Syntheism: Creating God in the Internet Age

By: Jan Söderqvist, Alexander Bard

Narrated by: Bert Deivert

Length: 18 hrs and 43 mins

Publisher's summary

After the monumental "Futurica Trilogy" comes a book that dares to describe individualism as the now defunct religion it always was and describe a reality that is primarily virtual, rather than physical. While the authors do not mind challenging the reader's view of the self and the world, their main intention here is to induce passive receivers of the future to become more active participants. This work offers engaging observations and perceptive interpretations of contemporary society.

Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist are Swedish philosophers and authors of the internationally successful "Futurica Trilogy". They lecture the world over about the current global internet revolution. Bard & Söderqvist are regarded as pioneers in the literary genre futurica, where philosophy, social theory and futurology merge.

After joining forces in the late 1990s, Bard & Söderqvist argued that the interactive revolution is the most profound and radical of all technological revolutions in the history of mankind, that it completely transforms society in every aspect: politics, the economy, culture, social power structures, the collective world view and the whole concept of being human.

Bard & Söderqvist demonstrated the effects of network dynamics on various levels of a globalised world. They not only made controversial predictions in the early years of the new millennium (and cleverly foresaw both the dot.com crash and the September 11 terror attacks), they have since then been proven right in virtually every aspect and even in the most minute of details. Not only did Bard & Söderqvist foresee revolutionary innovations such as Google, Facebook, Al-Qaida and Wikileaks; they also went deeper and looked into the very power struggle of the on-going revolution itself.

Bard & Söderqvist are now back with a proposal for a complete new metaphysics for the digital age, and it is called "Syntheism: Creating God in The Internet Age".

©2017 SAGA Egmont (P)2017 SAGA Egmont

The authors have a theological depth of a 6th grad

I was interested in this book because I have seen a number of Bard's lectures and enjoyed his thought process. However within the 1st couple chapters of this book I realized there were some serious errors in 'factual' assumptions the authors hoped an ignorant reader would miss. Lets start with String Theory. The Authors use the idea that String Theory; as Kraus states "The universe can create its self from nothing, because gravity exists' well if gravity exists it by def didnt create itself from nothing. String Theory also imposes that there are an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of creation events. Thus by its very definition String Theory would have to include a universe which was created by an Abrahamic GOD; not disprove it. Also String Theory is anything but that a theory which is largely losing popularity amongst scholars. 2nd) They seem to have the theological depth of a 6th grader in Sunday School. If the major premise of your book is going to be on the challenges of the Abrahamic religions, then you should take the time to study the actual theology a bit more in depth. A high schooler taking a apologetics class at a christian school would be able to tear their arguments apart with ease. Being philosophers I would have also expected them to read the work of kierkegaard, who's understanding of the Abrahamic Theology was much more versed. While I would expect them to disagree with kierkegaard, but to flatly ignore the work is just lazy. 3rd) You can tell that they love to use big philosophical terms because they will repeat the same sentence 8 times over but with different fancy words to let you know how awesome the authors are. You could have cut 50% of this book out and made it much more concise. All in all I wouldn't waste your money.

**Update - I just heard and interview with Bard on Sept 17, 2015. In it Alexandar Bard States - 2 years before I we wrote the book I knew nothing of theology. He then goes on to state that he studied mostly zoroastrianism. How in 2 years studying zoroastrianism can you even have the slightest understanding of real Abrahamic Theology??? Then go on to write a book critiquing Abrahamic theology as if you are an expert??? I don't care if you agree with the theology or not, thats why I bought the book. But do your homework.