An inventive neurological argument for the existence of God.
Combining neuroscience and Christian apology, a debut work hypothesizes scientific proof for the Holy Spirit’s interaction with the human mind.
Many believe that God exists and that he communicates with humanity, though most people are willing to concede that this phenomenon is impossible to verify with science. It is, like other aspects of religion, a matter of faith. But Lennard argues that science is capable of proving not only that such messages occur, but also that this evidence justifies the existence of the Holy Spirit and, by extension, God himself: “I will endeavor to give justification for the hypothesis that the Holy Spirit through the human spirit interacts in the transmission of specified information to the human mind through synaptic transmission in neural networks, a stochastic process.” In layperson’s terms, the Holy Spirit communicates with the human spirit (the intangible essence of a person, i.e. the soul) by manipulating the physical brain. Lennard seeks to demonstrate this using the contemporary understanding of quantum mechanics and synaptic transmission. Just as a radio receives radio waves and translates them into sound waves that audiences can hear, humans’ brains receive messages from the Holy Spirit and convert them into a language that they can understand. The reverse process (prayer) is also possible. Ambitiously mixing personal experience, research, and the work of previous thinkers (particularly the neurophysiologist, philosopher, and Nobel laureate John Carew Eccles), Lennard discusses this process and how it relates to Scripture, near-death experiences, and information theory. The author’s prose is highly specialized and will be mostly inaccessible for readers with no knowledge of neurophysiology: “Interaction between mental events and quantum probability amplitudes for exocytosis couples in coherent fashion a large number of individual amplitudes of hundreds of thousands of boutons.” The opacity of such an argument makes it difficult to evaluate. Lennard begins with the presumption that the Christian God exists and speaks to humans, and it is likely that those who share that belief will be the most persuaded by his findings. For readers who like a lot of science with their apology, the author displays a great deal of ingenuity in his thinking and offers an extensive and useful bibliography.
An inventive neurological argument for the existence of God.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973614-33-3
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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