Book review: Two excellent books

I've just finished reading two excellent books.  Both are highly recommended.

The first one happened because at the moment Mulan is writing an essay for school.  She has to choose four works that are connected by a single theme, so I was enlisted to give her reading suggestions.

With works and theme completely open, Mulan had a hard time narrowing her choices.  First up, she chose Dune as her first book (she simply likes the book).  She then needed a theme, and eventually settled on fictional works in which the author has a political intent.

Over the school holidays, while we were Covid-isolating, I scanned our home bookshelves and gave Mulan:

• Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
• Animal Farm, by George Orwell
• The Plague, by Albert Camus
• Erewhon, by Samuel Butler
• Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy
• and a little later, Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaarder

(She had already read a couple of these, and she read the others during our family lockdown.)

Why did I give Sophie's World later?  Because I wanted to read it first!  While I'd heard great things about it, I'd never got around to reading it.

What stands out for me is that it's a very cleverly written book.

First up, Gaarder attempts to explain the history of Western thought, from the pre-Socratics through to the existentialists, to teenagers!

Yeah, how many teens are going to want to read a textbook on Parmenides, Aquinas, Hegel, Sartre and so on?!

So, the first clever bit is that we meet soon-to-be-15-year-old Sophie, who starts getting mysterious letters from an unknown person.

The letter-writer turns out to be a philosophy teacher, who posts mini-lectures to Sophie, and we get interested in the dryer details of Plato, Aristotle and so on because Sophie gets interested in them.  We also have the mystery of who this teacher really is and how/why he is writing to Sophie.

But just as we're getting comfortable in Sophie's world, and getting to know the teacher, Alberto, we are introduced to another almost-15-year-old, Hilde, and her father who works for the UN in Lebanon.  But there's definitely weird, spooky stuff happening in Sophie's world.

By halfway through the book our philosophy lessons have moved through the ages and we're dealing with issues such as how-much-can-we-really-know and what-is-ultimate-reality-really-like in Descartes, Kant, Berkeley, and so on.

And then we get to the first of the two main twists in the story.  Without giving too much away, what we have in places is a book within a book, with the author teaching his readers via another author teaching his reader via another author teaching his reader.

What I especially like is how Gaarder is able to clearly explain the challenging ideas of these brilliant historical people in ways that can connect with normal life.  A big part of the story is the connection between the mini-lectures and Sophie's experiences in her world.  The ideas are made real to the reader (while at the same time challenging the reader to think about what is really real!).

If I was to be picky I might occasionally critique Gaarder's understanding of some of the ideas, what the historical writers were really saying, and which historical writers should be covered.

But at heart, this is an introductory book for complete beginners.  Of necessity it's sometimes going to be cartoon versions of the complex ideas.  But the historical names are the standard ones that all undergraduate philosophy students should be comfortably familiar with.  For any teens who like this kind of stuff the book will give them a head start before they enter university.

Most importantly though, this book is essential reading for all teens, to help them enter, and become participants in, that long conversation of human thinking.

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The second book I've just finished reading is Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True, which I borrowed from the local library.

Reminiscing alert: I distinctly remember, back when I was 12, a conversation I had with a school friend.

I'd grown up in a moderately conservative Christian family, and it was simply part of my unquestioned worldview that God created the world from nothing.  I'd never even considered any other possibility than that he'd formed the plants and animals and us at some unspecified time in the past.

But somehow, and in some way, by the time I was 12 I'd heard about evolution, that humans had evolved from other animals rather than being created.  To me at the time it was a weird and curious new idea, so I mentioned it to my friend one day.  He just looked at me like "yeah, of course."

His reaction made a lasting impression, because his apparent "of course evolution" made me reflect on my earlier "of course creation."  How is it that we can have opposite reactions when we both live in the same world and see the same things?

A sizable chunk of the next 15 years of thought for me was reconciling this and reorienting my worldview to match the best evidence.  It was about spending time listening to experts.

Coyne, as a biologist, is one of those experts.  His 2009 book is an excellent summary of the evidence.

In multiple ways, with innumerable examples, Coyne explains how the physical evidence around us perfectly fits the theory of evolution by natural selection.  In fact it fits so perfectly that for practical purposes we can call it true, and we can treat it as true to the same extent that we can treat atoms, gravity and germs as true.  Its predictive and explanatory power has been extremely successful.

He also explains why the physical evidence does not fit creationism.  A big part of this is showing how biological structures are often imperfect and non-ideal make-do add-ons and adaptations of existing structures.  In multiple ways they are not what we would expect to see if biological creatures were made fresh from nothing.  Instead, they're exactly what we'd expect to see if creatures evolved.

Coyne plausibly replies to creationist objections against evolution, showing how the objections fail to disprove evolution.

All of this is written in a very readable way for non-experts like myself.  It was an enjoyable read, with plenty of examples well-picked to fit the clear and explicitly labeled argumentative structure.

I'd picked this book to read, in part because I occasionally browse Coyne's blog, but also because P Z Myers, who is also a biologist, recently again recommended Coyne's book.  (Here's Myers' review back in 2008.)

What Coyne's book reinforced for me is that the world around us shows abundantly that the only way creationism could be true is if God was a malicious trickster-god.  Firstly, if God exists he must have intentionally set things up to try to fool us with all the evolutionary evidence, and secondly he must have intentionally set things up to cause lots of unnecessary pain and suffering in his creation.  In the very unlikely event that a personal creator-God exists, his creation shows us that he's in no way worthy of worship.

Again, I'd recommend this book for all teens and up, and especially those who are interested in science and religion but prefer to get their facts right.