Been Reading - The Invention of Air

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and The Birth of America by Steven Johnson, is a biography of Joseph Priestley written by the author of several synergistic works such as The Ghost Map.

Why I read it: Johnson was interviewed a while back on NPR, and the book sounded very interesting. Also, Priestley was an influential Unitarian minister, so reading more about him satisfied my professional effort to further educate myself about my faith tradition.

What I thought of it: Johnson's way of looking at history, seeking connections and patterns, is a delightful intellectual exercise. He connects the Carboniferous age, with its higher oxygen levels and huge lifeforms which consequently left huge coal deposits, to the industrial revolution in England which took advantage of those coal deposits and made possible the instrumentation which Priestley used to discover oxygen (he is not given clear and clean credit for this discovery, but that is a long story). He points to the connection between the adoption of coffee (instead of alcohol) as the fashionable drink and the rise of the Enlightenment.

The descriptions of the science were complete and satisfying, and some of my favorite history reappears here - Franklin's brand of science and politics, the politics of Adams vs. Jefferson, and the later letters between those two men - as well as some new connections with French science and history (I really do need to read more about the French Revolution at some point).

But I was left disappointed by the discussions of Faith, which was given equal billing in the book's subtitle but not within the pages of the book. I got the impression that Johnson viewed Priestley's faith as an aberation on his intellectualism, rather than as part of it. He talks about the rarity of an intersection of faith, science, and politics in one man, but he does not explain (adequately to my mind at least) the impact on theology that Priestley had.

In fact, I detected a bit of the modern secular bias that seemed to feel that Priestley's faith was a blindspot:

In The Corruptions , Priestley spends dozens of pages marshaling evidence showing how fifth century theologians concocted the idea that God and Jesus were one, breaking from the original narrative that God had merely created Jesus to be a human messenger of his Word. But to someone existing outside the belief structure of Christianity - and even more, someone existing outside all organized religions - the two narratives would both seem to be in dire need of empirical evidence. If you don't believe in God, it's just as implausible to suggest that Jesus was a man created by God as it is to say that Jesus was God.

This passage is ostensibly describing the attitudes toward Priestley of his atheistic peers - Lavoisier and the other French philosophes and Ben Franklin - but it is the main discussion point about Priestley's theological work in the book.

Overall: A good history, and worth reading for those interested in the Enlightenment and the Revolutionary period, but a bit of a disappointment for a theology nerd.