Blasphemy by Douglas Preston Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Blasphemy
Book Review: A very good read
Summary: 5 Stars
Douglas Preston's Blashphemy is a story that moves rapidly, is simply hard to put down and for me, ended too quickly. Blasphemy is certainly not anti-christian. I found that Preston's story certainly reaffirms why relegious tolerance is so important. The book provides a gripping story that revolves around some simple yet (unanswerable?) questions - Why are we here and what lies ahead? After reading the book, I've decided to improve my math and science skills. How can you get a definitive answer when you use pi? I need to cover my bases. Enjoy the read.Book Review: Absolutely Brilliant!
Summary: 5 Stars
It starts quietly but builds into a can't-put-down thriller that's as smart as it is fun to read. Don't worry about the physics -- those concepts make my head spin, but it didn't deter my enjoyment of this book in the least.
It's hard to imagine a thriller that is built around the science vs. religion hot bed not offending everyone, but this one manages to be though-provoking, fast-paced, and shouldn't offend anyone except the most extreme in either position.
A joy to read on so many levels. I liked Douglas Preston's books with Lincoln Child, but this one is in another category all together. It's great!
Book Review: After CERN
Summary: 5 Stars
How could someone who remember CERN this past summer and
not love this novel is beyond me.
It even helps you understand a lot about what CERN is all all about.
It's a shame we have to wait till next year before CERN is
turning it on again.
This is a GREAT NOVEL!!
Book Review: An uninformed, arrogant cliche
Summary: 1 Stars
The first half of Blasphemy had me hooked. The latter half would have been outright boring if it wasn't so inflammatory and offensive. Preston takes a thrilling, creative idea and ruins it with characters who are absurdly, offensively stereotypical idiots. Preston's portrayal of the hypocritical televangelist is as tired as discarded socks.
This could have been a good book if Preston had studied the evangelical people he lampoons so viscously, and had portrayed his extremists as just that--a radical fringe. Unfortunately, Preston betrays his disdain for Christians by portraying his hateful, psychopathic, murderous mob as typical of most mainstream American believers. If Preston had stopped with the televangelist he would have been guilty of being unimaginative and unoriginal, but by portraying an entire group of religious people as ignorant, intolerant lemmings, he demonstrates an attitude that would best be described as racist if only the mob had been united by color rather than creed.
In an interview with the author recorded at the end of the audiobook edition, Preston makes several arrogant statements that show just how little he understands religion and science. He says "Science for the last two centuries has been systematically disproving the central tenants of the world's religions. For example, where did we come from? Evolution has shown that we're not created by God. We evolved from animals. The question of how the universe was created. These are questions that religion used to deal with and religion answered and answered wrongly and now science is answering these questions correctly."
This paragraph is not a review of the book, but this statement begs an intelligent rebuttal. Modern science has its own language. It is precise, observational and linear. To assume that religious texts, several millennia old, were written in the language of modern science and were written to answer modern questions with modern specificity is extremely arrogant. It's like asking a question of someone who speaks a different language and declaring them wrong because their babble makes no sense to you. For example, Genesis was written for a people who had emerged from ancient Egypt where they had been slaves. The Egyptians worshiped the Sun, Moon, oceans and animals as gods. THE POINT OF GENESIS IS THAT GOD CREATED THE SUN, MOON, etc. It is futile to try to understand Genesis in terms of modern science. Science can no more discredit God as Creator than it can disprove the idea of life after death. Science will inevitably cause shifts in religious interpretation but some questions will always be beyond its reach.
Remarkably, Preston addresses many of these questions and mysteries in Blasphemy and does so in thought provoking ways. There is a conversation between a scientist and a medicine man about the similar origin problems of what caused the big bang and where did God come from. I think Preston could have found a more effective way to bring his story to a climax. It's a shame to have turned what could have been fascinating and provocative book into an obnoxious rant.
Book Review: An uninformed, blathering tirade against Christianity
Summary: 1 Stars
Imagine my delight to hear that a new Preston book was out. Then imagine my disappointment.
This thin gruel of a plot serves only one aim: to promote a new "religion of science." Religion has served its purpose in giving purpose to man, and therefore giving him a drive to survive and progress. But its time is over, and science has to take over. In this respect, the book is much like Michael Crichton's "State of Fear." Those who deplored the enviro-alarmism so widespread today thought the book timely, although the plot was likewise thin; those who are disciples of Dawkins will react similarly to this book, although, strangely, they thought the plot was the bee's knees. Dawkinism tends to warp the mind.
There are two "Christian" characters so repulsive, they are practical atheists. By this I don't mean that all atheists are bad, only that atheism provides a freedom from morality, as admitted by many of its proponents (Dawkins has recently defended adultery; Pinker has defended infanticide). So, like most Christians Preston knows, one is a murderer, another is a hypocritical, money-grubbing televangelist. One scientist, the "harmless" Christian, is some kind of Catholic, an ex-monk.
The nutcases are railing against a supercolliding computer, Isabella, which starts claiming to be God. But God, it seems, doesn't know much about history or cosmology. He says that religion and science are mortal enemies, quite ignorant of the foundations of modern science - the Christian view that matter is OK (because of the Incarnation) and the efforts of the Catholic Church, as recently documented in such books as "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization," to discover the rational order of the universe because it was created by a rational God. Neither does God know the future, since he's basically a creation of the universe.
Preston also puts forward the theory that the Big Bang, happened not in "nothing", but in some kind of quantum vacuum, in Hawking's theory of imaginary time, which Hawking himself has admitted does not fit reality, but is just a mathematical fiction to avoid the beginning. Did Preston really not know this? He seems to be betting that most readers will not be informed enough to object.
Theists historically welcomed confirmation of the Big Bang, while nontheists openly expressed disgust and nausea at the implications of the Big Bang. In fact, the confirmation of the Big Bang caused many scientists to draw parallels with the book of Genesis. Here, Preston turns history on its head - the "bad Christians" think the Big Bang threatens their faith. Why this twist? Preston seems to be embarrassed at the irrational reaction atheists have had to the Big Bang, and is rewriting history.
As Jim Holt writes in Slate, "Churchmen rejoiced. Proof of the biblical account of creation had dropped into their laps. Pope Pius XII, opening a conference at the Vatican in 1951, declared that this scientific theory of cosmic origins bore witness "to that primordial 'Fiat lux' uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation. ... Hence, creation took place in time, therefore there is a creator, therefore God exists!"
"Marxists, meanwhile, gnashed their teeth. Quite aside from its religious aura, the new theory contradicted their belief in the infinity and eternity of matter--one of the axioms of Lenin's dialectical materialism--and was accordingly dismissed as "idealistic." The Marxist physicist David Bohm rebuked the developers of the theory as "scientists who effectively turn traitor to science, and discard scientific facts to reach conclusions that are convenient to the Catholic Church." Atheists of a non-Marxist stripe were also recalcitrant. ... The dean of the profession, Sir Arthur Eddington, wrote, "The notion of a beginning is repugnant to me ... I simply do not believe that the present order of things started off with a bang. ... The expanding Universe is preposterous ... incredible ... it leaves me cold."
Did Preston just somehow fail to read *any* of thousands of relevant books on the main subjects, notably Dinesh D'Souza's recent "What's So Great About Christianity", or ex-atheist Antony Flew's "There Is a God"? D'Souza especially skewers Dawkins and Harris, the new crop of fundamentalist atheists, by turning their own reasoning against them. Was Preston entirely ignorant of these arguments? Perhaps. But ... perhaps not.
Perhaps God's inexplicable ignorance - or, in the book, Isabella's ignorance - is an intentional clue to the ending. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
As mentioned earlier, the plot is paper-thin, serving only as a vehicle for Preston to vent his wrath on his caricatures of Christians. I looked in vain for the promised "action" and "fast pace" the other reviews claimed. One must wonder why they felt the need to misrepresent the book in this manner. Fanaticism, I guess.
The missives from "God" are somewhat interesting, and make for most of the page-turning ... that is, if you are scientifically illiterate and can gobble up that stuff about the Big Bang arising from (almost) nothing. Otherwise, it's a frustrating window into how poorly-read Preston expects his readers to be. Strangely, I know atheists - and at least one ex-atheist - who would agree.
By the way, Preston's idea of accepting truths only verified by science is skewered in Berlinski's "The Devil's Delusion" and D'Souza's "What's So Great About Christianity". Some readers here will be aware of the severe limitations of the scientific method, and that even the basic premise - "only scientifically discovered facts are valid" - is self-defeating; and others will more thoughtfully crack open those books and discover how Kant and even Hume have shown the "pure scientific" path to be founded on irrationality, ignorance, and arrogance.