Customer Reviews

Seeking the Truth: How Science Has Prevailed Over the Supernatural Worldview (Gateway Bookshelf)

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This book covers the history of science from a pro-reason, anti-mysticism perspective. The author claims that Western civilization is "a composite of two diverse traditions -- the empirical-rationalistic perspective of the ancient Greek philosophers and the mystical-revelatory approach of Judeo-Christian religion." This is an interesting claim, which makes a lot of sense to me. As an atheist myself, I really wanted to like this book.

Unfortunately the vast majority of the book is a straightforward history of science with nothing new to say. And the quality of the writing is _terrible_, with awkward sentences on almost every page, needless diversions from the main flow of ideas, and quite a few paragraphs that left me guessing as to what he's trying to say. If this book was edited at all, the editor was incompetent.

Seeking the Truth: How Science Has Prevailed Over the Supernatural Worldview (Gateway Bookshelf)

I found this book to be a very enjoyable read. It spans the entire enterprise of science from the ancient Greek philosophers to our modern understanding of quantum mechanics and the wider universe. He does achieve a rather audacious overview of the entire evolution of science. A major purpose of the book was to show the triumph of science over the primitive views of religion. That is touched on, especially in his recounting of the development of our heliocentric model of the solar system and in chapter six where religion and Christianity in particular is examined. However, the major focus is on the story of the development of science itself.

The book is not without its limitations and flaws. The treatment of of biology is limited. I found his respect for insights on the part of the ancient Greeks to be a bit excessive. He devotes nearly a third of his book to his excellent retelling of early Greek thinkers. Does it count when they speculate based on no evidence and it happens to have some validity? There is a very robust treatment of modern quantum mechanics. However, the section on Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen phenomenon did not cover the important issue of quantum entanglement.

Some commentary has been excessively critical of the editing and accuracy of this book. With a rather careful review I could find about two dozen flaws in a 500 page book. This includes a case with the article "a" used where "at" is clearly intended. It includes his use of "electron orbits." The complex wave functions that represent the probable location of an electron in a given shell or subshell are quite different than the planetary orbits that come to mind with this term. However, Schlagel does report that Heisenberg dismisses these orbits as fictitious and I did see a recent Nova episode using "electron orbits" complete with graphics illustrating a completely circular orbit. So is it fair that I count this as one of my factual errors? You be the judge. Richard Schlagel is a high end academic who writes with a very readable style. The modest list of problems that I saw with this book does not materially detract from the pleasure of reading it.

Schlagel has enormous affection for the people who over many centuries created our shared understanding of science. That combined with the enormous scope of the story he is telling makes this a book that I can highly recommend.