Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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97 of 101 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A book for wanderers, 29 April 2006
I liked the first half of the book enormously, but my enthusiasm reduced a little as I read on. I ended up with some criticisms. On the whole, I think it is good, but it could have been a lot better.
The title of the book is a direct quotation from Lewis Carroll:
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
One of my minor disappointments was that Wolpert doesn't draw enough attention to the perversity of this "six impossible things" comment. Carroll makes his White Queen proud of believing impossible things and that is a feature of many passionate believers. "Any fool," says the fundamentalist "can believe things that are possible, but it takes hard work and talent to believe the impossible."
In discussing human beliefs Wolpert makes too little of the fact that many systems of belief seem to praise and honour adherents who are passionate in their belief of impossible things. This applies most of all to political and religious systems.
The devotion to Big Brother expected of the citizens in 1984 is a marvellous example of this zealotry. We might assume that the man at the top is free of the delusion he requires of the junior ranks. And yet, in 1984, it seems possible that O'Brien really is a true believer at heart. The massive irony is that his job includes fabricating the lies that other citizens have to believe.
And it does not happen only in fiction. The Catholic Church, the Stalinist state, the world of advertising, spin and PR are all examples of situations in which zealous belief is sometimes valued, apparently, at the expense of sanity.
And another thing: earlier on the White Queen has said to Alice: "I wish I could manage to be glad! Only I never can remember the rule." And maybe that is a key thing for belief - beliefs make us glad.
(I am inordinately fond of Alice - perhaps Dodgson was too - and I feel many of the White Queen's words, though quite mad, have enormous depths.)
I wish Wolpert had put more effort into exploring the reasons for rationality being so vulnerable in human culture. Even more, I wanted to hear any ideas he had on reducing that vulnerability.
However, that's just a peeve. There was a lot I liked about the book. It brings together a lot of ideas, many based on research results and summarises them well. It describes the implications of a whole range of work, most of it recent. Many of the experiments are subtle and clever. The progress made in the twentieth century was huge on several fronts.
It is an honest and open book. He explains his own position - atheist Jewish scientist - and freely admits that some of his idea may be prejudiced by his personal biases and beliefs. To that extent, he is humble.
Many of the ideas he presents are ideas I can readily agree with. The general thrust of his thinking is, for me, both exciting and convincing.
It is easy to read and assimilate, despite the fact that the ideas come from a huge range of sources and disciplines. Also, some of the ideas are intrinsically difficult and complicated, yet he explains them carefully and fluently.
It is well worth reading, especially if your interests are wide. Perhaps it is a book for Alice in Wander Land, a book for those who wander, rather than just going where authority tells them. And not everyone who wanders is lost.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Well thought out, well collected, lacking in depth, 23 May 2007
Rather than putting forward any ground-breaking or revolutionary ideas, Lewis Wolpert here prefers to gather together a selection of scientific examples and quotes from other thinkers on the subject to form a straightforward explanation of why it is in human nature to believe, whether that means to believe that throwing a rock might hurt somebody or to believe that there are forces beyond what science has shown us to be fact.
The sections about child development compared to the learning processes in other animals is interesting reading, as did the section about the effect religious hope has been seen to have on hospital patients and their health.
The truly interesting parts of this book are often the results of the various experiments that Wolpert cites as examples, rather than Wolpert's collection opinion.
However I'm an atheist and it is to this book's credit that I ended up feeling a little more sympathetic to people who have religious beliefs, not to say that I agree with them but at least I now have some reason to understand *why* they might be inclined to believe against the odds and against the evidence.
Wolpert keeps things brief, covering a variety of different topics without exhausting any of them. This book might leave you wanting to find some more intensive reading into one particular aspect.
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39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Easy to believe, hard to digest, 13 Dec 2006
"Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast" is a disappointing book. Disappointing because the topic is so well chosen: the evolutionary origins of beliefs, with attention to everyday common sense as well as the high end temptations of religion and alternative medicine. Disappointing because the author's previous mapping of related territory - in "The Unnatural Nature of Science" - promised much. And disappointing, too, because stating (twice, with variations) in the Introduction that "I admit I am a reductionist materialist atheist" is such a great start.
Wolpert throws in any number of intriguing ideas, but the argument is simply difficult to follow, making reading a chore and a good case less convincing than it should be. The material is not inherently that difficult - if not easy - but the writing makes it an uphill struggle.
Take just four sentences from the chapter "Believing": "Beliefs are held in one's memory and can be recalled. We express beliefs even when, all too often, we do not have the evidence, knowledge, or facts to support them. Moreover, emotions can undoubtedly influence our beliefs. In addition, the distinction between knowledge and belief becomes less clear in relation to memory." The sentences are pithy, but lurch here and there, with "in addition" piled on "moreover" but no pause to demonstrate, for example, how it is that emotions can influence beliefs. The distinction between "knowledge" and "belief" in the last sentence is referenced as if it was obvious, or previously explained. But it isn't and the distinction is never defined. Just a page before Wolpert was conflating "ideas" and "beliefs" - "15% of our day-to-day conversations contain ideas, that is, beliefs, about causes."
The problems aren't just in the detail. The sensibly short chapters ought to make the architecture of the book clear, but it isn't. Wolpert argues that early humans' adoption of tools - making and using them - was critical to the origin of belief. This has been controversial (see Marek Kohn's review for the Independent,) but then nothing that follows seems to depend on it. Again, at the outset of the book we're told it will concentrate on causal beliefs (though the definition here is again hard to grasp) but nestling at the end is a chapter titled "Moral". How moral beliefs relate to causal beliefs, and what's already been said about their origin, is unclear.
The best material reprises key ideas from "The Unnatural Nature of Science". The challenging proposition is that our instinctive ways of understanding causes are at odds with the reality of the physical and biological world, as science reveals it. We struggle with probabilities, preferring to over-interpret chance; we employ common sense models of physical causes which struggle with volumes and Newton's laws of motion, let alone particle physics. This leads to an interesting aside on how we respond to possible global warming: it's a key question for everyone, but few of us are equipped to assess the science - of necessity that leaves us guided by our flawed beliefs.
Unfortunately, the occasional opaqueness of "The Unnatural Nature of Science" is here the dominant quality.
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