Michael Pitman

Science and the Soul - Cosmic Connections Michael Pitman

Publisher Marketing: Are you agnostic? If you are this book's for you. Are you religious? Do you want to understand the natural roots round which your faith has formed? Or are you, by default, of atheistic/ materialistic faith? After all, isn't every object and event (including cosmic origin and nature of the mind) material alone? Everything, according to this modernistic view, is physical - unless a metaphysical constituent exists. Could any immaterial factor (say, information, reason or mathematics) exert fundamental influence? How did cosmos start? Who in heaven's name am I? Where on earth did you spring from? What, if any, is the object of brief travel through the nothingness of time and space? Such child-like questions have excited and still excite the whole of philosophy and science. This book treats them using a simple, polar framework called Natural Dialectic. Within this framework it coordinates the major scientific disciplines of physics, psychology, biology and information technology. And it defends neither any particular holistic faith nor evolutionary materialism; instead it systematically interprets current scientific evidence according to opposing but supra-religious world-views. Who in turn, therefore, wishes to defend its detached, clear and reasonable inspection of human and all other kinds of nature? Who is the friend of independence and truth-seeking objectivity? You won't have read a book like this before yet, paradoxically, it's redolent with long-familiar themes. If you're intrigued then come with Science and the Soul upon a voyage of discovery. Welcome aboard (in neutral, alphabetical order) all Buddhists, Christians, Darwinists, Hindus, humanists, Jews, materialists, Muslims, scientific atheists, Taoists and other sorts of faith or lack of it! Then, armed with SAS, read on. * Due to e-book formatting challenges such elements as lists and pictures may, on a few narrow-screen devices, be less than perfectly displayed. * The print version contains a detailed Index. This you are invited to regard as a web, a kind of sub-text whose indented entries make connections all across the volume's natural world.