Interstellar… Music

Posted on Tuesday 11 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Gary Westfahl’s reviews save me lots of time and money. Whenever I think a new SF film might be interesting enough to see…. his review often persuades me otherwise. (And when I do see them, my reaction is much the same as Gary’s, which is why I rely on him for reviews.) Thus, Interstellar. Worth seeing? I go to see so few new movies anyway, it takes some convincing to get me to get to the theater. At the same time, that Neil deGrasse Tyson has taken this film seriously enough to tweet about it, suggests it’s worth taking seriously. At least seriously enough to see. If only to keep up with what all the other SF filmgoers are seeing, and how the broader culture perceives science fiction, via films like this.

But even without seeing Interstellar, I do have a reaction to one criticism of the film, about the music. I’ve already posted this on Facebook:

The 7 biggest problems with “Interstellar”

“Hans Zimmer is a monster who must be stopped” is among the complaints.

If the soundtrack overwhelms the dialogue, this is not the composer’s fault; it’s the sound editor’s, or perhaps the director’s.

Several of my favorite film scores are by Zimmer – especially scores for “The Thin Red Line” (a film I like), “Beyond Rangoon” (a film I’ve never seen), and “The Da Vinci Code” (a film I saw but don’t care about). The scores I like, independent of the films. How the scores are used in those films is not within the composer’s control.

I remember seeing “The Hours”, over a decade ago, with an Oscar-nominated score by Philip Glass. I’m a Philip Glass fan, but as I watched the film I was aware about how relatively *loud* the score was, and wouldn’t this turn off movie-goers who found his music distasteful? Even as a Glass fan, I found the music obtrusive.

I’ve just listened to several YouTube tracks of Zimmer’s score to Interstellar, and I find them quite intriguing. If they interfere with the film, it’s not his fault.

Posted in Films, Music, science fiction | Comments Off on Interstellar… Music

Sibelius 1 and Mahler 6

Posted on Monday 10 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I did a post a couple weeks back about how I tend to like the later albums by pop/rock singers and groups over their earlier ones. Springsteen, REM, Darren Hayes. This applies generally to classical composers as well, though the distinction isn’t quite as clear-cut. Beethoven is great from the 3rd onward; Mahler is great from the 2nd onward; Tchaikovsky, ironically, is best-known from the 4th onward, though his first three are pretty good too, if you listen to them. Some composers, like Shostakovitch, are intermediate; their middle symphonies, in his case the 5th, 8th, 10th, 12th… are terrific; others are interesting but you have to give them much more attention to appreciate them. –And his 11th, a special case, via Cosmos. Later composers like Alan Pettersson, exhibit similar patterns; his 7th and 8th and 9th are gorgeous and intriguing, but his earlier and later symphonies seem like trials for later ones, or experimental offshoots that don’t quite compel.

But Sibelius is the exception, in my perception — his 1st symphony is my favorite of his 7 symphonies. It’s grand and mysterious, from the opening clarinet solo to the two ‘plump plump’ conclusions of the first and last movements. Yet the dynamic range across these movements is so vast that the music is hard to listen to, in certain contexts — e.g. my car CD player. Turn it up loud enough so that you can hear those quiet conclusions, and the loud passages blast you away.

And the same is true, perhaps, in the most grandiose of symphonies with such a dynamic range — Mahler’s 6th. The final movement, nearly half an hour long, is a dynamic interplay between passages (that begin with a gorgeous, uplifting, string theme) that build to aggressive conclusions, only to be smashed into silence by huge hammer blows… and then trying to rebuild. It does this, tries this, three times. And then the fourth, final passage has no hammer blow; it seems to give up, cautiously rebuilding, and then sighing back. The music gets so ever quiet. And then — after a full minute of nearly calm silence — the orchestra smashes back, in a huge abrupt loud chord, that startles you no matter how times you’ve heard this symphony and are expecting this to happen… a chord of mixed triumph and resignation and defeat… a final last breath… before it sighs back into nothingness.

As I said, the final loud chord is always startling when listening to this on a recording. In a concert hall — and in fact I heard this symphony live, in a performance in Albert Hall, in London, on a trip there in 1990 — you would see all the performers lift up their instruments near the very end, and you could tell that something was about to happen, even as the music seemed to be getting quiet, and dying down.

When Mahler was composing, in the early 1900s, of course, there were no recordings. In his worldview, the only people hearing his music would be those sitting in a concert hall… and seeing the musicians pick up their instruments in anticipation of that final chord, and knowing that the audience would see that. I wonder if he might have thought differently, if he knew the audience would not have seen that anticipation.

I suspect not.

Posted in Music | Comments Off on Sibelius 1 and Mahler 6

Fundamentalist Beliefs, the Real World, and Science Fiction

Posted on Thursday 6 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

“Those of us in the U.S. think we’re amazing at everything… mostly because we’re blissfully ignorant about how the rest of the world operates.”

Here’s a fun video of a fundamentalist pastor from an Atlanta suburb whose mind is boggled by the discovery – upon visiting Sweden and Denmark – that everyone in the world doesn’t possess the same religious beliefs as his own. See him struggling to wrap his mind around the idea. Wow, he keeps saying. He can’t quite believe it.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/11/06/watch-this-conservative-pastors-mind-get-blown-as-he-discovers-how-secular-norway-is/

The point is not to make fun of this guy (though it would be easy to do so — see him parroting bogus references to ‘missing links’, which obviously he does not actually understand); he is, as I suggested in a recent post, a member of most of the population of Earth who lives comfortably within their like-thinking communities and who otherwise doesn’t get out much, intellectually. It’s to cite another example of how most human beings are blissfully unaware of the true scope of the universe, of the Earth, the billions of years of history, the vast numbers of cultures that have lived on the Earth (even within the past few thousand years, for those who don’t ‘believe’ the evidence about the true age of the Earth and the universe).

It works for most people — they live comfortable lives within their communities, their tribes, and they die with calm assurance in their beliefs in religious myths about everlasting life. Does it matter in the end? Only if you care about what is truly real, and the evidence in the world for that.

This is not a frivolous post; in fact it keys in with a fundamental theme of this blog, which is an awareness of what is real, beyond any local tribal beliefs, social assumptions, and political stances, which are all trivial and transient in the big scheme of things. A consciousness, if you like, about how vast human culture, the world, the universe is. This is what I appreciate about the writings of Edward O. Wilson, for example, as I alluded in my previous post; he’s a scientist who addresses the huge scope of human existence, and what it ‘means’, in a way few writers have attempted. (But in a way that science fiction, in its finest examples, strives for.)

Posted in Culture, Religion, Thinking | Comments Off on Fundamentalist Beliefs, the Real World, and Science Fiction

The Meaning of Human Existence

Posted on Wednesday 5 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

(Earlier posted on Facebook)

Quick plug for Edward O. Wilson’s new book, THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE, which is as expected a grand if concise philosophical summary of this important scientist’s views on the big issues of science and philosophy — though it is also a rather slender volume that summarizes and glosses the ideas in books Wilson has written over his entire career, from ON HUMAN NATURE (1978) to THE DIVERSITY OF LIFE (1992), CONSILIENCE (1998), the recent THE SOCIAL CONQUEST OF EARTH (2012) (in which he changes his earlier mind and takes a still controversial position on the importance of ‘group selection’ in evolutionary theory), and even his 2010 novel ANTHILL. I’ll be rereading this and taking notes and extracting passages, to be posted here and/or on my blog.

(And there are several passages that directly or indirectly relate to how science fiction addresses these big issues.)

http://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Human-Existence-Edward-Wilson/dp/0871401002/

Posted in Book Notes, Evolution, Philosophy, Reviews | Comments Off on The Meaning of Human Existence

Conservatives, Liberals, Disgust, and Social Progress

Posted on Wednesday 5 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Why are some people innately ‘conservative’, and others innately ‘liberal’? — I put these terms in quotes because I’m not sure they apply in these terms to any cultures outside the American political system, though I suppose they must in one fashion or another in all cultures. Is it all about upbringing and cultural background? Has there always been this tension between conservatives and liberals? –In which, I have to think, liberals win out over time, otherwise we’d all still be living in caves. Ahem.

Social progress seems to be a pattern of two steps forward (the liberals) and one step back (the conservatives). Note this week’s elections — one step backward. (It’s not so bad — the Republicans are nowhere near as anti-gay as they were two or four years ago, because they know social standards are shifting, and they must abandon — well, except for the theocratic Neanderthals like Rick Santorum — their obsession with demonizing gays, or they wouldn’t have won their recent elections. This shift in Republican social policy is an example of … evolution.)

That Republicans are still anti-*science* is still a great concern, as expressed by New York Times’ columnist Frank Bruni: Republicans, Meet Science.

As always, science is exploring the issue about conservatives and liberals and providing insight. A recent study published in Current Biology, summarized here by the Los Angeles Times, headlines this as “Liberal or conservative? Brain’s ‘disgust’ reaction holds the answer”

Think your political beliefs arise from logic and reason? Think again. A team of scientists who studied the brains of liberal, moderate and conservative people found that they could tell who leaned left and who leaned right based on how their brains responded to disgusting pictures.

This is a useful insight. It’s not just about conservatives’ resistance to any kind of change. It’s about more visceral reactions to fundamental biological situations. (I’m thinking, of course, of the many right-wing demagogues who are weirded out by the idea of gay relationships. They can’t get over thinking obsessively about the details of how they must work. One can’t help but suspect that they have sublimated, deeply repressed, ulterior motivations.)

Ironically, as I’ve stated before, this conservative visceral reaction is precisely the reaction of animals whose instincts have been honed by evolution to maximize their reproductive fitness — an evolutionary strategy that (here is the irony) conservatives simply dismiss as not happening, because they don’t ‘believe’ in evolution, no matter how much evidence you show them.

(Of course this begs the question about why homosexuals exist among human beings — and hundreds of other animal species — a question I’ve addressed before. And it’s because evolution, natural selection, and sexual attraction among humans, is much more complex than simple animalistic reproductive strategies would suggest. If it were so simple, all males would be equally attracted to all females…..)

Posted in Culture, Evolution, The Gays | Comments Off on Conservatives, Liberals, Disgust, and Social Progress

Education and Faith; Reza Aslan and Religious Apologists

Posted on Tuesday 4 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s an article in Psychology Today about Why Education Corrodes Religious Faith. Well, of course it does; it’s all pretty obvious, but the article is a nice, concise summary for those who need it spelled out. (And an antidote, perhaps, to those who understand yet resist this, and home-school their kids and send them to religious colleges, where their faith will not be challenged by education about the real world outside their faith community.)

The threats, detailed in this article, are from history, psychology, anthropology/society, science, philosophy, humanities, and religious studies.

Education is mind expanding, in countless ways. Critical thinking, doubt, skepticism, independence of thought, and even existential insecurity, are common results. None of which make for healthy, durable piety.

—

Reza Aslan, author of the recent Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth and earlier books such as No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, has been in the news lately as an apologist for Islam in response to comments from Bill Maher and others. Salon’s Jeffrey Tayler responds with Reza Aslan’s atheism problem: “Fundamentalist” atheists aren’t the issue, apologists for religions are. Subtitled: “Major religions all contain macabre fables, explicit injunctions for vile behavior no civilized person should accept”. Well, of course.

Now we have to stop and ponder what we are being sold here. Aslan is essentially taking a postmodernist, Derrida-esque scalpel to “scripture” and eviscerating it of objective content. This might pass muster in the college classroom these days, but what of all those ISIS warriors unschooled in French semiotic analysis who take their holy book’s admonition to do violence literally? As they rampage and behead their way through Syria and Iraq, ISIS fighters know they have the Koran on their side – a book they believe to be inerrant and immutable, the final Word of God, and not at all “malleable.” Their holy book backs up jihad, suicide attacks (“martyrdom”), beheadings, even taking captive women as sex slaves.

There is this continual disconnect between the supposedly intellectual apologists for religious faith, who appeal to various strains of abstract theology to dismiss attacks against religion, and the believers on the ground, who take their religious texts at face value, to the point of beheading infidels and condemning gays to hell (in, needless to say, very selective readings of their religious texts), with a certain strain of right-wing American politicians among this group.

Tayler’s article concludes,

We will all be better off when we relegate religious texts to the “fiction” section in our local bookstore. And given the violence and lurid conduct they feature, we might want to stamp their covers with “X–RATED: NOT SUITABLE FOR MINORS.”

Posted in Religion | Comments Off on Education and Faith; Reza Aslan and Religious Apologists

Apophenia, Religious Apologists, No True Scotsman

Posted on Tuesday 4 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I maintain a Word document where I compile links and quotes from online articles I intend to comment on in this blog, and as I post each one, I gray out the text of that section of the Word doc. Here are a couple from September that I don’t seem to have yet posted.

Slate: It’s All Connected: What links creativity, conspiracy theories, and delusions? A phenomenon called apophenia.

Apophenia is the human tendency to see patterns in random events. It’s the tendency to see patterns in clouds, or to see Jesus or Mary in tree stumps and tortillas, for example — to detect whatever one is already culturally attuned to, in the random patterns of nature. It has an evolutionary explanation.

This interesting Slate article sees this tendency as an element of creativity.

In statistics, a problem akin to apophenia is a Type I error, or false positive. It means believing something is real when it isn’t, based on a misleading pattern in the data. The equal and opposite misstep, a Type II error, involves attributing a true relationship to chance. Defaulting to Type I thinking may have once conferred a survival advantage: Assume every rustle in the grass is a tiger, and you’ll last a lot longer than the carefree naïf who chalks each disturbance up to the wind. So, the theory goes, human brains evolved into “belief engines” and “pattern-recognition machines,” keen to organize jumbled sensory inputs into meaningful data.
…
Yet apophenia can also lure us into false and damaging convictions. Take the gambler’s fallacy, which states—erroneously—that in a sequence of random events, past outcomes will affect future outcomes.
…
So apophenia cuts both ways—it’s a profoundly human habit of mind that can underlie adaptive behaviors and reward flights of fancy, or induce all kinds of paranoia and silliness.

—

And then a long post by Jerry Coyne about how religious apologists — including President Obama — discount ISIS, or the Islamic State, or whatever it’s called, as not “true Islam”. It’s a variation of the no true Scotsman fallacy. Coyne points out how there is no “true” religion…

Everyone who is religious picks and chooses their morals from scripture.  And so, too, do religious apologists pick and choose the “true” religions using identical criteria: what appeals to them as “good” ways to behave. The Qur’an, like the Bible, is full of vile moral statements supposedly emanating from God. We cherry-pick them depending on our disposition, our politics, and our upbringing.

In the end, there is no “true” religion in the factual sense, for there is no good evidence supporting their truth claims. Neither are there “true” religions in the moral sense. Every faith justifies itself and its practices by appeal to authority, revelation, and dogma. There are just some religions we like better than others because of their practical consequences. If that’s what we mean by “true,” we should just admit it. There’s no shame in that, for it’s certainly the case that societies based on some religions are more dysfunctional than others. Morality itself is neither objectively “true” nor “false,” but at bottom rests on subjective preferences: the “oughts” that come from what we see as the consequences of behaving one way versus another. By all means let us say that ISIS is a strain of Islam that is barbaric and dysfunctional, but let us not hear any nonsense that it’s a “false religion”. ISIS, like all religious movements, is based on faith; and faith, which is belief in the absence of convincing evidence, isn’t true or false, but simply irrational.

This issue has gotten much hotter in recent weeks, with controversy about Bill Maher’s comments about Islam. Is criticizing the tenents of a religion tantamount to racism against its adherents? I say no. My inclination is that *ideas*, including the ideas of Islam, or Christianity, or any other ideology, or for that matter any scientific thesis or tenant, are always open to criticism, without necessarily impugning those who, for the moment, subscribe to any one of them. We should all be constantly re-examining our ideas and beliefs, against the evidence of reality, and making corrections as we can.

Posted in Culture, Evolution, Religion | Comments Off on Apophenia, Religious Apologists, No True Scotsman

Weekend in Oakland

Posted on Tuesday 4 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Back from another weekend in the Bay Area, looking at potential new homes and hanging out — dinner at The Terrace Room on Lake Merritt, in downtown Oakland, Friday evening after I flew up; a nice dinner with unexpected entertainment, Halloween costumes and a jazz band with dancers on a dancing floor.

Saturday: another round with our Peninsula realtor Denise, to see several new homes, including a lovely potential place on Winding Way (we’ve asked Denise to make an offer — though since properties on the peninsula are so competitive and typically sell with multiple bids and for over listing price, we’re not holding our breaths for a successful outcome).

That evening, a Halloween party with friends Jeff and Emily in Campbell, just outside of San Jose, with their 2-year-old boy Caiden, with whom I was happy to play with and follow around and keep out of trouble…

Sunday: an hour-long hike from the Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve trail head off Skyline Drive, to the Huckleberry Path trail head just south. A moist, hilly, forested path, quite unlike the dryer hillside hiking trails in SoCal. Then, a visit to a couple Open Houses along Skyline Drive. And then a trip into The City, San Francisco, for the afternoon and evening: Union Square, Chinatown, the Castro area. Dinner at Catch, on Market Street. Then a drive north on Castro up to Geary, past the Japanese Pavilion, and then down to the 101 and back across the bridge to the Oakland Hills.

http://www.theterraceroom.com/go/
http://www.ebparks.org/parks/sibley.htm
http://www.catchsf.com/

Posted in Personal history, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Weekend in Oakland

SFADB bug fixed, with a hyphen

Posted on Thursday 30 October 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

About a month ago I was updating sfadb.com and browsing around the site and happened to click on Richard Cowper’s page, http://www.sfadb.com/Richard_Cowper, and got a ‘file not found’ error message. Huh? Also for the following page in the alphabetical sequence of Names, David Cowperthwaite. Aside from those two, everything seemed fine.

At the time I rebuilt and uploaded the Cowper and Cowperthwaite pages to make sure they hadn’t been overlooked somehow, but still got the error messages. Didn’t have time to investigate further.

Tonight I updated several pages on the site with award winners announced this past month, which went pretty quickly since updating records already compiled does not involve a lot of text entry, verification of book and story titles, and so on — just tagging certain records as winners, and re-assembling and -building the affected Name and Listing pages. Updated five awards in under an hour, though that did include tracking down English language titles for finalists in the foreign novel category of the Deutsche Phantastik Preis…

And then returned to this bug. Did it affect any other pages than those two? I stepped through the entire set of Co Name pages and found no other problems. So, then what?

Well, the likely suspect was the ‘htaccess’ page that manages redirects, i.e., that converts visible URLs, like “http://www.sfadb.com/Richard_Cowper”, to the actual URLs of files on the site. When I set the site up in early 2012, I spent a lot of time figuring out how to implement simple, clean URLs, like the Cowper link, without the “.php” extension, and even though all those files are actually located with a /db subdirectory off the main sfadb.com domain. (Thus, the actual Richard Cowper page is http://www.sfadb.com/db/Richard_Cowper.php.)

This involves an ‘htaccess’ file — a text file with no extension — that instructs the server how to process requests for URLs. It consists of a series of ‘rewrite’ conditions and one key instruction, which is this:

RewriteRule (.*) /db/$1 [L]

This says anything like sfadb.com/filename, replace by sfadb.com/db/filename, and process that URL request and supply that page.

This is preceded in the htaccess file by a long list of *exceptions*, individual files names, or file name rules, that are exempt from this rewrite instruction. For example,

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/graphics

In this case the ! means ‘no’, and the instruction means any URL request such as www.sfadb.com/graphics/filename should *not* be mapped to sfadb.com/db/graphics, per the rewrite rule. Because the graphics subdirectory is a top level subdirectory at the same level as /db.

So… was there an exception to the rewrite rule that somehow affected Richard Cowper…?

Well, yes. It was this:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !wp(.*)

Designed to exclude the rewrite rule for those WordPress-installed files in the top level directory, which all begin with ‘wp’.

I fixed the Cowper problem by changing this rule to:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !wp-(.*)

since all of the WordPress-installed files are named things like wp-activate.php, wp-config.php, and so on. They all have that hyphen.

The original rule found the ‘wp’ in ‘Cowper’ and ‘Cowperthwaite’. By adding the hyphen, it still avoids redirecting the wp- files, but not the Cowper and Cowperthwaite files. So Richard Cowper’s pages are visible again now.

I think I didn’t anticipate any problem with the original rule because… you’d think !wp(.*) would apply only to file names *beginning* with ‘wp’.

Apparently not.

It took less time to fix this problem than it’s taken me to write it up. I do so because it’s another example of my philosophy about computer science and programming: you can *always* figure out and solve any problem. And fellow geeks might be interested.

Posted in Website Issues | Comments Off on SFADB bug fixed, with a hyphen

Arthur C. Clarke: Two Religious Explorations

Posted on Wednesday 29 October 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Arthur C. Clarke is, of course, the British SF writer (who lived much of his life in Sri Lanka) most famous for the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as several other of the most popular and influental SF novels of the 20th century: Childhood’s End (1953), The City and the Stars (1956), Rendezvous with Rama (1973), The Fountains of Paradise (1979). He also wrote many short stories, a couple of which are also among the most popular of all time. And both explore implications of religious ideas.

It’s my thesis in this blog that science fiction can be a useful way to examine alternatives to religious and philosophical and cultural assumptions, in ways that would never occur to people who live within those assumptions. (Most people, I think, absorb these assumptions without thinking about them; they have no reason to, and they live comfortably with others who have the same assumptions. That’s culture. And that’s why there are so many different cultures, with different implicit beliefs about the nature of the world. The people within them aren’t dumb; they just don’t get out much, intellectually.)

The two Clarke stories are “The Nine Billion Names of God”, published in 1953, and “The Star”, published in 1955.

Following are summaries of each story, with commentary. To provide spoiler alerts, I will simply set the last paragraph of summary for each story in white text. If you want to see them, just left-click your mouse and drag it over the apparently blank area, and the ‘hidden’ text will appear.

\\

“The Nine Billion Names of God”, first published in 1953, has just three scenes.

Scene One: A Dr. Wagner, in a New York City office, interviews a Tibetan lama about the purchase of an “Automatic Sequence Computer.” The lama explains they have a long-standing project to compile a list of all the possible names of God. They have devised a special alphabet for this purpose, which they have concluded needs no more than nine letters for any possible name. Generating all possible names (combinations of letters) was to have taken 15,000 years; with the computer, it will take 100 days.

Scene Two: Two technicians from the computer company, on location in Tibet to support the project, converse. One of them confides to the other that he’s discovered the purpose of this project. The monks believe that when they’ve listed all possible names of God – which they reckon amount to about nine billion – God’s purpose will have been served and “there won’t be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy.” Not just the end of the world – “nothing as trivial as that”, the monks say. The technicians worry about the monks’ reaction when the project finishes and nothing does happen; will they react violently? Or like the end-of-the-world cults who, when the end of the world doesn’t happen, presume the calculations were wrong and go on with their lives?

Scene Three:
The project is about to finish and the two technicians are ducking out early, riding ponies down to the airport where they will fly home. Darkness falls, and the sky is clear — “ablaze with the familiar, friendly stars” — and they realize the computer should just about have finished its run. And then they look up, and see: “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

\\

God works in mysterious ways. Religious apologists are always dismissing the senseless tragedies and accidents in the world, which would seem to challenge the idea of an omniscient, benevolent God, with this phrase. If you pray and your desire comes true, you thank God; if it doesn’t come true, well, then, God works in mysterious ways.

But the corollary of this is that the mysterious ways of God might easily be something completely independent – in fact, seems to be – of human health and happiness (not some hidden scheme to make up for current tragedies with some eventual overall good, which seems to be the implicit belief of those who invoke this defense). Clarke suggests, what if God’s mysterious purpose for humanity is the seemingly trivial task of aggrandizing Himself with all his possible names? And nothing more? Anyone who invokes the mysterious ways defense for God’s apparent disregard for human well-being should be willing to accept this explanation as well as any other.

————

“The Star”, first published in 1955.

The first-person narrator is on a spaceship, now some 3000 light years from the Vatican, as he puts it. He is a Jesuit astrophysicist on board a ship full of a mostly atheistic crew, to explore the Phoenix Nebula, the remains of an exploded star, a rare supernova. The crew has treated him good-naturedly; they’ve had friendly debates. The remains of the supernova is a white dwarf star, with one surviving planet, on which they discover a Vault – a repository designed to be found, left by a civilization that knew it was about to die. A bid for immortality, a vault that will take years to fully explore. The narrator wonders for what reason this civilization was destroyed. His colleagues say the universe has no purpose or plan, it was a random event.

But then the narrator does the calculations, and figures out exactly when the light of this supernova would have reached Earth. And has the revelation that casts his faith into question:

[Spoiler]
“There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?”

\\

Collateral damage. The implicit premise here is that, as according to the traditional religions, Earth and mankind are truly the center of the universe, and all those millions of galaxies and billions of light years of space that we have recently perceived are incidental, at best decoration. So, if the creator God wanted to stage a lightshow for the birth of his ‘child’ [a problematic concept at best], why worry about the consequences of an entire non-human civilization cast to the fire of a supernova? Mankind is all that counts.

Any problem with that? It’s a legitimate implication of this belief.

Clarke anticipated the consequences of this conclusion, in the final paragraphs of this story.

I know the answers that my colleagues will give when they get back to Earth. They will say that the Universe has no purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns explode every year in our Galaxy, at this very moment some race is dying in the depths of space. Whether that race has done good or evil during its lifetime will make no difference in the end: there is no divine justice, for there is no God.

Yet, of course, what we have seen proves nothing of the sort. Anyone who argues thus is being swayed by emotion, not logic. God has no need to justify His actions to man. He who built the Universe can destroy it when He chooses. It is arrogance — it is perilously near blasphemy — for us to say what He may or may not do.

This I could have accepted, hard though it is look upon whole worlds and people thrown into the furnace. But there comes a point when even the deepest faith must falter, and now, as I look at the calculations lying before me, I know I have reached that point at last.

It’s worth noting a comment by J.B.S. Haldane, whom Clarke quotes in the introduction to “The Nine Billion Names of God”, in his short story collection of the same title:

You are one of the very few living persons who has written anything original about God. You have in fact written several mutually incompatible things. If you had stuck to one theological hypothesis you might have been a serious public danger.

Ha.

Posted in Arthur C. Clarke, Atheism, Religion | Comments Off on Arthur C. Clarke: Two Religious Explorations