When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy

There are a lot of readers out there to whom Professor Chet Raymo's WHEN GOD IS GONE EVERYTHING IS HOLY will bring totally fresh information. Even for greying old me there was something new: I had never heard of "memes." Let me share with you Raymo's take: "Genes shape our bodies and some behaviors. Memes -- a coinage of the biologist Richard Dawkins -- are self-replicating units of culture, ideas or concepts passed from one individual to another through writing, speech, ritual, and imitation. Memes can be as trivial as jump-rope rhymes, or as profound as a full-blown theology" (p. 90). The younger you are or the less familiar either with organized religion or with empirical science, the more novelties you will find in WHEN GOD IS GONE. *** The book is about ongoing conflicts between religious faith and methodical experimental science. Raymo embeds a couple of hundred borrowings from thinkers on both sides of the faith/science divide inside his personal biopic. Now 71, Chet Raymo is a cradle Catholic, educated at Notre Dame and then teaching for decades at two Catholic colleges. Some years ago he could not handle the cognitive dissonance that came from trying to think both as an orthodox Catholic and as a teacher of science. He opted to cut out that discord by reducing his inherited supernatural, highly organized religion into an underlying natural religion, also called religious naturalism. He stopped believing that Jesus rose from the dead, that God is a person with something resembling will and intellect. He is almost nauseated by the thought of miracles and the supernatural. *** Yet he remains culturally Roman Catholic, a "smells and bells" lover of ritual, music and fleshy delights. Catholicism has too much magic, even paganism built into it for his taste. Yet he loves many Catholic writers, notably the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and Nobel prize winning novelist Sigrid Undset. Chet Raymo gives beautifully crafted reasons for his journey into almost rapturous scientific agnosticism, also called Catholic agnosticism. Some readers will accept some, maybe most of his arguments. Others will find that they do not hold water. -OOO-