Worthwhile and intelligent: Polkinghorne has the courage and the ambition to stroll onto a field where most would fear to...
A gentle discourse, very thoughtful and very English, on the relationship between physics and theology.
Physicist Polkinghorne (Belief in God in an Age of Science, 1998, etc.) attempts here to lay the groundwork for a theology that engages 21st-century science. In his view, the advent of quantum physics and chaos theory has provided theologians with an opportunity to develop a “bottom up” theology that takes into account scientific descriptions of the natural world while remaining true to Christian beliefs and intuitions. Taking modern (or post-modern) physics as a given, he argues that it does not necessarily lead to a reductionist, atheist, or deist world view, but could instead support metascientific and metaphysical choices that are sympathetic to Christian theology. Most compellingly, he suggests that the organizational principles evident in chaotic and complex systems may be evidence of a kind of “active information,” perhaps operative at the quantum level, that could be used to solve intractable theological dilemmas such as the possibility of special providence and the nature of God’s omnipotence and omniscience. Central to his thought in this regard is the idea of kenosis, the voluntary giving up of control by God, both at the Creation and through the death and resurrection of Christ. Kenosis, Polkinghorne avers, allows one to make sense of a world that is “free” to develop on its own according to scientific principles, yet is controlled by an omnipresent and all-powerful creator. These theses derive from the author’s work in not just one but two obscure fields (theoretical physics and Christian theology), and it is unclear that all of his arguments will prove immediately intelligible to the uninitiated. But he writes in the soothing tones of a Christmastime special on the BBC World Service, and one rarely gets the impression that one has to do too much theoretical heavy lifting, whatever the reality of the matter.
Worthwhile and intelligent: Polkinghorne has the courage and the ambition to stroll onto a field where most would fear to tread.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-300-08372-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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