Can Smart People Believe in God?
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50books_poc50) Can Smart People Believe in God? by Michael Guillen
I don't know why I'm drawn to these books. They're not written for me, and they offer me little. Guillen's answer to his title question, in any case, is yes. He really didn't need 160 pages to make his case. Here, let me distill his whole book into a simple proof:
Assume that smart people can't believe in God. Isaac Newton believed in God. Isaac Newton was smart. We arrive at a contradiction, so our assumption must be wrong and smart people can believe in God. QED.
In truth, there isn't much more to his book than that. Guillen is a person who, as a college physics professor, television science correspondent, and author of popular science books, has dedicated his life to making scientific knowledge more accessible to people who are disposed to be mistrustful of science. Here, even though he seems to be addressing atheists, it's clear from his churchy rhetoric and appeals to new-agey ideas like "Spiritual Quotient" that his real audience are American anti-science evangelicals, whom he is trying to persuade that science is Godly. Guillen's basic tactic is pitching the Catholic Church's long history of involvement in scientific advancement to an American Protestant audience that has traditionally distanced itself from such efforts. And if he can package his book as a rebuttal of Dawkins and Harris and the rest of our present generation of radical atheists (whom he terms Arrogant Atheists), so much the better for book sales.
In any case, it took me nearly 2 years (I started in March '09), but I have finally hit 50! Um... time to start again at 1, I suppose. :P Maybe this time I'll finish Beloved and The Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and all those other books I started and didn't make it through in the past two years...
I don't know why I'm drawn to these books. They're not written for me, and they offer me little. Guillen's answer to his title question, in any case, is yes. He really didn't need 160 pages to make his case. Here, let me distill his whole book into a simple proof:
Assume that smart people can't believe in God. Isaac Newton believed in God. Isaac Newton was smart. We arrive at a contradiction, so our assumption must be wrong and smart people can believe in God. QED.
In truth, there isn't much more to his book than that. Guillen is a person who, as a college physics professor, television science correspondent, and author of popular science books, has dedicated his life to making scientific knowledge more accessible to people who are disposed to be mistrustful of science. Here, even though he seems to be addressing atheists, it's clear from his churchy rhetoric and appeals to new-agey ideas like "Spiritual Quotient" that his real audience are American anti-science evangelicals, whom he is trying to persuade that science is Godly. Guillen's basic tactic is pitching the Catholic Church's long history of involvement in scientific advancement to an American Protestant audience that has traditionally distanced itself from such efforts. And if he can package his book as a rebuttal of Dawkins and Harris and the rest of our present generation of radical atheists (whom he terms Arrogant Atheists), so much the better for book sales.
In any case, it took me nearly 2 years (I started in March '09), but I have finally hit 50! Um... time to start again at 1, I suppose. :P Maybe this time I'll finish Beloved and The Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and all those other books I started and didn't make it through in the past two years...
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Date: 2011-02-01 10:34 pm (UTC)