Michael Rothschild - Reverse Engineering God: Irreligious Answers to Fundamental Questions

At age 17, one of my friends became religious . Many years later , when I asked why he did it , he said he wanted to get answers to questions like " What is my function on this planet ?" " What is morality ?" " How did life on Earth start ?" " How was man created ?" " Do I have free will ?"

Pondering his answer , I realized that the education system in which he studied , like almost all secular education systems , not only failed to answer these questions , but completely ignored their existence and importance . Only religious education addressed his questions . This understanding motivated me to write a blog , with two objectives in mind : to put together a collection of humanist , atheist , and logical answers to questions that people tend to turn to religion to have answered ; and to strengthen people ' s faith in the power of scientific and rational thinking . My aim was to increase people s ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood , and consequently to discern the benefit of answers based on logic over those based on belief .

Most of the questions that the blog sought to answer have received several answers over the years . I included in the blog only those that seemed to me correct . Some were my own answers . The blog was originally written in Hebrew , against the background of Israeli reality . As the material accumulated , I decided that it would make sense to translate into English the content that is universal in nature and distribute it as a book .

The result is the book you are now reading .

Organization of the book

In accordance with its two aims , the main content of the book is divided into two parts . The first part may be reminiscent of Kipling ' s Just So Stories , because it contains a collection of answers to separate loosely connected questions . The common denominator that holds the chapters together is the fact that they are sufficiently important for humans to have invented God to answer them , or that they concern fundamental issues that have preoccupied scientists and philosophers from time immemorial . Much of the first part is devoted to thoughts on evolutionary theory , not out of any preference for this field of knowledge over others . It stems from the fact that many of the questions we ask ourselves concern our very humanity , and the answers are based on processes that have led to this humanity . These processes are mostly evolutionary . In this sense , it may be said that in this book evolution plays to a large extent the roles that religions have ascribed to God .

The second part seeks to reinforce the readers tendency toward using logical and critical thinking , mainly by presenting solutions to paradoxes . It does so to illustrate the fact that reality does not tolerate contradictions , and that the proper way of dealing with apparent contradictions is to identify the errors that led to them , and not to adopt them and deal with the cognitive dissonance later .

The table of contents classifies the stories into chapters by topic and allows a systematic perusal of all of them . Each chapter also contains an explanation of the logic behind the grouping of stories within one chapter .

Links

You will find two types of links in the book :

Internal links by which it is possible to go from the table of contents to the various chapters and stories , or from one chapter or story to another , as needed .

External links to network resources that are outside the book .

You can distinguish the two types of links by the fact that internal links reference the name of the story and its number . You can read the book without following the links , but you may occasionally use a link to broaden the picture or find a reference . You can find all the external links in the file https :// bit . ly /2 Itz 0 WR , which has been created for the readers of the paper edition , but online readers may want to use it as well whenever a link in the book is broken . In the Kindle edition , when reading without a network connection , only the internal links will work .