Exploring the MIRACLE between science and religion
Robert De Filippis is of a teleological persuasion, i.e., he feels that life is goal oriented, that it moves with purpose, and he is very dismayed by the current debate in America between non-causal neo-Darwinian evolution and causal intelligent design because it misses what he considers the main point: the supernatural is actually part of the natural world. We are created by and co-create the universe in turn.
You can, as he freely admits, find this just weird, or you can begin to open your mind and ask questions.
Let us start with logic. "Generally speaking, we do not question the logic that shapes our thinking…We are like fish in water--we live in it." And, regardless of whether we are treating science or religion, it is the binary logic of Aristotle's "excluded middle" (something cannot be both right and wrong) that he wishes us to discard. Both religion and science are closed systems, each with its own ontology and epistemology. "We need another look not only at what we know, but how we know what we know."
The author's argument against monotheistic religious beliefs emphasizes the trivialism of fundamentalist Christianity but, more importantly, rejects such universally basic Christian tenets as "(1) the ontology of flawed and separate humans, (2) the cosmology of a dual and separated universe…and (3) the rejection of factual analysis in favor of blind faith in clearly unsubstantiated beliefs."
As for science, the classical level of understanding the universe which Newton's laws served so well, is no longer applicable to reality since the introduction of quantum mechanics in which probability only becomes actuality through the agency of the observer. To serve his ends he quotes a great many physicists, mathematicians, theoretical biologists, cosmologists…that whole crowd. It is probably the only book you will read in which Derrida and the Jesuits sit side by side.
"Our goal" writes the author, "should not be a new set of truths to believe, but a new orientation that allows us to continue asking." He would like us to seriously consider the possibility (probability?) that human consciousness and the universe--the two great mysteries of the age--are inextricably intertwined. Weird? Maybe. But certainly worth asking.
Review by Bookreview.com
