Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man - Softcover

Appleyard, Bryan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385420986 ISBN 13: 9780385420983

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1994

Synopsis

In a brilliant and explosively controversial work, the author attacks modern science for destroying our spiritual sense of self.
 
What is the role of science in present-day society? Should we be as dazzled as we are by the innovations, the insights, and the miraculous improvements in material life that science has wrought? Or is there a darker, more pernicious side to our scientific success?
 
Renowned British science columnist Bryan Appleyard thoroughly explores each of these provocative topics in a book that has incited the ire of the scientific community. He points out that while scientists have shaped our lives and our beliefs, they have consistently failed to explain human consciousness, the soul, or the meaning of life. From Galileo to Darwin, from Copernicus to Oppenheimer, countless scientists have proclaimed a universe in which human beings are only an accidental presence. The unwitting result is that science has cast humankind adrift, paralyzing us with fear and cutting us off from personal or religious truth. In Appleyard’s view, science has done us “appalling spiritual damage.”
 
These startling conclusions have prompted strong counterattacks from the scientific establishment. Yet regardless of where one falls in the debate, Understanding the Present forces readers to re-examine society’s blind faith in the benevolence of modern science.
 
“An exposition that is dazzling for its concrete illustrations and examples.”—The New York Times
 
“A withering indictment of modern science . . . This should crack a few test tubes.”—Kirkus Reviews

About this title

About the Author

Bryan Appleyard is a special-feature writer and columnist for the Sunday Times of London. He is the author of several books, including Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man and The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky.

From Kirkus Reviews

A withering indictment of modern science by, of all people, the science-and-philosophy columnist of The Sunday Times of London. Appleyard's blast is ferocious: Science has done ``appalling spiritual damage'' to modern human beings, for it rules the day but ``offers no truth, no guiding light, and no path.'' Enough is enough: ``We must resist and the time to do so is now.'' Appleyard's resistance takes the form, largely, of a history of how science came to be and the havoc it has wreaked. The crisis began in 1609, when Galileo peered through the telescope and ``invented the modern.'' Suddenly, observation and experiment replaced rational authority (exemplified by Aquinas's brilliant synthesis of Aristotle and Christianity) as the bastion of knowledge. This new way of seeing eschewed value and meaning, Appleyard says; it found its philosophy in Cartesian dualism, and its final, tragic expression in Darwinism. Appleyard runs through responses to this alleged debacle, from Nietzsche to Kierkegaard--all noble failures, he contends. Science's internal revolutions, especially quantum physics, may provide new life--but Appleyard doubts it. Nor does he have faith in New Age science (Bohm, Capra, Sheldrake) or the Green movement, which he describes as ``a religion of rejection.'' What, then, to do? Consider that science cannot understand self-consciousness or the soul, he says, although subjective experience indicates that we may possess both. These are clues that science is blinkered, that it poses its own questions and then insists these are the only ones that exist. The answer is to ``humble'' science, to see it as just one ``convention'' of knowing rather than as the royal road to truth. An old argument, but Appleyard attacks scientism with uncanny intelligence and heat (who else has managed to squash hard and New Age science with the same hammer, or has scorned Sagan, Hawking, and other scientific icons in such blistering terms?). This should crack a few test tubes. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0385420986
• ISBN 13: 9780385420983
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288