I recently finished the highly hyped novel Origin, Dan Brown's most recent effort to undermine theistic belief in general and Catholicism in particular. As in his previous works (The daVinci Code, Inferno, Angels and Demons) assaults on religious belief are embedded in a story, but unlike those earlier efforts, which were genuine page-turners that I found hard to put down, the story in Origin was pretty much a snoozer that I had to force myself to finish.
Despite the publicity given to the book, the best thing I can say about it is that it's possible that it's not the worst book I've ever read. Brown's attacks on theism were confused and sophomoric. It seemed as if he couldn't decide whether his target was belief in God or the expression of that belief in organized religion. He frequently conflates criticism of organized religion with atheism which is disconcerting and misleading since antagonism toward religion is not what makes one an atheist.
Throughout the book he advocates a naive 1960s Darwinism and demonstrates very little familiarity with the debate over biogenesis of the last two decades. He seems totally unaware of the developments in philosophy - particularly philosophy of religion, epistemology, the resurgence of Thomism, and the philosophy of science - which render most of his claims about the obsolescence and imminent demise of religious belief seem as if they were lifted from the mid-twentieth century.
For example, Brown has one of his main characters allege that faith, "by its very definition, requires placing your trust in something that is unseeable and indefinable, accepting as fact something for which there is no empirical evidence." This is, however, a tendentious definition of faith. Faith, as most people understand it, is not placing your trust in something for which there is no empirical evidence but rather placing one's trust in something despite the lack of empirical proof. There is in any case plenty of evidence for the existence of God even if proof that would command the assent of every rational person, including those who are averse to accepting that God exists, is hard to come by.
Brown also has his mouthpiece character predict that, "The age of religion is drawing to a close and the age of science is dawning." This assertion could only be made by someone with a very parochial view of the world. One only need look at what's happening around the globe - in the Islamic world, in Central and South America, in Africa - to see that though religion may be fading among the urban elites in Manhattan, it's doing just fine in much of the rest of the world.
One character in the book informs us that, "There are only two schools of thought on where we came from - the religious notion that God created humans fully formed and the Darwinian model in which we crawled out of the primordial ooze and eventually evolved into humans." This is not only simplistic, it's utterly false. Neither intelligent design advocates nor theistic evolutionists fall neatly into either of these two camps. The Darwinian view excludes any non-natural guidance or influence, but there are a lot of very thoughtful and intelligent people who believe that some kind of guided or intelligently influenced "evolutionary" process accounts for life on earth, even though Brown gives these folks little attention.
Add to these passages, and many others like them, a story line involving characters whose behavior seems totally implausible and an ending which is predictable from about a third of the way through the book, and the reader is left with a disappointing sequel to his earlier novels.
For a story in some respects similar to the one told in Origin and which preceded Origin by a year, The Soul of the Matter by Bruce Buff is, at least to my taste, a better reading choice.
