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The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates, by Howard Bloom
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Review
"If Howard Bloom is only 10 percent right, we’ll have to drastically revise our notions of the universe. . . . [His] argument will rock your world." -BARBARA EHRENREICH, National Magazine Award winner and author of Nickel and Dimed "Enthralling. Astonishing. Written with the panache of the Great Blondin turning somersaults on the rope above Niagara. Profound, extraordinarily eclectic, and crazy. The most exciting cliff-hanger of a book I can remember reading." -JAMES BURKE, Creator and host of seven BBC-TV series, including Connections"Bloody hell. . . . What a truly extraordinary book. I’m gobsmacked. It’s a fast-paced, highly readable, and deeply researched thriller-documentary that grapples with the big issues of the universe. . . . Food for the brain." -FRANCIS PRYOR, President of the Council for British Archaeology, author of Britain BC "For those of us who do not invoke god(s) to explain things, there is a challenge—where did the complexity of the physical and natural world come from? . . . This deep, provocative, spectacularly well-written book provides some answers. . . . A wonderful book." -ROBERT SAPOLSKY, MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" winner and author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers"Strong. Like a STEAM ROLLER. Impressive. Great." -RICHARD FOREMAN, MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" winner and founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater "A deeply engrossing and mind-bending meld of philosophy and science, written with great clarity, humor, and daring." -CHARLES SIEBERT, Contributing writer, New York Times Sunday Magazine"Truly awesome. . . . Bursting with insights and ideas, delivered with delightful verve and zest. . . . A tantalizing, fresh new view of the cosmos for humankind."-DUDLEY HERSCHBACH, Winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in ChemistryFrom the Hardcover edition.
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About the Author
Howard Bloom has been called "the Darwin, Newton, Einstein, and Freud of the twenty-first century" and "the next Stephen Hawking." He is the author of The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism ("impressive, stimulating, and tremendously enjoyable"—James Fallows, national correspondent, the Atlantic Monthly); Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century ("reassuring and sobering"—the New Yorker); and The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History ("mesmerizing"—the Washington Post). A recent visiting scholar at New York University, Bloom is the founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, founder of the Space Development Steering Committee (a group that includes astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Edgar Mitchell), and a founding board member of the Epic of Evolution Society. In addition, his scientific articles have appeared in PhysicaPlus, New Ideas in Psychology, and Across Species Comparisons and Psychopathology and on arXiv.org. He has appeared on Good Morning America, the CBS Morning News, CBS News Nightwatch, CNN, the BBC, and over one hundred other media outlets.
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Product details
Paperback: 708 pages
Publisher: Prometheus Books; New edition (February 2, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1633881423
ISBN-13: 978-1633881426
Product Dimensions:
6 x 1.8 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.2 out of 5 stars
115 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#470,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
As an atheist, this looked like it was going to be a great book --- it's very well written and looked like there would be some great material. However, I got into trouble with it pretty quickly and didn't even bother going past the first chapter. Here's the problem - Bloom starts by suggesting that we need to get rid of some preconceived notions such as 1 mightn't always be equal to 1 and more generally A may not be equal to A. He starts with an example of whether you (A) are the same as a clone of you, which he also refers to as A.I have to call bull on this. He's welcome to call you A and a clone of you A1 and then have a discussion as to whether A and A1 are the same but you have to define what you mean by equality before you can start playing games with definitions such as A = ARather surprising to me given that the author starts by talking about building the entire number system using Peano's axioms.I'm reminded of the old "paradox" question, "if an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, what happens?" The thing is, as soon as you accept the concept of an unstoppable force then you don't get to introduce the concept of an immovable object!So it just makes me agree more strongly with Stephen Hawking's comment that the art of philosophy is dead!
An ambitious work like this, unless it is a masterpiece, requires an immense amount of additional writing to address all of the difficulties.I confess I'm puzzled at the intensity of praise for The God Problem. Several initial pages and the back of the dustcover are filled with endorsements, and the back cover flap describes the author in such hyperbolic terms as would make most of us blush, were anything close applied to ourselves. Perhaps some of the prospective blurbistas demurred. And despite all of the contributions thus, I only spotted one hard-science person, a 1986 Nobelist in Chemistry, and no mathematicians.A friend called me to recommend the work, which at the time he'd not quite finished, but with which he was clearly impressed. Having tried, on his previous recommendation of another Bloom book, The Genius of the Beast, to get through that tome, I was somewhat skeptical. But when he went on to tell me how he'd never known about Peano, which he pronounced like Beano, I thought: what in the wide world of sports does an axiom system for the natural numbers, introduced around the turn of the 20th century when the logical foundations of mathematics were all the rage, have to do with the nonexistence of God? So I ordered the book.The Peano postulates are introduced in the context of a class Bloom was in at Reed College. He makes the material sound as if it is well-nigh impenetrable, and cites the high SAT scores (what?) of the class members to support his claim that they were very special. After a bit more reading I realized that the author is high on axiomatics, and rules for generating “complexity†out of minimal beginnings, and then thought: Ah! I bet as well I'll find Wolfram and his obsession with cellular automata featured prominently. And indeed I did. But I did not find a convincing connection as to how much of this pertains to the cosmos of physical space-time, let alone one populated by conscious and self-conscious beings.Backing up a bit, as others have noticed: this is not a book by a "professional" atheist like Dawkins. Bloom, after all, is originally a successful promoter and salesman (see Genius of the Beast for some historical details), and had to find a fairly sensational title to assure getting his "oxygen" of attention. And he touches on some of the standard arguments against God, the "cause of the first cause" one that appealed to Russell, and the Problem of Evil one that perplexes many. Without revealing exactly my own evolving views, we're not talking about some guy “bearded and bathrobedâ€, as Howard terms Him toward the book's end. So this is not a polemical work like Hitchens' God is Not Great. It is rather a rambling attempt at system-building and something by way of a confessional, indeed for me rather embarrassingly revealing of the extent to which its author is still feeling the acute influence of who he was as a child and adolescent, "growing up awkward" in Buffalo.Others have remarked on the gimmick of insisting that we become Boy Howard for a day, and this leading to sentence structures and momentary misapprehensions that quickly become very tedious. But perhaps others find them charming and evocative.As mentioned, the sheer length of the book, even if it were considerably condensed by cutting out a lot of florid verbiage, makes it impossible to do a succinct enumeration of all of the issues. But the epistemological material in the early part of the book is mostly a succession of what professional philosophers call "logical howlers". They are presumed to shock us and leave us in awe, I suppose. There are also astonishing distortions of rather-well-established physics, like thermodynamics, which within its appropriately-circumscribed domain works just fine. Here and there, swipes are taken at Ayn Rand, but referencing only her novel Atlas Shrugged. What would have served the author better: her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, a partial account of her theory of concepts, and particularly the parts about concepts of consciousness and axiomatic concepts.And then there’s Shannon and Weaver and information theory. No sooner has he stated explicitly that they said that their term "information" did not have the same meaning as the conventional and colloquial, that it did not encompass meaning, than we are off and running about Shannon's "mistake". Now I do agree with Bloom here that the term has been colossally misused.At times the prose reaches such heights of obscurity as to beggar description, reminding me of the statement by Randy California of the 60s rock group Spirit, that "Everything is Everything". Here is a sample, I hope reproducible as part of the fair use doctrine:"So information is not necessarily two-way communication. Information can go one way. What turns it into information? Translation. Interpretation. In other words, the key to making something neutral into information is Shannon's missing ingredient: meaning. And what is meaning? Movement. The movement of a quark, the movement of a mote of space dust, the movement of a tongue, the movement of a pen, the movement of a hand on a keyboard, or the movement of Robert Darwin's block of stone with fossilized plesiosaur bones to the Royal Society (65).Which leaves a question. Is anything really neutral? Is everything meaning waiting to be invented? Waiting to be understood?But there are more corollaries to the idea that information is anything that a translator can decode. There are more truly peculiar implications to the simple idea that information is any signal that can be turned into a response." (pp. 431-432)I find this not only baffling, but almost motivationally suspicious. Look at the number of concepts deployed here, and ask yourself why, with this suggestion of identifications among them, do we need distinct words for each of them.When we get to fractals and the Mandelbrot set, a simple example of its iterative generation would have been helpful, instead of --- after this apology: "I hate to go incomprehensible on you", he pulls out references to Babylon and building city walls from earlier in the book. Contrast this with something that addresses the math in clear terms, a short section in The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (see page 244), a wonderful book which has, as well, a nice observation at the outset about Russell's definition of math and its near-absence of application to what mathematicians do nowadays. And while you are at it, see if you can find any mention whatever in its 1034 pages of Wolfram and cellular automata, a pursuit which has, I suspect, tragically isolated a brilliant mind.And I can't avoid mention of the Conway-Kochen-Dyson-Kaufmann material, that elementary particles' apparent indeterminism means that in some sense they have free will. Really? I hasten to add that all of those folks are furiously bright, but I feel they have been seduced into serious lapses here. However, I'll have to dig out the original references to see in detail what they said.After looking at this curious work from many angles, it struck me that one word rarely seen was Love. So I went into the index, and there it was: love, pp. 515-518. How could I not have recalled it? Well, it bypasses any attempt to describe love other than in terms of war, conflict, "dominance hierarchies", pecking orders --- and begins with, wait for it, protons! I won't spoil it for you.So, as a summary assessment of the book: stylistically maddening, thought-provoking, a couple of good ideas, but a book with the hidden agenda --- an agenda hidden even from the author, probably --- that the purported godless cosmos, following simple rules, had to produce a Howard Bloom who simply has to be the way he is.
Everyone enjoys a good, well explained theory. This book contains no theory, and the explanations are comedically bad. The mark of a great teacher is the ability to explain complicated concepts so simply that anyone can understand. Bloom just quotes Wikipedia.Bloom appears to be under the impression that comparing quarks to Harry Potter bridges some gap in understanding. It doesn't. Instead he winds up with a volume that should have been 1/5th the size, where seemingly half the sentences end in question marks and which appears intended to stroke the ego of a four year old rather than the intellect of an adult. Who cares whether Bloom has a point or not? Wading through this monstrosity wouldn't be worth the effort if he did.And by the way, he doesn't have a point. None. After 558 pages there is a 5 page "conclusion" which just restates questions. The subtitle of the book "How a Godless Universe Creates" is answered with a 5 page version of 'we don't know.'I doubt anyone reading this review will get a visceral sense of just how bad this book is without a quote, so here goes:"And what does that mean for us human beings? It is our obligation to defeat this annihilation by squeezing all that we are, all that we value, through the annihilation at the bagel's edge, through the anally tiny hole at the next universe's center, and into the universe to come. It is our task to come through the next annihilation rejoicing. Intact and giddy with the power of our feat."Yes, that really is the punctuation Bloom uses. No, putting the line into context doesn't help.If you are looking for a good book then keep looking. This should never have been published, and showing it to children should be considered per se child abuse and a crime against their basic human rights.
I'm ashamed at having been lulled into purchasing this book. His sentences are frequently fragmented and flow horribly; he is wholly and entirely unqualified to be answering or even deeply considering "The God Problem,"; and he is narcissistic in thinking that his being a self-proclaimed ardent atheist, as well as an amateur philosopher, somehow places him at the forefront of knowledge.I always finish books, but this assortment of drivel-coated pages made me break that conviction.
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