blog/content/reviews/books/in-the-beginning-science-faces-god-in-the-book-of-genesis.md

+++
title = "In the Beginning...: Science Faces God in the Book of Genesis - Isaac Asimov"
date = 2018-06-25

[taxonomies]
tags = ["books", "isaac asimov", "reviews", "history", "3 stars"]
+++

[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39341052-in-the-beginning):
In the Beginning: Science Faces God in the Book of Genesis. The beginning of
time. The origin of life. In our Western civilization, there are two
influential accounts of beginnings. One is the biblical account, compiled more
than two thousand years ago by Judean writers who based much of their thinking
on the Babylonian astronomical lore of the day. The other is the account of
modern science, which, in the last century, has slowly built up a coherent
picture of how it all began. Both represent the best thinking of their times,
and in this line-by-line annotation of the first eleven chapters of Genesis,
Isaac Asimov carefully and evenhandedly compares the two accounts, pointing
out where they are similar and where they are different.

<!-- more -->

{{ stars(stars=3) }}

I'm really a fan of Asimov books and I was really eager to read some of his
non-fiction books.

On this book, he discusses the Genesis, the first book of the bible. The weird
thing is that the introduction makes it seem like he will use the bible as a
starting point for science -- the introduction mentions that the people who
wrote the bible were not stupid, and they were the most smart people at the
time -- so I was expecting it to be more like "they thought this, but now we
know this". It wasn't like this; but it was really interesting for pointing
what was in the bible and what know at the time.

So although it is not a journey to the science, its a really interesting
journey to history in the region were the bible was written.