Category: book reviews

A book recommendation: “The Overstory”

November 11, 2025 • 9:15 am

I don’t often recommend books—well, at least not on a weekly basis —but I’ve just polished off one that ranks among the best books I’ve read in the past several years. It’s a Pulitzer winner (when I’m trawling for fiction I check the Booker and Pulitzer winners): The Overstory (2018) by Richard Powers (see Wikipedia entry here). I recently finished another fat book of his, The Time of Our Singing (2003), and while it was engrossing and worth reading, I was somewhat put off by Power’s use of language that seemed show-offy, as well as the emphasis on music, which made me (a classical-music ignoramus) unable to fully appreciate a lot of the allusions.

This time the book is not about music but about trees. Well, about how trees and the desire to preserve them affects the lives of nine people. Some of the characters work on trees, like a biologist who discovers how trees communicate with one another (I think she’s modeled on Suzanne Simard), while another man, a Sikh computer programmer (they are all in North America), has his tree encounter by falling out of one, paralyzing him from the waist down. Most of the others are deeply into ecology, motivated by knowing that trees are essential for our well being and the health of the planet, and are being cut down at an incredible rate. All but one of the chracters (the computer guy) become eco-activists, chaining themselves to trees and, ultimately, committing crimes against tree-cutting firms, who they see as evil.  The stories have a lot of sadness, but also a lot of joy, and you follow the characters from youth through old age: the narrative is chronological but jumps from person to person. A sense of doom hangs over the whole story, with repeated references to our future demise via global warming and loss of natural habitat.

The title surely refers to the view that trees are more important than transitory humans (humans are surely the “understory”), and that the wanton cropping of forests is immoral.  That is the “truth” of this book, but it’s not a universal truth, as many clearly don’t agree with it. But if you think that humans are exacerbating global warming and creating a potential catastrophe, as I do, then yes, that warning is real. But we don’t have to learn it from this book; scientists have already told us that.

Powers still plays with language in a way that’s occasionally irritating, but the story is mesmerizing—a page-turner, even though it’s 500 pages long.  Here are a few plaudits from the book’s Amazon page, just to let you know that others find it equally impressive. And remember, it got a Pulitzer, which is usually, though not inevitably, a guarantee of literary quality. (I find the Bookers a more reliable guide to quality.)

“It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it…. It changed how I see things and that’s always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading.”
― Barack Obama

“The best book I’ve read in 10 years. It’s a remarkable piece of literature, and the moment it speaks to is climate change. So, for me, it’s a lodestone. It’s a mind-opening fiction, and it connects us all in a very positive way to the things that we have to do if we want to regain our planet.”
― Emma Thompson

“Monumental… The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of the story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size.… A gigantic fable of genuine truths.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The New York Times Book Review

“The best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period.”
― Ann Patchett

“I’ll never see a tree the same way again.”
― Louis Sachar, New York Times

“I’ve read a lot of good books, but the last truly great book I read was The Overstory, by Richard Powers.”
― Ed Helms, New York Times Book Review

And yes, The Overstory may change your life by affecting how you view trees, and that is reason enough to read it.  That, of course, is not a “truth”, but a “way of feeling” that’s one of the reason to read books like this.

You can get this big book for only eleven bucks on Amazon, or thirteen for the hardback. It would make a wonderful holiday gift for your friends who love nature.

Finally, as always, I proffer this not just as a recommendation, but also as a solicitation. What books have you read lately that you’d recommend to other readers? I get many good recommendations from posts like these, so don’t be hesitant to tell us what you like.

The cover:

Matthew’s biography of Francis Crick gets a glowing review in Nature

November 3, 2025 • 10:00 am

Matthew’s new biography of Francis Crick is the third one published, but, according to this glowing review in Nature, is by far the best of the lot. I’ve read a lot of it in draft and, while I can’t compare it to the other two, I can tell you that Matthew’s is worth buying and reading, and you don’t have to be a biologist to understand it. Just have a gander at the final assessment of reviewer Georgina Ferry:

Of Crick’s three biographers, Cobb comes closest to making the case that Crick belongs in the scientific pantheon alongside Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, arguing that “Crick’s thinking changed how the rest of us see the world”. Ridley’s book (Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code, 2006) is an entertaining primer but brief, unreferenced and unindexed. In his authorized biography Francis Crick: Hunter of Life’s Secrets (2009), Olby is as thorough as Cobb but perhaps more reverent, glancing coyly at Crick’s preoccupations with drugs and sex, whereas Cobb makes them essential accessories to his intellectual pursuits.

Ferry’s review (click on headline below to read, or find it archived here) occupies nearly three pages of the journal—the longest book review I’ve seen in Nature.  That alone tells you of the book’s importance. Matthew must be chuffed (in fact, he told me so), and the only other review he needs now is a good one in the New York Times. I hope they’re reviewing it, for Crick was one of the greatest scientists of our era, and the NYT often pays scant attention to science books.

Click to read the review. And yes, there are drugs and sex.

Crick is best known to the layperson as the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA with J. D. Watson, but he did far more, including hypothesizing the existence of a three-base code for amino acids, of messenger RNA to carry the code into the cytoplasm to make proteins, and formulizing the “central dogma,” best characterized as “information can go from DNA to protein, but information cannot get from the protein back to the genetic material.”

Now Crick, like his contemporary polymath J. D. “Sage” Bernal, was no saint, at least if you expect Crick to be a saint. He was a complex human being and that complexity, including affairs and drug-laced parties, is part of Crick’s life. But it can also be seen as instantiating the same tendencies that helped make his career: his need to interact with others and his desire to open the “doors of perception” when he worked on consciousness at the end of his career.

Let me give just a few quotes from the review. I tell you, had I written this book I’d be popping champagne corks today:

In a magisterial new biography, Crick, zoologist and historian Matthew Cobb revisits the double-helix breakthrough, a discovery he discussed in forensic detail in his book Life’s Greatest Secret (2015). Yet, this time, the publication of the structure and the immediate aftermath of the discovery occupy just 41 pages. Instead, Cobb explores how Crick’s thinking, writing and interactions with others transcended that brilliant, yet contested, episode, revolutionizing molecular biology and influencing evolutionary and developmental biology, visual neuroscience and ideas about consciousness.

At the same time, he makes a more sustained attempt than either of Crick’s previous biographers (Matt Ridley and Robert Olby) to answer several questions. Who was Crick? What kind of person was he? What did he care about?

Crick was notoriously reluctant to divulge personal information or even have his photograph taken. Combing through a remarkably comprehensive set of personal and professional archives with meticulous attention to detail, Cobb has reconstructed Crick’s relationships with those who were essential crew mates on his intellectual odyssey.

People will of course be curious about the Rosalind Franklin episode in the elucidation of DNA’s structure, though the whole DNA-structure narrative occupies only about 40 pages in the book. Matthew’s view is outlined below, and I believe he’s written on this site that Franklin should have gotten the  Chemistry Nobel Prize with Wilkins, but she died of ovarian cancer before the Prize was awarded (they’re not given posthumously).

Cobb presents the double-helix story as much more of a collaboration with chemist Rosalind Franklin and biophysicist Maurice Wilkins at King’s College London than Crick and Watson acknowledged in their iconic 1953 paper (J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick Nature171, 737–738; 1953). He exonerates Crick and Watson of theft, but not of bad manners. “They should have requested permission to use the data,” Cobb writes. “They did not.”

The elucidation of the triplet code and the mechanism for translating it into proteins was done by Crick in association with Sydney Brenner, who won his own Nobel Prize much later: 2002. And this collaboration brings up some of the “unsaintly” behavior of Crick. From the review:

These landmark findings involved numerous experiments overseen by Brenner’s highly skilled research assistant, Leslie Barnett; Crick himself was notoriously clumsy in the laboratory. Cobb acknowledges her “vital” role but we learn nothing about her as a person. Various long-suffering secretaries also appear fleetingly: they formed part of Crick’s essential support system, some became close friends, and it would have been good to hear more of their voices (and perhaps less of Kreisel’s). As for the lovers, they drift by like ghosts: noted, occasionally quoted, but not identified. “Not our business”, says Cobb.

After this period, Crick was fruitlessly distracted by problems of development and the origin of life, going “off the rails” according to the reviewer. But then he found his footing again when he moved to the Salk Institute in 1977 and began working on consciousness.

. . for the rest of his life focused mainly on tackling the second of the two problems that he had identified at the outset of his career: the basis of human consciousness. Homing in on the question of how humans experience the visual world, he once again became a brilliant influencer and synthesizer of ideas from both neuroscience and machine learning. His 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis argued that all conscious experience stems from brain activity and nothing else; however, it fell short of explaining how. Although this theory was not particularly astonishing to most neuroscientists, it made an enormous public impact.

Well, Crick was certainly right about that: where else could consciousness come from unless it’s some supernatural phenomenon that is outside the ambit of physics. Yet the neurological basis of consciousness is still contested by both scientists (included the deluded “panpsychists” who think that everything in the Universe is conscious) and by laypeople who haven’t thought about the problem. The problem, of course, is connected with determinism, and Crick was certainly a determinist. As I’ve written elsewhere, J. D. Watson told me that he and Crick were motivated to find the structure of DNA partly to demonstrate that the “secret of life” had a purely chemical and materialistic basis.

Here’s the final paragraph of the review: the cherry on the sundae:

Cobb is reliably excellent in maintaining the narrative momentum of a life in science that was anything but mundane. His gripping and accessible account is generous while calling out flaws as he sees them, and discreet when that could hurt the feelings of living friends and relatives. What made Crick Crick, he argues, was his lifelong attempt to “chase the intellectual high” produced by flashes of unique insight. Crick was not, he concludes, a saint or a hero but “an extraordinarily clever man with limits to his interests and perception”.

Are you ready to read the book now? I hope so, and note that I get nothing out of blurbing it here. I do get an autographed copy, though, for having helped Matthew find a fact about baseball in the book (box scores are forever).

You can order the Crick bio from the UK by clicking on the screenshot of the British version below, or here if you’re in the US. And of course there’s always Amazon. The book comes out in three days in the UK and on November 11 in the U.S. (The UK cover is much better, but the contents are identical.)

Kathleen Stock leaves her lane, says that creationist arguments “undermine her faith in science”

October 10, 2025 • 10:15 am

Having read one of her books (Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism), which I liked, and knowing how Kathleen Stock (OBE) was hounded out of the University of Sussex for her gender-critical views, but has stood her ground since, I’ve been an admirer, though I haven’t followed her doings much. I see this from Wikipedia:

On 9 March 2023, Stock, alongside tennis player Martina Navratilova and writer Julie Bindel, launched The Lesbian Project.  The purpose of the Lesbian Project, according to Stock, is “to put lesbian needs and interests back into focus, to stop lesbians disappearing into the rainbow soup and to give them a non-partisan political voice.”

Stock is a lesbian, and you see above, she doesn’t want gay women stirred into the “rainbow soup” with the “T”s  Yet, at least from that book, I don’t see Stock as a transphobe, but rather as someone who thinks hard about the slippery concept of “gender” and who doesn’t see transwomen as fully equivalent to natal women.

But I have to ratchet back some of my admiration for Stock in view of what she has just published: a semi-laudatory review of a creationist/ID book, God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies.  The Sunday Times also extolled the book (which is a bestseller, by the way); I dissected some of its arguments here. As far as I can tell—and the book isn’t yet available to me—the authors give the standard creationist guff touting a “God of the Gaps”, arguing that things that science doesn’t yet understand, like how the Universe began or how life began, are prima facie arguments for God. Of course they were once prima facie arguments for God about things we now have a scientific explanation for, like lightning and plague, but the new book apparently sees the existence of a complicated god as more parsimonious than saying “we don’t yet know, but all the evidence given for God that science has investigated has proven to be purely materialistic.”

Sadly, Stock has somewhat fallen for the God of the Gaps, to the extent that the book has “undermined her faith in science”.

If you subscribe to UnHerd, you can read Stock’s hyperbolically-titled review by clicking on the screenshot below, or you can read it for free as it’s archived here.

The very beginning of the review, in which Stocks ‘the eternal truths of religion” gets the review off to a bad start. (Is she joking here? I don’t think so.) There’s the usual incorrect noting that religiosity is increasing in the West. Then she says the god-of-the-gaps arguments have weakened her faith in science. Bolding is mine, and excerpts from Stock’s review are indented”

The eternal truths of religion are having a moment. Church pews are filling up with newcomers. Gen Z is earnestly discussing demons and sedevacantism on social media. This might, therefore, seem like a good time to publish a book which purports to lay out a positive empirical case for the existence of a supreme being.

God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, out this week in English, is already a best-seller in Europe. It comes with endorsements from various luminaries, including a Nobel Prize winner in physics. Reading it hasn’t affected my religious tendencies either way, but it has definitely undermined my faith in science.

Leibniz once asked: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Bolloré and Bonnassie’s answer is that God originally decreed “let there be something”; and they think that 20th-century developments in physics, biology, and history support this hypothesis. Their basic strategy in the book is to keep asking “What are the chances of that?” in a sceptical tone, concluding that only the truth of Christianity can explain otherwise unlikely natural circumstances.

Now Stock isn’t completely laudatory about the book, especially its “Biblical” evidence for God (see below), but saying that her faith in science has been weakened by God-of-the-Gaps arguments means she thinks that their priors have increased to the point where scientific evidence for the Big Bang, the “fine-tuning” of the universe, the complexity of single-cell organisms, and “the stunning efficiency of the double helix”—all of this is weakened, strengthing the evidence for God  or at least something divine.  But even here she waffles, ultimately concluding that these arguments “empty nature of mystery”:

Fine-tuning arguments remain interesting, though. Ultimately, they don’t work to rationally justify Christianity, or indeed any other kind of concrete theology, because of the large gaps they leave. One big problem is about how to calculate the probabilities of physical laws being as they are; for on many secular views of the laws of nature, their being different from the way they are is, precisely, physically impossible. But even leaving aside that technical issue, God’s intentions in designing the universe still look worryingly vague: what was He calibrating the background physical laws for, exactly? Was it just to bring carbon into the universe; or carbon-based life forms, generally; or humans, specifically; or even just one human in particular — Liz Truss, say, or Craig from Strictly? Why did He adopt so painfully indirect and slow a manner of implementation, and not just magic up the Garden of Eden in a trice instead, like a pop-up at the Chelsea Flower Show? The nature of God also looks pretty vague, defined only as whoever it was that came up with the floorplans: are we talking just one cosmic architect, or a committee?

“Why did He not just magic up the Garden of Eden in a trice, like a pop-up at the Chelsea Flower Show?”

Effectively, then, though fine-tuning arguments empty nature of mystery, treating it like a piece of machinery we might one day fully understand, they return all the obscurity to God.

The problem is that although her points against fine-tuning are decent, and she raises several other arguments against a divine origin, she doesn’t like the creationist arguments not because there are materialist explanations for fine-tuning, but because she wants these things to remain a mystery.  I suspect this because she says this at the end of her piece:

Perhaps, then, we are at an impasse: two mutually incompatible explanations of how we got here, each with its own measure of confusion and darkness. We could just stipulate that a creationist God, by definition, gets all the glamorous mystery, while the material world gets rational comprehensibility; He is whatever started things off, but that which we cannot otherwise hope to know. Or perhaps — and this would be my preference — we could give up flat-footed quests to prove the existence of the supernatural by rational means; we could start becoming alert to immanence, rather than simply hypothesising transcendence. That is: we could stop treating the natural world as if it were an Agatha Christie novel, where the only real mystery is how exactly the body got into the library.

I prefer our flat-footed attempts to explain things materialistically instead of becoming “alert to immanence,” whatever that means.  What we see throughout the review is Stock not just sitting on the fence, but pirouetting on it, going from one side to the other.  I still don’t know why her faith in science has been undermined, as God-of-the-Gaps arguments have been around for decades, if not centuries.  I would note that my faith in Stock has been undermined.

But in one area her review is good. As I said, it’s the “evidence” that Bolloré and Bonnassie adduce for God from the Bible. Here’s a bit:

Or take the authors’ argument that the historical Jesus must have been the Messiah, by attempting to rule out more prosaic rival explanations. Jesus can’t have been just another wise sage wandering round the Levant, they suggest, because he sometimes said crazy things. Equally, though, he can’t have been a crazy man, because he sometimes said wise things. The possibility that both sages and madmen sometimes have days off seems not to have occurred. The next chapter is of similar argumentative quality: could the Jewish race have lasted so long, been so intensely persecuted, yet achieved so much — including producing “the most sold book in history” and achieving “many unexpected and spectacular military victories” — had God not been intervening on their behalf all along?

By the time you get to the book’s treatment of the Fatima “sun miracle” — not to mention the authors’ insinuation that God instigated it in order to precipitate the Soviet Union — images of Richard Dawkins leaping around with glee and punching the air become irresistible. As chance would have it, only this week Scott Alexander published his own, much more rigorous, exploration of the Fatima sun miracle than the one offered by Bolloré and Bonnassies in their chapter. I recommend that they take this as a sign from God, and give up the explanation game forthwith.

If you have the patience, do read Scott Alexander’s very long piece on the Fatima “sun miracle,” (Spoiler: he suggests a naturalistic explanation.)

What I don’t understand about Stock and her review,then, are four things:

1.) If Stock, as a philosopher, can skillfully debunk Biblical miracles, why doesn’t she adduce the other naturalistic explanations for fine tuning, the origin of life, and the complexity of one-celled organisms.? Granted, she does raise questions about why God would make the universe as it is, but stops there.

2.) How did the book “undermine her faith in science”. She’s not clear about this. Does she find God-of-the-gaps arguments somewhat convincing?

3.) What does she mean in the title “Science can’t prove the ineffable”? “The ineffable” means “things that cannot be expressed in words.”  But of course stuff we don’t yet understand can’t be expressed in words simply because we don’t understand them, not because there’s something “transcendent” about them. If the title and subtitle are the work of an editor, well, I’ve always had the right to okay titles.

4.)  What is the “immanence” she speaks of? Is this the usual interpretation that God is to be found everywhere in the world instead of outside of it? That is, is she a pantheist?”  If so, what evidence does she have for “immanence,” or is that just something she chooses to believe?   And does she worry about where this “immanence” she accepts comes from?If the Universe is really a god in itself, why could it not be a NOT-GOD in itself—that is, something purely naturalistic?

This is a murky review, ending without the reader able to know what Stock really tbinks. That’s unseemly for a philosopher.

h/t: Chris, Loretta

Science editor of Sunday Times touts book “proving” God’s existence

October 5, 2025 • 10:15 am

In the face of declining belief in God in countries like the US and UK, believers are looking for any evidence that God exists.  But there’s nothing new to support the existence of the supernatural, though as science finds out more truths about the Universe, and we think of more questions about things (e.g., what is “dark matter”), religionists continue to take unanswered scientific questions as the evidence for God they so desperately need. And so a new book simply reprises the “god of the gaps” argument, a shopworn argument that has been tried–and has failed–many times before, both philosophically and scientifically. First, recent data from the US and UK on declining belief in God.

Here are figures from a 2023 Church Times article showing waning belief in the UK since 1981, though belief in life after death has held steady (belief in God is the line at the top in orange).. Click to read article:

And a similar decline from a 2022 Gallup poll showing a decline of about belief in the US of about 18% since 1950.

In both cases the trends are unmistakable, and, with a few hiccups, inexorable.  How do you keep your faith when all around you people are leaving it? You write a book decrying materialism, which of course, like all such books (as well as those recounting “visits to heaven”) become bestsellers due to the many believers desperate for “proof of God.”

This article appeared in today’s Sunday Times of London (h/t Pyers). Click headline to read, or find the article archived here.

The book that gives evidence that God “must” exist is God, the Science, the Evidence, by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, published by Palomar on October 14 at £22.  It’s already sold more than 400,000 copies in non-English editions (it was published four years ago in France), and U.S. publishers have ordered a print run of 110,000 for the book, which will be published here in a week.

The two authors are both believers, of course (excerpts from the Times are indented):

These authors — like Dawkins and Hawking — consider themselves men of science. Bolloré, 79, from Brittany, is a computer engineer who has founded a series of successful heavy industry, engineering and mechanical firms; Bonnassies, 59, from Paris, studied science and maths before a career as an entrepreneur in the French media industry.

Both are also men of faith. Bolloré is a lifelong Catholic. Bonnassies, who did not find his Christian faith until his twenties, said he thought before his conversion that “believers were irrational people”, adding: “God, the Resurrection, the Virgin Mary — I found it crazy.” Yet it was logic, he said, that won him around: “The surprise was there were many rational reasons to believe in God.”

And here is the book’s argument summarized by the Sunday Times. It amounts to no more than this (this is my characterization.

We do not understand how the universe began or how life began.  If everything occurs by materialistic processes, what caused the Big Bang, and how did life originate? The most “rational” solution is a creator. 

And some excerpts from the laudatory review in the Times (why are they touting superstition?):

Science and religion have never been easy bedfellows. As Thomas Jefferson put it in 1820, priests “dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight”. Five centuries of scientific breakthroughs — from Galileo to Darwin to Crick and Watson — have eroded our belief in the divine.

But now, according to a new book, a “great reversal” is under way. Science, its authors argue over 580 pages, has come full circle and “forcefully put the question of the existence of a creator God back on the table”.

Good Lord: has the argument ever been off the table? William Lane Craig has been banging the drum about it for years. But I digress; here’s more:

In a striking challenge to the academic consensus, two French authors, Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, argue that the latest scientific theories lead to only one logical conclusion: an all-powerful deity created the universe and all life within it.

. . . .Instead, the authors have written a critique of materialism — the theory that all reality, including our origins, thoughts and consciousness, can be explained solely by physical matter and physical processes.

The materialist narrative for the beginnings of the universe and life on earth is so full of holes, he and Bonnassies argue, that every modern scientific advance increases the strength of the case that a “creator” is the only rational explanation.

The authors insist that their book is not a religious one, or one touting the advantages of faith. No, it’s a critique of one of the underpinnings of science, materialism.

The authors’ ideas have received support from unexpected quarters. The renowned physicist Robert Wilson, who was jointly awarded the Nobel prize in physics for the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, agreed to write the foreword to the book. “Although the general thesis … that a higher mind could be at the origin of the universe does not provide a satisfying explanation for me, I can accept its coherence,” he wrote. “If the universe had a beginning, then we cannot avoid the question of creation.”

Yes, but if God exists, how did He/She/They/It come into existence? Why terminate the regress of causes at the creator God instead of going back even further. After all, God is not simple, as Dawkins has emphasized, so how do an immaterial being of such complexity and power come about?

Here are the two main arguments described in the Times (my headings, indented matter from article).

The Universe:

For the past century, for example, scientists have known the universe is expanding. If stars and galaxies are always moving further apart, logic dictates, the universe must have started at a single point, in a state of immense density. In 1931 the Belgian theoretical physicist Georges Lemaître termed this the “primeval atom”. We now call it the Big Bang.

But if all matter originates from that single explosion, and materialism dictates there is nothing outside of matter, what caused the bang?

Evolution:

According to the theory of evolution, this incredibly sophisticated data storage system — 40,000 billion times more dense than the most advanced computer today — emerged from the primordial soup quite by chance. The authors write: “While we still do not know how that gap was bridged, or a fortiori, how to replicate such an event, we do know enough to appreciate its infinite improbability.”=

Finally, I find this bit pathetic:

Bolloré acknowledged that the book does not present proof of God’s existence. “You cannot prove it,” he said. “You have evidence for one theory — the existence of God. And you have evidence for the other one, which is the non-existence of God. The best you can do is to compare the two sides of the scale.”

But he said that many areas of science require as big a leap of faith as that demanded by faith in God. “We are all believers,” he said. “Believers in God believe, with some evidence — and believers in materialism, they believe in plenty of things which are a little bit weird.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the biggest critics of the French edition of the book have not been scientists, but priests. “Some theologians say we don’t want evidence of God because it would reduce the merit of faith,” he said. “‘We don’t want proof’, they say. ‘Because proof would mean that we don’t have faith.’”

Here we see that the authors offer only two alternatives: God or not-God, but the alternative is really materialistic processes that we do not understand but might with more work.  And faith in materialism or science is not at all the same thing as faith in religion, an argument I dispelled in Slate some years ago.

The rejection by believers of the need for evidence is what is most pathetic. Faith, some say, is based not on empirical evidence but on revelation or authority (priests, Bibles, epiphanies, etc.) alone. Yet when believers see something that looks like evidence, they glom onto it. That’s why books like this are always best-sellers, why two documented “miracles” are required for canonization of a saint, and why people flock to Lourdes to be cured.  It’s all because unexplained. cures and miracles count as evidence for God. So do books like Heaven is for Real!

And so we get “evidence” from unexplained origins—of both life and the Universe.  To the authors, both of these fit into to a combination of The Cosmological Argument (or “First Cause” argument) and the “God of the Gaps” argument.  Readers should know the problems with both of these, and if you don’t, simply look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the relevant sections of Wikipedia.  Since we don’t know how the Universe came into being (i.e., what is the physics behind the Big Bang?), or how the first form of “life” originated, it’s foolish and impossible weigh ignorance against a belief in God—and not just God, but clearly the Abrahamic God— the god of both authors.

I have spent more than half my life dealing with these arguments, and will say just one more thing before I show a few of the Times readers’ comments. The existence of a creator God, especially of the Christian subspecies, should not be accepted simply because it’s hard at present for materialism to explain some things.  Instead, look to the Universe itself for positive proof of God: do we see signs of a loving, omnipotent creator God in the universe?

Carl Sagan discussed what evidence could count in favor of not just God, but the Christian God, as I do as well in Faith Versus Fact. But we don’t have any of that evidence. Why did God create so much of the Universe that is inhospitable for life? Why do little kids get cancers that kill them? Why do tsunamis and earthquakes happen that kill thousands of innocent people? These things cannot be explained rationally by positing a beneficent and omnipotent creator God.  In the absence of these explanations, and of positive evidence for God (e.g., Jesus coming back and doing real miracles documented extensively by film and newspapers, or, as Sagan noted, the stars arranging themselves to spell “I am that I am” in Hebrew), the best alternative is atheism, the view “there is no positive evidence for God.”  Thus the “god” side of the scales becomes lighter over time, continuing the trend begun when one after another “unexplainable” miracle or phenomenon was been explained by materialism. And of course physicists haven’t given up trying to understand the Big Bang, nor have biologists given up trying to understand how life originated.  Will the authors give up their thesis if one day, under early life conditions, scientists see a primitive form of life originating in the lab, or create a theory of how there could be cyclical universes or multiple Big Bangs creating multiple universes? I doubt it, for they are “men of faith”.

A few readers’ comments. The first one was upvoted the most:

And some more. (The readers are clearly smarter than the authors, though there are some believers in there, too.)

There are 1100 comments, so knock yourself out! As for the Sunday Times, well, they decided to present an argument for God without interviewing detractors.

Richard Dawkins stirs up things again in the Torygraph

September 27, 2025 • 9:15 am

I have to say this about Richard: he is fearless.  Of course he’s in a position to say what he wants and not lose much, though he is sensitive to erosion of his reputation, but that won’t stop him from speaking out. And one thing he will not apologize for is the claim shown in the Torygraph headline below, a headline guaranteed to raise the hackles of millions of gender activists. (By “women”, of course, he means “biological women”, not people who self-identify as women.)

Click the headline to read; you will go to a free archived version:

The quote comes from the book I discussed recently: the anthology The War on Science that I discussed yesterday. Richard’s contribution, which opens the volume, is particularly good.  We authors have gotten a lot of flak because we should have written about ideological erosion of science by Trump and the Right, instead of about incursions from the Left. We should have left the Left alone, say the blockheads.  So be it.  An excerpt from the Torygraph piece:

The slogan “trans women are women” is scientifically false and harms the rights of women, Richard Dawkins has said.

In a new book, the evolutionary biologist warns that scientific truth must prevail over “personal feelings” and argues that academic institutions must defend facts above emotion.

In The War on Science, Dawkins joins several scientists and philosophers contending that academic freedom and truth in universities was being stifled by diversity, equity and inclusion policies that promoted falsehoods under the banner of social justice.

“I draw the line at the belligerent slogan ‘trans women are women’ because it is scientifically false,” he said. “When taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women.

“It logically entails the right to enter women’s sporting events, women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons and so on.

“So powerful has this postmodern counter-factualism become, that newspapers refer to ‘her penis’ as a matter of unremarked routine.”

. . . . “Both politics and personal feelings don’t impinge scientific truths and that needs to be clearly understood. I feel very strongly about the subversion of scientific truth,” he said.

“I think part of what’s happened is the move of academia towards postmodernism, which is pernicious, and probably does account for the current vogue for the nonsense lie that sex is a spectrum.

“I think part of what’s happened is the move of academia towards postmodernism, which is pernicious, and probably does account for the current vogue for the nonsense lie that sex is a spectrum.

. . . . “JK Rowling can look after herself, but you look at the way they hounded Kathleen Stock out of Sussex University, and it’s always women who suffer.”

At London Pride demonstration in 2023, Sarah Jane Barker, previously Alan Barker, told a crowd, “If you see a Terf punch them in the f—— face.”

Dawkins said: “I don’t think I’m unduly guilty of sexist stereotyping if I say such language is more typical of the sex that ‘Sarah Jane’ claims to have left that the other she aspires to join.”

The last statement is both judicious and true. Among trans people, it is largely the trans-identified men who perpetuate hatred and violence.  And that, of course, comes from men being more aggressive and domineering. \

There’s more, including quotes from Sally Satel, but you have the link above.

Matt Ridley discusses our anthology (and the wokeness of science) in The Spectator

September 26, 2025 • 11:30 am

In one of the most aggressive and misguided examples of “whataboutery” I’ve been involved with, quite a few people criticized Lawrence Krauss’s anthology The War on Science (in which Luana and I have an altered version of our Skeptical Inquirer paper), for we had the temerity to show that science was being injured by attacks coming from the Left. OMG! What we should have published, said the blockheads, was a book showing how the Right, instantiated by Trump’s attacks on universities and grants, was doing more damage to science.

And indeed, in the short term that may well be the case. But to exculpate the Left is ridiculous, especially because their attacks are not dependent on who is President. The “progressive” infection of science may last.much longer, especially since it’s being passed on from professor to student, and has now metastasized to many scientific journals and societies. “No, no!”, cried the miscreants, “You should have gone after Trump, and Trump alone!” Well, since this website has concentrated largely on the excesses of the Left, since I consider myself on the Left, readers already know the fallacies of this whataboutery. Everybody and their brothers, sisters, and comrades are already criticizing Trump’s attack on science, and I have been among them. But where else but in this book (and this website) will you find a compendium of criticism about how the Left harms science?

Enough said. I have paid little attention to the critics, for none of them have engaged with the book’s arguments. “Look!”, they shout, “There’s even a chapter by Jordan Peterson. That’s enough to make you throw the book in the fire.” Yes, I find the inclusion of Peterson unfortunate, and his message almost impenetrable, but you don’t damn an anthology because of one weird piece, or because you don’t like the politics of some of its authors. No, you must criticize its contents. 

At any rate, Matt ‘Ridley has just mentioned the anthology in The Spectator, and actually seems to like it (cue the attacks on Ridley’s politics).  But what really angers him is the Left-wing attacks on science, the very subject of the anthology.

You can read his original article here, but it’s paywalled. Clicking below will take you to a free archived version.

Ridley discusses several issues; I’ll concentrate on what he says about the book (not all that much) as well as the general “wokery” of science, one theme of the anthology that presumably got Ridley revved up:

My, how we all laughed. Thirty years ago the physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed a social science journal into publishing a paper ‘liberally salted with nonsense’ (in his own words) that ‘flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions’. Its title alone gave away the joke: ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.’

Little did we in the truth-seeking enterprise which is real science realise that verbose and vapid social deconstruction was coming for us too. In a new book, The War on Science, edited by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, 31 scientists and scholars lament the corruption of their field by left-wing ideological nonsense. Whereas once a book with this title would have raged at the conservative right pushing creationism and sexism in the teeth of truth, now it is exposing the woke left pushing identity ideology and intersectionality at the expense of reason.

In 2022, Nature, at the pinnacle of the scientific establishment, published an editorial stating that it would refuse or retract papers that ‘could reasonably be perceived to undermine the rights and dignities of an individual or human group on the basis of socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings’. The editors went on to reassure readers that they would consult ‘advocacy groups’ before doing this, just as they once had to consult popes before denying that the Earth circles the sun. This was an open invitation to activists to censor science they did not like. Sure, scientists always had their prejudices, ideological biases and blind spots, but almost by definition regarded those as bad things to be minimised. Here now was a manifesto for deliberately injecting bias into science.

. . . But surely biology was safe, let alone chemistry and physics? How naive we were! Gender became the new front line. Journals were falling over themselves to declare sex a spectrum, despite the fact that all animals divide neatly into a sex with large, immobile gametes and a sex with small, mobile gametes – and there are no other sexes, just some rare developmental anomalies. Deviate from this new Lysenkoism by saying there are two sexes and you will be excommunicated.

Richard Dawkins once pointed out in a tweet that a mostly white woman had been pilloried for ‘identifying as black’, which seemed puzzling given that race is a spectrum in a way that sex is not. Why is it all right for a man to identify as a woman but not for a white person to identify as black? Just for raising the issue, he was retrospectively stripped of his humanist of the year award by the American Humanist Association. They accused him of implying ‘that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while simultaneously attacking black identity’.

. . . Hilariously, the ideologues have painted themselves into an awkward corner in their attempts to decolonise mathematics. They demand non-western slants on algebra and algorithms, which are words of Arabic origin, while rewriting exam problems to replace adding up grocery bills (which ‘carry the ideological message that paying for food is natural’) with calculating how many aboriginal people can fit in a tipi, which is patronising to the point of racism. One right-on mathematician admitted this change was insulting, but only ‘because indigenous people would not divide themselves in the way stated in the word problem. Relational and spiritual factors would dominate’. Meanwhile, New Zealand now requires schools to teach indigenous Maori ‘ways of knowing’ as equivalent to scientific ones. So creationism is fine if brown people do it?

. . . Many scientists continue to do good work unperturbed by this revolt against critical thinking. But the sheer volume of funding, publishing and attention that is being siphoned off into this pathology represents a massive opportunity cost. Grants are being spent, papers retracted, scientists sanctioned, hiring practices altered and peer reviews corrupted, while scientists are self-censoring to prevent their cancellation. Four-fifths of students say they self-censor, many more than at the height of McCarthyism.

. . . Science has always behaved like a cult to some extent, enforcing dogma and persecuting heretics, but it has grown far worse with wokery. Science as a philosophy is still great, but science as an institution is about as true to its philosophy as the church was under the Borgias, and as ripe for reformation.

I have crossed swords with Ridley before, in some critical review I wrote of one of his books (I can’t even remember what it was about), but I’ll cut him a break.  Not because he’s on our side, but because he’s right. I’ll let the blockheads go after hm because he doesn’t engage in “whataboutery” in this review.  Note that he doesn’t discuss the book’s contents much, but uses it as a springboard to vent his own take, which is what book reviews often do, and, said H. L. Mencken, was really the purpose of a book review.

Several books to read, and a NYT recommendation

September 22, 2025 • 10:00 am

I am a huge fan of Ian McEwan, and have read most of his novels. While the quality is variable, it’s always high, and books like Atonement (a great movie as well), Amsterdam, and The Cement Garden are world class. I expect he’ll win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Now the NYT reviews McEwan’s latest book, What We Can Know (click on cover below to go to the Amazon page), with reviewer Dwight Garner calling it the “best book [McEwan] has written in ages.” The book comes out formally tomorrow, and here’s a bit of the review:

Ian McEwan’s new novel, “What We Can Know,” is brash and busy — it comes at you like a bowling ball headed for a twisting strike. It’s a piece of late-career showmanship (McEwan is 77) from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing.

McEwan has put his thumb on the scale. This is melodramatic, storm-tossed stuff. There is murder, a near kidnapping, a child hideously dead of neglect, multiple revenge plots, buried treasure and literary arson. Writers treat other writers’ manuscripts and reputations the way Sherman treated Georgia. No one is a moral paragon.

Civilization as we know it ends. A pair of scholars in 2120, risking death from roving predatory gangs, travel across what’s left of England in search of a long-lost, epoch-making poem titled “A Corona for Vivien.” They are the last, it seems, historians alive.

This can sound like a bit much, and perhaps it is. But below and beyond these (mostly sly) surface machinations is a different sort of novel, a quite careful one. It’s about what biographers owe their subjects. It’s about the nature of history. It’s about letters, journals, emails and the other things we leave behind.

It’s about the talented wives of certain literary men and their bright resentments and wars against misfortune. It’s about affairs and empty wine bottles and quail with mushrooms and A.I. and animals and how the best poets read their work aloud. The small things scrape against the large. This other book is inky and thinky, as the poet Frederick Seidel said of the offices of Partisan Review.

Some aspects of “What We Can Know” will put readers in mind of McEwan’s early novels, which helped give him the nickname “Ian Macabre.” But the novel this most resembles, its historical sensibility, its metafictional touches and its jumping back and forth in time, is his stately 2001 classic, “Atonement.”

That’s good enough for me, and I’ve already ordered it from our library via interlibrary loan (I no longer buy books as my bookshelves are full to the extent that I must put new books horizontally atop the vertical ones).

I’m on a kick now reading Booker Prize winners, and in the last couple of weeks I’ve polished off two of them, both of which I recommend highly: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively (Booker winner in 1987), and Disgrace by John Coatzee (Booker winner in 1999). You won’t go wrong with either of these, though I suppose I’d give Lively’s book the edge.

When I run dry on novels to read, I go to lists of literary prizes, and I’ve found the Booker winners more reliable than Pulitzer fiction winners.

After these two, I have started a behemoth history book to read, one recommended by a friend:  Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, by University of Chicago professor Ada Palmer. I’ve already read a wee bit, and believe me, I’ve never found a history book written in this style (informed but totally informal and lively, almost as if it were a text message).  After a spate of novels, I decided I needed some nonfiction.

So that’s what I’ve read lately, and again I recommend the two novels I just finished.

Now it’s your turn. What have you read lately, and what can you recommend?