Article of Faith

If I believed in a god I would swear to him/her/them that I’ve read “Article of Faith” by Mike Resnick before. A priest has a robot servant who wants to understand god. The robot asks him questions and takes his answers to heart. The robot desperately wants to believe. It wants to know if it [...]

Do you like your cookies sweet or crispy?

Here’s a twofer Tuesday. Why not?

The Fable of the Octopus

Still working my way through the Podcastle archives, I enjoyed a series of four fables by Peter S. Beagle that were podcast last fall.  My favorite was “The Fable of the Octopus,” about an octopus who wanted to see god. His ideas about god are about as good as your typical human New Age book. [...]

Small Gods

While so far, my favorite book by Terry Pratchett is easily Small Gods, it’s not so easy to call it a funny book. In this book, he finally sets aside the urge for constant jokiness, and is content to raise a few smiles or groans, while telling a damn good story. This is the story [...]

The Self-Aware Universe

Like Programming the Universe, I got one key idea from The Self-Aware Universe, by Amit Goswami: that the probabilistic realm of quantum potentia is the same thing as the unitive consciousness of mystic experience. Unlike the Dancing Wu-Li Masters, this book conveys a good introduction to both quantum mechanics and the unitive consciousness. I just [...]

The G.O.D. Experiments

I checked out The G.O.D Experiments, by Gary E. Schwartz partly because it was right next to God: The Failed Hypothesis in the library, and partly because it seemed like a logical followup. Followup, yes. Logical, not so much.

GTFH: Morality and Meaning

It’s about time I posted the third half of my musings about God: The Failed Hypothesis. Though the book makes a good case for the non-existence of the Abrahamic God, it could have been argued better. The book’s real strength lies in its discussion of evolution and cosmology. Where the book ventures into morality and [...]

God: The Failed Hypothesis

I like messing around with God, or gods, or Cosmic Muffins, but that doesn’t mean I believe in any sort of god. So I was interested in seeing how God: The Failed Hypothesis, by Victor J. Stenger would apply the methods of science to the hypothesis that God exists. Like The Fabric of Reality, it [...]