Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order.

George Johnson Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50, 379 pp.

In the introduction to this fine book, the author makes the following statement: There are two opposing views of the scientific enterprise. Almost all science books, popular and unpopular, are written on the assumption that there are actually laws of the universe out there, like veins of gold, and that scientists are miners extracting the ore. We are presented with an image of adventurous explorers uncovering Truth with a capital T. But science can also be seen as a construction, a man-made edifice that is historical, not timeless--one of many alternative ways of carving up the world."

George Johnson, a science writer for the New York Times and author of two previous books on science, stakes out his claim somewhere between the extremes of science as discovery and science as construction. His stand is not as radical as he makes it sound. I would say that most science books being written today, popular and unpopular, crowd into the same territory.

Almost no one believes any more that scientific truth is timeless; indeed, the provisional, evolving nature of truth can reasonably be taken as one of the defining notions of twentieth-century science. On the other hand, few scientists believe that the many alternative ways of carving up the world are equally viable; most scientists are convinced that theirs is the Camino Real, the royal road to truth.

Johnson takes us to the terminus of the old Camino Real in his search for the nature of truth, to the environs of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It is a place rich in the clash of cultures: Tewa (the culture of the pueblos), Hispanic, and Anglo. Native faiths contend with Catholicism, Christian Fundamentalism, and various New Age religions for the hearts and minds of men and women. And don't forget that other faith system, science. On a mesa outside of Santa Fe is located one of the nation's premier research establishments, Los Alamos, where the secrets of the atom were teased into the blazing light of day. And in the city of Santa Fe is the Santa Fe Institute, which touts itself as the revolutionary hotbed of twenty-first-century science.

It would be hard to imagine a place better suited to contemplation of diverse avenues to truth, and Johnson exploits the cultural diversity of northern New Mexico to give his book a rich and engaging texture. He is respectful of all of the local ways of carving up the world, and takes away something from each of them. But it is to the scientists that he gives his fullest attention and ultimate loyalty.

The largest part of Fire in the Mind is an exposition of contemporary science, and Johnson's rendition is as good as any one is likely to find. As a scientist, I found little new here in the way of information, but I was frequently struck by fresh and luminous insights. Johnson helps us understand what's going on at the research establishments on the mesa and in the town. The physicists at Los Alamos can be taken to represent the reductionist way of doing science: complex phenomena are broken down into smaller and smaller bits that can be more exactly known. The scientists at Santa Fe take the opposite approach, using computers to investigate ever more complex systems. Phenomena emerge at the edge of chaos, they say, that cannot be reduced to the laws of physics; examples are human consciousness and the evolution of life. They call this new way of doing science, simply, complexity.

Lately, complexity has become all the vogue, and Santa Fe the glittering Hollywood of the new science; Johnson contributes to the hype. In fact, reductionism remains far and away the most fruitful way of doing science; complexity has so far added little to our understanding of nature. But the complexologists are confident, and Johnson's book may yet turn out to be a useful primer for the future. Our increasing reliance upon computers will almost certainly affect the way we think about the world, adding new metaphors and tools to the search for truth. I would not be surprised if a computer-based shift of paradigms is in the offing, perhaps early in the next century.

However, it will be nature and nature alone that will finally arbitrate between reductionism and complexity as ways of carving up the world. Science is indeed a faith system, but it is committed to skeptical self-examination. As Johnson writes: "It is because of this willingness to put its feet to reality's fires that science, like no other system of belief, has given us so much power to predict and control nature. In this way it is unlike any religion or philosophy."

What then of those other ways of knowing, the Tewa way, for example? Are all faith systems equally viable? Johnson writes: "If [the Tewa] way of carving up the world didn't provide levers powerful enough to move the earth, it gave them the inner strength to weather invasion after invasion--by Navajos, by Spanish soldiers and missionaries, by inquiring anthropologists, and finally by the physicists of Los Alamos. For the Tewa, the purpose of building mental orders seems less to control the environment that to control the world within." But, as Johnson points out, the doctors of the Indian Health Service are usually more successful than the pueblo healers at curing sickness. And the Tewa way of making sense out of the world won't put a television in the front room or a 4x4 in the garage. A faith system that supplies inner strength finds itself under increasing pressure from a faith system that satisfies material wants.

George Johnson's objective and sympathetic discussion of this clash of cultures takes us to the heart of a profound intellectual issue of our time: What is the fate of traditional faiths in a world materially dominated by the scientific way of knowing?

Chet Raymo teaches science at Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts, and writes a science column for the Boston Globe.