About this item
A paradigm-shifting blend of science, religion, and philosophy for agnostic, spiritual-but-not-religious, and scientifically minded readers Many people are fed up with the way traditional religion alienates them: too easily it can perpetuate conflict, vilify science, and undermine reason. Nancy Abrams, a philosopher of science, lawyer, and lifelong atheist, is among them. And yet, when she turned to the recovery community to face a personal struggle, she found that imagining a higher power gave her a new freedom. Intellectually, this was quite surprising. Meanwhile her husband, famed astrophysicist Joel Primack, was helping create a new theory of the universe based on dark matter and dark energy, and Abrams was collaborating with him on two books that put the new scientific picture into a social and political context. She wondered, "Could anything actually exist in this strange new universe that is worthy of the name 'God?'" In A God That Could Be Real, Abrams explores a radically new way of thinking about God. She dismantles several common assumptions about God and shows why an omniscient, omnipotent God that created the universe and plans what happens is incompatible with science - but that this doesn't preclude a God that can comfort and empower us. Moving away from traditional arguments for God, Abrams finds something worthy of the name "God" in the new science of emergence: just as a complex ant hill emerges from the collective behavior of individually clueless ants, and just as the global economy emerges from the interactions of billions of individuals' choices, God, she argues, is an "emergent phenomenon" that arises from the staggering complexity of humanity's collective aspirations and is in dialogue with every individual. This God did not create the universe - it created the meaning of the universe. It's not universal - it's planetary. It can't change the world, but it helps us change the world. A God that could be real, Abrams shows us, is what humanity needs to inspire us to collectively cooperate to protect our warming planet and create a long-term civilization.
About the Author
In 2012 Nancy Ellen Abrams and her co-author Joel R. Primack (one of the world's leading cosmologists) won the Chopra Foundation Prize and also the Nautilus Prize. The controversy surrounding their two books arises from the question of whether the serious cutting-edge astrophysics they present -- which has been universally praised for its accuracy and clarity -- should be combined with interpretation of what these discoveries might mean to an emerging global culture. But Abrams and Primack argue that a change in cosmology has historically always created a huge cultural shift, and if those who understand the new cosmology don't explain this, those who don't understand it are likely to misinterpret it, and the enormous social benefits of learning to think cosmically may be lost.
The books are THE VIEW FROM THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE: DISCOVERING OUR EXTRAORDINARY PLACE IN THE COSMOS (Penguin/Riverhead, 2006) and more recently, THE NEW UNIVERSE AND THE HUMAN FUTURE: HOW A SHARED COSMOLOGY COULD TRANSFORM THE WORLD (Yale University Press, 2011) . NEW UNIVERSE grew out of the prestigious Terry Lectures, which Abrams and Primack delivered at Yale in October, 2009, and is filled with gorgeous color illustrations and embedded videos, including supercomputer visualizations of the invisible but now understood workings of the universe. These videos can all be watched on the accompanying website, http://new-universe.org .
Abrams has worked in science policy for a trans-European environmental think tank in Rome, the Ford Foundation, and the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress. Her more political writing has appeared in journals, newspapers, and magazines, such as The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Environment, California Lawyer, and Science and Global Security. She and Primack developed a course called "Cosmology and Culture" and have co-taught it for a decade at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The course has received awards from both the Templeton Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. She and Primack have also co-written articles that have appeared in books and magazines including Science, Astronomy Now, Philosophy in Science, Science & Spirit, Spirituality and Health, and Tikkun.
She has a B.A. from the University of Chicago in the history and philosophy of science and a law degree from the University of Michigan. As an attorney, she has specialized in scientific controversies and consulted on this for many governments here and abroad. She works as a scholar to put the discoveries of modern cosmology into a cultural context, as a lawyer to understand their potential impact on shaping a new politics, and as a writer and artist to communicate their possible meanings at a deeper level.
Nancy Ellen Abrams is most recently the author of A God That Could be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet (Beacon Press, 20
