Book: The Ghost in the Universe: God in Light of Modern Science

Author: Taner Edis
Publisher:

The Ghost in the Universe: God in Light of Modern Science

Reviewed by Mohammad Gill

I came across a reference to the book under review in the author’s paper “Flipping a Quantum Coin”, which was published in Free Inquiry, spring 2003, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 60-61. In it, the author stated, “Defending my perspective takes a lot more than a brief clarification of quantum coins. So I will use another science teacher’s trick. When I see deep waters ahead, I tell my students that, if they want a fuller picture, they should do the reading I then assign. In this case, I will shamelessly plug my own book, The Ghost in the Universe: God in Light of Modern Science.” It intrigued me and I wasted little time before placing my order for the book with Amazon.com on Internet. The book arrived in a couple of days and I started reading it voraciously.

Edis was born in Turkey in 1967 to liberal parents. In his own words, “My (Edis’s) father is a hardcore Turkish secularist, with no patience for religion intruding on modern life. My mother, who grew up irreligious in California, seems slightly curious about religion at most, mainly as something other people do. They might have some vague beliefs in some sort of higher creative power, but even today, I’m not exactly sure,” (http://www2.truman.edu/-edis/writings/articles/critic.html).

Edis received his first degree, B.S., from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, and his graduate degrees (M.A., Physics, and Ph.D., Physics) from The John Hopkins University, Baltimore. He is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Truman State University (Northeast Missouri State University), Kirksville, Missouri. Having read the information about Edis’s biography, I was reminded of Tariq Ali. Like Ali, Edis grew up in a liberal and secular environment. In his book “The Clash of Fundamentalisms”, Ali dealt with history and international politics. Edis’s crusade, on the other hand, is against creationism and God.

The book under review consists of nine main chapters with additional chapters on Introduction and Conclusions. The Introduction is captioned “Does God Exist?” The book concludes with a chapter captioned “The God of Song and Story.” One of the two sections of Conclusions is captioned “Divine Falsehoods”. Similarly, the main nine chapters also have catchy captions. For instance, Chapter 3 is captioned “Gods of Physics” and Chapter 7 “Of Mystics and Machines.” The book has been written in a very easy and fluent style interspersed with ticklish statements and phrases. For instance, in the chapter on Mystics and Machines, the author writes, “ If mystics hint that skeptics are blind, skeptics suggest mysticism is a delusion. Indeed in the culture of science, mysticism usually stands for superstition or woolly-minded flights of fancy.” Here is another one: “We must believe in order to see.”

In his opening chapter on Introduction, Edis states, “God used to be an obvious reality in our cultures, no more a matter of dispute than the existence of trees. A few philosophers toyed with doubt, but mostly as a prelude to a metaphysical discourse on why God must exist. Today, godless infidels are commonplace, especially among people with a philosophical or scientific background. Even as a social force, religion is no longer what it used to be. The devout believe in very different versions of God, and many people are apathetic, accepting religion as part of their social background but nothing more.”

Although Edis’s unbelief seems to be deeply entrenched in his psyche, his approach is very persuasive and unobtrusive. Surely, his book is not going to finally settle any outstanding controversial issues that are being debated since eternity; the book is very readable and pleasantly structured. The question of God’s existence or non-existence will continue to haunt human mind for ever, perhaps, because belief in a God, some kind of a God, fills a psychological void in the human makeup. God is like a Big Brother who is there to help when need arises. This need is probably everlasting. He is there not only to help but also to punish those who fall out of the supposedly “narrow and straight” path.

In his Conclusions “The God of Song and Story”, Edis writes, “Muslim apologists like to say that every one, deep down, knows there is a God: atheists fool themselves even about their own beliefs. I think otherwise. If my arguments add up to anything, there is, in all likelihood, no ghost in the universe. There is no divine reality which theologians are imperfectly trying to tell us about. We have many questions, some of which we may never answer, but no reason to invent a God.”

The book has discussed the rational and scientific side of the controversy without demolishing the divinity of religions. Suggestions are available in the book which point to the weirdness of such divine beliefs but since people are not going to discard their beliefs so easily, a symbiotic accommodation between belief and unbelief is recognized. In his Song and Story chapter, the author writes as a matter of fact, “I have never known faith from the inside – like an exotic country it fascinates me, and I feel compelled to visit it repeatedly, yet I keep coming home. However, much I work up sympathy for hopes of permanence, I can’t help asking whether the promises religions make are real. It appears not, and I confess I am not especially devastated by this. Still, I don’t want to conclude by saying religion is false and leaving it there. Skeptic though I am, I do not live by reality alone. Our Gods do not belong in our explanations, perhaps not even in our hopes, but they should be at home, I think in our stories and songs.”

The book was published by Prometheus Books in 2002. The author received the Morris D. Forkosch award for “best humanist book of 2002” from the Council for Secular Humanism