Customer Reviews

The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Pollack's writing is a little disjointed but the overall thrust of the book is interesting. Pollack's distinction between rational and irrational is unclear. His book would be greatly helped by dilineating what he takes these two terms to mean. As far as I can tell, he equate rationality simply with science. But why think this is so? Why can't there be other kinds of reasoning than just scientific? Still, his position that there is an intuitional side to scientific thinking, and that religion is that same intuitional approach pushed as far as it can go, is interesting. Further, his examination of the placebo effect and its importance is ahead of its time. This book's strength is the examination of bio-ethics. Even though Pollack doesn't come out and say it, and it takes some putting the dots together yourself, his overall view seems to be that the placebo effect has some relationship to religion. That the power of trust is itself a kind of justification of faith, and that we shouldn't be scared of things that genuinely help people just because we don't understand it or have a methodology to study it. That strikes me as a very interesting position, and I think the other reviewers here seemed to have missed it. There is a good critique of this book in Lorenzo Albacete's GOD AT THE RITZ, I strongly suggest reading them as a unit.

I give this book two stars because it was a nice attempt at a difficult topic but it fails in my opinion.

The major falling of this book in this readers opinion: The absence of scientific explanation does not automatically prove that God exists.

The author is a molecular biologist, not an expert on behavior. Yet claims are made about behavior that are not supported by data, or ideas are suggested which have been solidly refuted by good data.

I went into this book very optimistically but left very disappointed. I did however enjoy some sharp insights the author made, such as a good education not only give one the facts but also teaches one how to argue against the facts.

The book offers too many radial ideas, which are not supported and are very unlikely to be supported by data in the future.

Overall read this book and decide for yourself. I thought it was in the bottom 25% of all books I have ever read.

Let me start by saying that although I have not read Dr. Pollack's book, I did attend one of his lectures discussing "The faith of biology, the biology of faith." Thus, this is more a comment on Dr. Pollack's explanations of his approach to this critical issue than a comment on his book. Dr. Pollack seems to take a rather interesting though confusing standpoint on humanity and its search for the meaning of existence through science and religion. He seems to argue that science and religion are somewhat linked in their striving for human nature, although their insights are different. However, Dr. Pollack was not clear on how this two insights are diferent (or the degree of extraneousness). Also, I got a little confused on his discussion of the "unknown" and the "unknowable." Obviously, this is not an easy reading, and anyone attempting to understand this book should first try to focus more on the human side of life rather than on the spiritual or purely scientific side, which Dr. Pollack seems to leave unclear.