Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science and Spirituality at the End of an Age

From The Tao of Physics to At Home in the Universe, most successful books on science and spirituality have come from scientists whose research led them to embrace previously marginalized religious views or to develop a new understanding of the divine. So Ebert's argument that ""the worldview of materialism is currently undergoing transubstantiation into a more spiritually-informed way of regarding the cosmos"" is surely tenable. But his call to overthrow a Clockwork God is outdated, for most scientific theories have already moved beyond Newton's mechanistic vision of the universe. Ebert has assembled some important or influential thinkers for this book of interviews, however, including evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, Deepak Chopra, biologist Rupert Sheldrake, chaos theoretician Ralph Abraham and mythologist William Irwin Thompson. Ebert seems inordinately enamored of LSD and other hallucinogens, so his discussions with Stanislav Grof and Terence McKenna, for example, focus on this topic to the detriment of other subjects. Throughout, Ebert remains a sensitive interviewer, willing to stay in the background while his subjects expound. Anyone interested in the confluence of spirituality and science will find material to engage and challenge in this congenial introduction to some of the most exciting and daring scientists of our era. (May)