Skeptics and True Believers by Chet Raymo (book review)

When mathematician Jacob Bronowski wrote that line in his famous sonnet he was discussing one of the great dilemmas of the modern age, faith versus science. In this book, Chet Raymo examines the same problems trying to reconcile the wondrous stories he learnt as a youth with the science that he studied as an adult. In the past the problem has been subjected to extreme polarisation, first by extreme domination of the subject by the church and more recently by the relatively new era of unbridled freethinking. The result is two armies, sceptics on one side and true believers on the other, two camps trying to undermine the others position. Raymo's book offers a bridge between the two groups.

The argument is neatly summed up by Bertrum Russell's classic analogy. Imagine that there is a teapot floating in space, too small to see or detect through any modern means. The scientist would ask for proof of its existence, the religious person would ask you to deny its existence. The teapot obviously is abstract for a god figure and it neatly sums up the fundamental problem between these two extremes.

Raymo begins with a look at the myths that we peddle to children and moves on to the mysteries of religion, The Turin Shroud, The Spinning Sun at Fatima and the like. By contrast the book then moves on to some of the miracles of nature such as the inbred migration patterns of birds and the nature of DNA. All of these are ideas that to some degree are hard to rationalise with science, some are obviously untrue others yet to be fully explained. From this wave of stories and facts he explores how we build up our own map of reality based on our personal view of the world around us.

Raymo moves through the related ideas and arguments that lie between religion and science with ease and always provides clear explanation, something that is essential with such an abstract and technical subject matter. His is a voice of sane thinking, an eternal optimist that manages to balance the two sides with out undermining either. He exemplifies the two Adams arguments, which runs as follows. Adam in the first chapter of genesis is driven by curiosity, wanting to know how god's creations work. Adam of the second chapter is bewitched by the world around him and looks for the image of god in everything. To his credit Raymo manages to convey his ideas in a light yet informative and often witty style making the difficult ground he is working on very accessible and never dull.

One of the problems with a book of this type is that it is a very personal subject, but the subject matter here is dealt with from the author's own experiences which goes some way to make the ideas easier to understand. Like him, I believe that there is a counterpoint between science and religion, that one with out the other is a dangerous weapon. Within the pages there are not so much answers but at least clearer understandings of some of the questions, which should help the reader, make their minds up for themselves. The book should appeal to a wide range of readers, scientific minds who know that there is something more to the universe or believers who are open to the modern views of the world, but mainly to anyone with a healthy view of the world around us and its mysteries, be they miracles of sciences or religious mysteries.