The Purpose-Guided Universe: Believing In Einstein, Darwin, and God
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- ISBN13: 9781601631220
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- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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“Committed atheists, traditional Christians, or hard-core Muslims will no doubt try to dismiss this book. It is wide ranging, provocative, sometimes entertainingly whimsical, but permanently mind-stretching and logically levelheaded. The Purpose-Guided Universe is one of persons rare books that gives serious food for thought.”
Prof. Owen Gingerich, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, leader of God’s Universe
“At a time when religion- and spirituality-bashing has become a blood sport within science, it is thrilling to read The Purpose-Guided Universe. Neither science nor theology can consider itself informed lacking taking into account Haisch’s views.”
Larry Dossey, MD, leader of Healing Words
“If you reflect that science has nothing to do with God, and vice versa, read this book–and you just may change your mind.”
Prof. Peter Sturrock, Dept. Physics, Stanford Univ.
“Bernard Haisch is the latest entry on this promising scene: an eminent scientist turned profound philosopher. It merits being read and pondered by everyone seeks deeper meaning underlying science’s ever more astounding view of the world.”
Dr. Ervin Laszlo, leader of Science and the Akashic Meadow
“The Purpose-Guided Universe is an enlightening exploration of creation and the human being’s being on Planet. The intricate, precise conditions necessary to sustain life have baffled even the most cynical scientists who do not accept a privileged power. Dr. Haisch discusses the reasons for incorporating a nonthreatening and nondenominational God into scientific study. Using a practical, common-sense approach, he clarifies why belief in a universal force does not exclude or negate the theories of Einstein and Darwin.”
Julia Ann Charpentier, ForeWord Reviews
In this engrossing new book, Dr. Bernard Haisch contends that there is a purpose and an underlying intelligence behind the Universe, one that is consistent with modern science, especially the Huge Bang and evolution. It is based on recent discoveries that there are copious coincidences and fine-tunings of the laws of scenery that seem extraordinarily unlikely.
A more rational concept of God is called for. As astrophysicist Sir James Jeans wrote, “the Universe starts to look more like a fantastic thought than like a fantastic machine.”
Despite bestsellers by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris that have denounced the evils of religion and proclaimed that science has shown that there is no God, The Purpose-Guided Universe shows how one can judge in God and science.
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I loved and really agreed with many of the thoughts that Bernard Haisch open in this book. I agree as he states that “The purpose in life is to let God make his own potential real.” And Haisch does a superior job developing that thought, building it even more clear, I reflect, than he did in his book, The God Theory. The thought that God experiences a PHYSICAL being through His creation, mainly Us, is a point that is life changing taken seriously. Another point that is well developed in this book is the thought that consciousness makes reality. This has been proven time and again and should not be disputed any longer. Haisch writes much about the “keenly-tuned” laws of the universe, just right for life, which nobody can dispute. But, there are points in this book that should be disputed like(and this is a long quote but necessary), “The One chose to make a Universe in which it could experience the Many. But the Many could not just be ready-made. To make what Wilbur calls the “Kosmic game” appealing, novel, and adventurous, the many guises of the One would have to freely arise through the natural laws of the made Universe… including evolution.” Firstly, I really disagree with the thought of God making life as a “game”. It seems to me that God would have a more serious purpose for His creation and I judge He does. Secondly, Haisch does a lot of bashing of organized religion. He especially demonizes the “christian” thoughts of God based on their biblical interpetation. Toward the end of the book he even lays out his supplies for a God worth rejecting. Haisch states that he rejects any God who is pleased by cruelty. But,I judge that a creation process through the use of evolution is very cruel. How about we play survival of the fittest for a few million years? That’s cruelty! Haisch’s biblical understanding seems very underdeveloped, I would wish for him a better understanding of the biblical God. A excellent question for him would be, how should God be dealing with the seed of Satan?
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
It is a excellent book to read. It will tell you about how fine tuned the universe is and some additional appealing stuff. No matter what you judge (Or don’t judge), you should read it!
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
If the accepted standard for expository books of this scenery is the extent to which they provoke the reader to extend the thoughts, take them in new directions, or to refute them outright, the leader has succeeded. The book does to physics (and perhaps to science in all-purpose) what Teilhard de Chardin did to reconcile paleontology and religion and L. Ron Hubbard did to reconcile fiction and religion though I add the latter with tongue in cheek.
The apologists who attempt to merge science and religion fall into two camps; there are persons scientists who take place to be believers and there are persons believers who take place to be scientists. The difference is in the degree to which they allow their innate biases influence their opinion. Persons scientists who only take place to be believers or have a desire to cling to long challenged beliefs skew their religion to fit their science. There are few who balance their thoughts of both science and religion and avoid biases. Haisch, alas, is not one of them but he adroitly sidesteps the problem by, in essence, making a belief system so apart from Judeo-Christian orthodoxy that the balance point is achieved.
There should be no doubt, technically the book is heretical but that assertion should not be taken negatively. It is not heretical in the sense that it argues against God – Haisch obviously believes in the same God that us more conventional believers worship, but is heretical in that it redefines our God so drastically that it circumvents biblical teachings. That is what we might need.
James Arminius, the founding theologian of a large segment of Protestantism, stated in, “Disputations on Some of the Principal Subjects of the Christian Religion, #22″: “… the churches of God and Christ, even persons which were instituted by prophets and apostles, may decline by degrees, and sometimes do decline, from the truth of the faith, from the integrity of divine worship, and from their first like . . .” Thoughts from such thinkers as Haisch might be just what is needed to make the necessary course correction.
Pantheism is the belief that God is in everything. Panetheism is the belief that everything is in God. Haisch takes Panetheism to a new level. His restatement is that not only is everything in God but everything is the product of God’s consciousness; that includes our own consciousness as well. He takes Descartes’ “I reflect, therefore I am” and morphs it into “God supposes, therefore the universe is.”
With this emphasis on the creative power of God’s consciousness, why isn’t the title of the book “The Purpose-DRIVEN Universe”? That would place no room for free will and Darwinian evolution which figure highly in Haisch’s theory. Rumor has it that God thought the universe into being but has chosen to step aside and savor the unfolding of it all while we mortals twist in the wind with, at most, a gentle tug on the reins to guide us in the right direction.
As I read the book, I waited in vain for an explanation of consciousness’s power to make or, for that matter, an objective discussion of consciousness in all-purpose. The most I got was, perhaps, a layman’s interpretation of William James treatises on that theme (works by James, the guru of consciousness, do not appear in the bibliography). At one point, Haisch defines consciousness as the part of our perception gained lacking benefit of sensory input though he attributes that thought to others. On the last page, he admits that there is no clear understanding of what consciousness really is but, by inference, I came to the conclusion that it is mentally akin to whatever it is at the heart of string theory. It was only after an in-the-shower epiphany that I realized that Haisch has defined consciousness as the power that made and guides the universe – the definition is in the title of the book but this circularity allows one to pretty much substitute anything for consciousness. As a matter of fact, the Jungian term “anima” – the essence of life, serves reasonably well although a global substitution would require some modification in the opinion open and might represent a really different book and the problem encountered in attempting to define `consciousness’ would be replaced by the equally hard necessity to define `life’.
Throughout this book, Haisch flirts with a notion referred to as “The Anthropic Principal” although he does not refer to it directly. The entire book can be construed as an extension of that principle or a restatement of it.
The Anthropic Principle has many aspects but, in all-purpose, it holds that the universal physical laws of scenery are as they are so as to be experimental by us; somehow our mortal power of observation is determinative. A variation is that our purpose is to observe persons natural laws so that the details of our creation were tailored to determine, decipher, and utilize persons perceivable parts of the universal laws of scenery for our own benefit. It is more probable, and to some extent of a middle ground that does not do an injustice to either thought, is that the extent to which we are able to know persons laws of scenery is restricted by anthropomorphic limitations. The difficulty encountered in hard that assertion is that anthropomorphic characteristics cannot be sufficiently separated from the physical laws of scenery–we have no independent vantage point from which they can be experimental.
Haisch spends some time to berate the geocentricity of Ptolemy’s astronomy but adopts an equally erroneous `centricity’ of his own. Central to his thesis is the notion that there are ten critical properties of the universe that are fine tuned and any deviation in eight of persons properties would have precluded the formation of the universe. A deviation in the values of the additional two would preclude the formation of organisms capable of sustaining life as we know it (see `anima’ above). As to the eight, it is arguable if they are tunable at all or the values merely reflect what they are measured to be. The energy resonances of carbon and oxygen and the unusual properties of water are the additional two but their inclusion as critical properties reveals Haisch’s bio-centricity. By adding in notions of consciousness, a decidedly `human’ attribute, the fault becomes one of homo-centricity. If God can reflect anima into strings of carbon based molecules, could he not reflect anima into, say, silicon molecules? Haisch can probably distinguish his centricity from the more obvious centricity of the proponents of the Anthropic Principle by adage that his is more a `theo-centricity’ but doubt remains.
Time or more accurately `timelessness’ is a topic that facts in the book’s thesis but a topic that emerges as more of a hot potato than something to chew on. At one point, he boldly states that the accepted view is that God is outside the space-time continuum. That assertion is suspect although I subscribe to the notion of an atemporal God. (See my book “It’s About Time, God and Man”.) Timelessness and science are like oil and water. With but one or two exceptions, at the most fundamental level science is the study of changes of state over time – lacking consideration of time there would be no science. Place another way: science provides no vantage point from which to observe time as an object of study. The two exceptions that come to the mind of this non-scientist are quantum physics and string theory where time intrudes more as a nettlesome pest at worst and a worthy sparring partner at best. An example is that in some quantum physics experiments result in the conclusion that effect might precede cause in some cases. Another example and one which Haisch spends much time discussing relates to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle which holds that either a particle’s position or its velocity can be determined but not both simultaneously. Is it overly simplistic to point out that position is independent of time and velocity is a function of time? (I nearly typed `Heidegger’ rather than `Heisenberg’ but that would have opened a whole new can of worms.)
A to some extent minor criticism of the book is the manner in which quotations and cites are handled. It is apparent that Haisch is a first rate scientific researcher and it is acknowledged that the book is for the all-purpose reader rather than a scholastic treatise but his reliance on secondary sources is troublesome. He regularly quotes a name who has written about a name else’s research rather than going back to the primary source. This gives the fake impression of shallowness. And the citations themselves are inconsistent. At times the citations are imbedded in the text and sometimes after the quotation and seldom are they perfect enough to allow the reader to place the quote into its original context. End notes would not have offended the all-purpose reader and they would have added a depth of clarity.
To more conventional believers such as me, a serious shortcoming of the book is the lack of biblical references except for negative comments concerning the severity of the Ancient Tribute God. (Is Haisch a right Gnostic at heart with multiple layers of gods – a `Conscious-in-chief’ and a demiurge to account for all that is terrible?) He neglects multiple opportunities to cite biblical passages that can be interpreted to support his theory. An example is Exodus 3:13,14 where, in the King James Version, God tells Moses, “I am that I am” which can be interpreted as God adage that he is the creator of his own creation or the essential enabler by thought alone. Another example is the Gospel of John, especially the opening paragraph: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and lacking him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people”(NRSV). The word and the light can both be identified with consciousness and it is a stretch not to do so. Many additional examples can easily be cited.
Perhaps much to the surprise of both Haisch and the heresy fearing fundamentalists, the book might not be as heretical as first impression might indicate. At any rate, it is provocative and well worth the read.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
After reading The Purpose Guided Universe I stand in awe of Bernards open mindedness and humility all through out the book he gives due to additional views disagreeing with his having much validity indeed. He list various theories and discusses why he feels they have fleeting comings and why he feels his theory makes more sense.
I ultimately see Bernard as having the main goal to encourage people to seek heaven within as Jesus instructed and to have a honest desire to do his part for world advancement. Bernard feels that if science included spirituality then science could advance in ways never before imagianed I agree and I reflect the very ancient pyramid builders knew what Bernard says as a reality and used it in building the pyramids.
I highly recommend this book to teenagers above all but to everyone in all-purpose this is one of the most thought inspiring books I have read in a long long time
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This treatise appears to have been directed toward an eighth grade level reader, certainly not what I expected. Haisch appears to have reached a conclusion similar to my own, that there is indeed a “Creator”. But, some of his conclusions irritate me, one of these being that Humans “make” reality (“…To cut to the chase, quantum mechanics is telling us that consciousness makes reality”) and there are implications in his argument that Human consciousness influences reality, which brings me to the ancient philosophical question: If a tree falls in the forest and no one (meaning Human) is there to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer is YES.
Trees (and all living matter and even apparent “inanimate” matter at the quantum level) communicate (any species of tree when under attack by insects or additional harmful agents share this information through apparent compound means), they don’t need us (Humans) to do so. Therefor: the consciousness that “makes reality” is NOT our own, but that of the First Thinker (creator). Haisch states that “God desires to experience his potential….What greater purpose could there be for each of us than to make an experience for God? Because we are the incarnations of God in the physical realm, God experiences the fruitfulness of his potential through us.” I gravely disagree with this statement. First: my opinion (after a lifetime of study) is that “God” is making a physical “mirror” in its creation, that consciousness on ALL LEVELS of this physical creation (no matter where it occurs) appears to be moving forwards (in sophistication, awareness, communication, etc.) in the “flesh” (as it were), toward the perfection of God’s actual (non-physical) “self”. Second: Homo Sapiens appears to be an appalling species (although admittedly we, too, are evolving in consciousness albeit reasonably slowly: one step forwards, ten steps back). I hardly reflect that God requires our “experience”, rather we are a very minuscule part of the entire physical creation, all of which ultimately (according to my theory) will make that “Mirror”: God’s reflection of itself, in perfection, in the material universe.
I wish Haisch would take up his further works to persons who know as much as he thinks he does (or perhaps, more) rather than try to persuade the “masses” that his thoughts are right.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5