Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsNice try, but the author is a bit too full of himself, and it's a little short on science!
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 27, 2013
If you count biocentrism, there are essentially three science based theologies that explain how consciousness, the triumphant crown of creation, came to be in a universe that began with absolutely nothing. In fact, the odds against the creation of intelligent human beings is simply astronomical. Consider the physics of our universe:
There are perhaps a hundred fundamental physical constants. These are things like the mass of a proton, the charge on an electron, the strength of the strong nuclear force, the fine structure constant, the speed of light in a vacuum and the gravitational constant. For a complete list, Google "NIST fundamental physical constants index". There is NO physical reason why these universal constants should have the values that they do, and if conditions at the beginning of our universe were slightly different, the values of these constants would have been very different. But it is a fact that if any one of them was different by as little as one part in a thousand life in this universe would not be possible. Indeed, if some of them were even slightly different than the values we measure, matter would not exist at all.
Or consider the odds against animal life ever developing on the nascent earth, or virtually any other planet (as outlined in Peter Ward's book: "Rare Earth"). Most stars in the universe are smaller than our sun, so the habitable zone surrounding them would be so close to the star that gravitational lock (One side perpetually facing the star) would guarantee that animal life would never have a chance to develop. The large moon of earth, a very rare phenomenon,is the only thing keeping the poles from precessing through 90 degrees over the course of a few million years. That size precession would destroy developing animal life. The planet Jupiter is in a circular orbit at the correct distance from the earth to protect it from life ending asteroid strikes, while the Jupiters surrounding all the other planets we have seen so far are in eccentric orbits (which would likely send earth-like planets hurtling off into space) or are too close to their suns to serve the same purpose as our own Jupiter. There are a whole slew of other reasons that animal life was fantastically lucky to develop on our earth!
The three scientific theologies that currently explain these and other unlikely anthropic circumstances of our existence are scientific cosmology, intelligent design, and biocentrism.
Make no mistake. Modern cosmology IS a theology. It may be based on scientific observations, but it is no more provable than the thesis of God!. The current scientific theology suggests that the universe did explode into existence from nothing. It explains the fine tuning of the cosmological constants by postulating a "multiverse". "M-theory" (as explained by Stephen Hawking) requires ten to the 500th power, (a fantastic number) of universes. It needs a nearly infinite supply of universes so that all combinations and values of cosmological constants can be "tried out", as well as all the one-off circumstances that allowed the creation of animal life and ultimately consciousness. Most of these universes would never even allow the formation of matter, or, if they did, would ultimately be sterile. But if you get that many tries, chance should produce at least one human bearing earth!
The second scientific theology in the running to explain how we came about is "intelligent design". Intelligent design IS based on science and is NOT the same thing as creationism or creation science. It involves itself with the statistical analysis of biological and physical data and is a major thorn in the side of the scientific reductionists who try to justify scientific cosmology and evolution science. Biologists had to admit that while Darwin was right about common ancestry and natural selection, the third leg of his theory, random mutation, does not explain how life started in the first place. Intelligent design simply argues that in order for such an improbable species as Man to have evolved on such an improbable planet in such an improbable universe, there must be an intelligence behind his creation. If this argument seems unlikely because of its simplicity (or, if you will, naivety), in comparison with the scientific cosmological theory invoking a nearly infinite number of sterile universes in order to produce the one in which we live, Intelligent design acquits itself quite well.
Biocentrism is quite different from scientific cosmology or intelligent design in that it does not postulate a scenario for creation, or any form of history for that matter. It is based upon the discovery that consciousness is an intrinsic property of reality. The roll of consciousness in the production of the real world is part of the theory of quantum mechanics refined by such luminaries as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg (much to the horror of Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrodinger). Biocentrism argues that nothing exists until and unless it is observed by a conscious observer. When a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, according to biocentrism, it does NOT make a noise. In fact, the tree and its noise are really just waves of probability existing in an undefined state, and do not become actual trees or noise until they are observed by a conscious observer.
In order to show how this is so, the author expends considerable time explaining the famous double slit experiment in which electrons can produce either an interference pattern (wave-like property) or a bell curve pattern (particle-like property) depending on how the experiment is set up. In short, electrons and other subatomic particles exist as probability waves until the wave is collapsed by a conscious observer. He goes on to explain the improbability of the anthropic values of the universal constants, and time as an illusion. Essentially he says that the only reason that the universe contains its anthropic coincidences is that living observers looked at it and collapsed the wave forms to create the universe in the only way that it could be created if living observers were there to look at it in the first place. In other words, life creates the universe, and not the other way around.
Regardless of what you think of the biocentrism hypothesis, the author's science is superficial, and he is not very convincing. His arguments are in accordance with quantum physics, but they don't fit in with ordinary reality and he fails to give the reader any reason to accept them in lieu of ordinary reality. Without some sort of evidence, it is hard to take biocentrism seriously. Another criticism is that he inserts himself and his family into the book in various places to no useful effect. He is a physician. You are very aware that he doesn't seem to care much for his mother or father, and feels that his sister was badly served by his family. He describes his rather large estate in Clinton Massachusetts well enough that you can find it on Google Earth.
On the plus side, he does describe biocentrism well enough to get the point across. Furthermore, biocentrism has a validity rooted in quantum physics. Originally, the standard model predicted that the quarks that make up hadrons (protons and neutrons) would have no mass. In order to give them mass, the theorists had to invent the Higgs field. With the recent confirmation that the Higgs boson does exist, it appears that mass is not an intrinsic property of matter, but is instead constructed entirely from the energy of the interactions between massless elementary partials, and their quantum fields.
The question the reader must ask himself is, "Is reality real?". And if, in fact,it isn't, and consciousness creates the reality we live in, perhaps there are other realities created by other intelligences. And maybe God has a place to live after all.
