Despite a promising premise that hints at revealing the nature of religious belief, Cary Cook’s Abram¹ provides something more akin to a parable about the primitive mind and its ability to make sense of the world. Interestingly, I write this review just days after digesting an article in Science² articulating how fear leads to magical thinking. This article charts a fascinating series of experiments that reveal the human mind’s tendency to invent patterns when the subject feels afraid or unable to comprehend his surroundings. I will resist the temptation to see more than coincidence here; instead, I will savor the timely irony of this article and its ability to frame the fable of Abram, who invented the pattern of monotheism to make sense of his world.

While Cook’s work strikes an occasional chord of truth, his choice of backdrop—namely the mythology of Abram as the inventor of the world’s monotheistic religions—remains its primary point of interest. This canvas could have supported a fascinating philosophical portrait, but Cook’s writing style and relativism paint more of a religious burlesque than a masterpiece.

The basic premise of the work is that Abram gives birth to the notion of monotheism because he refuses to adopt the traditional perspective of competing supernatural interests. While the doubt and inquiry of thinking men have produced many masterworks in literature, Cook’s fable merely has Abram exchanging one form of mysticism for one he coins himself.

The introductory chapters of the book offer an interesting view into the range-of-the-moment mindset that must have been endemic to primitive men. While some level of concept-formation is in evidence via such things as the use of tools and a limited command of agriculture, Cook properly identifies the willingness of men to leave virtually everything else in their lives to the province of faith. Cook also does a wonderful job of sketching ancient landscapes and explaining what the daily existence of such men might have been. Indeed, this sense of “setting” will likely be my most permanent memory of this work.

While the mythology around Abram does prove interesting for its context, Cook dedicates far too much of his work to characters and anecdotes that do little to advance the plot. To be sure, there is value in drawing a parallel between Abram’s geographic wanderings and his meandering intellectual journey, but the reader could excise fully a third of the book with no impact on the storyline or its meaning.

Another source of distraction for the reader arises from the numerous transitions from the archaic word usage and cadence of the characters to the colloquial, tongue-in-cheek (and occasionally snide) commentary of the narrator summarizing the action. The fable begins in a stilted, choppy style that gives the impression of a newly trained translator working through an ancient language devoid of adjectives. This continues for nearly one third of the book, after which the reader begins to notice the narrator as an increasingly heavy-handed presence. Cook provides additional diversions by peppering his work with text blocks, which seem to be included principally because the author had the research at his disposal. These text blocks rarely add value to the reading, and they interrupt the flow of the narrative, giving the impression of watching some strange “I Love the 80s” show—where only occasionally relevant trivia pops up on the reader’s screen. Overall, the writing style never quite achieves a single rhythm and detracts from the reader’s ability to focus on the text and meaning of the fable.

There are, of course, occasional bright spots in Cook’s writing, though I suspect some of these to be quite unintended by the author. For instance, Cook identifies (correctly) that Abram’s relinquishment of superstition defines him as a businessman (p. 130). How true indeed, though Cook immediately betrays his own straw-man argument by detailing how Abram behaves more like a witch doctor than a businessman, engaging corrupt clergy in their own games of sophistry. In another passage, Cook observes that ancient men failed to “recognize a distinction between pride and insolence” but then concludes that pride is a by-product of “the belief that you are doing well” (p. 255). Again, there is a flirtation with truth, but Cook places “belief” too prominently in this equation, never leaving room for knowledge based on observable fact.

Cook’s ultimate failing here is that his fable never pays any credence to the identification of Reason as man’s proper and singular faculty for survival. Indeed, there are precious few mentions of even quasi-rational thought in the text at all—typically referred to as Abram’s “doubt”; his inability to reconcile the contradictory gibberish of clergy; or his conclusion that all priests are corrupt because the people “beg for lies” (p. 253). Cook’s treatment of Reason as a third rail speaks more completely about his motives than anything else. Indeed, it helps to explain why Pride—properly defined as the by-product of seeing and acting upon only what is truly there—is a sin to the religious mind, for Pride can be only insolence to an unseen, unverifiable force that neither permits nor rewards rational thought.

At the conclusion of the reader’s journey, the author abandons his audience in mid-thought, leaning on the claim that his charter is simply to update a parable for readers to draw their own conclusions (a perspective we must piece together via the author’s Epilog and website). This thin veil of “objectivity” slips many times within the text and falls to the ground outright in the Epilog. In this four-page afterthought, the author lays bare his philosophical premises, including his utter disregard for any system of thought not grounded in a faith-based frame of reference, calling them “even crazier” than religion (p. 291). Cook properly identifies that such systems often lead to atheism but then dismisses these out of hand as “clearly...nihilistic” and offering “no justification for ethics” (p. 291). It is telling indeed that an Epilog clearly intended to share the writer’s motives dismisses the most powerful rebuttal to his book without even the benefit of a straw-man argument.

Ironically, this dismissal leaves his work even more exposed to reasoned rebuttal. Contrary to the Epilog’s assertion that rational thinkers are “crazy,” the proper rejection of the book’s flawed premises provides no fertile ground for any of Cook’s seeds to find any purchase. Ultimately, we see in Abram nothing more than a penny-ante version of Pascal’s wager, where belief in a supernatural marionette is proper because such things are truly unknowable and the penalty for betting on the wrong belief could be dire. All Cook has had Abram do here is choose to believe in a marionette of his own invention over the variants invented by others.

This choice neatly parallels that of the reader. For we take from Abram either a confirmation that Cook’s wager is either proper or flawed. As for me, my faculty for Reason does not permit me to think very much of this work. In choosing to see the world with un-borrowed vision, I free myself from the cosmic puppet show that Cook stages. To recast the author’s own words, my Pride is “the unavoidable side effect” of the knowledge that I sever the very strings that might otherwise entangle me—and my ability to see the world as it really is. The author should be credited for attempting an ambitious goal, but Cook’s work ultimately stalls at the intersection of faith-based belief and reality—much like the religion Abram invented.