Bunch o' Reviews

It's been quite a while since I have actually posted anything here. I figured I would attempt to get back into it, at least for the next while.

I often write reviews of bad Christian apologetics. To break this trend (and show that this isn't all that I read), I am going to do a few quick reviews of some books I have read recently.

The God Part of the Brain by Matthew Alper

I picked this book up expecting a book full of neuroscientific findings about religious belief. I was very disapointed. Much of the book is, instead, talking about the author's journey away from religious belief, and how basic science has undermined much of traditional religion. I ended up just skimming much of this, since it seemed completely irrelevant to the thesis of the book.

When the thesis is finally mentioned, and the book goes on to explain it, I found the basic idea unoriginal. Basically, a predisposition to religious beliefs evolved to lessen the anxiety humans feel about death. It might have been better if more space was devoted to exploring the evidence and the ramifications of this idea, but the book was short as it was and much of the space was wasted on the bits irrelevant to this thesis.

Overall, I can't recommend this book.

Gödel's Proof by Ernest Nagel, James R. Newman, edited and foreword by Douglas R. Hofstadter

The proof to which the title refers to, of course, is his classic proof of the incompleteness of logical systems (for more specific information, you can read about it on wikipedia). This was enormously important for the history of mathematics, extremely interesting as a logical proof, and has been (unfortunately) misused in attempts to prove all sorts of far-reaching philosophical conclusions.

The book itself presents the argument in a very easy to understand way. It gives the overall structure of the proof, without getting too bogged down in details and formality. It's quite readable (or as readable as you could expect, given the subject matter), and does a wonderful job of getting the basic structure of the proof across.

I highly recommend this to any one who is interested in logic or mathematics, especially those who have not had a chance to study Gödel's result before.

Mindfield by Lone Frank

This books talks about how the cognitive sciences, particularly neuroscience, are having an effect on other fields and on everyday life. A very good balance is achieved between depth and breadth of issues. The book looks at a very broad array of topics, but - although I may have been inspired to want to read more about a specific topic - I never felt that something was covered only superficially.

The topics the book talks about are how neuroscience can give us insight on religion, morality, happiness, social interactions, economics, marketing, and lieing. A very interesting read for anyone interested in any one of those topics.

Happiness by Richard Layard

This book was rather interesting. It looked at many scientific findings about happiness - sociological findings about the happiness of different countries through the years, the effects of various things on the happiness of the individual or a whole country, etc. He uses this to put forward some arguments on policy changes which would increase the happiness of a country, and things which affect happiness in our everyday lives.

This is a very thought-provoking book. I have a feeling many hard-core libertarians would have a lot of problems with the arguments put forward, but I would still recommend this book to them and anyone else interested in the science of happiness.