been no Abraham, no Moses, no Jesus . . ." would, in such a world, science come to describe something like God?
Unfortunately, the rest of the book does not live up to the depth and elegance of that first paragraph. Further, I fear that books like this do more to hurt scientific research into metaphysical phenomena than help it.
"The G.O.D. Experiments" reads more like a series of disjointed and mildly self-indulgent blog entries than a book. It proves no central point. The title is only tangentially reflective of the contents.
Disjointed: the book contains bar graphs recording a computer's attempts to choose random numbers, a poem by the author, an annotated bibliography of books, some he likes, some he doesn't, highly personal anecdotes, and the tale of a "Kabbalah corgi."
The book is also repetitive to the point of driving this reader to search for a projectile that might reach the author's home in Arizona. In an attempt to prove that the universe's order defies theories of random generation, Schwartz shook up the grains of sand in a sand painting. No matter how hard or how often he shook up those grains of sand, he reports, they never again reformed as a sand painting.
Needless to say, scientific proponents of an atheist worldview would heap scorn upon this experiment, insisting that it falsely represented their arguments for how order arises out of god-free nothingness. I'm not one of those people, and their protest is not mine. I just got profoundly irritated, as a reader, having to read Schwartz's multitudinous references to his shaking a sand painting.
Schwartz says his book is meant to be "popular," but he speaks casually of difficult material - the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for example - in a way that would certainly lose readers without previous knowledge.
Schwartz reports that he used to be a secular agnostic. He recounts, with wide-eyed amazement, experiences that lead him to faith. The problem lies therein. In the same way that a powerfully psychic person, who had never studied the hard sciences, would probably not write a very good book about the hard sciences if he tried to do so after sticking his toe in the world of hard science, Dr. Schwartz, who built his career on academic science, and then stuck his toe into metaphysics, has not written a very good book about that.
There are people who have dealt with their own psychic abilities, their own contact with the dead, and their own religious faith all of their lives. They have a more mature appreciation of what these phenomena are.
Someone with a more mature appreciation of metaphysics would never write, as Schwartz does, in a way that feels both grandiose and innocent, in a few brief, sketchy pages, of revolutionizing education, medicine, and law, and "globally resolv[ing] our conflicts" merely because he, a Yale and Harvard affiliated professional scientist, has had an epiphany.
Um, Gary. News flash. Many of those unwashed of us who are not affiliated with Yale and Harvard have realized for a long time that God exists, that psychic abilities are real, and that synchronicity happens. And, funny thing. You know what? We still pull our pants on one leg at a time. And we have yet to revolutionize the legal system, or resolve global conflicts.
Too, like a tyro, Schwartz doesn't ask himself hard enough questions. In one anecdote, he reports praying for information, and a word popping into his head - "Sam" - that turns out to be the information he was seeking. In his attempt to interrogate this incident, Schwartz asks himself eleven questions. But he never asks this one: "How often have I prayed to receive a correct answer, and had a word pop into my had, and it was the *incorrect* word?" Someone long in the field of such research would ask that.
Self-identified "skeptics" have been unfair and unkind to Schwartz. That does not excuse, though, Schwartz's dismissal of them. Schwartz mentions Michael Shermer's "How We Believe," and identifies it as "incorrect," without clearly detailing how and why. He theorizes that people like Shermer do what they do for financial gain (268). Similarly, "skeptics" insist that psychics do what they do for money. This mutual mud slinging illuminates nothing, and degrades debate. Does anyone really believe that a young man interested only in money, and choosing a career, would chose skeptic *or* psychic ahead of, say, stock broker, or lawyer? Is it not possible that both Shermer and Schwartz are driven by beliefs they find genuinely worthy?
Finally, any book that, as "The G.O.D Experiments" does, introduces Wernher von Braun as a source of spiritual enlightenment and fails to mention von Braun's career as a Nazi and exploiter of slave labor . . . fails.
To one seeking a popular account of science and God, I recommend Lee Strobel's "Case for a Creator." For readers seeking more demanding material, there are books by John Polkinghorne and William Dembski. There is, of course, the Bible.
There are worse books you could read than "The G.O.D. Experiments." But I did expect more from the man who gave us "The Afterlife Experiments," a much better book.
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36 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A book that disproves its own thesis, June 5, 2006
This review is from: The G.O.D. Experiments: How Science Is Discovering God In Everything, Including Us (Hardcover)
I would like to say that my friend, Gary Schwartz, has written a travesty--a tongue-in-cheek parody of the sort of wish-fulfilling fantasy that hides under a patina of scientific terminology--but I can't. Gary was serious when he wrote: "Science no longer is taking God away; science is discovering God in every place it looks and bolstering our beliefs." Thus, the irony is that his book disproves its own thesis.
To support his contention, Gary refers to an experiment on precognitive dreams and the occurrence of sand paintings. The precognition experiment shows that Gary is a gifted experimentalist. But his interpretation of that experiment and the sand paintings in terms of what he terms the "G.O.D hypothesis" shows that he's not a theorist.
Theorists develop and analyze conceptual frameworks with intellectual discipline and rigorous logic. Both of these are absent from Gary's book. Instead, his conclusions rely on semantic tricks, logical fallacies, self-reference, and category mistakes. In an 23 page analysis I wrote for Gary, I pointed to many examples of these errors, but in this brief review, I'll indicate only a few representative examples that disprove his assertion that science is discovering God.
Semantic trickery includes the liberal use of wild words in argumentation. Because they are ambiguous, wild words serve the same purpose as wild cards, i.e., they can represent anything that suits a purpose in an argument. Gary prominently uses the wild words "consciousness," "mind," "intelligence," and "superintelligence." This is a critical mistake, because using words or other symbols that lack consistent meanings might be philosophy or sophistry, but it isn't science.
The key logical fallacy is the circular argument, in which a conclusion is included in a premise. Concerning the precognition experiment, he tacitly began with the premise that "an extraordinary invisible intelligence...played a fundamental role in the conduct of our lives," then "deduced" that a "superintelligent process" guided the events of the experiment.
Gary's sand painting argument depends on a flagrant category mistake. He implicitly places manmade objects (sand paintings and a Windows OS) and naturally occurring objects (the evolving universe and DNA molecules) in the same category. Thus, he doesn't distinguish the categories named "artificial" and "natural."
Though he apparently does not recognize it, this category mistake has fatal consequences for his main thesis. Here's his argument, reduced to its essentials: Because a sand painting is made by an intelligent artist, then--by analogy--the evolving universe and DNA must be made by an intelligent god. For this analogy to be valid, natural and artificial things must be in the same category with respect to their origins. If they are not, the analogy fails. But if they are arbitrarily assigned to the same category, then the argument is circular. Either way, relying on the sand painting analogy is decidedly unscientific.
Another logical fallacy, the false dilemma, is so important to Gary's argument that he used it as the title for Chapter 9: "Chance Versus Intelligent Design--Which Is It?" This question doesn't acknowledge the existence of other theories that explain life, consciousness, and evolution. In fact, there is at least one alternative explanation, the Theory of Enformed Systems. It's important to note that Gary is a co-author on several formal presentations of this theory, yet he doesn't mention it in the book.
Of course, Gary isn't alone in depending on the false dilemma. This fallacy is the common way of characterizing the ongoing conflict between proponents of teaching intelligent design in public schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution. Perhaps he hopes that his book will help the religious advocates of ID to claim scientific reasoning as the basis of their faith. I hope he doesn't, but whether or not he does, I don't expect his logical fallacies and other mistakes to deter those who rely on faith, not science, to convince themselves of the "truth."
I give this book three stars because I'm ambivalent about recommending it. On one hand, it lacks value because it repudiates the point Gary tried to make-that science can lead us to "G.O.D." or any other portrayal of God. But on the other hand, as an excellent example of faulty theorizing, it can be educational to students of science and other thinkers.
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