Reverse Engineering God: Irreligious Answers to Fundamental Questions

Review\nThe famous saying "good things come in small packages" is an accurate description of this really amazing book. It is rather short, and yet succeeds to provide illuminating discussions of no less than 40 central scientific/philosophical subjects and questions of the type that most human beings were wondering about at certain points in their lives.
The author calls these discussions "stories" (in the spirit of Kipling's "Just So Stories"), since they are not written in the heavy style of the scientific or philosophical literature. But the name "stories" should not mislead those who want to better understand the world we live in, the place of humanity in it, and our nature.
These are concise but highly serious and informative small articles. What is common to all of them is that they are based strictly on scientific facts and rational (often quite brilliant and original) considerations and thoughts. What's more, each article provides links to further reading and study.
It is difficult to think of any book that can serve as a better place to start for anybody who seeks to get rational (rather than religious or faith-based) answers to many big questions. --Prof. Arnon Avron, former chair, Computer Science Department, Tel Aviv University\n"Michael Rothschild's Reverse Engineering God: Irreligious Answers to Fundamental Questions is a collection of very short, fascinating essays, which the author refers to as his own "just so stories." Their brevity in no way reflects the depth of thought that went into each one. The essays appear to be unconnected to one another, but the discerning reader will note a thread that, through razor-sharp reasoning, unifies them into one entity."
The questions are surprising and original, as in "Do plants feel pain?" The author's answers are no less surprising. He points out that readers are likely to seek the answer to this question in two ways: by putting a plant under a microscope to search for a central nervous system or by relying on "'behavioral studies'... without pretending to know the mechanism" behind pain. Rothschild provides an original and more philosophical answer: the sensation of pain would not be expected in an organism that cannot move, because the role of pain "is to make us try to avoid the cause of pain." Through an elegant argument that goes far beyond the issue of pain, he shows how the use of experimental methods to find a central nervous system, and thus arrive at a solution, is a superfluous endeavor. This essay provides just one example of how the remarkable "stories" of Reverse Engineering God display the triumph of logic and reasoning. --Yoel Rak, Professor, Department of Anatomy and Anthropology, Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University and Member, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities\n"In this intriguing book, Michael Rothschild has created a series of 'stories', as he refers to them. Each 'story' is in reality a fundamental question that many people had often asked, in many different fashions, such as, 'Is there indeed a free will?' or 'How did language develop?' Many of these questions have one or more traditional answers, some of which have a distinctly religious aspect."
Rothschild, however, suggests answers to these questions that are typically quite different from the traditional ones, and certainly, are never religious. Rather, his answers are based on facts and on a highly persuasive, exceptionally clear, chain of inference. The reader is thus led, usually in a very entertaining fashion, to new insights and new ways of thinking, which challenge the traditional, and in particular, religious ways of thinking.
The shattering of the free will delusion and of the mind-body paradigm, through Haggard's experiment, and the suggestion of an intriguing but quite plausible explanation to the origins of human language, through an individual evolutionary process augmented by a tribal one, are only two of the many examples that attest to the book's value. Without doub