A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet, by Nancy Ellen Abrams
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A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet, by Nancy Ellen Abrams
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A paradigm-shifting blend of science, religion, and philosophy for agnostic, spiritual-but-not-religious, and scientifically minded readers Many people are fed up with the way traditional religion alienates them: too easily it can perpetuate conflict, vilify science, and undermine reason. Nancy Abrams, a philosopher of science, lawyer, and lifelong atheist, is among them. And yet, when she turned to the recovery community to face a personal struggle, she found that imagining a higher power gave her a new freedom. Intellectually, this was quite surprising. Meanwhile her husband, famed astrophysicist Joel Primack, was helping create a new theory of the universe based on dark matter and dark energy, and Abrams was collaborating with him on two books that put the new scientific picture into a social and political context. She wondered, “Could anything actually exist in this strange new universe that is worthy of the name ‘God?’” In A God That Could Be Real, Abrams explores a radically new way of thinking about God. She dismantles several common assumptions about God and shows why an omniscient, omnipotent God that created the universe and plans what happens is incompatible with science—but that this doesn’t preclude a God that can comfort and empower us. Moving away from traditional arguments for God, Abrams finds something worthy of the name “God” in the new science of emergence: just as a complex ant hill emerges from the collective behavior of individually clueless ants, and just as the global economy emerges from the interactions of billions of individuals’ choices, God, she argues, is an “emergent phenomenon” that arises from the staggering complexity of humanity’s collective aspirations and is in dialogue with every individual. This God did not create the universe—it created the meaning of the universe. It’s not universal—it’s planetary. It can’t change the world, but it helps us change the world. A God that could be real, Abrams shows us, is what humanity needs to inspire us to collectively cooperate to protect our warming planet and create a long-term civilization.
A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet, by Nancy Ellen Abrams - Amazon Sales Rank: #348174 in Books
- Brand: Beacon Press
- Published on: 2015-03-10
- Released on: 2015-03-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.40" h x .90" w x 6.20" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 200 pages
A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet, by Nancy Ellen Abrams Review “A fine addition to the growing library of alternative approaches to literalism in belief, this book is suitable for academic libraries, liberal churches, and individual seekers.”—Library Journal“A truly extraordinary read from beginning to end...Informed, informative, thoughtful, thought provoking, inspired and inspiring. Very highly recommended.”—Margaret Lane, Midwest Book Review“Like everything else in life, Gods die. And when they do, new Gods come to take their place. Ours is a time of new Gods birthing, and Nancy Abrams’s magnificent book A God That Could Be Real is a powerful act of midwifery. This is not a eulogy for the old Gods but a prophecy of the new.” —Rabbi Rami Shapiro, author of Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent “You will find that your beliefs are enriched by reading Abrams’s book. I am thrilled that we have the creativity and originality that is exhibited in this book, and I recommend it highly to all, religious or secular, believer or atheist, who are ready to explore honestly their understanding of the divine in our beautiful, expanding universe.” —Archbishop Desmond Tutu, from the Foreword “Over the past two decades a largely sterile dispute has raged between two diametrically opposing camps: atheists and religious fundamentalists. It is surely time to move on and elevate the discussion to a higher intellectual level. This ambitious and thought-provoking book by Nancy Abrams on the interface of science and religion is a timely and welcome contribution to a more productive discussion of the topic.” —Paul Davies, from the Foreword “A God That Could Be Real is full of sparkling prose, memorable quotes, and strikingly original insights that have never been brought to the page before, despite the long-running culture wars between organized religion and modern science over God and cosmic knowledge. My family and I spent a long dinner and all of breakfast the next day debating the meaning of this book. Give this book to the other questing minds in your family and brace yourself for heated discussions.” —Sandra Moore Faber, National Medal of Science recipient and University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz “Nancy Abrams dares to pose many of the important and challenging questions that arise at the intersection of contemporary cosmology, spirituality, and atheism. I respect Abrams’s moral passion and honest search for a God that could be real, a search beckoning us all.” —Matthew Fox, founder of Creation Spirituality and author of Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior for Our Times“[Abrams] points to a way beyond the boring religion-science debates, which pit secular fundamentalists against religious fundamentalists.”—Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg, Patheos
About the Author Nancy Ellen Abrams is coauthor with Joel R. Primack, of The View from the Center of the Universe and The New Universe and the Human Future.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From Chapter 2: "A God That Can't Be RealScience can never tell you with certainty what’s true, since there’s always the possibility that some future discovery will rule it out. But science can often tell you with certainty what’s not true. Galileo, for example, showed with telescopic evidence that the heavenly spheres could not exist, even though he could not actually prove that Earth moves around the sun. When scientists produce the evidence that convincingly rules out the impossible, there’s no point in arguing. It’s over. Grace lies in accepting and recalculating. That’s how science moves forward.What if we thought this way about God? What if we took the evidence of a new cosmic reality seriously and became willing to rule out the impossible? What if we cleared away those distractingnotions of God that can’t be true in the kind of universe we actually live in? God can be imagined to do or be anything, but the goal of this book is to find a God that is real.It’s amazing how many unnecessary requirements have gotten tacked onto God. Unnecessary requirements are harmful. They divide us from each other, since different people see them differently; worse, they divide us from our own rational selves. A religion that credits God with powers that can’t exist in this universe sets its followers up for inevitable doubt, which in turn requires of them an exhausting effort to jack up their faith in order to fight the evidence against it. This is self-sabotage. People are expending all that effort and worry to defend “characteristics” of God that no one really needs.So here’s a chance to pare our definition of God down to the essentials.In my quest for a believable higher power, I decided to look one by one at the reasons God seemed unbelievable and ask if they really matter or whether they are merely traditional attributes. The results of this exercise amazed me.Not one characteristic that conflicts with science turns out to matter. We can let them go.Shakespeare said it best in Richard II: “Superfluous branches we lop away that bearing boughs may live.” Here are the branches that must be lopped away that a real God may live. These beliefs can’t be literally true in our universe. To the extent we cling to these images, even as metaphors, we are rejecting the real universe:1. God existed before the universe.2. God created the universe.3. God knows everything.4. God plans what happens.5. God can choose to violate the laws of nature.I know that approaching with any level of scientific rigor something so personal, so cherished, so core touching as God may be hard at first. But the price of a real God is that we have to consciously let go of what makes it unreal. God can’t be everything or it will be nothing. We all need hope and comfort and inspiration, but we also need the built-in bullshit detector of science.If you’ve never taken these five ideas literally but instead have seen God as simply a word for the sense of wonder, of the unknown, of endless possibility, of cosmic connection, and of the opportunity to not need all the answers, then it may perhaps seem silly to bother refuting them one by one. Yet I would be surprised if your sense of wonder, of the unknown cosmic connection, and endless possibility connected with the idea of God was not based on an unconscious lifelong association of God with at least some of these impossible characteristics.1. God could not have existed before the universe.The history of the universe tells us that complexity evolves from simpler states of being, so there could not have been an intelligence complex enough to design anything at all, let alone a universe, before cosmic evolution even began.What I’m about to say about the universe is based not only on direct astronomical observations but also on supercomputer simulations. The two standard ways of doing astronomy used to be theory and observation, but simulation is a new way. Direct observation of the universe in many cases is impossible, since dark matter and dark energy, which are most of the universe, are invisible, and because events on the scale of the universe happen across such vast stretches of time that a human lifetime is far too short to experience them. Theory is also inadequate because, no matter how sophisticated it may be, it can’t predict in any detail the kind of awesome transformations that had to happen for primordial particles and energy to turn into galaxies, stars, and planets. But supercomputers can predict them, to a surprising degree. The availability of supercomputers is a key reason why scientific cosmology has entered a golden age.Supercomputers enable scientists to collapse billions of years of evolution into minutes, and billions of light-years onto a computer screen. My husband’s team of astrophysicists, for example, has several times simulated the evolution, from the Big Bang to today, of a representative cube of universe a billion light-years on a side. The team ran the simulations according to different theoretical assumptions in order to test those assumptions. The supercomputer—the equivalent of fourteen thousand top-of-the-line Intel computers working for two months—can track the motions of many billions of particles and cross-correlate their interactions with all the others for (a simulated) 13.8 billion years.My husband’s team then compares the final universe produced by the simulation to the real universe as telescopes directly observe it; the computers predict what the observational astronomers will find. Only if the simulated and real universes match were the initial assumptions right. They match in incredible detail.* When the simulation is not stopped at today but allowed to run, we are watching a simulation of the future of our universe.Not only cosmology but many fields, from neuroscience to climate science, have leaped ahead since the advent of supercomputer simulation. Here, in an abbreviated and simplified form, is whatmodern cosmology tells us about our origins.Right after the Big Bang there was nothing but rapidly moving elementary particles and energy, not even atoms yet, though the simplest atoms, hydrogen and helium, formed after a few hundredthousand years. The early universe was smooth, expanding but not turbulent. Spacetime (space and time in the universe have since Einstein been understood to be a continuum) came into existence wrinkled, and the wrinkles expanded with the universe. For billions of years primeval particles of dark matter flowed toward the wrinkles by gravitational attraction alone. The dark matter formed clumps along the wrinkles through a process that astronomers enigmatically call “violent relaxation.” Up to here, our cosmic history was simple, governed by pure physics. Scientists deeply understand that era. But as time passed, enormous transformations came about,and the complexity that resulted is much harder to understand. The immense gravity of the dark matter clumps drew in clouds of hydrogen and helium, which cooled and collapsed to the centers of the clumps, igniting as stars. Surrounded by a halo of dark matter, the stars cooked up inside themselves the heavier atoms, like oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, silicon, and the nearly a hundred natural atoms that are heavier than helium and make up most of the periodic table of the elements. The biggest stars exploded in supernovas and spewed these heavy atoms into space as pure stardust to soar for eons. The intermingling stardust of thousands of supernovas, which had occurred over many eras, got pulled into the gravitational field of our forming solar system, and 4.6 billion years ago the stardust condensed into the rocky planets, including Earth. Hundreds of millions of years passed before the earliest life evolved here, and billions more before intelligence evolved that was complex enough to understand the idea of creation. The evolution of such complexity takes a long time.This is the kind of universe we live in. This is where our thinking should start.Something as complex as a mind capable of planning and creating the universe could not possibly have been there to do so.What’s more, it’s not clear where “there” would be, since cosmologists are continually pushing back the beginning. The Big Bang used to be thought of as the beginning, but the larger theory of cosmic inflation now explains what set up the initial conditions for the Big Bang and caused the wrinkles that later attracted dark matter. The theory of cosmic inflation has made five specific predictions, and the four that have been tested so far have all been confirmed by observation, so the theory has become part of the standard model of cosmology. Astrophysicists have also extrapolated backward from cosmic inflation, theorizing what may have happened before. This theory is called eternal inflation, and it posits a pure quantum state of being outside our universe that, once begun, can never stop and may continue eternally, producing multiple universes, including ours. Where, in that case, would the beginning be?Let’s suppose the theory of eternal inflation turns out to be right. Does eternal into the future require eternal into the past? Not clear. It’s not even clear what “eternal into the past” might mean. In eternal inflation not even an atom can form. No information can be preserved in any way, and thus no meaningful past could exist.Furthermore, “eternal into the future” is not even a meaningful concept inside our universe. The largest structures in our universe are called superclusters of galaxies. They will exist for many billions more years, but gradually the dark energy that’s causing the universe to expand faster and faster will tear them apart. Unlike superclusters of galaxies, our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is bound together by gravity, which will permanently prevent dark energy from tearing it apart. Instead our Milky Way will merge in five billion years or so with our neighboring large galaxy, Andromeda, and tens of smaller nearby galaxies will also fall into the forming megagalaxy that we might call Milky Andromeda. New stars will keep forming, and Milky Andromeda will shine on for a trillion more years, hundreds of times longer than Earth has existed. That’s pretty close to eternal—but not the same.The fact is, “in the beginning” is no more precise than “once upon a time.” The beginning is just a line we draw in our minds to be able to start telling a story. The end is a line we draw to stop. They have no objective reality. They can’t even be defined, let alone explained. So demanding to know the very beginning of the universe is as misguided as trying to understand the last moment of the universe.*You can watch visualizations of these simulations on the website for the most recent book I coauthored with my husband, The New Universe and the Human Future, http://new-universe.org.
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74 of 79 people found the following review helpful. Stimulating, Disturbing, Exasperating, Overwhelming, Inspirational... By Dean Family This is a difficult book to review. It is also a hard book to get through. The subject matter is both lofty and dense. If you are going to do more than skim it, you will probably have to read parts, put it aside, chew on it, and then return for another session. And if it is difficult to read and review, I can only imagine how terrifically much harder it must have been to write! For the effort alone, I would give it four stars.What a task to take on: to set out not only to define what God is, based on (the author's grasp of) the most recent scientific understanding of the nature of the universe -- and then to infuse this with her personal experience of a Higher Power encountered through her 12-Step program!I found this read (and find, since I am not finished with it) to be stimulating, exasperating, disturbing, overwhelming, inspirational, headache-making, breakthrough, bewildering and finally (even grudgingly), elucidating.I will say first, in case I lose you along the way, if you are serious in your contemplation of the nature of God, you will want to read Nancy Abrams' book.To begin, it helps to look at the roots on which the book grew. There are many, but four I find fundamental to understanding.One: Nancy Abrams is the wife of cosmologist Joel Primack, one of the promulgators of the theory that our universe is not composed primarily of atoms, as you and I were taught, but instead, of invisible and mysterious "cold dark matter" and "dark energy." Together, these two form the "double dark" theory, that, according to Nancy, are "the foundation of the modern picture of the universe." Her idea of God had to fit, first and foremost, with that and the current take on the laws of physics and thermodynamics.Two: when Nancy was 15, she told her rabbi, "God didn't create us; we created God." While she explains how she came to refine that immature idea, nevertheless, that the seed grew into her ultimate theory.Three: Ms. Abrams was a successful intellectual, lawyer, and philosopher. Yet she developed an eating disorder that eventually drove her to a 12-Step Program (which, you may know, began when two alcoholics banded together in their attempt to remain sober. It was part of the Christian temperance movement of the 20th Century, and grew into a worldwide spiritual program of recovery for addicts of many kinds). Nancy believes that her Higher Power, or God, has a reality outside herself. God is not merely a projection, as many philosophers and theologians have said, of the better part of human nature. Nancy found a God who, unlike the title of her book, not only "Could Be Real" but Is.The fourth key to Ms. Abrams' concept of God is the Theory (or phenomenon) of "emergence." Cells have individual life, but when billions are gathered together in a certain form, what emerges is greater than the sum of the parts: it is (or can be) a human being. Humans themselves have individual life, but when millions focus their efforts in certain ways, other realities emerge. One might be called "the stock market," which exists and has definite rules and characteristics. Another is "the media," and so on.Therefore, Ms. Abrams tells us, God is an emergent phenomenon. He (or it) is not the omnipotent, omnipresent Creator of all things that many religions claim. Instead, she says, God is an emergent reality from humanity. However, God is not just a projection. God is a reality humans can know, pray to, hear, and embrace.Millions upon millions of the world's inhabitants would reject Nancy Abrams' version of God, of course. In some cultures today, she could be executed for blasphemy. In more tolerant, reasonable systems, she would still be branded a heretic, or dismissed as a kook. The first possibility is a lot of what is wrong with our world today -- a narrow and violent view of existence that would return humanity to some new version of the Dark Ages. Even the last two would do this deep thinker a disservice.I have thought about the nature of God and reality a lot in my life, but I approach the spiritual being and force that powers a universe with more of a sense of humility and awe, and the sense that the tiny human speck of awareness I am should not and cannot define a God within and behind all things. I am forced to admit, I have never approached the idea of God with Ms. Abrams' rigor, or depth of research. Reading her book has required me to question everything I held true about both science and God. I am not saying in the end that I agree with all or even most of what the author is so boldly willing to declare.I stand with Desmond Tutu, who wrote one of the forewords to her book. "I do not agree with everything that Nancy Abrams says about the scientific understanding of God," the Archbishop writes. But "...The God I believe in...wants us to keep learning and discovering and exploring every inch...of creation.... This book will help you clarify your own personal understanding of God.... I recommend it highly to all, religious or secular, believer or atheist, who are ready to explore honestly their understanding of the divine in our beautiful, expanding universe."Amen, brother Tutu. And bravo, Nancy Abrams.
39 of 43 people found the following review helpful. God as an Emergent phenomenon By J. Peterson The premise of this book fascinated me, so I had to read it.As a child, I was raised in one of the major churches that preached revealed religion via "faith" (i.e. just believe what you are told), but as I matured I became an agnostic because I simply could not accept what I had been taught as a child. I have remained uncertain about how things came about in the Universe, and how it could have just "happened," and could there be a god. This book seemed to offer a possible answer, so it intrigued me.This book provoked a variety of thoughts and emotions for me, thus I judge the book a very worthwhile read.I fully admit that I did not (and still do not) grasp all of what the author is trying to say, so I need to read it again. I can't say that about very many books.Some of the author's ideas are fascinating, while others I reject. I will leave other readers to decide for themselves on these, and won't attempt to review all of them here.One of the ideas I liked the best was her description of "god" as an "emergent" phenomenon. Perhaps I don't get out enough, but I was not familiar with the whole concept of "emergence." But now that I have been introduced to the concept by this book, many (non-religious) things are much more clear. Simply put, an emergent phenomenon is one that is literally greater than the sum of its parts, e.g. a living organism is composed of unthinking atoms that individually just obey the laws of physics, but when aggregated into a human body, a totally new and wonderful thing emerges - somehow. The author's premise is that god is also emergent, which is quite interesting. I am still trying to decide if I buy this or not, but I *am* still thinking about it.Overall, the author firmly believes that the laws of physics do apply everywhere, and that "god" must also obey them. So if you don't agree with that, some or most of the book will be a tough sell. But she makes a convincing case that this might be true.Perhaps my only disappointment was that if "god" truly is an emergent phenomenon, that still does not explain "the beginning." But perhaps god did not create the universe. Perhaps there never was a beginning, and just an endless circle. More to think about.None of this can be proven or disproven, but at least here we have a coherent body of thought that doesn't rely upon blind faith in a revealed religion of some type.Recommended.
29 of 33 people found the following review helpful. Seeking Real Good By Simply Curious This is one of the most intriguing books I have read in some time. It shows us a way forward toward a coherence that transcends the divisive religious doctrines that deny the well-established truths of the universe and the sterile scientific models that ignore or dismiss the power of spirituality.Throughout history concepts of God have evolved to explain the workings of the universe as it is best understood. Historically theologians did their best to make their image of God consistent with the universe as they understood it to be. Today our understanding of the universe has advanced far beyond what the gods of traditional religions explain. These obsolete gods are holding people back. This book proposes a concept of god that is up-to-date with our present understanding of the universe.The book emerges from a dilemma faced by the author. Because her husband is Joel Primack, a prominent physicist who studies the origins of the universe, she is conversant with the most up-to-date research describing the origins of the universe and its composition including dark energy and dark matter. Based on her husband’s research, she has total confidence in the accuracy of these scientific findings. She lived as an atheist most of her life. However, recently she has been able to recover from an addiction to overeating using the spiritual approach of a twelve-step program. She conceived of the higher power called for in the program as a “loving but unbullshitable witness to my thoughts.”She abandons the tired question “Does God Exist?” as a hopeless distraction and instead pursues the question “Could anything actually exist in the universe, as science understands it, that is worthy of being called God?” The price of a real God is that we have to consciously let go of what makes it unreal.Rejecting intelligence, tool making, and language as the defining characteristic of humans, she proposes that humans are unique because we aspire to something more. After illustrating the concept of emergence she presents the core thesis of the book: God is endlessly emerging from the staggering complexity of all humanity’s aspirations across time. God is all that drives us forward toward what we can be and what we want to be.Chapters 4–6 making up part II of the book are somewhat contrived. Here she attempts to accommodate spirituality, prayer, and afterlife within her reality-based concept of God. These ideas are thought-provoking and worthy of more discussion, but not yet settled in my mind.In Chapter 7 she gives practical suggestions for renewing and reinventing religion. After describing actions to bring religion into harmony with reality, she identifies three sacred goals: 1) to protect our extraordinary jewel of a planet, 2) to do our best for future generations, and 3) to identify with humanity’s story.Chapter 8 outlines a “Planetary Morality.” Here she considers the essential question: “How can we individually expand our moral sense to care about our collective effects at size scales and timescales we are just beginning to grasp?” She presents eight high-level principles for good living informed from a global perspective.This book is both poetic and scientific. Within a rigorous scientific framework she passionately discusses spirituality, prayer, love, identity, common bonds, heaven, and hell. “For the first time we can have a coherent picture of reality that meets our highest scientific standards, reveals unexplored terrain in ourselves, has a meaningful place for an awesome God, and frees our spirits to strike out with fervor—and not a moment too soon.”Read this important and thought-provoking book. It is boldly conceived, well written, clearly argued, and backed by reliable evidence.
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A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet, by Nancy Ellen Abrams
