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Hobby Forum Index » Arts - Books - Reviews » Book Review: The Ghost In The Universe (Taner Edis)
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| Anthony Campbell |
 Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2003 3:13 am |
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Taner Edis
THE GHOST IN THE UNIVERSE
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Book review by Anthony Campbell. Copyright © Anthony
Campbell (2003).
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Taner Edis belongs to that company of skeptics about the
existence of God who nevertheless find religious questions
to be important. As a result, his treatment of the question
generally avoids superficiality and is well referenced. He
has read pretty widely and, somewhat unusually, has a good
grasp of the Islamic view of God, having grown up in
Turkey. Now, however, he lives and works in the USA, where
he is a physicist.
The book is largely concerned with Christian and Islamic
views of God, though since both these religions have roots
in Judaism and the Old Testament, Jewish concepts of the
divine are also cited. There is little or nothing about
non-Abrahamic religions apart from a few references to
Buddhism; this is no doubt understandable in view of the
expected readership for the book, which is mainly American
and Christian. However, some reference to the considerable,
if often unacknowledged, importance of Zoroastrianism for
post-exilic Judaism and for Christianity would have been
useful.
There is a widespread notion afoot which says that religion
and science have nothing to say to each other. Edis finds
that this idea tends to trivialize religion by making it
over-conceptual and a topic for philosophy alone. If we
take religion seriously, he says, we should apply the whole
of human knowledge to the question. He therefore avoids
much discussion of the classic "proofs" of God (which are
widely recognized to be inconclusive in any case), but he
does look at what light can be shed on the subject from our
modern knowledge of evolution and of physics. (This is, in
effect, a discussion of the Argument from Design.)
Inevitably, in a book destined for the American market, he
has to dispose of so-called "Creation Science"; once this
has been done, Darwinism in his view leaves little room for
any kind of Divine Plan in biology. As for physics, theists
have claimed to find evidence for God both on the large
scale, in cosmology (the apparent "fine tuning of the
universe for life") and on the small scale, in quantum
mechanics, where some believe that consciousness plays a
vital role in deciding what happens. But Edis points out
that the fine tuning can be explained in non-theistic ways
and that there is no real evidence for a Divine mind
directing quantum events; as Laplace remarked to Napoleon,
the phenomena can be explained without this hypothesis. "We
seem to live in a strictly natural, impersonal world,
indifferent to our hopes and fears."
All the Abrahamic religions attach great importance to Holy
Writ, and this is particularly true of Islam, which regards
the Quran as directly inspired by God. Edis treats all such
claims even-handedly, concluding that all sacred texts are
of human origin. And he has a separate chapter on
Christianity, which will evidently be of prime interest to
most of his readers. Here he echoes much modern scholarship
in finding a large mythic element in accounts of Jesus's
life, though he does not feel able to go as far as those,
such as G.A. Wells, who doubt the entire existence of Jesus
as a historical figure.
As far back as the nineteenth century, disillusioned
refugees from conventional religion sought to find a way of
maintaining faith in a science-dominated world by seeking
the paranormal. Psychical research, now renamed
parapsychology, began largely as a reaction to perceived
soulless materialism. Edis considers this option, but
concludes that the evidence for the paranormal is
unconvincing. The same applies to reports of miracles in
general; a non-miraculous explanation can usually be found
if one looks hard enough, he believes.
While this may well be true, Edis does not wholly avoid
falling into the skeptic's trap of adopting rationalist
explanations uncritically. For example, when the Virgin
made her final appearance at Fatima in 1917 a large crowd
turned up to witness the promised miracle, and duly saw the
sun performing extraordinary gyrations. Edis suggests that
this may have been due to a rare atmospheric phenomenon
called a "sun dog" or "false sun". The difficulty with this
idea is to account for the occurrence of such a rare event
on cue at just the promised time. His alternative
suggestion of a "contagious misperception" is perhaps more
plausible.
There has always been a tendency to seek for evidence of
God's existence at the subjective level, in those
experiences usually designated as mystical. That such
psychological events do occur, are widespread in all
societies, and are enormously important for those who have
them is certain, but the question is whether they are
merely subjective or afford genuine knowledge about
ultimate reality. They produce feelings of utter certainty,
but could this be delusive? And how far is all mystical
experience inevitably coloured by the culture of the person
to whom it occurs? Edis offers a pretty balanced discussion
of such questions but concludes, as one would expect, that
claims to knowledge based on mysticism cannot be sustained.
This is one of the best books on its subject to have
appeared in recent years. It will not, I imagine, persuade
any readers to alter their opinions about the questions it
deals with, for religious views are not accessible to
intellectual argument. Tertullian famously remarked: "I
believe because it is absurd", and a similar attitude was
adopted centuries later by Kierkegaard. Although he does
not cite these authors, Edis appears to recognize the
hopelessness of the task of persuasion. "It is scientific
thinking, not religion, which is profoundly unnatural for
us; no matter how science progresses, most of us will be
most comfortable explaining the world through the actions
of personal agents. ... For most people, learning to go
without a God is a costly undertaking for no clear
benefit."
I do have two relatively minor gripes about the book. One
is that Edis uses "It" as a neutral pronoun to refer to God
instead of the more usual "He". This usage seems to be
creeping in quite widely in progressive circles these days
and is no doubt yet another manifestation of political
correctness, but I find it jars. The second quibble
concerns the large number of notes that are stuffed into
untidy cubbyholes at the end of each chapter. I know that
this is pretty well inevitable nowadays (footnotes are
nearly extinct), but I think Edis would have done better to
work at least the more important of these addenda into the
text.
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%T The Ghost in the Universe
%A Taner Edis
%I Premetheus Books
%C Amherst, New York
%D 2002
%G ISBN 1-57392-977-8
%P 326 pp
%K religion
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