Bill Gairdner is one of those rare writers who has the ability to take a complex subject, condense it into almost poetic prose, and keep your attention long enough to read the 400+ page tome. I have read several chapters individually over the years, they were so good, I had to return and read the book in its entirety. Hands down, this is the best book written in defense of absolutes. Whether you agree or not does not really matter, since this book will, at the very least, present a thorough case for absolutes in nature and morality. As a side note, a previous reviewer stated that Gairdner supports the theory of Creation. While this may be true, it is misleading. What Gairdner, in fact, supports is the idea that the cosmos was "created" by God, something many physicists themselves belief. Here is a direct quote from the book regarding this subject:
"In preparation for Cosmos, Bios, Theos (1992), the editors sent a handful of questions, including one asking for 'thoughts on the concept of God and on the existence of God,' to sixty scientists of international reputation, among whom were two dozen Nobel Prize winners. The answers were surprising: the physicists were far more likely to say that nature and the universe are here for a reason and by design (many believe they were created by God) than those in the biological sciences, whose answers were grounded in...bottomless materialism that has served as a creation myth for secular science since the nineteenth century. This is interesting in itself, as it is physics that underlies biology, not the other way around, atoms and all the smaller particles being far more fundamental than cells and genes" (p. 78). To say, as one of the previous reviewers had, that Gairdner is basing his book and argument on faith instead of reason is (a) not fair (since Gairdner is primarily citing scientists and scholarly sources) and (b) the reviewer appears to be ignorant of developments in logic since Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica; Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem demonstrated that all logical systems are incomplete and are all grounded in unprovable axioms (the implication being that even absolute truths, like mathematical ones, are grounded in...faith - that is, faith in the unprovable axiom). There is no dichotomy between faith and reason - the reviewer must be politely corrected and permanently ignored (since we are living in a post-Gödelian world!).
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Eamon Hoey
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Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 23, 2020
