Douglas Preston: Blasphemy

The world’s largest supercollider was designed by a Nobel laureate to recreate the very moment of the big bang but nobody knows for sure what will happen when the machine is turned on.
The scientists working with the machine hope it will unlock the mysteries of the universe, others warn it could all go horribly wrong and suck the earth into a miniature black hole, while a superstar televangelist has convinced his followers the machine is an attempt to disprove genesis and that its designer is the Antichrist.
When government officials notice that the machine has been drawing power but the scientists on site insist that it is not yet operational they send in a man undercover to discover what the scientists are trying to hide.
He finds out that the scientists believe a hacker has implanted a chatterbot program that can pass the Turin test into their software and they want to find it before they make a report to save themselves an excess of embarrassment. But they can’t locate the program and as time goes on they come to believe that they are not seeking an example of artificial intelligence at all but have made contact with God.
Word leaks out and fundamentalist Christians band together and head to the Arizona desert, where the machine is located deep underground, believing they are about to commence the battle of Armageddon. They succeed in destroying the machine and killing its creator.
But they fail to kill all of the scientists working on the project. Those scientists take the printouts of the machine and present them as the words of God founding a new religion based on pure science.
Only one man alive knows the truth behind those conversations with God and he is not entirely sure whether the words are in fact those of God or not.
If you’re looking for meaningful discourse on the science vs religion debate, look elsewhere this is not the book for you.
But if you’re happy to overlook a few plot holes and inconsistencies in pursuit of a fast paced, philosophy-lite, Da Vinci Code-esque thriller then go no further here it is! Though I think it better than that other work in spite of the abundance of clichés both overt and implied (fundamentalist Christians=bad, scientists=eccentrics + altruists + humanitarians, Catholic ‘rewarded’ for standing by his faith, Navajo only people truly in touch with the spiritual), the main character being two dimensional and the behaviour of the scientists not holding up to close examination.
The pace is maintained by a combination of very short chapters and having action taking place on four fronts making it quite a fast read. I found its most redeeming feature to be the occasional humorous touch (usually at the expense of fans of the Left Behind series). I would read more of this author. He’s good if you’re in the mood for a light conspiracy theory but only if you can suspend your disbelief for the duration.-Lynn