Summary

Chapter 13 is titled “God,” and is subtitled “Don’t Take the Name of God in Vain.” The author begins this chapter by discussing how humanity has assigned the term “God” to serve as the answer to many, most, or perhaps all its questions about the mysteries of existence. Those mysteries, he says, range from the origins of consciousness to the function of physics – everything that humanity does not understand about how the world works. He goes on to suggest that “we don’t have any evidence whatsoever that the Bible or the Quran or the Book of Mormon or the Vedas or any other holy book was composed by the force that determined that energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared …” (201). He adds that “to the best of our scientific knowledge, all of these texts were written by...