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Saying the world is Todorovian, in the sense of the fantastique, is both a humble admission of our ignorance and a payment of respect to the scientific method. It is possible that a God of the sort described in the Old Testament exists - a sort of overgrown three-year-old with a beard and superpowers, given to creating scenes and exacting vengeance, with a taste for caprice. It is possible, but is it likely? Perhaps no more so than the Flying Spaghetti Monster, an alternative being proposed (in jest) to have made the Earth and humans by intelligent design. (For more on the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, go to http://www.venganza.org/.) In fact, despite the airtime given by the too often scientifically ignorant and politically meek media to creationists, the men who started the United States were deists, not fundamentalists: Their god, insofar as they had one, was on the side of science and nature, and not a supernatural nutcase operating beyond nature with jealousy jags, temper tantrums, and afterlife ultimatums. The argument for atheism is the same as the argument for monotheism except that there's one fewer god. This brings to mind Alexander Hamilton's reputed response to Ben Franklin's suggestion that each session of the Constitutional Convention be opened with a prayer: "We have no need of foreign aid."
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This is an exceptionaly satisfying book, beautifully written and elegantly constructed; it may be a tad little difficult to follow for some though. But Mr. Sagan has produced an amazing work through an intelligent, vivid and witty combination of philosophy and science.
Brilliantly amazing.
See this book on Amazon, and on Barnes & Noble.
