IN THE MAIL: John Allen Paulos, “Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Paulos is the author of the best-selling “Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences,” and his new book seeks to add to the already burgeoning neo-atheist best-seller list.
Here is an excerpt that gives a representative flavor of the book:
At the risk of being a bit cloying, I remember another early indicator of my adult psychology. I was scuffling with my brother when I was about ten and had an epiphany that the stuff of our two heads wasn’t different in kind from the stuff of the rough rug on which I’d just burned my elbow or the stuff of the chair on which he’d just banged his shoulder. The realization that everything was ultimately made out of the same matter, that there was no essential difference between the material compositions of me and not-me, was clean, clear and bracing.
Paulos considers his adolescent insight precocious, but his passage inadvertently demonstrates the inherent limitation of a purely materialistic or mathematical view of life. It lacks a soul.
Leon Kass — who holds a B.S. in Biology from the University of Chicago, a Ph.D in Biochemistry from Harvard, an M.D. from the University of Chicago (serving as a surgeon with the U.S. Public Health Service) and is Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics — may have best captured the immense knowledge of science and its inherent limitations in this passage about eating, from his book “The Hungry Soul” (University of Chicago Press: 1999):
When the scientist looks at eating, what does he see? An objective fellow, he sees coolly from the outside. Generally speaking he sees animal movements to gain food, the movement of edible material from the outside in and down, the physical and chemical breakdown of food, the energetics of the process, and the maintenance of a steady internal environment of sugar, nitrogen, salts, and the like.
More specifically the anatomist may show how the powerful masseter muscles at the angles of the mouth cause the lower jaw to move, enabling the teeth to grind the ingested food, or how the tongue and the pharyngeal muscles are coordinated with each other and with the closure of the epiglottis to ensure the successful act of swallowing without aspiration into the lungs.
The physiocologist can show how the sight of food stimulates the psychic phase of gastric secretion through the vagus nerve or how rise in blood glucose after a meal releases insulin from the pancreas to facilitate the transport of sugar into the cells.
The biochemist studies how sugar is oxidized and its energy trapped by the process of oxidative phosphorization or how stores of glycogen in the liver are released during a period of fasting.
The molecular biologist can demonstrate how a certain genetic mutation produces the inborn metabolic disease phenylketonuria (PKU) or how the supply of mesanger – RNA – is regulated to increase the desired protein synthesis.
The psychologist will show how certain stimuli ordinarily presented with food can come on their own to induce salivation or how certain childhood traumas give rise to special food aversion or to eating disorders.
And the anthropologist will study how different cultures eat different foods, in different manners, and with different rituals.
And anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, molecular biology, psychology, and anthropology — even taken together — cannot produce the transformative understanding contained in a simple prayer before a meal. Perhaps it is because they describe only the visible world, where everything may appear to be just stuff.
There are a lot of nice blurbs on Paulos’s book. Sam Harris found it “elegant and timely.” Michael Shermer found it “penetrating.” I found it consistently cloying.
In less time than it would take you to read Paulos’s 149-page book, you can watch the articulate and spirited debate between David Wolpe and Sam Harris at American Jewish University, moderated by Los Angeles Times religion editor Steve Padilla, entitled “Does God Exist?”
The high quality video was produced by Jewish TV Network. Allow about 10 seconds for it to load and another 10 seconds for the sound to begin. It will be worth the wait.
(See also JCI, “Science, Religion and the New Atheism;” Damon Linker, “Atheism’s Wrong Turn;” David Klinghoffer, “The Human Factor;” Ross Douthat, "Lord Have Mercy;" and especially Preston Jones, "Christopher Hitchens Explains It All For You").
UPDATES: See also Anne Lieberman’s lovely post "Me and Not-Me" at BtB.
Steve Padilla’s column in The Los Angeles Times reported on his “night with the atheist and the rabbi” at American Jewish University.
John Allen Paulos’s comment on this post is below.