4 ideas
Engineer Rudolf Marek builds the Karburátor, an engine that burns matter completely and yields almost free energy, but it also releases the Absolute, the divine substance bound inside matter. Everyone near it falls into religious ecstasy, experiences conversions and works miracles. Marek sells the invention to industrialist G. H. Bondy, who mass-produces it, and the spreading Absolute brings economic collapse, fanatical sects and finally a world war.
The book treats God as a by-product of a production process, a contaminant to be vented, contained and managed like smoke or radiation. Seen this way, religious experience is not a message to be interpreted but an externality to be regulated, and the institutions that take it up act like firms handling a hazardous emission, not like guardians of revelation.
Factories run by the Absolute produce without limit, turning out nails, buttons and other goods far beyond any demand. Prices collapse, trade stops and the goods become worthless while people still go without. An economy built on scarcity breaks when the constraint on supply is removed, because distribution and exchange depend on that scarcity.
Every nation, church and faction believes it holds the one true Absolute and wants it exclusively, so a single shared divinity produces the Greatest War instead of unity. The book's closing argument is that each person believes in their own god but not in other people. Tolerance comes from trusting other people, not from certainty about the infinite.