David A. Shiang
author of two books regarding the nature of reality, explaining his opinion of an ordered and intelligently created universe
As a result of feeling as though I was being forced into a scientific straight jacket, I decided to carry out a search for knowledge as something of an extracurricular activity. I began reading dozens of books in a variety of other subjects, often spending hours on end at various bookstores in Cambridge and Boston. Among disciplines I immersed myself in were philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, history, literature, and religion. While researching in these areas, I felt that I could formulate my own thoughts rather than simply learn a body of unquestioned knowledge. There was room for dialogue and inquiry of a kind that was wholly absent from my work in the sciences. My courses in math and physics were making me very good at coming up with solutions to all kinds of routine and insignificant problems, but I found such pursuits to be mundane and often tedious. I knew that I was gaining important grounding, but I really didn’t care very much about calculating variable masses, inverse ratios, and angular velocities.
On the other hand, I recall the tremendous excitement of coming across Norman O. Brown’s pioneering analysis in Life Against Death and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. I remember examining Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Lao Tzu, and other philosophers who thought about notions of reality and the absolute. Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, which I had read before coming to MIT, played an important role in my ongoing reflections of themes such as alienation and redemption. The work of T.S. Eliot also captivated me, especially in the early poems that express a haunting vision of a human race at odds with itself.
As I continue to read practically anything I could get my hands on about the mind and various ways of approaching truth, I found myself making a kind of progress in my explorations. I slowly develop the feeling that I was onto something really important. I became increasingly confident that my search was leading somewhere. The more I worked at it over the months, the more it seem that unrelated things fell into place. I had no inkling where this unfamiliar and at times intensely unsettling journey was going to end up, of course; I was simply taking in as much as I could from a wide range of sources. (I showed my reading list to Noam Chomsky, one of my professors, and he said something to the effect that it was a life’s work.) Some of the material that I came upon would prove to be of no lasting value, but I wasn’t about to rule out anything in advance. My general area of investigation was the unknown, and I was more or less prepared to follow any avenue that showed promise, no matter where it might lead.
from God Does Not Play Dice by David A. Shiang (Pierce Press)