Customer Reviews

Out of the Labyrinth: For Those Who Want to Believe But Can't

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Walters does a <far> better job explaining New Science in the context of Eastern wisdom than such respected luminaries as Fritjoff Capra, Ken Wilber, and Deepak Chopra. For one thing, his writing is accessible to a far wider audience. A good thing, too, because what he's done is nothing less than demolish the West's leading killjoys: the twentieth-century thinkers who claimed that life is meaningless because science has shown us that the universe simply doesn't make sense: evolution is random (Darwin), light behaves like both a particle and a wave (Einstein), and we are creatures of mud who struggle to rise above our roots (Freud).

The ringleader of modern western nihilism was Jean Paul Sartre. While fully accepting the findings of science on which the nihilists based their claims, Walters arrives at radically different conclusions. When he's done, Sartre stands revealed as the last in a line of rationalist con-artists, and life is shown to be not bereft of, but bursting with meaning.

Walters wakes me up and inspires me to shout with pleasure. Finally, here's a synthesis of western and Eastern wisdom that is a joy to read as well as intuitively and rationally persuasive.

Thank you, JDW!!

This book is definitely an ESSENTIAL reading for all philosophers, evolutionists, scientists and rational human beings. It basically takes on a new approach to the problem of meaninglessness and seemingly random events in our universe. In short, this work is an all out attack against nihilistic philosophy AND absolute philosophy. It condemns a rigid approach to religion as well as in science in a very sophisticated yet simple style of writing.

This book in fact engages any deep thinking reader to further define his/her thoughts and reasoning capabilities on subjects such as evolution, religion and purpose of existence. This work reveals that the author is more intellectual (and intelligent) than any other famous philosophers of the past. For example, Walters' unsympathetic attack on Sartre shows the reader that Sartre was actually an "intelligent idiot"! In fact, this pseudo intelligence is quite common among western philosophers and scientists.

In summary, this book MUST be read by any aspiring philosophers and students of evolutionary biology. It WILL strengthen the faith of any scientist or evolutionist.

I wouldn't recommend this book. Chapter 3 is a clear straw man version of Sartre's philosophy and so it's criticisms are irrelevant. However, I don't think the author intentionally built a straw man argument. I simply think he was more concerned with refuting Sartre than understanding him.