Views from Crestmont Drive

Subtitled: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom

(Henry Holt, January 2015, 541pp, including 55pp of notes, 30pp of bibliography, and 15pp of acknowledgments and index)

This is Michael Shermer’s magnus opus, perhaps, culminating a running theme in his earlier books from WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS in 1997 (reviewed here), HOW WE BELIEVE in 2000 (here), THE SCIENCE OF GOOD & EVIL (which I haven’t read yet), and THE BELIEVING BRAIN in 2011 (ditto). Not to mention WHY DARWIN MATTERS in 2006 (here) and other books about the territory between science and irrationality. Shermer was founder and editor of Skeptic magazine, and his perspective is interesting because for a while in high school he was a born-again-Christian until, as he put it in the Darwin book, “The scales fell from my eyes! It turned out that the creationist literature I was reading presented a Darwinian cardboard cutout that a child could knock down.” Also, he was a cross-country bicyclist for a while.

The book is spiritual kin to Steven Pinker’s THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE (partial summary) and I even sat down to read this Shermer book soon after it came out, until seeing in the opening pages Shermer himself crediting Pinker’s book. Eventually I did read Pinker’s book, and its sequel, and so eventually just last month, despite not having read a couple of Shermer’s earlier books in that thread above, plowed through this one, his longest.

Continue reading →