We live in flux between yin and yang, chaos and order, science and religion. Whether we like it or not life cannot function without this dualistic nature. Death brings meaning to life and religion breathed life into science. The quest to understand the divine sparked the seedlings of the scientific method and yet the war between science and religion has been ongoing ever since the foundation of the scientific method sprouted into existence. Does one destroy the other, or can they live together in harmony?
Written by Dan Brown, the best selling author known for The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons and Inferno, Origins tells a story of the quest to release a scientific presentation tipped to destroy the last remnants of religion in a world that still hasn’t turned its back on God. Robert Langdon is invited to Bilbao, by his former student, futurist and computer scientist Edmond Kirsch. Kirsch is set to give the presentation of his lifetime in which he will share a scientific discovery that will once and for all destroy the worlds faith in a divine creator, ushering in a new era of scientific worship. However, just as the presentation begins, chaos rears its ugly head and fearful for his life Robert Langdon must flee across Spain on a quest to discover the truth.
Combining religious conspiracy and scientific mystery, the literary mechanism is eerily familiar for regular Dan Brown readers, yet this book somehow manages to be refreshingly innovative. If the Da Vinci code looked back at the “history” of Christianity, Origins looks forward to its future.
This book is clever, and frightenening, and deeply profound. However, it creeps along at a painfully slow pace. After the first three hundred pages, I had made my mind up. It was a stale attempt to recapture the magic of previous books. The art wasn’t as captivating, and the mystery wasn’t as thrilling. Quite frankly, it felt like the decrepit offspring of a polyamorous three-way between The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, and Inferno. However, I judged too soon. The final one hundred and fifty pages tie the entire novel together, stimulating thought and intrigue like never before. It plays out like the history of life on Earth. For billions of years nothing much happens, until, all of a sudden, at five seconds to midnight, the book erupts into a cacophonic crescendo.
From our starting point in the chaos of primordial soup to our current point in time, order is brought forth and chaos dissipates. In much the same way, the mysteries unravel within.
Origins acts as a looking glass into the future potential of technology and its potential implications for science, religion and morality. It asks the questions: where do we come from, where are we going, and what involvement will science and religion play?
In an act of seeming synchronization, this book throws its hat into the ring of the ongoing debate between The New Atheists and the Theists, a la Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris, without providing much in the form of concrete answers. And yet, what comes to mind is Shapiro’s beautiful aphorism “science tells us what is, religion tells us what ought to be.”
Thankfully, the book does not attempt to proselytize, and instead, it leaves us with enough questions to fill a short novella, inviting the reader to ponder and peruse the philosophical preponderance of that contained.
With a deeper level of analysis, the artistic choices provide a clever balance, and indeed synthesis, of science and religion, the natural and the divine, the classical and the modern. The art is chosen to lead the reader in developing a sense of reverence for the natural world and the laws that guide it, paying homage to the original “gods”, Mother Nature and her Natural Phenomena.
In the acknowledgements, Dan Brown gives thanks to his brother, musician and composer Gregory W Brown, for creating a piece of music that inspired the entire book. Gregory, initially a Geology major, composed a musical arrangement synthesizing religion and science. Titled Missa Charles Darwin the piece utilizes the traditional structure of the standard mass juxtaposed with quotes extracted from Darwin’s seminal work On the Origins of Species. It is a brilliant act of competing forces uniting to create something truly spectacular. This single piece of music sets the foundation for the entire novel and its use of philosophy and art.
The symbiosis and art and nature, the awe-inspiring nature of Physics, and the beauty of Mathematics; all shrines of a scientific world and yet, reverence for these forms only seem to bring us closer to God. Perhaps one can never truly escape the divine.
Origins truly is a book of our time.
Thanks for reading,
Remember: Strong Ideas, Held Loosely
Doubtful Centrist
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