February's Book Review
February 2010
True North: Exploring the Great Wilderness by Bush Plane.
by George Erickson, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, CA. Globe Pequot/Lyons Press, New York, NY
Remember how creationists hid their intent by running stealth campaigns for school boards? Well, here's a great response from American Humanist Association board member George Erickson, whose adventure/travel best seller True North... tucks candid criticism of creationists and missionary practices between tales of polar bears and killer whales while promoting the science that makes our standard of living possible.
As the author wings past Manitoba's Lake Winnipeg - a remnant of Glacial Lake Agassiz - he tells of Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist and the lake's namesake who put the nails in the coffin of the Biblical Flood mythology. Later, while examining a bedrock chip of the Canadian Shield, he describes how we've come to know the age of the earth, beginning with St Augustine's effort and the even more inaccurate reckoning later made by an Irish Bishop named Ussher.
A visit to 40-cannon Fort Prince of Wales on the shores of Hudson Bay provides an opportunity to compare the ethics of Moses Norton, its debauched, bible-waving 18th century commander who murdered two of his wives, to those of his contemporary - a highly ethical atheist Cree chief named Matonabbee.
On the barren shores of Baker Lake, NWT, he describes the abuse suffered by native children who were forced to attend Catholic and Anglican schools, and tells of the often-reprehensible missionary treatment of natives. A later chapter chides an anti-evolution evangelist who is peddling his wares on the streets of Juneau.
As they say - there is more to a book than its cover - and this truly applies to True North. Besides delivering marvelous tales of adventures with musk oxen, caribou, polar bears and some of the North Country's characters, Erickson's True North introduces new and unsuspecting minds to the way freethinkers operate. As a consequence, True North makes a marvelous birthday or graduation present.
Darwin, Diamonds, Death and Deceit - True North has them all! -Originally published in NOSHA News Winter 2003
January's Book Review
January 2010
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
Daniel Dennett, 2006, Viking (Penguin)
There are few times in my life where I've experienced "revelation." Not in the religious sense, but in the sense of scientific enlightenment.
Even though my education and career is in engineering, I've made it a point to become familiar with the science of evolution. However, I've always unknowingly limited my learning to the perspective of biological adaptation. Dennett's book brought the realization crashing home that our brains and therefore our thought processes are just as much a product of evolution as being bipedal or having opposable thumbs.
Furthermore, just as it is inevitable that other species want to use us for food, shelter, and propagation, (rats, cockroaches, tape worms, to name but a few) exactly the same is true for our brains. Using Dawkins' principal of memes that was proposed in The Selfish Gene, (1976), (memes are analogous to genes, in that they're cultural ideas or patterns of behavior that are passed from one person to another, or "replicated" by non-genetic imitation), Dennett defines religion as a natural phenomenon that has evolved to take advantage of natural cognitive thought mechanisms. Just as a forest of trees has crawling plants, woodpeckers, and burrowing insects, why wouldn't a "forest" of six billion human brains have its own parasitic infestations?
Dennett is the most accommodating of the original New Atheists in that he bends over backwards to the theistic reader. This will be a point of irritation for an atheistic reader. The first several chapters of the book are Dennett proposing theistic ideas and then saying, "You may be right, but let's take a look and find out?" The obvious intension of this intellectual "tickling" is to draw theists in to consider his reasoning. This becomes obvious in later chapters where he lays down his well thought out arguments. But even then, there are numerous appeals to the theistic reader for intellectual honesty in an attempt to prevent having his half-read book thrown in the trash.
One practical recommendation he makes is the compulsory teaching in public schools, private schools and even home schools of other major religions. He proposes that if we educate our children about the creeds and customs, prohibitions and rituals and the texts and music of alternate world religions they'd be able to make a more informed choice. As a product of the British school system, I couldn't agree more! I had a class called Religious Education and I can remember the teacher explaining that "in this part of the world people believe this, and in that part of the world, people believe that"! It was as bizarre to me then as a 12-year-old as it is to me now. He goes on to challenge theistic parents that if they have a problem with this, then what they're actually saying is that they want to keep their child living in ignorance. Who can argue with that?
His conclusion, which is a big pill to swallow for the religious, is to "break the spell" of religious reverence and analyze belief as we do in the pharmaceutical industry, the petroleum industry or any other world influencing organization. Religion has built a social wall of defense against scientific inquiry that, if attempts are made to breach it, the results vary from mild disapproval to hostility and even violence.
There was a time when it wasn't illegal to drink and drive a motor vehicle. Way back then, the inevitable accidents were blamed on the alcohol as opposed to the individual. Can you imagine a world where the inebriated were not just overlooked but socially revered? This book helps us to see the problems caused by untested religious belief in modern society from the same lens.
-Doug Stewart
December's Book Review
December 2009
Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder.
Richard Dawkins, 1998, Houghton Mifflin Co.
The title of this book comes from a line in John Keats' poem 'Lamia.' In one verse of that poem, Keats accused Newton of unweaving the rainbow, having destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by explaining the physical principles that result in the formation of rainbows. Dawkins, in defense of Newton, argues through many enlightening examples that an understanding of our physical reality in terms of its own laws leads to an appreciation of beauty and intricacies of the world in ways that Keats could never have imagined.
Starting with light and what can be known about distant stars by the properties of the light they emit (after it is scientifically unwoven), Dawkins explores our current understanding and its limits with an uncanny ability to draw the reader into his sense of wonder. The breadth of his exploration is impressive: cells, stars, genes, fossils, our brain, and more. To accentuate the magnitude of Keats' error, Dawkins laces his scientific explanations in almost every chapter with appropriate poetry and poetic prose from Yeats, Lawrence, Nehru, Wordsworth, and Feynman , among many others. Coming from a scientific background, I was unappreciative of the interlaced poetry at first, preferring more straight-line prose, but I warmed to it and found it effective in the end.
Keats' disappreciation of science is still with us today, even if it is not as poetic. Dawkins convincingly argues that there is a real danger in the widening gap between scientific progress and the scientific literacy of the populace. Because humans have a sense of wonder, and because science is often hard to understand, there is a ready market for pseudoscientific explanations, simply because they are easier. The gap is also easily exploited by lawyers attempting to plant doubt in the minds of jurors who must decide a case based on DNA evidence that appears incontrovertible to those who understand the methods and jargon. Antiscientific attitudes grow because of the gap; because as Dawkins admonishes, scientists are not actively engaged in explaining their science to the public. If the gap is not narrowed, science is in danger of becoming ever more marginalized as a basis for understanding anything important to the growing mass of the scientifically illiterate.
The poet and the scientist, although very far apart in their craft, are, as Dawkins argues, motivated by the same sense of wonder. Where one draws on the mystical and supernatural to express awe, the other brings reason and imagination in attempt at deeper understanding. In the end, Dawkins accomplishes his goal of showing that within our understanding of rainbows lies a more awe-inspiring sense of wonder.
-David Schultz
