Roger Olson’s Review of The Cosmic Dance
Today we wanted to share a review of The Cosmic Dance by esteemed theologian Roger Olson. You can check out an excerpt below or you can read the whole review here. You can place an order for The Cosmic Dance here.
The Cosmic Dance is Greg’s (and friends’) attempt to present the case that the best contemporary science supports viewing time as an “arrow” such that an omnipresent being (such as the God of traditional Christianity) would not “already be” in the future or “still be” in the past but would experience the future as not yet and the past as no longer available. In other words, the book argues, using numerous quotations from and references to modern and contemporary physics, that relativity theory, as understood through post-Einsteinian physics, supports an “open view” of the universe and the future in which real novelty and spontaneity characterize events within an overall interconnected whole of reality.
When I read a book I often try to find a key paragraph that sums up its main “big idea” or single most important thesis. Here is my candidate for that in The Cosmic Dance: “In this book we’ve argued that Quantum Theory, Chaos-Complexity Theory and Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics suggest that a fully deterministic description of the world is impossible, and that time and novelty are more than mere illusions. We’ve argued that even Relativity Theory gives a role to time that is very different from space. This all suggests that reality moves from a settled past into a partly open future.” (184) …
I can heartily recommend this book for the pictures if nothing else! Seriously, however, if you are interested in reading a case made from science that time is “for real” and not illusory, and that although time and space are, indeed, inter-related that does not mean an omnipresent being must somehow already be “in the future,” buy the book.