Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man

Though science has advanced our understanding of the universe and provided us with the toys and weapons of modern civilization, it has failed to answer the ultimate questions: Who am I? Does life have a purpose? Is there a God? What lies beyond death? By taking no account of our most fundamental needs, science devalues human experience and even threatens to destroy our inner selves. Well-known British science commentator Bryan Appleyard begins with a marvelously compact overview of science from the ancient Greeks to the "weird science" of the 1990s, showing precisely how we reached our present dilemma. But he shows us more than how science has led us to the brink of disaster: he proposes the end of science's spirit-killing hegemony and an alternative route to the future. In this thrilling and compelling exploration of the human condition, Appleyard not only exposes the central role of science in shaping our lives and beliefs; he analyzes the health fads, environmentalism, mass communications, and politics of today and explains them all as the outcome of science's four-hundred-year-old assault on our view of ourselves and the universe. Appleyard traces the history of this assault from Copernicus, Newton, and Descartes to Einstein, Feynman, and Hawking. He asks whether new developments in twentieth-century science like quantum mechanics and chaos theory can really be regarded as a way out of the dead end of classical science. Or are they just another spiritual dead end? This is an emergency, Appleyard writes, because we must now find our true nature before science crosses the final frontier of the human self.