Jove

Hah, scared you for a second, didn't I?

Today, I picked up in my school's library "God: The Evidence". I flipped through it, and at first glance, the "evidence" seemed laughable. Is anyone else familiar with this work, and what do you think of it?

scumble

Phew, that's a relief.
I'm happy to say I haven't read such a book for a while.

Mageth

Was this a public school library? I hope not.

WWSD

Never read it, what were these "proofs?"

Jove

Yes, public school library. But they have other religious texts besides Christian, so I don't hold it against them too harshly.

And I don't have it in front of me right now, but the proof seemed to consist of the fine-tuning argument, NDE's, statistics on how atheists lived an unhappier life than theists, faith healing statistics....and that's all I can remember right now.

themistocles

I'm a history nerd, I never venture anywhere but the history section of my public library, do public libraries actually have a religion or mystic section? Bizarre. I'm not against it, I kind of loathe the idea of banning books, barring bomb-making and porn.

Jobar

Let's put this in GRD.

Jobar goes off to read his Hustler's Illustrated Guide to Plastic Explosive Manufacture And Hot Sex

HaysooChreesto!

Porn?!?! How dare you besmirch such a fine institution. Many fine people have died so that we may look at naked women.

cpickett

God The Evidence - Amazon

The only book I could find by that title, here is the "review":

Wall Street Journal, December 23, 1997
Like Mr. Buckley, Patrick Glynn is a Christian who has written a book about his faith. But his is a very different journey-from faith to agnosticism and finally back to faith again. As he puts it: "This book had its origins in a spiritual reawakening-or to put the situation somewhat less philosophical atheist or agnostic, I finally realized that there was in fact a God."

Mr. Glynn, the product of a secular Harvard education roughly 25 years after Mr. Buckley was at Yale, is a former arms-controller and now a professor at George Washington University. In "God: The Evidence" he sets out in layman's language the scientific evidence for the existence of God. This is a monumental and ultimately impossible task-no one can reason his way to faith-but Mr. Glynn's review of the scientific literature is compelling.

His thesis is that the scientific discoveries of the past 25 years, especially in the physical sciences, have refuted the idea of a "random universe"-the modern idea that human life was a chance event-in favor of the "anthromorphic principle": the idea that there is an intelligent guiding hand at work. The phrase "anthromorphic principle" was coined by Brandon Carter, a Cambridge University physicist and cosmologist, at a seminal 1973 lecture in Krakow, Poland, where the world's greatest scientific thinkers had gathered to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of Copernicus. He argued that the long list of mysterious coincidences inexplicable to students of the origins of the universe share one common denominator: All were necessary for the creation of human life, thus implying a creation by design.

Carter was by no means alone in these God-friendly views. His lecture was inspired by ideas that were just then beginning to percolate in scientific circles and that took off afterward. Mr. Glynn summarizes a host of these ideas, among them those of astronomer Fred Hoyle, progenitor of the "big bang," who once said: "An explosion in a junkyard does not lead to sundry bits of metal being assembled into a useful working machine."

Mr. Glynn devotes a chapter to the science of psychology, reviewing studies that show a correlation between religious belief and mental health-in contrast to Freud's view of religion as a childish illusion in need of correction. Elsewhere, he looks at the growing body of literature on near-death experience, which he believes offer evidence of an afterlife.

Underlying Mr. Glynn's analyses is one crucial point, which is that Western intellectual life is undergoing a huge shift: It is finding room for God. Until very recently the history of modern scientific thought-Galileo, Darwin, Freud-pointed away from religion toward a secular world view. Now, the "God hypothesis" is gaining ground; and for the first time since the heretic Galileo appeared before the Inquisition, science and faith aren't on a collision course.