Jennifer Cobb uses her seminary and consulting experience to explore the realm of cyberspace and its role in spirituality. There is a growing fear that as our culture becomes more and more technologically run, there will be little room or reason faith and spirituality. Cobb offers a more optimistic perspective, reasoning that the internet enhances the evolution of faith. It is this evolution, that she claims leads to a more pure relationship with God.

     Jennifer Cobb worked for 15 years as a technology consultant for public relations and marketing. She worked on campaigns for Lotus Development, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard Sybase, and International Data Group. She helped formulate and launch the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards program which is now the leading award in the technology industry. She achieved a B.A. from Amherst College and UC Berkley and studied theological ethics at Union Theological Seminary for her Masters. She also wrote an article for Wired Magazine about the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. She draws on much of his work in Cybergrace, using his prediction of the emergence of cyberspace based on his studies of evolution.

     Cobb points out that since the age of the enlightened scientists, the world has been at odds about God's role in a material world. The question she claims all of wonder is "was God the creator, or did the laws of evolution coupled with physics, chemistry, and biology give birth to the world?" (p.11). For the most part, people have picked one view. However, Cobb believes that cyberspace is a looking glass for another view. Much like the Taoist idea of chi, Cobb proposes an energetic creative process that occurs all around us. To her the divine is evident through the creativity of our world, displaying itself through love and evolution. God is no longer a wizard who creates something out of nothing, but rather is working continually to create civility and organization out of the chaos.

     The divine creativity became most evident to Cobb through the famous chess match between Deep Blue, a computer, and Gary Kasparov, the world champion chess player. Going against what seemed mathematically the best decision, Deep Blue opted not to move its queen into a very strategic position. Instead after two minutes of deep "thought," Deep Blue exchanged pawns. Many experts in chess and computers spoke of an intuition that Deep Blue displayed. It became known as The Hand of God. After losing the next two games, Kasparov gave up in game six after only 19 moves. He had "lost his spirit" he said. This was unheard of for a chess master. Deep Blue also seemed to realize its affect on Kasparov. In one game, Kasparov resigned seeing his defeat. However, Deep Blue had made an error in the last few moves that would have allowed Kasparov to achieve a draw later on. Deep Blue would not have made this mistake had it happened earlier, but seeing Kasparov's move indicating defeat, it did it anyway. Cobb calls moves like this and The Hand of God having an essence called God.

     Using much of her research for her Wired Magazine article, Cobb reintroduces Teilhard de Chardin. While he was never around for the actual emergence of cyberspace, Cobb sees Teilhard as one of the first modern thinkers to begin to successfully reconcile the God he saw in his Church and the God he saw in his paleontology work. Not doubting the evidence he saw for evolution, Teilhard knew that there was only one possible path that reconciled the two views. Evolution was moving towards a time when all things, living and not, would be connected through information and the mind. It would come at no surprise, I gather, for him to hear us speak of robots in terms of thinking, feeling, and learning. In her Wired Magazine article, she spoke of today's recognition of Teilhard: "Al Gore, in his book Earth in the Balance, argues that Teilhard helps us understand the importance of faith in the future. 'Armed with such faith,' Gore writes, 'we might find it possible to resanctify the earth, identify it as God's creation, and accept our responsibility to protect and defend it.'" Through God's intervention, the creative web of energy and information would come together in the final stage of evolution, according to Teilhard. In order to come at her beliefs from a more scientific perspective, Cobb claims that this energetic presence and connection is also supported by work in quantum physics. Just as electrical impulses occur across nerves and the push and pulls that exist between bodies of matter, Cobb claims this same energy is mirrored in cyberspace. To her the notion that this is not so due to the inability to see it and test it emphatically, doesn't hold. Quoting Robert Jahn, Cobb states that "you don't notice E=MC^2 every day in our lives." As Jahn points out, "you can't tell, quantum mechanically, that the electron that came in with atom A is here now and that the electron that came in with atom B is here as well. All you can now say is that there are two electrons participating in the structure and they are now indistinguishable." The point is that not all things can be explained using the simple notion of number crunching. Going along with Cobb, Jahn points out that if we neglect the subjective conclusions about life in the midst of all the objective discoveries from cyberspace, then we are at a great loss.

     When Cobb traveled to India, she encountered a verbal meditation experience that was the seed of a new way of thinking about her beliefs. Somewhere in the midst of audibly repeating a religious phrase over and over was the increase in experience and religious activity. She began to see why symbols, sayings, and actions increase our experiences. Many people wonder why pray, if thinking prayerful thoughts feels just as good, or why participate in ritual traditions. But as Granville Henry put it, "God encounters us not just in the ground of our freedom, but in ways that are religious." It is the words and emotions encountered that create a sacred experience. Conclusively, Cobb says that "if one can feel the presence of divinity in time and space through the form of words and symbols, the symbols that travel on electronic impulses must also be able to carry deep experience." She seems to agree with Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote "Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of Love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire." If this is true, then I have a little more hope in the world we are living in than I did yesterday, because I was finding it hard to see any discovery of "love energies."

     To finish off her book, Cobb moves toward action. She spoke of an Information Way (IM) where the computer was used as both a weapon and defense mechanism. She reveals that one of the first programs written was used to help the production of the hydrogen bomb. And more currently, computers have been used by warring countries such as the US in the Gulf War. On the flip side the era of the internet and cyberspace has given rise the unprecedented ways of communicating inhumanities. From remote locations, we can now transmit what is happening in places once cut off from the world. She tells how affluent communities have children using computers primarily for their studies and communication skill with their schools providing up to date technology, while at the same time, the low-income families have their kids playing "shoot 'em up" video games. We must start now (if we have not already) developing ethics that drive the way we use this new medium of communication. She fears how most people have simply seen this new technology as a way to bring in more money, and less of a way to develop our spiritual lives. Just as we evolved, she claims the rules we live by must as well. No longer can we simply live by the Ten Commandments, because life has become situational. To her, the solution is similar to the notion of God's existence. We are not to take an extreme view of do's and don'ts but more of a balance. The blurry line in between is where the solution lays.