The Art of God, an actual theory of everything. By Joel A Wendt

When I first visited America as a teenager I was astonished to be welcomed by the armed border guard with the words,

“Welcome to God’s own country.”

Every patriot (child of a land) knows that s/he comes from God’s own country, in my case Scotland, but generally we keep quiet about it at the borders…. Not so America.

This book is about the Idea of God’s Own Country and the author is American, he keeps quiet about little when his country is at stake.

I experience this book as audacious yet unashamedly homespun. That is not in any way a fault or a denigration, it is in the best traditions of the commonsense school and indeed, if I read the author right, he is saying that we all need to get homespinning. He is showing us the thinkers, ideas, biographical processes, inspirations, out of which it is possible to weave a cloth that keeps the soul warm in the cold material cosmic space that is the New Age of Materialism, now born of an actual Big Bang.

As long as the Big Bang is just a theory of a few cracked physicists, the rest of us could live with that. But at Los Alamos the Big Bang theory gained the power to fall from the skies and visit actual destruction of horrendous proportions on the earth.

What have the atom bomb and a theory about a Big Bang in a galaxyless galaxy far, far away to do with each other? That is what this author is trying to tell us. It matters how and what we think.

Of course the materialists will argue that the audacity is to think materialism..all living things, including self conscious beings, are just the product of a random Big Bang and fortuitous collision of chemical elements. That is not audacity but just weak scientific thinking. Nowhere in the history of science has life ever been observed emerging from the lifeless. At every moment, should we wish to do so, we can observe the lifeless emerge from life. That we cannot explain the process is the scientific challenge, but that it is an empirical experience is beyond doubt; life is primary, lifeless is secondary. Any one of us could take another and show him in the plant, animal, and human kingdoms a lifeless chemical corpse emerge from a living being. No one on the planet can take another and show him the reverse, a living being emerge from a chemical soup, pie, casserole or laboratory oven.

So why do we waste billions in resources trying to understand something that is not an empirical experience...namely that inert chemicals produce life? Well again that is what this author is trying to show us. It matters how we think.

So here’s the thing. In this book a countryman of God’s own country goes to the Temple of Materialism, enters and asks

“What is the purpose of this very, very expensive Temple?”

The answer is, “A Theory of Everything,”

“Good,” he replies, “that is a worthy aim, just what I am looking for.”

The book comprises the various debates held in that Temple and the author’s ten pence worth,(which by the way is not a monetary value but a Manichean one) and indeed, the author emerges with a Theory of Everything...The Art of God.

It should be mandatory reading in every American High School in God’s Own Country.

The author asks us to keep a lot in mind..often.. but at least we can get it into our minds...as a layperson just try getting in mind what the high priests in the Temple of Unempirical Science, an associate Temple to the Temple of Materialism want you to keep in mind!

No, far better to have a homespun guide who has been there and can show us a few tricks, for ultimately, as the author knows, we are all going to be called individually on our Theory of Everything.

1/1/2012 E.A. MacKenzie.