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God Problem, The: How A Godless Cosmos Creates (2012)

by Howard Bloom(Favorite Author)

3.87 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Prometheus Books

review 1: The God Problem's main problem is that what it took 563 pages to do could easily have been done in around a hundred. Repetition is one way to make a short book long and this book has plenty of that. Simple concepts are lathered in metaphors almost as if he jotted down a list of candidates and unable to decide on one, used them all. The idea behind it seems to be to illustrate of one of the core concepts in the book - that Aristotle's idea, that metaphor, is a poor way to truth, is wrong. Bloom uses a peculiar autobiographical narrator through-out the book which, at times, he struggles to maintain; he asks that you pretend, for the duration of the book, that you are he and then narcissisticly proceeds to tell you how clever you were for coming up with all this wonderful stu... moreff that he came up with. The number of glowing quotes (39) that adorn the dust jacket and first few pages made me suspicious and it turned out that they were as over-done as the book itself.Having said that, there were, scattered through-out the book, some interesting bits and pieces; that bees get depressed; a brief discussion on anthropomorphism versus anthropocentrism; the almost un-elucidated conclusion that every consciousness exists as a wave and, a thing about a bagel/toroidal shaped universe theory which he lays claim to but which seems also to have origins elsewhere: A search for toroidal universe doesn't show much in the way of hits for Bloom although bagel universe does. They seem to amount to the same thing, but which has precedence? I would have thought that a mathematician, having come up with a possibly viable model of the universe would not name it after a bread treat.I thought Bloom's history of math and geometry from pre Babylonian times to the present was excellent but again, it contains too much repetition and obsessive use of metaphor. The book ends without any clear conclusion other than a recommendation to remember to come up with new questions. It leaves me wondering whether being a polymath is a bit like being a jack of all trades and master of none.
review 2: Asks a lot of questions, starts off strong, is insufferably verbose throughout and provides no significant insight into how a godless cosmos would create itself. While I appreciated the human history lesson, it really seemed misplaced and disconnected from the underlining point of the book. Whatever that point was supposed to ultimately be. If someone were to bring this up and ask me if it is worth reading, I'd reply with, "Eh. The opening is relatively decent. But, I'd skim through it. You'll get the basic premise and his final thoughts without having to deal with the middle parts too much".I got more out of the fictitious writings from Scott Adams' - 'God Debris : A Thought Experiment'.That was at least compelling enough for me to take pause and consider the implications of what the young and old man were conversing about. Howard Bloom's - The God Problem, does not do this for me. Think I'll go find myself a book on how a godless cosmos creates from someone who actually has something worth saying on the matter, like the bad ass Astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson or Professor and Nuclear Physicist Jim Al-Khalili. less

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