Reverse Engineering God: Irreligious Answers to Fundamental Questions

Product Description
What is morality? Do we have free will? Are there any limits to what the human mind can understand? How is it that humans speak? Why do we die? What is it that transcendental meditation transcends?
If you ever asked yourself questions of this type then this book is for you.
Reverse Engineering God proposes rational and science-based answers to these and many other related and similar questions. It does so in a series of short “stories.” Each story presents one question, describes the scientific data available for its solution, shows how these data, when combined with logical inferences, can be used to answer the question, and points to its relation with other questions.
Review
 









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Michael Rothschild's Reverse Engineering God: Irreligious Answers to Fundamental Questions is a collection of very short, fascinating essays, which the author refers to as his own "just so stories." Their brevity in no way reflects the depth of thought that went into each one. The essays appear to be unconnected to one another, but the discerning reader will note a thread that, through razor-sharp reasoning, unifies them into one entity.





The questions are surprising and original, as in "Do plants feel pain?" The author's answers are no less surprising. He points out that readers are likely to seek the answer to this question in two ways: by putting a plant under a microscope to search for a central nervous system or by relying on "'behavioral studies'... without pretending to know the mechanism" behind pain. Rothschild provides an original and more philosophical answer:  the sensation of pain would not be expected in an organism that cannot move, because the role of pain "is to make us try to avoid the cause of pain." Through an elegant argument that goes far beyond the issue of pain, he shows how the use of experimental methods to find a central nervous system, and thus arrive at a solution, is a superfluous endeavor. This essay provides just one example of how the remarkable "stories" of Reverse Engineering God display the triumph of logic and reasoning.














Yoel Rak 


Professor, Department of Anatomy and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University Faculty of Medicine. 


Member of Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities













The famous saying "good things come in small packages" is an accurate description of this really amazing book. It is rather short, and yet succeeds to provide illuminating discussions of no less than 40 central scientific/philosophical subjects and questions of the type that most human beings were wondering about at certain points in their lives.


The author calls these discussions "stories" (in the spirit of Kipling's "Just So Stories"), since they are not written in the heavy style of the scientific or philosophical literature. But the name "stories" should not mislead those who want to understand better the world we live in, the place of humanity in it, and our nature.


These are concise but highly serious and informative small articles. What is common to all of them is that they are based strictly on scientific facts and rational (often quite brilliant and original) considerations and thoughts. What's more, each article provides links to further reading and study.


It is difficult to think of any book that can serve as a better place to start for anybody who seeks to get rational (rather than religious or faith-based) answers to many big questions.



Prof. Arnon Avron  


Former chair of the Computer Science Department at Tel Aviv University






In this intriguing book, Michael Rothschild has created a series of "stories", as he refers to them. Each "story" is in reality a fundamental question that many people had often asked, in many different fashions, such as, "Is there indeed a free will?" or  "How did language develop?"

 Many of these questions have one or more traditional answers, some of which have a distinctly religious aspect.     

    Roth