Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science and Spirituality at the End of an Age [Hardcover]

John David Ebert (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1999

Analyzes the fusion of religious and scientifiic thinking at the turn of the millennium. Cutting-edge thinkers and practitioners in all scientific disciplines are emerging with startling discoveries and theories, all of which have much in common with the ancient myths of many spiritual traditions. In Twilight of the Clockwork God, John David Ebert brings many of these views together and illustrates their place in the history and development of Western thought.

At the center of the book are interviews that allow nine highly regarded thinkers to present their theories in their own words. Drawing on his expertise in this subject, Ebert skillfully places the different ideologies in a clear context. A historical overview demonstrates not only the emergence of modern science from ancient myth, but also shows that contemporary science is returning to the ground of its mythic origins, drawing from its images, narratives and metaphors to form a seamless continuum of ideas for the dawning millennium.

Those interviewed include Brian Swimme, Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham,Terence McKenna, Stanislav Grof, Lynn Margulis, William Irwin Thompson and Deepak Chopra.

In his conclusion, Ebert argues that no longer can we conceptualize our universe as a mechanical thing-a machine, a clockwork. This outdated and "pernicious" world-view has long blinded Westerners to the truth. The universe has revealed itself as a living entity, self-sustaining, growing, sentient and bursting with creativity. Thus our culture is undergoing a profound change in cosmology as the images of myth are used to expand our horizons of scientific knowledge.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

From The Tao of Physics to At Home in the Universe, most successful books on science and spirituality have come from scientists whose research led them to embrace previously marginalized religious views or to develop a new understanding of the divine. So Ebert's argument that "the worldview of materialism is currently undergoing transubstantiation into a more spiritually-informed way of regarding the cosmos" is surely tenable. But his call to overthrow a Clockwork God is outdated, for most scientific theories have already moved beyond Newton's mechanistic vision of the universe. Ebert has assembled some important or influential thinkers for this book of interviews, however, including evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, Deepak Chopra, biologist Rupert Sheldrake, chaos theoretician Ralph Abraham and mythologist William Irwin Thompson. Ebert seems inordinately enamored of LSD and other hallucinogens, so his discussions with Stanislav Grof and Terence McKenna, for example, focus on this topic to the detriment of other subjects. Throughout, Ebert remains a sensitive interviewer, willing to stay in the background while his subjects expound. Anyone interested in the confluence of spirituality and science will find material to engage and challenge in this congenial introduction to some of the most exciting and daring scientists of our era.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Ebert, a scholar of mythology and contemporary culture, here interviews nine unorthodox thinkers. His main thesis is that our concept of the universe is shifting from that of a machine to that of a living organism and that scientists therefore need to find more organic images that will help link them to the universe instead of making them external observers. After presenting a basic historical context and discussing the importance of mythological symbols, Ebert presents his interviews in question-and-answer form. His experts come from many different fields, including anthropology, ecology, medicine, psychology, and philosophy. Though they do not always agree with one another, they all have strong qualifications and new ways of approaching old questions that are fascinating and thought-provoking. The interview style helps keep the reader from becoming lost in unfamiliar and often complex ideas. The book also has an excellent annotated bibliography for further reading. Recommended for public libraries.C. Robert Nixon, MLS, Lafayette, IN
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Council Oak Books; 1 edition (May 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571780793
• ISBN-13: 978-1571780799
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,329,036 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am a writer and a cultural critic. I have thus far published three books and a handful of articles. My first book, which is available on Amazon, is called "Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science & Spirituality at the End of an Age" (Council Oak Books, 1999). My second book is called "Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society" (Cybereditions, 2005). It is also available on Amazon. My third is entitled "Dead Celebrities, Living Icons: Tragedy and Fame in the Age of the Multimedia Superstar" (Praeger / Greenwood 2009). I am working on a fourth book about technology, history and the cult of the dead, tentatively entitled "The Wonder Child vs. the Elders: How the Cult of the Dead Shaped Civilization." I am not, by the way, a Jungian.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Thoughts Without Synthesis, June 1, 2001

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Kenneth Laws (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science and Spirituality at the End of an Age (Hardcover)

I read all the way through John David Ebert's "Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science and Spirituality at the End of Age," but there isn't much meat in the text. It's inspiring, in a way, that one can get a published book out of just asking eight philosophers to comment on the history and place of their own work. Aside from that, Ebert's contribution is an annotated timeline of about 120 books since 1894. This begins with Rudolf Steiner and works through Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred North Whitehead, Joseph Campbell, Marshall McLuhan, Fritjof Capra, and many others, away from mechanical models of the universe and toward mythical and biological models. We can now use man's shared and perhaps universal myths to think about our place in the growth and interaction of natural ecologies -- perhaps including the Earth ("Gaia") or the universe as living systems. If that proves a productive line of reasoning, these philosophers will have been among the pioneers. Some of the most interesting themes come from attempted syntheses of Western and Eastern thought. I might look up some of the cited authors, especially Stanislav Grof, William Irwin Thompson, and at least the early writings of Deepak Chopra.

18 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Pretty title, May 20, 2000

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Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science and Spirituality at the End of an Age (Hardcover)

Some of this is New Age babble of the most annoying sort, the usual concoction of pseudo science and nineteenth century vitalism. Ebert, who conducts the "conversations" with eight current New Age illuminati that form the bulk of the book, is a pretty fancy babble master himself, proving without half trying that he can speak pseudobabblese with the best of them. Consider this formulation as he converses with Rupert Sheldrake on page 46: "So your theory that information can be transmitted by these non-material morphic fields makes plausible a paradigm in which phenomena such as telepathy or ESP can be understood. Can you explain how your paradigm makes sense out of this type of phenomena?"

Note that Ebert is incorporating into his talk scientific-sounding terminology shorn of any scientific meaning. It's a sort of sly of mouth that lends a "scientific" gloss to the babbling. Ebert's "non-material morphic fields" (from Sheldrake), for example, sounds good since we have "field theory" in physics. Sheldrake chimes in with talk of "fields of perception." Note especially, however, the killer word "paradigm." For the last couple of decades or so, one way to test a book's BS content has been to count the number of times the word "paradigm" appears. Once every ten pages or so is tolerable. More than that should start your BS-detector to crackling. New Age babblers never use the word "construct" or "idea" or such a phrase as "body of knowledge" when they can throw in "paradigm" instead. In general they like to spice up their discourse with a plethora of scientific sounding words and phrases such as "psychokinetic influence," "fusion," "quantum events," "cultural hybrids," etc., as Ebert and Sheldon do on, for example, page 48. On pages 94 and 95, in the space of nine sentences, Ebert manages to use the New Age shibboleth "resonance" six times.

There's also the patterning of words to imitate a reasoned discourse, a weighing and choosing of plausibilities as though weighing evidence or comparing experimental results. Thus Sheldrake says on page 47, "...[S]ome...phenomena of parapsychology are hard to explain from the point of view of morphic fields and morphic resonance. For example, anything to do with precognition or premonition doesn't fit into an idea of influences just coming in from the past. So, I don't think this is going to give a blanket explanation of all parapsychological phenomena, but I think it's going to make some of it, at least, seem normal rather than paranormal." Notice how this mumbo jumbo makes it seem like something is being explained. Not all of this is annoying, thankfully. The conversation with psychedelic guru Terence McKenna is interesting and invigorating, and the chat with Deepak Chopra is uplifting and admirable, which is what New Age thought in general tries to be. The New Age movement itself, which is easy to make fun of (it takes itself so seriously, I can't resist), is actually a noble enterprise engaged in trying to free us from the shackles of antiquated religions and the limitations of scientific materialism. The New Age in fact is a new religion in the making. In view of the stupidity and intolerance of some world religions, this is a welcome development. The problem is that many New Age apostles in skirting scientific materialism, skirt the scientific method as well. Much of the conversation in this book wants to substitute pronouncements for trial and error experiments. Thus Sheldrake can postulate morphic fields and morphic resonance, and continue on as though such notions had been experimentally verified and independently confirmed. And the terrible thing is I really don't think a lot of the New Agers really know the difference between asserting something and presenting an idea in a scientifically verifiable manner. Ebert is perhaps aware of this criticism because on page 92 he pays considerable homage to the scientific method, but then continues on as if it didn't matter.

In short, this book has a beautiful title, but it's a little after the fact since quantum mechanics killed the clockwork god a long time ago. Instead we have the god who plays dice, a much more sophisticated god who can Be or Not Be in the twinkling of a probability function. To find out more about this god we need the kind of speculation sometimes found in New Age thinking, but more than that we need the scientific method, a process that Ebert and friends would prefer to ignore.

5.0 out of 5 stars Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment, December 30, 2011

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Halifax Student Account "a-beautiful-idea" (Liverpool, UK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science and Spirituality at the End of an Age (Hardcover)

Apologies for the title of this review, it is indeed the title to John Hogan's excellent collection of interviews with various New Age 'philosophers' like Ken Wilber, Terence McKenna and the rest of the pro-life movement. By pro-life, I mean the opposite to scientific nihilism.

While Hogan's effort had glowing reviews in the press and now on Amazon, Ebert has been lampooned. Ok, I guess we should laugh at John David Ebert for having the audacity to publish a collection of interesting interviews, and without the public-relations machine John Hogan had, and so we should give this independent author rubbish reviews, especially when he and Hogan have basically written the same entertaining book. Go figure!

Twilight of the Clockwork God is written by a clever guy, so I will not be bitchy or snooty; even more so because Edert is an `independent' thinker (whatever that means) and he is enthusiastic in investigating the yet to be fully understood Death of God , when the rest of us are working the nine to five! So if you enjoy John Hogan then you will probably like John David Ebert's book. Though I do think that Ebert nudges passed Hogan in the brains stakes!