I finally read this book after a respected co-worker had recommended it to me a couple times in our long conversations about the relationship between scientific knowledge and religious belief. It was written by Dr. Henry Eyring in 1967, with the key goal of sharing his own ways of reconciling an esteemed career in the physical sciences with his LDS beliefs (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints).First of all, Eyring has all the right credentials. His Mormon bona fides include being born in the Mexican Mormon diaspora in the early 20th century, and even marrying from the Romney family (George was a cousin). His son is Henry B. Eyring, who is First Counselor to Thomas S. Monson, the current President of the Mormon church. For those unfamiliar with Mormon hierarchy, this makes him the 10th most senior apostle in the church, and a prophet, seer and revelator. Returning to the father/author, Henry Eyring (Sr.) was an accomplished chemist, serving at a number of universities and winning many medals for his significant contributions to material sciences. The book is prefaced with a hagiographic compilation of his professional and personal accomplishments, awards, and admirable qualities.Right off the bat, there are things I agree with. As the publisher's statement says in part: "...true science and true religion are and must always be in complete harmony; that this must be so because truth is consistent - no one truth can conflict with another truth..." That's right! However we arrive at truth, we shouldn't expect it to conflict with other things that are true. Eyring chastises some of his LDS cohorts for being too literal when it comes to certain parts of scripture. "...some theologians have unwittingly assisted in this rebellion by taking positions so dogmatic as to stifle the honest and thoughtful inquiries of youth when they needed help and sought it." He differentiates historical knowledge, especially religious history, from the repeatable laboratory experiments the hard sciences deal with. He also gives science credit for strengthening religion "by sifting the grain of truth from the chaff of imagined fable." I love this line: "Perhaps the believer never does more disservice to religion than to support the truth with bad arguments."Interestingly, Eyring defines the LDS faith's core tenet as the embracing of truth, whatever its source. This sounds fantastic on the surface, but it struggles in application. On one hand, this stance allows him to accept the new findings of science with open arms and incorporate those truths into his life. This only gets weird when it conflicts with existing Mormon doctrine and ideas. For example, Joseph Smith claimed that there are people living on the moon (they're about six feet tall and dress like Quakers... Brigham Young said our sun is also inhabited). Eyring knows this to be false, and happily dismisses it. He says that perhaps Smith never truly said such things, or even if he did... that wasn't a moment of inspired revelation. There's no pause taken to consider that this might bespeak of some proclivity in Joseph Smith to... you know... be inventive. Elsewhere, Eyring points out the faulty description in the Old Testament of Pi (the number) being equal to 3. Oddly enough, he doesn't cite this as an error, but pats it on the back: "This gives correctly the first term of an endless series, namely Pi = 3." Eyring accepts the truth of the earth's age at 4.5 billion years, and the truth of evolution, but somehow still believes in a literal Adam and Eve - how do they fit in the scientific narrative? They don't.Time and again throughout the book, Eyring is willing to disregard the errors of revelation, and simply replace them with new scientific knowledge as it becomes available. I'm all for embracing truth, but where's the accountability for previous false beliefs? He finds some way to see the errors as not being conflicting, either because they were misunderstood or simply because scriptures don't speak in scientific terms. It would have been interesting to see his reaction to Smith's forgery of the canonical "Book of Abraham" from a mistranslated Egyptian Book of the Dead, or the lack of any archaeological support for Jewish migration to South America, let alone missing massive populations of Lamanites and Nephites. Or, shooting forward in time, how he would feel about black men being allowed as members of the church in 1978 (after revelation had previously prohibited them). So much for eternal truths. The strategy for dealing with cognitive dissonance, in this case, seems to be ignoring that there is any conflict to begin with.While Eyring is willing to admit that many LDS beliefs are not directly supported by science, his feeling is that they will be, eventually. This is an attitude I have seen in many other believers - science is trumpeted to the sky as true and wonderful when it is found to be consistent with a religious principle, but is considered "unresolved" or "tentative" when it presents a conflict. Excuse me - "apparent conflict". Apparent contradictions/conflicts are referenced a few times in the book. The flip-side behavior is to embrace new scientific ideas and press them into service as justification for ancient beliefs (or in the case of Mormonism, old beliefs). Eyring cites the uncertainty principle of quantum physics as a buttress for his understanding of free will/agency. The relationship between energy and matter is presented as evidence for our spiritual natures. These are both huge leaps of logic that the science doesn't justify.Eyring relies heavily on this argument: X is a scientist, X is also a religious man (they are all men here), and therefore religious belief in a creator is important to the scientific enterprise. Isaac Newton, Max Planck, Louis Pasteur, and Albert Einstein (a shaky example at best) are all given their own small chapters. If the point is that religious persons can be competent and even brilliant scientists, then the point is amply made and accepted by me. However, one might also point out that pretty much everyone in the past was religious; it's not like there was a large trend of professed atheism in the 1600s, and many of the intellectual tools for informed disbelief were not developed until much more recently. The numbers Eyring cites have flipped just in the 40+ years in which he wrote his book: now some 93% of members of the National Academy of Sciences are atheists. Another point is that a skilled scientist can believe all sorts of strange and unsupported things outside the realm of his or her specialty. Linus Pauling promoted vitamin C panacea nonsense. Jane Goodall feels pretty strongly that Bigfoot is pacing the forests. Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell believes aliens have visited our planet. Even Newton wasted years pursuing alchemical means of turning lead to gold in addition to his obsessions with charting biblical history.So while one lesson of this book may be that any committed scientist can also be a religious believer, another lesson should be that a committed scientist may believe in any sort of unsupported idea and find ingenious ways to make it live consistently with scientific knowledge, especially when he or she has been born into a community believing said unsupported ideas.

Dr. Eyring and I may disagree on many particular conclusions about how the universe operates, but I heartily recommend his book to anyone interested in the topic. His writing is clear, concise, dense with keen observation and insight, and I think makes the best case possible for reconciling religious belief with the provisional truths of science. It is worth reading, and I think might be particularly instructive for religious believers who do not accept the tenets of the Mormon restored gospel, as it might provide something of an external lens to their own beliefs. The book contains a number of fun scientific explanations, and freezes in time an interesting slice of history that immediately precedes the moon landings and the information age we now occupy. These are engaging reflections from a clearly brilliant and fascinating man.