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    Where God Comes From: Reflections on Science, Systems, and the Sublime
    Where God Comes From: Reflections on Science, Systems, and the Sublime
    Where God Comes From: Reflections on Science, Systems, and the Sublime
    Ebook246 pages3 hours

    Where God Comes From: Reflections on Science, Systems, and the Sublime

    By Ira Livingston

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    Where God Comes From explores how the sublime and miraculous can be found in a whole range of processes-- from chemistry and biology to language and literature and social interactions -- and how they loop back on themselves to form complex systems, stitching themselves and their environments together. The book traces an arc that passes through a series of different essay forms: a prose poem in Twitter-length units, a philosophical dialogue, traditional essays, and finally a story. Each is a metacognitive investigation of mystical experience as what happens when consciousness discovers its family resemblances with other recursive processes.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Hunt Publishing
    Release dateOct 26, 2012
    ISBN9781780994017
    Where God Comes From: Reflections on Science, Systems, and the Sublime

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    • 4/5
      We humans are a curious lot, aren’t we? Always digging for meaning.Ira Livingston once found a miracle message in a plate of noodles that tasted so incredibly good it overcame a deep funk. It was as if God had left a pick-me-up message just for him, embedded in noodles. As the Jews and Chinese say, Food is Love.From noodly transubstantiation, Ira progresses to a million dollar question: Where does God come from?Do understand that this is not really a book about God. It is an eccentric and intelligent philosophical road trip. The subtitle is Reflections On Science, Systems and the Sublime. The topic meanders around aimlessly like a good philosophy book should, until near the end you realize you've been circling something meaningful, if also something melancholy, the whole time."Where God comes from" is not the same question as "Who is God?" Says Livingston's beloved professor, "I've got no particular quarrel with any of these explanations [of God]—inflated parent, synaptic ghost, social glue—all fine, though obviously too reductive—but at the same time, I also don't object to various personalizations of God—an old guy with a beard, or a wafer or whatever." The problem with God (or evolution or a mechanistic universe) as a concept is that it casts the miraculously complex as something familiar. Says the professor, "the problem is not in how we use God or evolution or mechanism as ways of thinking about these things but as ways not to think about them."…and therein lies the problem with Livingston’s book. It makes you think.

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    Where God Comes From - Ira Livingston

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