Written by a biologist with a broad, open-minded curiosity about world religions, this brief meditative essay offers a multitude of opportunities to synthesize reason and faith.
Scientists commenting on their acceptance or disavowal of religion as a source of knowledge of reality have authored weighty tomes on this topic for centuries. But Simson stands out among the dozens of recent scientist-writers in this controversial area by establishing an exceedingly clear glossary of terms germane to thinking carefully about science and religion. Through making repeated references to these glossary definitions, and by defining these terms with a disarming mix of simplicity and thoughtfulness, Simson has created an inviting way for readers to search out their own connection between scientific reason and religious faith. For example, the often ambiguous meanings attributed to “belief” and “faith” are differentiated by the position that “faith is arrived at from one’s own experience, whereas belief involves acceptance of a received doctrine, integrated into personal experience.” Bringing together more than a half-century of readings in world religions along with global travel to sacred sites, Simson presents a nondoctrinaire, lively view of how science and religion possess their own realms of legitimate authority. For Simson, science finds meaning through testing facets of external reality, and religion forges meaning through the individual and collective interpretations of beliefs, myths and practices. The author nuances religion personally to mean a gratitude to a power higher than oneself for the gift of life. The nature of what conservative believers identify as “sin” and “evil” Simson identifies as the inevitable conflict of biological instincts and societal limits—the only time in the book when the author seems an unequivocal spokesperson for the scientific point of view over the religious. In suggesting that all religions historically have promoted ideals of gratefulness, love of creation and a dedication to living a life of service to others, Simson particularly focuses upon the centrality of feelings of love and the need to make modest claims—scientifically and religiously—about what we absolutely know of ultimate reality. This well-reasoned, sensitively written meditation on the relationship of science and religion offers considerable food for thought for readers eschewing simple dogmas.
Pub Date: May 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450549042
Page Count: 133
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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