Rating: 
Summary: Flippant clunker -- uneducated.
Review: What is one to make of a book that ignores 3000 years of work on the central topic so as to take matters resolved centuries ago and hype them up as novelty "gotchas"?By analogy, what would one make of a 6th grader sending a college physics department his proof that "E<>MC^2" because E, as the 5th letter, M as the 13th and C, the 2nd, don't add up? Seriously. It's that bad. The image of the author standing on the shore skipping stones across the surface of a deep ocean came to mind quickly. There is a field called "theology" for which it is historically and epistemologically correct to describe modern science and logic as being subsidiary branches. While not all answers are in hand even now, most issues raised in the book have histories that extend back centuries or more. The author displays almost no awareness of this. The primary sources are atheists, agnostics and skeptics currently living. Most such people have never encountered serious theology in their lives; everything they know of religion is gleaned from what other atheists say or from caricature figures like Jim and Tammy Faye Baker. So the author keys off of quotes from lawyer Alan Dershowitz and random people who have sent him e-mail on the Internet. Theology is a difficult subject because people usually approach God by projecting themselves onto an immense scale. Thus, there is certainly much garbage out there (95% of it). And Pickover weaves as much of it together as he can, while leaving out the brilliant analysis of thinkers from Augustine to Aquinas that have shaped the modern world and given birth to science itself. If your time is valuable and you are seriously interested, better books are "The Existence and Attributes of God" (Charnock). Or "Eternal God" (Helm), "Systematic Theology" (Geisler), "The Battle for God" (Geisler), "In Defense of Miracles", "Warranted Christian Belief" (Plantinga) These may be harder to read than Pickover's (no cartoons); theology has technical words with precise meanings, as does physics and other fields of study. Careful thinking requires clarity in meaning, the preservation of subtle distinctions. One should expect to have to learn things to advance a well-developed discussion -- not amble into the physics department wagging your finger about how the "gravitational immutability of color demonstrates the paradox of orangeness surrounding depth of vibration". Here are some concepts relevant to understanding God as Christians do: Aseity -- self-existence. God is pure actuality with zero potential. He cannot be anything other than He is. All other beings have actuality and potential and are contingent. Humans endure a state of progressive actualization. Simplicity -- God is absolutely simple and indivisible. Simpler than a hydrogen atom. No "parts" or divisibility, yet a living being. Necessity -- God is a necessary being. Not being contingent, he has no potential for non-existence. Immutability -- unchangeability; change implies unactualized potential and is a tensed (time-dependent) concept. Eternal -- God exists outside of time and space. He is aware of the universe's past, present and future simultaneously and eternally. Eternity does not mean "endless time", but the absence of time. God is aware of all places and times at once and directly, without intermediary agents. From God's point of view, the universe was never created, it is eternal. It is created only as seen from the point of view of beings in time. Time is the progressive actualization of things with potentiality. The universe is neither small nor large to God; these are intrinsically spatial terms relevant only to creatures in space. Carl Sagan's observation that there must be alien life otherwise the "universe would be a waste of space" imposes human perceptions on God. 12 billion light years or the nucleus of an atom -- neither large nor small to God because he is not similarly dimensioned. One of the most common problems in the book is to phrase the discussion using words that have subtle spatial and tensed meanings -- the paradox is drawn by mixing concepts improperly. Relatability -- God, as eternal and unchanging, is not dependent on anything. Everything else is defined relative to Him. When the Bible speaks of God's "anger" being kindled, it is a clarifying anthropomorphism describing the result of people changing relative to God. Biblical Hebrew had 3000 words to choose from to communicate subtle concepts across thousands of years. It does so very well to the careful reader, but moderns prefer not to understand. When you strike a match, the match moves while something else doesn't. Similarly, people change their position/potential with respect to God who doesn't change. Sort of like holding a glass upside down under a waterfall, saying it is empty, then turning it up and, as it fills, claiming turning the glass over "turned on" the waterfall. The waterfall is the same, your position has changed relative to it. So it goes with God's seeming "changes". The history, basis, reasoning and analysis of these issues is fascinating. Those interested in "Paradoxes of God" might want to look into the real deal. Theological students at conservative seminaries might enjoy this book for the light-recreation of picking it apart in late night bull sessions. Of course liberal seminaries would adopt it as a text. An apparent paradox is one way of saying you don't understand the subject. Science has learned this over and over. Hopefully the author's "science of omniscience" will too. -- archimedes_tritium.
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