Uncommon Sense: the Heretical Nature of Science by Alan Cromer

In this, Cromer argues that the development of modern scientific thinking and procedure was a fluke that arose from a single culture (the Greeks) at a specific period of time which defied the typical thinking of our egocentric "tradition-bound, irrational"(19) race.

"Human beings, after all, love to believe in spirits and gods. Science, which asks them to see things as they are and not as they believe or feel them to be, undercuts a primary human passion. [...] Science is the heretical belief that the truth about the real nature of things is to be found by studying the things themselves." (18)

"These three aspects of science -- its recentness, the completeness of some of its fundamental knowledge, and its intrinsic unity -- mean that for the first time in human history we have true knowledge of the nature of existence and of our place in it. This fundamental fact is often ignored. Since science is necessarily tentative and uncertain at its growing edge, the great foundation of certainty that currently exists is seldom emphasized. Atoms and genes have changed from hypothetical notions into concrete objects whose existence is as certain as objects we can see and touch.

Academics cringe at the words truth and certainty. They believe that truth and certainty aren't possible because philosophers have shown that neither empirical nor deductive knowledge can be made error free. But in the case of a finite number of discrete entities, such as the chemical elements or the human genes, certainty is an appropriate word. And in any event, our knowledge of atoms and genes is as certain as our knowledge of tables and chairs, and a lot more certain that our knowledge of human behavior." (17)

I just liked this:

"We know little about planet formation except that it is a very complex process, involving the segregation of the heavier elements (oxygen, silicon, iron, etc.) from the hydrogen and helium that constitutes over 98 percent of matter in the universe. So many factors are involved -- mass, temperature, chemical composition, and so forth -- that every planet will be different. Neither the earth nor any other planet in the solar system can be considered typical or even likely." (175)

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Quiet, contemplative, reminiscent musings of an aging father for his very young son. I was really touched by this book... the narrator is a pastor, but he treats every subject he dwells on (including his own religion and life's work) with an even-handedness that happily surprised me.

This part made me laugh, for reasons you'll understand:

"...we ate our supper in the parlor -- it turns out that whoever brought the trays brought one for each of us. Since supper was three kinds of casserole with two kinds of fruit salad, with cake and pie for dessert, I gathered that my flock, who lambaste life's problems with food items of just this kind, had heard an alarm. There was even a bean salad, which to me looked distinctly Presbyterian, so anxiety had overspilled its denominational vessel. You'd have thought I'd died. We saved it for lunch." (127)

"I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve." (162)

"He did then seem to me the angel of himself, brooding over the mysteries his mortal life describes, the deep things of man. And of course that is exactly what he is. 'For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?' In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and acceptable -- which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us." (197)

(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)