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1.0 out of 5 stars
Why Chemists Should Not Write Biology Books, October 3, 2004
This review is from: Healing the Land: A Supernatural View of Ecology (Paperback)
This was a very poorly written book. I had difficulty finishing it. My motivation was that, in order to conscientiously review, I needed to read the entire book. But I have to confess I had to resort to skimming to get through it.
This is a treatise on why chemists should not write biology books. I don't doubt that Pratney knows a good deal about Chemistry, more than I do. But I know a good deal more about Biology than he does, having studied it and taught it. And as a chemist, he doesn't know jack about biology. If you were listening as I read it, you would have heard my groans of despair at the utter incomprehensibility of Pratney's statements about biology. He makes facts up as he goes along. I'm sure that he believes what he wrote is true. But it's utterly lacking in sound research or actual truth about the biological world. He wants to prove that nature is actually kind, and not in constant competition. So he brings up some anecdotal evidence to prove this. But no studies. Any scientist should know better than this. I don't doubt the anecdotes. They may be true. But that doesn't indicate a theory- that's why we have studies. That's why we have the scientific method.
I really had been looking forward to reading this book for years. I'd had it on my shelf, and hadn't had time until now to get to it. What a disappointment! For it's advertised as a book with a Christian approach to environmentalism- going beyond practicality, to see the wonder and majesty of the world around us, to get back to an idea of the grace of God as expressed in nature. But instead, the first 2/3rds of the book are spent in a polemic against evolution- which is really rather a red herring. Again, for this polemic, Pratney brings up numerous facts that simply don't exist. Most of this is creating strawmen, arguing that Evolutionists believe certain things, argue certain beliefs, that they don't, and then showing how the Evolutionists are incorrect. A bit of training in actual evolutionary theory would have done wonders. Pratney even goes so far as to argue that natural selection and competition in nature don't exist- something even the most die-hard Creationist doesn't advocate.
Pratney spends a long time on Cleve Backster's plants that sense human emotions. He even devotes an entire chapter to it. In the end Pratney has a caveat that maybe Backster's ideas aren't true- but then Pratney builds much of his argument in that chapter on possibly untrue hypothesis! It is a rather ridiculous hypothesis at that, which even Pratney points out was unduplicatable by other scientists- therefore making it *by definition* unscientific, according to the scientific method. A Chemist should no better.
You may wonder why I'm not addressing the key point of the book. That's because Pratney never really gets to it. Instead, it's mostly full of tangents, with repeated assertions and some argumentation, about how we should care about the land, and how materialism and evolution keep us from seeing the wonder of God's creation. (A wholly materialistic outlook *does* keep us from doing so; an evolutionary outlook by itself of course does not; a wholly spiritual outlook is naturally an early heresy.) An example of these tangents is a chapter repeating the Zionist myth of a deserted wasteland of Palestine, until the Jews came in to make something bloom in the desert. Though there is copious evidence to indicate that Palestine was one of the most fertile areas of the Middle East before 1948, that doesn't fit with Pratney's argument that the righteousness of the Israelis has brought God's blessing back to the land of Israel. In so doing, he commits a classic error of misconstruing modern Israel with ancient, Biblical Israel, that Israelis and Israelites are the same people, metaphysically speaking. He is being unscientific in ignoring contrary evidence and not presenting it and discussing it. And most of all, it has absolutely nothing to do with the stated purpose of the book.
Pratney writes from 1993, after the 1st Gulf War. It's not his fault that events after his writing have revealed more. But Gulf War II belies the ideas presented in the book that God came to save the glorious Americans in their putsch to defeat Iraq in Gulf War I. Pratney writes about how prayer saved many American lives, advocating the Myth of Redemptive Violence that
Walter Wink speaks of. Pratney's goal seems to be to show how God can help us when we pray. To do this, Pratney ignores the many violent Iraqi deaths. From the 2nd Gulf War we learn the American cost in lives. Pratney writes of how kindly the Iraqis were treated, implying it was the lack of Islam and the commitment to Christianity by American troops that was the root of the kindness. But as everyone now knows from the 2nd Gulf War, from Abu Ghaib, the great kindness of Americans at war is also somewhat myth, as much as the idea of America as a "Christian" nation. To speak of God coming gloriously, that God is on our side as we fight this war, and at the same time to speak of the need to stop the rape of the land, is somewhat disingenuous.
There are some helpful aspects, like a discussion of Romans 8, but these are relegated to an appendix, when they should be central to the work. The best part of the book is an appendix on the destruction of the environment under Islam. But this is by Charles Lynn, a different author.
I was about to throw this book away in the trash after reading it. But there's a compendium of environmental scriptures at the end of the book, which makes it a helpful resource for me to hold on to. Sadly, not near enough to redeem the book from the wasteland that it is.
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