With that small critique aside, I can talk about the main substance of the book. For a more thorough account I’d recommend James Hannam’s ‘ God’s Philosophers’. This is, and other examples like it are, simplistic in the extreme, to the extent that they are misleading though no doubt many who would like to think of religion as science as being mutually incompatible will be predisposed to disagree with me on this. An example of this is where he uses a single quote from John Wesley to summarise all of Western religious thought. Though not factually incorrect, Sagan cherry picks his examples to give a metanarrative that agrees with his worldview. His narrative is also peppered with examples of where he sees “religion” as being inherently opposed to science. So while his methodology might be akin to what we might loosely recognise as being scientific today, Eratosthenes would not have called himself such (regardless of translations) and would not have been recognised as such by his peers. The anecdotes he uses are often highly anachronistic an example being that he describes Eratosthenes as being a “scientist” though this term was not coined until about 2 millennia after Eratosthenes. The second thing to note is that he wasn’t a very good historian. His effusive style is poetic, at times rhetorical and conjures up great images in the mind. On reading the first few chapters, there are two main things to notice.
I spied this in one my local bookshops and, keen to make up for my lack of recent science reading, snapped it up in an instant. I only picked this book up because I had ordered the 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene but it didn’t get delivered. I’m a little too young to have seen the legendary tv series, from which this book is the spin-off, when it was aired in the 1970s.
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