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I first stumbled upon David A. Shiang’s very obscure, if not now, very rare first book, On the Absence of Disorder in Nature, on the floor all by itself at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon quite late on a cold and rainy night in the early 1980’s. I bent down to pick it up. When I cracked the pages, the text was so shocking and strange to my Stanford scientific training that I had to read and re-read the book forty or fifty times forcing me to go back to the text literally hundreds of times since then. I subsequently included it in my pantheon of favorite books. And the book is only 29 pages long. His second book, this one, is longer and just as exciting to read. It has taken me over 20 years for Shiang’s new way of thinking to finally become integrated with my own preconceptions and scientific stereotypes. Perhaps the readers of this book will not take so long to understand Shiang as I did.

Shiang elegantly attacks and charmingly demolishes, randomness, atheism, Darwin and natural selection. And this does not exhaust the list. His lucidity and logic are breathtakingly devastating. He is not afraid to defend the mind of God, either. He is the most original and wildest thinker in the philosophy and psychology of science today.

Shiang has been laboring in obscurity since the late 1970’s on his discoveries regarding the nature of the universe and the erroneous assumptions the scientists of our era are making regarding chaos, randomness, and God. Shiang also refers to God as “the gold mine of consciousness.”

Shiang acknowledges he’s been encouraged by Karl Popper, David Bohm and others to continue development of his deductions. His scientific arguments and the ways he argues them are original in scientific thought. This book is a culmination of decades of courageous and frustrating effort going against the grain of popular scientists who now ride the wave of the trendy new atheism and a universe of randomness. The book sales of these scientists are in the millions of copies. It’s quite common and lucrative now to write and lecture about how God is nonexistent or a psychopath. And of course there is always the criticism about God’s alleged poor craftsmanship in the universe. As if God had only him/herself to blame for all that ails our planet!

In opposition to the trendy belief in atheism and chaos, Shiang step-by-step and in elegant detail uncovers the secret of a surprisingly deep ignorance shared among today’s most popular scientists. Some of the scientists have actually referred to themselves as the “brights.” As one bright indicated, brights do not believe in God.

I think Shiang will outlast the trendy brights, especially on the question of randomness. After disproving something proponents of natural selection and most other lay people just take for granted – namely, that there have actually been empirical experiments that have proven the existence of randomness – he cites recent quotes of some of our premier scientific minds showing they irrationally believe in that powerful illusion. They have to believe it; otherwise, they would all have quite little to talk about.

Moreover, Shiang shows they cling to a universe full of randomness out of a need to be in control. It’s a bit frightening to watch Shiang’s mind explicitly illuminate how the brights we have been listening to deserve even less credibility than the God they say is a delusion. For this reason, Shiang is sure to be vilified and this book is sure to be attacked for decades. This book is that powerful.

Over the past decades whenever I have discussed Shiang’s fascinating ideas in my university classes, my students have reacted precisely with a combination of glorious delight, shock, and delicious dismay.

I cannot overstate the importance of Shiang’s work and its deep influence. It represents a paradigm shift in science not dissimilar to such epoch-changing concepts as the Theory of Relativity or the discovery that the earth is not flat.

A warning: This book is dangerous to some atheists and believers in randomness!

I never had much to say. Except to my students. Then David Shiang comes along. And David is the wildest thinker we have. And I just wrapped up in him.

– adapted from James Whitcomb Riley’s

The Old Man and Jim

Len Klikunas

Department of Anthropology

Boise State University

Boise, Idaho

11 September 2007