There are some books that, after you put them down, your only response is, “Huh?” Chet Raymo’s Skeptics and True Believers: The Exhilarating Connection Between Science and Religion is certainly one such book.

Is it an attempt at soft apologetics by an enlightened scientist? Is it an attempt to convince fundamentalist to stop insisting that the world was created in six days? Is it a cliche celebration of the human spirit? Is it an ode to a great over-soul that has fewer specific characteristics than Emerson’s? Is it a tribute to the wonder of nature? Is it an expose on the inefficacy of astrology and intercessory prayer? Is it a devotional book?

Yes! Yes! A thousand times, yes! A bundle of yeses! Numberless quanta of yeses!

I’ve never read a book more muddled than this. It is, in short, the ramblings of a man who’s given up theism and yet desperately wants to genuflect to something. Anything!

Read this book too quickly and you’ll get mental whiplash.

What is Raymo, a science writer for the Boston Globe, trying to do here? Sell science to believers? Sell belief to skeptics? Sadly, Raymo himself doesn’t even know, for it’s not entirely clear where he stands on the issue himself.

Is he an outright skeptic, completely denying the validity of organized religion? Yes:

It became obvious to me [while taking academic degrees in science] that certain doctrines of the Judeo-Christian tradition, including such central tenets of faith as immortality and a personal God who answers prayers, were based on long-discredited views of the world that placed humans in a central position and ascribed human attributes to other creatures and even to inanimate objects. (8)

Is he a theist at heart, somewhat bewildered by what he finds in the Bible and what science tells him? Yes:

There’s a “God-shaped hole in many people’s lives,” says physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne. He’s right, at least about there being a hole in our lives. To call the hole “God-shaped” begs the question, for the affliction of our times is that we have no satisfactory image of God that rests comfortably with what scientists have learned about creation. (1)

Or maybe. The problem with Skeptics and True Believers is that Raymo alternates between denying the existence of anything vaguely associated with mainstream religion read: Christianity to the point of denying the existence of the soul, of a personal God, of a spirit world, and yet talking of “worship” and “liturgy” as if any of that has meaning if there is no divine being.

Raymo insists that he’s not trying to “turn science into a religion; science is too shallow a vessel to hold ultimate mysteries.” (8) Yet, there’s really no other way to interpret his feeble book as a whole. It’s the confession of a man who wants to reject his theology and write it too.

Raymo begins, though, by setting up a dichotomy of True Believers and Skeptics. At first it seems that “True Believers” is just a polite term for “fundamentalist”

True Believers have low tolerance for changeable knowledge. They prefer stable truths of faith, even if those truths run counter to a preponderance of physical evidence. For example, a 1993 Gallup poll indicates that nearly half of Americans believe in a geologically young Earth, despite the fact that not a shred of reproducible empirical evidence can be adduced in favor of the idea and a mountain of evidence is arrayed against it. (5)

True believers believe surprise religion, which everyone knows is an idiosyncratic belief system. Raymo then quotes what Anthony Storr says about idiosyncratic belief systems:

“Idiosyncratic belief systems which are shared by only a few adherents are likely to be regarded as delusional. Belief systems which may be just as irrational which are shared by millions are called world religions.” (66, 7)

Religion, then, is irrational. Fine. But unlike Gould in Rocks of Ages, he never really defines what religion is. Is it, like Gould suggests, primarily (or at least “primarily” in a proper understanding) an ethical system? Is it something akin to belief in UFOs? Is it somehow a logical result of evolution? Raymo suggests all of these things, and gives priority to none. Perhaps this is because Raymo himself doesn’t want be too specific. Yet, though he is using too broad strokes, he’s just making more work for himself, for he’s both painting and erasing as he goes along.

Primarily Raymo wants to be identified as a Skeptic, because they’re cool. They can live without the emotional fluff of weak religion. They look the cold, hard universe in the eye and say, “Well, I don’t care about you, either!”

The forces that nudge us toward True Belief are pervasive and well-nigh irresistible. Supernatural faith systems provide a degree of emotional security that skepticism cannot provide. Who among us would not prefer to believe that there exists a divine parent who has our best interest at heart? Who among us would notprefer to believe that we will live forever. Skepticism, on the other hand, offers only uncertainty and doubt. What keeps scientific skepticism on track, against the individual’s need for emotional security, is a highly evolved social structure, including professional associations and university departments, peer-reviewed literature, meetings and conferences, and a language that relies heavily on mathematics and specialized nomenclature. The point of this elaborate apparatus is to minimize individual backsliding into the false security of True Belief. (5, 6)

And yet, if we look closely enough, we realize that God (?!) has revealed himself through the marvel of his creation:

The God of my early religious training pulled off tricks that are not beyond the powers of any competent conjurer; Harry Houdini or David Copperfield could turn a stick into a serpent or water into wine without batting an eye. But no Houdini or Copperfield can turn microscopic cells into a flock of birds and then send them flying on their planet-spanning course. No Houdini or Copperfield cause consciousness to flare out and embrace the eons and the galaxies. The dubious miracles of the scriptures and of the saints are an uncertain basis upon which to base a faith; the greater miracle of creation is with us twenty-four hours a day, revealed by science on every side, deepening and consolidating our sense of awe. (133)

The real miracle is creation, not creation. I mean, the real miracle is the functioning of beings created by slow, tedious, testable evolution, not the way God created the world in six days. Wait did I say “miracle”? Of course, I really didn’t mean “miracle” like, you know, miracle. I’m speaking only metaphorically. But in a very real way.

Aggh! This book was infuriating!

If all this were not bad enough, Raymo actually suggests the following:

If the prodigious energy of the new scientific story of creation is to flow into religion, the story will need to be translated from the language of scientific discovery into the language of celebration. This is the work of theologians, philosophers, homilists, liturgists, poets, artists, and, yes, science writers. Only when we are emotionally at home in the universe of the galaxies and the DNA will the new story invigorate our spiritual lives and be cause for authentic celebration. Knowing and believing will come together again at last. Cautious and skeptical as knowers, we can then give ourselves unreservedly to spiritual union with creation and communal celebration of the mysteries. (234)

What does he want? “Take this, all of you, and eat: this is my DNA, encoded for you for the creation of a communal ceremony to produce warm and cozy feelings”?

Just eleven pages later, he writes,

The Copernican and Darwinian revolutions [“] have brushed away the last cobwebs of animism, anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism. The human gods are swept from their thrones. Angels, devils, spirits, and shades are sent packing. We are contingent, ephemeral animated stardust caught up on a random shore, a brief incandescence. (245)

What is this man trying to do?! And the madness doesn’t stop there, for the very next page includes this:

If we can surrender the ancient dream of immortality, then we can begin building a new theology, ecumenical, ecological, non-idolatrous. It will emphasis our relatedness and our interrelatedness, our stewardship rather than our dominion. It will define our value by our participation in a cosmic unfolding; we are flickers of a universal flame galaxies, stars, planets, life, mind a seething cauldron of creation. Natural and supernatural, immanent and transcendent, body and spirit will fuse in one God, revealed in his creation. We have discovered the story on our own. On this speck of cosmic dust, planet Earth, the universe has become conscious of itself. The creation acknowledges the Creator. Our lives are sacramental. We experience the creation in its most fully known dimension. We celebrate. We worship. (246)

There is no God, but we worship!? Pardon the crudeness of this, but what the hell are we supposed to be worshiping?

Answer: the uber-soul:

Deep and inviting, beautiful and mysterious, the starry night draws us into communion with a soul and a life force greater than ourselves that animates the spiraling galaxies and untangles the knots of DNA. (43)

Such religious imagery. Communion and sacrament and worship and celebration and life force and soul! Just never mind that he says earlier that science proves souls don’t exist. They do. Metaphorically. Except in the case of the uber-soul. I think.

Double arrggh!

What an awful waste of time. I only continued because I wanted to see how bad it could get.

Perhaps I should conclude in a manner befitting the book itself and declare it to be the

confessions of a wise religious humanist who also loves, practices, understands, and lives by the ideals and findings of science show us how to heal the false and unnecessary rifts in our intellectual cultures, and to bridge the gap between knowledge and morality.

But too late Stephen Jay Gould already did, on the back cover. And that’s the ultimate irony, for Skeptics is a prime example of what Gould said in Rocks of Ages was an absolutely dreadfully inappropriate use of science: to bolster religious faith.