I should make it clear that I have no religious agenda. I’m not a believer, but I’m not a committed atheist either. For ten years, I was an editor at Scientific American. During that time, we were diligent about exposing the falsehoods of “intelligent design” proponents who claimed to see God’s hand in the fashioning of complex biological structures such as the human eye. But in 2008 I left journalism to write fiction. I wrote an international bestseller about Albert Einstein (Final Theory). I wrote a trilogy of Young Adult novels about teenagers who become robots (The Six). And ideas about God kept popping up in my books.
I wrote...
Saint Joan of New York: A Novel about God and String Theory
By
Mark Alpert
What is my book about?
Saint Joan of New York is a novel about a modern-day Joan of Arc, a 17-year-old math genius who becomes obsessed with discovering the Theory of Everything. Joan Cooper is a lonely, confused high-school student in New York City, but she also has an extraordinary gift for mathematics. Traumatized by the recent death of her older sister, Joan tries to rebuild her shattered world by studying string theory and the efforts to unify the laws of physics. But as she tackles the complex equations, she falls prey to disturbing visions of a divine being who wants to help her unveil the universe’s mathematical design. Joan must enter the battle between science and religion, fighting for her sanity and a new understanding of the cosmos.
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The Books I Picked & Why
Life of Pi
By
Yann Martel
Why this book?
I love Life of Pi because it dramatizes a new approach to religion and belief. The novel’s hero, Pi Patel, has a strong spiritual impulse but doesn’t want to be limited to a single doctrine. Instead, he becomes an adherent to three religions – Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam – allowing him to glean the best lessons from each. Pi’s subsequent adventures – I won’t give away the plot, but it involves a Bengal tiger – are an extended argument for the existence of God. If your life is a story, the author argues, isn’t the story more interesting and less depressing with God than without Him/Her/Them/It?
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The Complete Stories
By
Flannery O'Connor
Why this book?
Flannery O’Connor was one of the best American short-story writers and totally obsessed with God and questions of belief. In her story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” she paints an unforgettable portrait of the Misfit, a murderous criminal tortured and infuriated by religious doubt. Without concrete evidence of God’s existence, the Misfit feels free to go on a killing spree, exacting vengeance on a deity that refuses to reveal itself. In “Revelation,” a self-satisfied believer is confronted with a vision of Heaven that looks nothing like what she’d expected. O’Connor uses shock and Gothic horror to jolt readers into reevaluating their beliefs.
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The Brothers Karamazov
By
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Why this book?
This classic of 19th-century Russian literature offers a disturbing parable about God and religion. In the middle of a sprawling novel about a dissipated family squabbling over money, one of the three Karamazov brothers – Ivan, a strident atheist – composes a “story within a story” about a medieval Grand Inquisitor who imprisons a resurrected Jesus and threatens to execute him a second time. The Inquisitor reveals to Jesus that the Church has opted to follow Satan rather than God, because God’s teachings are simply impractical for the human race. But Jesus’s unexpected and mysterious response suggests that belief might still be possible even in a hopelessly broken world.
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The God Delusion
By
Richard Dawkins
Why this book?
This nonfiction book by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist who has become one of the most fervent advocates of atheism, provides a good summary of all the arguments for nonbelief. It’s easy to agree with Dawkins when he argues that natural selection is far stronger than creationism or intelligent design as an explanation for how humans came to be, but his claims seem shakier when he delves into philosophical realms that are beyond his area of expertise.
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Is God a Delusion?
By
Eric Reitan
Why this book?
Philosopher Eric Reitan offers a spirited rebuttal to Dawkins by arguing that belief in God isn’t necessarily irrational or harmful. In particular, Reitan defends the progressive faiths that are based on universal love rather than sectarian division and superstition. I especially enjoyed Reitan’s discussion of atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell, who compared religious faith to a belief in the existence of a “celestial teapot” that travels around the sun in an orbit so distant that it could never be observed by telescope. You can’t disprove its existence, but doesn’t it seem ludicrous? Can you explain how it got there?
