The God problem : how a godless cosmos creates

The God problem How a godless cosmos creates

Howard K. Bloom, 1943-

Book - 2012

God's war crimes, Aristotle's sneaky tricks, Galileos creationism, Newton's intelligent design, entropys errors, Einstein's pajamas, John Conway's game of loneliness, Information Theory's blind spot, Stephen Wolfram's New Kind Of Science, and six monkeys at six typewriters getting it wrong. What do these have to do with the birth of a universe and with your need for meaning? Everything, as you're about to see.

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Subjects
Science > Social aspects.
Religion and science.
Cosmology > Miscellanea.
Published
Amherst, N.Y. : Prometheus Books 2012.
Language
English
Main Author
Howard K. Bloom, 1943- (-)
Physical Description
708 p. : ill. ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781616145514
  • 1. Appetizers, Canapés, and Snacks
  • Introduction: I Dare You-The Weirdest Ride in the Universe
  • The Cafe Table at the Beginning of the Universe
  • The Problem with God: The Tale of a Twisted Confession
  • 2. A Taste of Sin
  • Brace Yourself: The Five Heresies
  • Heresy Number One: Why A Does Not Equal A
  • When Is a Frog a River? Aristotle Wrestles Heraclitus
  • Heresy Number Two: Why One Plus One Does Not Equal Two
  • Heresy Number Three: Prepare to Be Burned at the Stake (The Second Law of Thermodynamics-Why Entropy Is an Outrage)
  • Heresy Number Four: Randomness Is Wrong-The Six Monkeys at Six Typewriters Error
  • A Brief History of the God Problem: Were Kepler, Galileo, and Newton Creationists?
  • Galileo's Nature Fetish: Poking the Pope
  • Gamow versus Hoyle: The War between Big Bang and Steady State
  • The Tale of the Termites
  • 3. The Saga of a Scratch Mark
  • The Mystery of the Magic Beans: What the Hell Is an Axiom?
  • Barley, Bricks, and Babylonians: The Birth of Math
  • Scratch Mud and You Get Mind: The Rise of a Virtual Reality
  • The Sorcery of Corners
  • Celebrities in the Heavens: How to Invent Astronomy
  • What's the Angle? Blindness in Babylon
  • Why Knot? The Egyptian Rope Trick
  • How to Hypnotize a Greek: Math as a Tourist Attraction
  • Seduce 'Em with Numbers: How to Do a Pythagoras
  • Squaring Your Way to Fame: Pythagoras's Hot New Theorem
  • 4. How Aristotle Invented the Axiom
  • A Trip to Plato's Cave
  • Aristotle Fights for Attention-Or Zeroing Zeno
  • How Euclid Makes Aristotle's "Science" Stick
  • Galileo's Dad and the Drug of Geometry
  • Kepler: How to Tickle the Soul of the Earth
  • Kepler's Boxes and Balls: Yes, Kepler's Freaky Math
  • 5. Everybody Do the Flip
  • Guillotining an Axiom: Severing the Neck of Parallel Lines
  • "One Man Deserves the Credit, One Man Deserves the Blame, and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Is His Name"
  • Bare-Naked Math: Peano Strips It Down
  • Ted Coons, Dancing Wonder: A Tale of Two Translations
  • Presto, Change-o: Translation's Little Secret
  • The Day You Uploaded Your Self Translation Saves Your Life
  • 6. Is Metaphor a Crime?
  • The Hunger of the Stuttering Forms: Isomorphic Symbol Sets
  • Leonardo's Stones: Why Metaphor Works
  • Plaid in the Pool: The Eye Doctor Who Gave You Waves
  • How Form Goes Manic-What's an Ur Pattern?
  • Real Estate in the Embryo: Location, Location, Location-Karl Ernst von Baer and Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch
  • Master of the Universe: Herbert Spencer, Grand Unifier and Flirt
  • The Scandal of the Century: George Eliot and Her Ape
  • Bulging Forth from Nothing: The Emergence of "Emergence"
  • Charlie Darwin Shows Up Late
  • The Zygote Snabs Herbert Spencer
  • The Embryo Goes Cosmic
  • 7. Einstein Turns an Axiom Inside Out
  • The Man Who Gave Star Trek Its Space-Bernhard Riemann
  • Albert Einstein's Pajamas
  • Einstein Gives Seven Ugly Ducklings a Home: The Year of Miracles
  • Einstein's Secret Weapon: Aristotle's Invention
  • The Adventures of Einstein's Predictions
  • 8. The Amazing Repetition Machine
  • Forget Information: Or How Claude Shannon Got It Wrong
  • The Case of the Conversational Cosmos
  • How Gossip Grows the Universe
  • The Magic Onion of Meaning
  • Doing the Glycerin Twist: David Bohm
  • Benoit Mandelbrot Zigs and Zags
  • 9. It's from Bits: The Two-Bit Tarantella
  • How Math Lost Its Pictures ... and How It Got Them Back Again
  • Fuse and Fizz, Thou Shalt Bud: Fractals and the Bounce from Boom to Bust
  • The Sorcery of Simple Rules
  • The Japanese Sword Maker and the Alchemy of Iteration
  • Gaming Your Way to Fame: John Conway Enters the Scene
  • Axioms in Silicon: Conway's Game of Life
  • Good-Bye to Equations: Stephen Wolfram's New Kind of Science
  • 10. What Are the Rules of the Universe?
  • The Case of the Obsessive-Compulsive Cosmos
  • Time, the Great Translator: An Information Theory of Time
  • Wrap Yourself in String: Iteration and Emergent Properties
  • Baking the Big Bagel: How to Start and End a Universe
  • Will Silicon Axioms Fly?
  • Conclusion: The Big Bang Tango-Quarking in the Social Cosmos
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

This is a fascinating book with a heap of unconnected tidbits and conceptual nuggets woven into an enjoyable story. Writer/publicist Bloom (The Lucifer Principle, CH, May'95, 32-4871) talks about the wonders in the universe and the puzzles that have intrigued the human mind for generations. The chapter and section headings tickle the reader, and their elaborations are "curiouser and curiouser," as Alice would have exclaimed. So much history without a touch of boredom, so much philosophy without denseness, and so much physics without equations are all presented with dressing and frosting in one book--a real bargain. But in the end, like George Carlin, Bloom leaves readers with provocative questions rather than answers: questions that can turn one's head like strong wine and grand poetry. He bluntly states that in those unanswered questions "lie the real answers to the question of how a cosmos without a bearded and bathrobed god creates." There is more wisdom than science in the recognition that ultimately there is mystery, not clear-cut answers, when one digs deep to unscramble the universe. Books like this add spice to the more substantial knowledge that hardworking scientists in laboratories and observatories bring to human understanding. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic, general, and professional audiences. V. V. Raman emeritus, Rochester Institute of Technology

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review

Scholar Bloom (The Genius of the Beast, 2009) addresses the question whether a god or supernatural power is required in order to explain the vastness, complexity, and creativity of the cosmos. He seeks a naturalistic explanation for the workings of the cosmos in lieu of relying on bearded deities, divine designers, and holy minds in the sky. Indeed, Bloom believes that some of Western science's laws and unquestioned assumptions ineluctably require a divine explanation. This is the god problem of the book's title. So, he proceeds to take his readers through a history of Western science, mathematics, and philosophy, suggesting when and how we got it wrong. While that is no easy task, Bloom engages heady material with enthusiasm, even when his unrelentingly folksy style wears a bit thin. Scientific experts will have to debate the merits of Bloom's views on, say, entropy and sociality and the conclusions he draws. Even assuming he is correct on all counts, a bearded and bathrobed god only becomes unnecessary, not impossible.--McConnell, Christopher Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

Readers may conclude that their foundational beliefs are wrongheaded. In this provocative and erudite work, Bloom (The Genius of the Beast) deconstructs "heresies" (e.g., A does not equal A; one plus one does not equal two; entropy is wrong) and shatters scientific laws. He, furthermore, poses the question, "How does a godless cosmos create?" Bloom's tone is much less acerbic and much more civil than the New Atheists' vitriol, and to pursue an answer to Bloom's query, readers will traverse a cerebral landscape: a masterful integration of anthropology, history, science, and philosophy. The author exposes readers to his model of cosmology, which he calls the Big Bagel theory. He presumes a multiverse, or "ensemble of universes"; it pays homage to the oscillating or cyclical universe, which expands and contracts ad infinitum. This view, according to Bloom, would unseat the dominant Big Bang model. VERDICT Bloom, an iconoclastic and seminal thinker, has been mentioned in the same breath as Stephen Hawking, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin; this contribution is paradigm-shifting and brings to mind Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In short, this intellectual tour de force and heady expedition will challenge readers' education, assumptions, and perceptions.-Brian Smith McCallum, Arlington Heights Memorial Lib., IL (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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