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4.0 out of 5 stars
This is NOT what you're thinking!, January 30, 2003
This book is a gem -- buy it. The only reason I didn't give it five stars is that the copy I had contained a number of spell-checked typographical errors (e.g. "most" instead of "must") that I found amusing, but nit-pickers may find annoying or distracting. Also the cover material could be improved, but I prefer a bargain over slickness and substance over appearance. This book is not at all like most books dealing with creation and/or evolution. I was reminded more of books like Douglas Hofstadter's _Metamagical Themas_ and popular-level works on chaos theory, fractals, and the strange implications of modern physics. Professor Herrmann's attempts to explain the mathematical logic of his work should hold some interest for people involved in a number of fields such as computer simulation, linguistics, probability, advanced physics, etc. Professor Herrmann does not bombastically state that one view is obvious and anyone who doesn't accept it must be an idiot. Rather, he demonstrates that at a fundamental level, the purely naturalistic (atheistic), designed/theistic-evolutionary, and direct creation frameworks are equally valid, and therefore secondary evidences should be examined without ruling out any of them. What was especially fascinating to me was the way Dr. Herrmann illustrated his strict mathematical proofs (available on the Web) with amusing and imaginative extended analogies. In our every day modern life, we experience examples of human thought producing designed phenomena that purposely appear to be chaotic but have an underlying logic. These phenomena can be encoded in compressed forms, filed and catalogued with labels that are essentially further compression or packaging of the phenomena, edited by the insertion of similar media, etc. Then by simply popping a videotape, computer CD, or DVD into a machine, the designed phenomena comes to life in all its glory. Dr. Herrmann shows that we can just as easily believe that God created the Universe in a similar manner. Although we can't know if He simply thought up the universe in a mature form, or if in some sense He created it in a virtual or "parallel" form (or if our concepts of such things can begin to do justice to the workings of God), these simple images give us some basic concept of how a universe could appear suddenly but with an appearance of age. Dr. Herrmann explains with as little math as he can (you may need to brush up on your set theory and logic) that this is a perfectly valid possibility. Dr. Herrmann completed his original, purely mathematical work in this area before the Intelligent Design movement was formed, and has since expanded it to (in general terms) a Grand Unified Theory of Everything. As noted, it is open to several interpretations, but this should encourage everyone to take a good look at it. What I liked best about this book is that it serves notice that belief in an active and rapid Divine creation of a universe with many appearances of age is logically valid, that there may be (and in many cases today there is) intelligent design operating to produce apparently random or chaotic phenomena, and that the question is not, "How do we explain everything without reference to God?" not "How many universes does it take to explain away the Anthropic Principle?" but "Are there evidences that THIS universe, and everything in it as it is, was more likely produced by design than by the raw forces within it?" Again, Dr. Herrmann does not use bombast and pontification, but he does burst the pompous bubbles of scientific snobs -- he doesn't insist that only one choice is intelligent, but he demonstrates that it is intelligent to make an open choice rather than insisting on naturalistic blinders.
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