The G.O.D. Experiments: How Science Is Discovering God In Everything, Including Us (Hardcover)

by Gary E. Schwartz (Author), William L. Simon (Contributor)
Key Phrases: new predictions that can, intelligent evolution, invisible guidance, Ockham's Razor, New York City, University of Arizona (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Schwartz, a University of Arizona professor of psychology and neurology, believes passionately that 21st-century science provides clues to G.O.D.—the "Guiding, Organizing, Designing" process animating the universe. With the fervor of an evangelist, he draws on quantum physics, psychology, mathematics and evolutionary biology to convert unbelievers to the idea that this G.O.D. exists. He underwent his own conversion after testing the claims of a man who said that his dreams could foretell the future. In a kind of double-blind 10-day experiment, Schwartz found that the man's dreams accurately described locations, randomly selected, for them to visit each day. Schwartz became convinced that nothing happens by chance and that some kind of organizing and guiding process must exist. Order rather than chance is the exception to the rule in the universe, says Schwartz, because all objects are interrelated. Many, both scientists and not, will have trouble accepting Schwartz's sophomoric and overly determined experiments—you can't have sand paintings without a designer, but that doesn't prove that the universe has a designer—but others no doubt will find Schwartz's blend of pop spirituality and pop science satisfying explanations of intelligent design. 5 b&w illus. (Apr. 4)
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Review
"Gary Schwartz has written a provocative book...The journey he takes you on is fascinating, mind-opening, and, above all, entertaining."

-- Andrew Weil, M.D., author of the New York Times bestseller Healthy Aging --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Atria (April 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743477405
• ISBN-13: 978-0743477406
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #498,903 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

78 of 93 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I Believe in God; I Believe in Science; I Do Not Believe in This Book , May 8, 2006

By	Danusha Goska (Bloomington, IN) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I believe in God. I believe in Science. I do not believe in this book.

I very much appreciated Dr. Gary E. Schwartz's 2002 book, "The Afterlife Experiments." Schwartz's warm and sparkly personality came through. My reader's affection for him makes this review all the harder to write.

The first paragraph of "The G.O.D. Experiments" is a keeper. Schwartz asks, "Imagine that there had been no Abraham, no Moses, no Jesus . . ." would, in such a world, science come to describe something like God?

Unfortunately, the rest of the book does not live up to the depth and elegance of that first paragraph. Further, I fear that books like this do more to hurt scientific research into metaphysical phenomena than help it.

"The G.O.D. Experiments" reads more like a series of disjointed and mildly self-indulgent blog entries than a book. It proves no central point. The title is only tangentially reflective of the contents.

Disjointed: the book contains bar graphs recording a computer's attempts to choose random numbers, a poem by the author, an annotated bibliography of books, some he likes, some he doesn't, highly personal anecdotes, and the tale of a "Kabbalah corgi."

The book is also repetitive to the point of driving this reader to search for a projectile that might reach the author's home in Arizona. In an attempt to prove that the universe's order defies theories of random generation, Schwartz shook up the grains of sand in a sand painting. No matter how hard or how often he shook up those grains of sand, he reports, they never again reformed as a sand painting.

Needless to say, scientific proponents of an atheist worldview would heap scorn upon this experiment, insisting that it falsely represented their arguments for how order arises out of god-free nothingness. I'm not one of those people, and their protest is not mine. I just got profoundly irritated, as a reader, having to read Schwartz's multitudinous references to his shaking a sand painting.

Schwartz says his book is meant to be "popular," but he speaks casually of difficult material - the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for example - in a way that would certainly lose readers without previous knowledge.

Schwartz reports that he used to be a secular agnostic. He recounts, with wide-eyed amazement, experiences that lead him to faith. The problem lies therein. In the same way that a powerfully psychic person, who had never studied the hard sciences, would probably not write a very good book about the hard sciences if he tried to do so after sticking his toe in the world of hard science, Dr. Schwartz, who built his career on academic science, and then stuck his toe into metaphysics, has not written a very good book about that.

There are people who have dealt with their own psychic abilities, their own contact with the dead, and their own religious faith all of their lives. They have a more mature appreciation of what these phenomena are.

Someone with a more mature appreciation of metaphysics would never write, as Schwartz does, in a way that feels both grandiose and innocent, in a few brief, sketchy pages, of revolutionizing education, medicine, and law, and "globally resolv[ing] our conflicts" merely because he, a Yale and Harvard affiliated professional scientist, has had an epiphany.

Um, Gary. News flash. Many of those unwashed of us who are not affiliated with Yale and Harvard have realized for a long time that God exists, that psychic abilities are real, and that synchronicity happens. And, funny thing. You know what? We still pull our pants on one leg at a time. And we have yet to revolutionize the legal system, or resolve global conflicts.

Too, like a tyro, Schwartz doesn't ask himself hard enough questions. In one anecdote, he reports praying for information, and a word popping into his head - "Sam" - that turns out to be the information he was seeking. In his attempt to interrogate this incident, Schwartz asks himself eleven questions. But he never asks this one: "How often have I prayed to receive a correct answer, and had a word pop into my had, and it was the *incorrect* word?" Someone long in the field of such research would ask that.

Self-identified "skeptics" have been unfair and unkind to Schwartz. That does not excuse, though, Schwartz's dismissal of them. Schwartz mentions Michael Shermer's "How We Believe," and identifies it as "incorrect," without clearly detailing how and why. He theorizes that people like Shermer do what they do for financial gain (268). Similarly, "skeptics" insist that psychics do what they do for money. This mutual mud slinging illuminates nothing, and degrades debate. Does anyone really believe that a young man interested only in money, and choosing a career, would chose skeptic *or* psychic ahead of, say, stock broker, or lawyer? Is it not possible that both Shermer and Schwartz are driven by beliefs they find genuinely worthy?

Finally, any book that, as "The G.O.D Experiments" does, introduces Wernher von Braun as a source of spiritual enlightenment and fails to mention von Braun's career as a Nazi and exploiter of slave labor . . . fails.

To one seeking a popular account of science and God, I recommend Lee Strobel's "Case for a Creator." For readers seeking more demanding material, there are books by John Polkinghorne and William Dembski. There is, of course, the Bible.

There are worse books you could read than "The G.O.D. Experiments." But I did expect more from the man who gave us "The Afterlife Experiments," a much better book.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars What are the G.O.D. experiments?, April 2, 2007

By	JOHN J. MCGRAW "author of Brain & Belief" (Solana Beach, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

What are the G.O.D. experiments? Dr. Gary E. Schwartz, a Harvard-trained psychologist, attempts to lead us through a set of experiences and reflections that converge to answer the question of all questions: is there a God? He and co-author William Simon have written an intriguing book that claims to use science and logic to answer this ultimate question. Given Schwartz's rigorous training (which he reminds us of throughout the book) one comes to expect something in the way of data and experimentation, especially given the title. The reader of this book needs to ask one simple question to determine whether or not Schwartz and Simon deliver: namely, what are the G.O.D. experiments?

Are the G.O.D. experiments Dr. Gary Schwartz's ten day long escapade throughout southern Arizona (these are carefully controlled laboratory conditions?) testing the validity of a British psychic named Christopher Robinson? Robinson, who Schwartz describes alternately as a blue-collar worker with marginal income and as a psychic whose faultless predictions have led to the capture of escaped murderers, IRA bombers, and crooked cops, came all the way from England to have his abilities tested by Schwartz, the famous author of such books as The Living Energy Universe (with Linda Russek), The Truth About Medium (also co-authored with Simon), and The Afterlife Experiments (co-authored with Simon, foreword by Deepak Chopra). Dr. Schwartz assures us that Robinson's predictions provide unassailable proof of his abilities though the psychic seems unable to ascertain Schwartz's own honesty and motivations:

"I subsequently learned that Christopher could be unreasonably suspicious at times--no doubt because of his dangerous work as an undercover agent and his extraordinary sensitivity as a psychic."

The so-called experiment that Schwartz designed for Robinson involved using his co-author (Simon) and wife as co-experimenters and a set of envelopes with psychic predictions as the data to be tested. Amazingly, this experiment parallels many prior `experiments' performed by Vaudeville magicians in front of their audiences and by Johnny Carson in front of millions of his viewers. But after reading this entertaining account of scientist and psychic, one is left uncertain whether this can be deemed an experiment at all let alone evidence for G.O.D.--Schwartz's acronym for the "guiding, organizing, designing process."

Perhaps the G.O.D. experiments are the various coincidences that Dr. Schwartz has experienced: his uncanny conversation one night with a God who called himself Sam (whom he selectively credits as using the name Sam from the Hebrew Shmu'el (`name of God' or `heard of God') rather than from Samael (Hebrew `venom of God') or Samiel (`the blind God')), his strange encounter with the heir of a diamond fortune, the bizarre repetition of the number 11 all around him when he taught at Yale, or the Kabbalistic path that led him straight to his very favorite pet, a Cardigan Welsh corgi named Willie. Sadly, after reading this book carefully one will have no clear answer about the G.O.D. experiments. Nevertheless, Schwartz will continue to assure us (as he does throughout) that "The G.O.D. Experiments presents a body of evidence from physics, mathematics, psychology, and parapsychology that provides compelling reasons to posit the existence of intelligent design everywhere present in the universe and daily life." Schwartz and Simon have put together a highly readable book sure to find a place on the bookshelf of any fan of Deepak Chopra. But if one who is scientifically inclined reads the book, it will undoubtedly disappoint.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Anecdotal and Repetitive, July 17, 2006

By	breaux (san francisco) - See all my reviews

Let me first say that I have no problem with the principal themes of this book: that there are extreme subtleties that operate in our lives; that the world is more than we can see; that a force -- whether one calls it god or anything else -- is operative in the world. i think there are many books that explore these profund ideas. But Dr. Schwartz's book was extremely disappointing in its execution of these ideas. By the end of the book I had the feeling that he had dictated this book and, because he needed the book to be certain length, gave the same name to different chapters that essentially covered the same material. I found Dean Radin's "Entangled Minds" a much more rigorous exploration of some of the subtleties that affect our lives. I have not read any of Dr. Schwartz's other books; but I have often noticed that, sometimes, an author has exhausted the limits of his/her explanation of a particular topic but still squeezes out a book from a much smaller pool of information. In the instance of this book, Dr. Schwartz should have exercised, perhaps, a bit more discipline and either not written this book or made it shorter. One final point: the name of this book is incredibly misleading. The "experiments" listed inside are highly non-rigourous thought experiments; I mean, so thin as to make me believe that Dr. Schwartz actually undercuts his arguments if those are the best positions he can muster.