Howard Bloom's God Problem Pluses and Minuses

A different version of this review is posted as a customer review at Amazon
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I have completed this book on my Kindle.  As I read it I thought that this book  would have a conclusion  that would knock my socks off.  Unfortunately the conclusions of The God Problem  are revealed initially  and then repeated throughout a highly repetitive text.  I was encouraged as I inspected  the little line at the bottom of my Kindle.  Since I saw I was only approaching the halfway mark,  I figured there would be a big finale.  A truly new cosmology.  Maybe a philosophy.  A pattern language beyond Christopher Alexander. Something.   Yesterday I breached that 50 percent mark  and found that the text ended almost exactly there.  The rest was footnotes!  What some reviews described as a loooong book  was in fact a not-so-long and less-than-satisfying  effort to arrive at something genuinely new.  What in fact the book appears to be  is a mega TIME-style account  of what science and math biggies have thought forever,  with a cluster of suppositions  that are indeed provocative but which beg,  and I mean beg,  for more salient presentations than are offered here.  This quasi-TIME like text is  blended with an autobiographical apologia of sorts  which demonstrates the probable truth  that lies behind the text.  Here is an author who has thought  much the same thing forever  and had a life of massive intellectual stimulation  by indulging his passion to somehow imbibe  the cogitations and theories of anyone  who was anyone all the way up to Stephen Wolfram.  Sadly, he leaves out the most illustrative modern thinker whose wisdom would have stood him in good stead.  That would be Charles Sanders Peirce,  the greatest thinker America has produced.  No problem.  Yale scholar Harold Bloom also manages to ignore Peirce.  If one wanted to read material that  does amount to the basis for a new zeitgeist,  Peirce would be the one to read.  I should add that I find Howard Bloom  both personable and engaging.  I heard of The God Problem on  a quite remarkable CSPAN program which hooked me  as Howard Bloom has evidently himself  been hooked many times.  I think that the issues Howard Bloom deals with  are as much philosophical  as scientific or cosmological.  The advantage of philosophy is  that on rare occasions it can influence  how we think  and on a very few occasions  it can have an influence  Harold Bloom flags as history-making.  I sense this is the effect Howard Bloom  would like to  have.  I would advise him to take his  cluster of suppositions  and craft them into a philosophy text,  minus footnotes.  My own effort to do this  I call Triadic Philosophy and  while it may not move mountains  it does manage to say things  that are new and provocative in 100 crisp aphorisms,  the device Nietzsche used to good advantage.
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