From the Wandering Jew to William F. Buckley, Jr. : On Science, Literature, and Religion by Martin Gardner

Author:Martin, Gardner [Gardner, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2011-12-26T22:42:56+00:00

POSTSCRIPT

My review, even in its truncated form, naturally produced an angry response from a Christian Science spokesman. His long letter, and responses by Caroline Fraser and me, appeared in the Los Angeles Times Book Review (September 19, 1999), and are reprinted below:

Martin Gardner’s article “Mind Over Matter” purports to review three books: Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures; Dr. Gillian Gill’s 1998 biography, Mary Baker Eddy; and Caroline Eraser’s new God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church. Had these books received equal treatment along with their equal billing, the first two books would have considerably redressed the pointed imbalance of the latter.

Clearly the reviewer favors Eraser’s rancorous indictment of Eddy and her church over the scholarly study by Gill As to the article’s “review” of Science and Health, Los Angeles Times readers would have been hard-pressed to find one. The contents of the final edition of Science and Health—the culmination of Eddy’s refinement of her ideas in the book over several decades—are barely mentioned. Instead Gardner focuses on the book’s first edition. Though this edition is of genuine historical interest, there were six major revisions that followed.

The story of Science and Health, selling more than 100,000 copies annually in sixteen languages, will continue to be told in lives healed and transformed. To the many Los Angeles Times readers searching for deeper spirituality and prayer that brings solutions, a reading of Science and Health would be of great interest. Certainly, the 42 percent of Americans who use alternative treatments would be amazed at the review’s reiteration of Eraser’s dismissive attitude toward alternative and mind-body interventions, especially considering the nearly 300 studies documenting the benefits of prayen Such a view lags sorrowfully behind the course curricula of 64 percent of American medical schools that now teach complementary and alternative medicine—the near majority of which feature courses in spirituality and healing.

Both Gardner and Fraser place undue reliance on an unreliable source, the 1909 biography of Eddy attributed to Georgine Milmine. Gardner justifiably praises Gill’s Mary Baker Eddy as an “impeccably researched biography,” yet his review inexplicably ignores the fact that in more than twenty references to the Milmine biography, Gill thoroughly discredits its sources and conclusions. (Gill’s appendix documents her conclusive evidence against the propagandistic intent of the Milmine volume.)

The review’s blanket statement, “To Christians and skeptics she was an object of ridicule,” is easy to write but unsupported. Consider the words of Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross: “Love permeates all the teachings of this great woman [Mary Baker Eddy]. … Looking into her life history we see nothing but self-sacrifice and selflessness.” And consider, too, that many evangelical Christians, including clergy, who have embraced this reinstatement of “primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing,” also have recognized Mrs. Eddy as a Christian benefactor whom they deeply respected. Moving accounts of healings experienced through reading Science and Health fill that book’s last chapter, including some by those who began as skeptics.

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