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Grady Harp is an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer
With very little of the world’s headlines making sense to those millions who read or watch them, this novel or story form, A Secret of the Universe: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Discovery of an Eternal Truth, of addressing the glue that holds people’s perceptions together is a healthy start toward healing.
Author Stephen L. Gibson (’ Truth-Driven Thinking: An Examination of Human Emotion and Its Impact on Everyday Life’) is a young campaigner for epistemology - the science of studying the origins of human belief and knowledge as examined through basing all thought on truth.
Instead of electing to create what could have been a dry discourse on science and religion and how the two intertwine, Gibson has demonstrated his own personal journey through a story involving the friendship of two boys/men, one (Bill) is a devoted literalistic, evangelical Christian while the other (Ian) seeks to explain the holes in the blind faith religion of his upbringing, choosing instead to question every aspect of every form of ‘religions’, looking for the proof or truth of each and how these religions have so profoundly influenced human behavior.
The characters created to enact the drama of this philosophical exercise are interesting enough to propel the reader through the far too long (576 pages) book. Spanning a time frame from 1985 to 2010 the story is essentially one of coming of age of two boys from Michigan (the author’s home) and how they respond to love, death, tragedy, marriage, children, personal losses and personal triumphs, terrorism, and individual soul searching.
If the polarity between these two lads strays a bit at times, the reasons are to explain the author’s plan for revealing the bifurcated facets between blind faith religion and re-examined religion: Conservative Bill (who believes that such things as premarital sex and homosexuality are sick and are abominations to God) while inquisitive Ian joins forces to form a group of intellects called The Desoterica, a conclave committed to re-examining the Bible and the Koran and other religious writings to see how ‘truth’ reveals how much of what the world has accepted as fact is actually a mixture of myth, copy discrepancies about events that have been altered by influences and human needs to make the universe understandable. For example, the Desoterica goes to the Old and New Testament to trace the expectations of the Jews for a Messiah and how those expectations resulted in a splinter group who created a man - Jesus of Nazareth - described by four different men (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) - in disparate ways, demonstrating that time has pasted pieces together and created a myth out of need, a myth that cannot be based on truth from the very source from which it is taken: there are significant variations in the concept of the Virgin Birth, the resurrection, the human form son of God who is the only path to heaven, etc.
Gibson has done his research (and shares it in the appendices of this tome) and has successfully created a book that will challenge the reader no matter the end of the spectrum from which each reader begins this journey, a positive effect during this time Gibson calls ‘this very difficult period of history…a tribal retreat’. A SECRET OF THE UNIVERSE is a wise title: the operative word is ‘A’ secret not ‘the’ secret. And while that ’secret’ as revealed at book’s end is a bit precious and less adventuresome that the bulk of the novel, it at least provides a leveling ground for the philosophy discussed. Many people will be polarized by this book, but isn’t that a healthy beginning to opening wide discussions about the very sources of thinking that have lead us to where we are in 2007?
Though few would describe this as a Great Novel (the writing, while often interesting, is too often caught up in sidebar excursions that somehow too frequently end up in conversations in the cockpit of an airplane!), for this reader it is worth the time required to read it through, despite the tedious passages. It is thoughtful, challenging, and provides some good scholarship as practiced today as a bait for the author’s very worthwhile truth-driven thinking. It will doubtless cause debate: it will hopefully provoke some thoughtful changes.
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