Calculating God

338 pages

English language

Published 2001 by Tor.

ISBN:
978-0-8125-8035-8
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4 stars (1 review)

Calculating God is the new near-future SF thriller from the popular and award-winning Robert J. Sawyer. An alien shuttle craft lands outside the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. A six-legged, two-armed alien emerges, who says, in perfect English, "Take me to a paleontologist." It seems that Earth, and the alien's home planet, and the home planet of another alien species traveling on the alien mother ship, all experienced the same five cataclysmic events at about the same time (one example of these "cataclysmic events" would be the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs). Both alien races believe this proves the existence of God: i.e. he's obviously been playing with the evolution of life on each of these planets.

From this provocative launch point, Sawyer tells a fast-paced, and morally and intellectually challenging, SF story that just grows larger and larger in scope. The evidence of God's universal existence is not …

3 editions

Review of 'Calculating God' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This book made me think about a lot of things. In the field of science fiction, religion is most often something to be scorned and laughed at, mostly through[return]heavy handed pokes at the Catholic church. While I'd agree that Christianity has a set of major problems, I think most readers and writers of science fiction[return]are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. That's what makes Calculating God so interesting: it takes a new and fresh look at creationism. Oh, basic[return]religious issues have been looked at before, but the treatments that I've seen have been confined to the classic Adam-and-Eve storyline, or to the tiny[return]genre of Christian science fiction. Yeah, there are books in this genre, and the fact that you've most likely never heard of them proves my point. calculating[return]God, however, isn't particularly Christian; the ending proves the fact beyond all doubt. It manages to make points about the …

Subjects

  • Human-alien encounters -- Fiction
  • Life on other planets -- Fiction
  • God -- Proof -- Fiction
  • Toronto (Ont.) -- Fiction