Notes on A.C. Grayling: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism

Posted on Thursday 12 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly


A.C. Grayling is a British philosopher whose 2013 book The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, is a clear and concise summary of why religion is best abandoned and why humanism (as he describes it) is a preferable alternative. (I mentioned before that the book’s title is a bit crude…I suspect imposed by his publisher.) His book is thus somewhat in contrast to the famous or infamous titles by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others, that are aggressively anti-religion; Grayling, rather like Sam Harris’ more recent book The Moral Landscape (which I also have read recently, and will blog about), is discussing religion mostly as the basis for a case that an alternative is more reasonable, more realistic, and more humane.

Grayling’s book comprises two tasks:

  • To deal with what religious apologists say in defending religion
  • To show that there is a beautiful and life-enhancing alternative outlook… based on the best, most generous, most sympathetic understanding of human reality.

I quoted his first paragraph a while back.

To put matters at their simplest, the major reason for the continuance of religious faith in a world which might otherwise have long moved beyond it, is indoctrination of children before they reach the age of reason, together with all or some combination of social pressure to confirm, social reinforcement of religious institutions and traditions, emotion, and (it has to be said) ignorance — of science, of psychology, of history in general, and of the history and actual doctrines of religions themselves.

The first half of the book is about religion, and summarizes, in clear and beautiful prose, all the various arguments – many of them obvious to those of us who’ve read these arguments many times before, but perhaps unfamiliar to those faithful who don’t realize why anyone would question their faith – about why religion is a nonstarter. To summarize these arguments:

Faith means beliefs held independently of any testable evidence, or even in the face of counter-evidence—the latter often regarded as a virtue. The central faith of religions is the existence of a supernatural, divine being, and the consequent need for worship and praise, submission and obedience. Also, typically, that this being is the universe’s creator, ruler, and moral law-giver. Beyond that details are vague; religious apologists resort to vagueness about mysteries the human mind cannot comprehend.

Most people assume that the word ‘god’ refers to something that can be believed in, worshiped; that explains the origin of the universe; that lays down rules for behavior. That different religions make different claims about their god or gods is evidence they are man-made… but religious people think this insight applies to other religions, not their own.

Atheists reject the various myths of the Greeks, Babylonians, etc., and then add that they regard Christianity and Islam as similar myths. It’s just one more god to stop believing in.

The first half of Grayling’s book addresses debates about theism, secularism, and morality; basic issues about rationality; about agnosticism, atheism, and proof; and then addresses the classic philosophical arguments for the existence of a god, and discusses how philosophers and scientists over the ages have dismissed them. Arguments by design, by definition. Cosmological arguments. Pascal’s wager.

(He makes a crucial point that I’ve made here on my blog, but is not generally appreciated: even if one of these classical arguments were valid, it would say nothing about which of the many gods humans have imagined corresponds with the presumably-proved creator. Why isn’t the creator by first cause Zeus? A similar argument reveals the narcissism of many Christian apologists (Craig, Plantinga, et al) who think morality or the human sense of awe necessarily implicates the reality of *their* idea of God, i.e. the Christian one. What about the majority of humanity that is not Christian? Are they immoral, or lacking a sense of awe? This does not pass the reality-check test.)

Grayling goes on about creationism and intelligent design, which merely push the idea of origins back one step (who created God? Claiming God is the exception from needing a cause is special pleading).

He concludes Part I (page 127)

The cumulative case against religion shows it to be a hangover from the infancy of modern humanity, persistent and enduring because of the vested interests of religious organizations, proselytisation of children, complicity of temporal powers requiring the social and moral policing that religion offers, and human psychology itself. Yet even a cursory overview of history tells us that it is one of the most destructive forces plaguing humanity.

While the first half of this book treads ground many other books before have covered, the second half focuses on the positive: the case for humanism. Grayling distinguishes between three debates:

  • theism vs atheism, which is about metaphysics, what does or does not exist;
  • secularism, which is about the place of religion in the public square; and
  • the source of morality; from divine command, or human realities?

The secular position is that religions are entitled to exist, but deserve no privileged place in society; there should be no “respect due to faith”, since religions “derive ultimately from the superstitions of illiterate herdsmen living several thousands of years ago” (p135.5) (discussed again p238)

Humanism is the ethical outlook that says each individual is responsible for choosing his or her values and goals, is responsible for living considerately of others.

Humanism is above all about living thoughtfully and intelligently, about rising to the demand to be informed, alert and responsive, about being able to make a sound case for a choice of values and goals, and about integrity in living according to the former and determination in seeking to achieve the latter.

p138b. Like being a good guest at a dinner party.

Grayling lists two fundamental premises of humanism:

  • First, there are no supernatural agencies in the universe.
  • Second, our ethics must be drawn from the nature and circumstances of human experience.

A key requirement of Humanism is that individuals should think for themselves… it has no metaphysics. It is not about ‘faith’ in reason or science; science is open to challenge and refutation, faith is not.

Grayling examines the history of Humanism and boils it down to the criteria for living good lives. They are:

  • Life seems meaningful or purposeful
  • They are lived in relationships with others
  • They are lives of activity
  • They are marked by honesty and authenticity
  • They manifest autonomy
  • The experience of living them is rich or satisfying
  • They have integrity
  • Life seems meaningful or purposeful
  • They are lived in relationships with others
  • They are lives of activity

There is no single ‘meaning of life’. It is what you make it. Loving someone, raising children, succeeding in one’s field are common themes. Conventional values are not always bad, but need to be honestly examined, with those no longer suitable being abandoned.

(An aside mentions an aspect of religious history I had not appreciated: that New Testament ethics were for people who thought they lived in the last weeks or months of history (p156b), thus instructions to give away all your property, turn the other cheek to your enemies, and so on. Of course, 2000 years later, there are still people who think they live in the end times, apparently never having learned the lesson of history and failed prophecies.)

He discusses the difference between ethics and morality, and notes that certain human needs are basic to everyone; thus morality is an objective matter, concerning common themes across societies. (Cue here to Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape, which I’ve read, which addresses these issues, and which I’ll blog about soon.) Morality concerns matters such as marriage, divorce, sexual behavior, abortion, euthanasia, drugs.

For the humanist it matters to ask this: if interest in and concern for one’s fellows is a reason for being moral, what relevance does the existence of a deity have? Why cannot we accept that we are prompted to the ethical life by these natural human feelings? The existence of a god adds nothing, other than as an invisible policeman who sees what we do always and everywhere, even when alone in the dark, and who rewards and punishes accordingly. Such an addition to ethical thought is hardly an enrichment, since among the under-pinnings to the moral life they offer are threats – of fear, of exclusion, even of violent sufferings: which are, among other things, exactly what the moral life seeks to liberate us from. These threats characterize the state of mankind under religion for most of history; liberation from them, and therefore from religion, is a desideratum of humanist morality. (p242t)

There is a beautiful, poetic final chapter, from which I will only quote excerpts, beginning p255:

The fact is persistently overlooked that those who are not religious have available to them a rich ethical outlook, all the richer indeed for being the result of reflection as opposed to conditioning or tradition. Its roots lie in rational consideration of what humankind’s cumulative experience teaches; and that is a great harvest of insight.

And, discussing a wide variety of belief systems (astrology, feng shui, religion, etc):

But with the exception of the individuals who promote these systems when they should know better, humanism is not against the majority who subscribe to them, for it recognizes that they were brought up in them as children, or turn to them out of need, or adhere to them hopefully (and some, too often, unthinkingly). These are fellow human beings, and humanists profoundly wish them well; which means too that they wish them to be free, to think for themselves, to see the world through clear eyes. If only, says the humanist, they would have a better knowledge of history! If only they would see what their own leaders think of the simple version of the faiths they adhere to, substituting such sophistry in its place! For whereas the ordinary believer has somewhat misty and incomplete notions of the religions they subscribe to, their theologians deploy such a labyrinthine, sophisticated and complex approach, that some go so far as to claim that a god does not have to exist to be the focus of the faith.

And, echoing Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Having the intellectual courage to live with open-endedness and uncertainty, trusting to reason and experiment to gain us increments of understanding, having the integrity to base one’s views on rigorous and testable foundations, and being committed to changing one’s mind when show to be wrong, are the marks of honest minds.

If I were to recommend one book to believers who have doubts, or to believers who simply want to understand why nonbelievers cannot accept what they feel to be the obvious truth of their faith, it would be this one. (Rather than the books by Hitchens, Dawkins, et al.)

Posted in Atheism, Book Notes, Humanism, Philosophy | Comments Off on Notes on A.C. Grayling: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism

Unafraid of the Dark: Highlights from the last episode of Cosmos

Posted on Monday 9 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Passages from the last episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos”.

Early in the episode, he describes a thought experiment:

Pick a star, any one of the hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, which is just one galaxy out of a hundred billion in the known universe.

How about that star, or that one? Okay, this one. It’s orbited by dozens of planets and moons. Suppose on one of them, there lives an intelligent species, one of the ten million life forms on that planet, and there’s a subgroup of that species who believe they have it all figured out: their world is the center of the universe, a universe made for them, and that they know everything that they need to know about it—their knowledge is complete.

How seriously would you take their claim?

[pull steadily back to reveal millions of other stars…]

Toward the end of the show, there is a long (famous and moving) quotation/narration by Carl Sagan, about how everyone we’ve ever known or known of has existed on the tiny pale blue dot of Earth as seen looking back from the outer solar system by the Voyager spacecraft. Here it is on YouTube. (The episode plays this over animation of the Voyager moving outward through the solar system, passing Mars, Jupiter, Saturn…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M

At the end of the episode, Tyson looks back to summarize the principles that have allowed humankind to perceive and understand the vast cosmos we live in, and then draws it all to a close. The understanding we have so far has been the work of generation of searchers, who took “five simple rules to heart”:

(1) Question authority. No idea is true just because someone says so, including me.

(2) Think for yourself. Question yourself. Don’t believe anything just because you want it. Believing something doesn’t make it so.

(3) Test ideas by the observations gained from evidence and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it’s wrong! Get over it.

(4) Follow the evidence wherever it leads. If you have no evidence, reserve judgment.

(5) And perhaps the most important rule of all: Remember, you could be wrong. Even the best scientists have been wrong about some things. Newton, Einstein, and every other great scientist in history—they all made mistakes. Of course they did—they were human.

Science is a way to keep from fooling ourselves, and each other.

Have scientists known sin? [image of atom bomb] Of course—We have misused science, just as we have every other tool at our disposal, and that’s why we can’t afford to leave it in the hands of a powerful few. The more science belongs to all of us, the less likely it is to be misused.

These values undermine the appeals of fanaticism and ignorance, and, after all, the universe is mostly dark, dotted by islands of light.

Learning the age of the earth or the distance to the stars, or how life evolves—what difference does that make?

Part of it depends on how big a universe you’re willing to live in. Some of us like it small. That’s fine. Understandable.

But I like it big. And when I take all of this into my heart and my mind, I’m uplifted by it. And when I have that feeling, I want to know that it’s real, that it’s not just something happening inside my own head, because it matters what’s true, and our imagination is nothing compared with Nature’s awesome reality.

I want to know what’s in those dark places. And what happened before the big bang. I want to know what lies beyond the cosmic horizon, and how life began. Are there other places in the cosmos where matter and energy have become alive … and aware?

I want to know my ancestors—all of them. I want to be a good, strong link in the chain of generations. I want to protect my children, and the children of ages to come.

[scenes shifts to the California coast, where the series began]

We, who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos, we’ve begun to learn the story of our origins, star stuff contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness.

We and the other living things on this planet carry a legacy of cosmic evolution spanning billions of years.

If we take that knowledge to heart, if we come to know and love nature as it really is, then we will surely be remembered by our descendants as good, strong links in the chain of life.

And our children will continue this sacred searching, seeing for us as we have seen for those who came before, discovering wonders as yet undreamt of in the cosmos.

Posted in Astronomy, Cosmology, Culture, Evolution, Philosophy, Religion, Science, Thinking | Comments Off on Unafraid of the Dark: Highlights from the last episode of Cosmos

Salon on Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson, science, and conservative denialism

Posted on Monday 9 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Several posts at Salon lately about “Cosmos”, Neil deGrasse Tyson, science, and conservative denialism.

5 Most Important Lessons from “Cosmos”
Which are:

  1. It’s OK to not know all the answers
  2. Climate change is happening, and it’s made-made.
  3. Evolution: How did we get here?
  4. The danger of ignoring science, or following special-interest science.
  5. Discovery starts with an open mind and the scientific method.

Another list article: Five “Cosmos” moments that made creationists’ heads explode

These concern the age of the universe, the age of the Earth, the origins of Christmas, anything about evolution, climate change, and… basically the entire series.

And a third article compares Tyson’s frank defense of science and reality with Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century, which is getting a lot of (world-wide) attention for its challenges to conservative denial that rising inequality is not something to worry about (and undermining the dogma of trickle-down economics): Rise of the myth busters: Why Piketty and Tyson are the icons America needs. Here are a couple nice passages — not about Piketty, but about how Tyson’s worldview unsettles conservatives.

And that’s really the deepest terror that conservatives have when encountering Tyson, and the whole sweep of scientific discovery he articulates. (William James, who was a graduate student when Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was published, had a similar view of our place in the universe. Consequently, he reframed the analytical truths of math and philosophy as a sort of backdoor empiricism: What our brains perceive as necessary truths reflects the empirical influence of how they evolved.) It’s one thing if science confirms our predetermined religious dogmas, but quite another if it challenges them. Yet, it’s worst of all for religious dogmatists if it threatens to replace those dogmas by providing its own sense of meaning, order and purpose in the universe. And that’s just what Tyson is suggesting.

…

Here [Piketty says], specifically, as is generally the case, openness is a requirement for the advancement of knowledge.

This reflects back onto one of the broadest findings in political psychology, as discussed by Chris Mooney in “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—And Reality.” Namely: Liberalism is correlated with the “big five” personality trait of openness to experience. The exploration of novelty is a recurrent theme linking liberalism and science to one another, just as the veneration of tradition is a recurrent theme linking conservatism and religion. Yet, several centuries on, science and liberalism have their own venerable traditions as well, and this has been a recurrent theme in Tyson’s “Cosmos” series. “Science is a cooperative enterprise, spanning the generations,” he said in one “Cosmos” segment. “It’s the passing of a torch from teacher, to student, to teacher. A community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.” One can even go so far as to say that Tyson preaches a kind of scientific faith: a faith in doubt, in a philosophy “unsettled daily,” as he put it. In another “Cosmos” segment, he said:

There seems to be a mysterious force in the universe, one that overwhelms gravity on the grandest scale, to push the cosmos apart. Most of the energy in the universe is bound up in this unknown force. We call it ‘dark energy’, but that name, like ‘dark matter’, is merely a code-word for our ignorance. It’s OK not to know all the answers. It’s better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what’s really there.

This evokes the conservative discomfort with science, which some seem to think that, because science doesn’t (claim to) have all the answers, and some current scientific conclusions are subject to change, it therefore can’t be trusted at all. As Andrew Sullivan mentioned last week,

A figure as respected on the right as Charles Krauthammer has been reduced to claiming that no reigning scientific theory should be taken seriously because it might one day be adjusted in light of new data or new experiments.

A curiously backwards route to thinking that only unchanging faith can be trusted. Such arguments, of course, do not bear up to reality-check scrutiny for a moment.

A fourth article is 5 demented conservative attempts to hijack and discredit science:

  1. Climate Change Isn’t Happening, but if It Is That’s Fine Because It Means Jesus Is Coming
  2. Creationism, Dinosaurs, and the Loch Ness Monster
  3. Neil deGrasse Tyson
  4. AIDS Has Been Weaponized to Doom Heterosexual Culture
  5. Gay Parents Are Worse Than Straight Parents (If You Lie)

The last item addresses, yet again, the discredited Regnerus study, commissioned by conservative groups specifically to create evidence to use in court cases against same-sex marriage.

One more: a long book excerpt which I have so far only skimmed: Science can’t tell us everything: Faith, physics and the origin of the universe, from a book by Marcelo Gleiser called The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning. Salon’s subtitle is, “Recognizing the limits of science doesn’t mean surrendering to religion, but being free to understand ourselves”.

Posted in Astronomy, Cosmology, Culture, Science, Thinking | Comments Off on Salon on Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson, science, and conservative denialism

Mathematics and Economics

Posted on Monday 9 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Both Slate and Salon have run excerpts from Jordan Ellenberg’s book How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking,. A new one at Salon, Math vs. Reaganomics: Why GOP’s anti-tax hysteria falls flat, examines economic relationships, and Laffer curve, and tax rates. (And being too Swedish.) General lesson: simplistic correlations are attractive to ideologues, but life is usually more complicated than that.

Conclusion:

There’s nothing wrong with the Laffer curve—only with the uses people put it to. Wanniski and the politicians who followed his panpipe fell prey to the oldest false syllogism in the book:

It could be the case that lowering taxes will increase government revenue;

I want it to be the case that lowering taxes will increase government revenue;

Therefore, it is the case that lowering taxes will increase government revenue.

With an amusing aside part way through.

(Aside: it’s important to point out here that people with out-of-the-mainstream ideas who compare themselves to Edison and Galileo are never actually right. I get letters with this kind of language at least once a month, usually from people who have “proofs” of mathematical statements that have been known for hundreds of years to be false. I can guarantee you Einstein did not go around telling people, “Look, I know this theory of general relativity sounds wacky, but that’s what they said about Galileo!”)

Posted in Economics, Mathematics, Science | Comments Off on Mathematics and Economics

Clarke, Childhood’s End, part 3 – passages

Posted on Saturday 7 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Passages from Clarke’s Childhood’s End.


The early part of the book involves a faction of the public that objects to the Overlords’ presence, on the grounds that their influence deprives them of “Freedom to control our own lives, under God’s guidance.” (p16.6) The religious right is ever-present.

The Overlords actually intervene very little, but one case where they do is described, to defeat a racial strike in South Africa. So that “full civil rights would be restored to the white minority”. (Sic!) This is a classic example of an SF writer casually overturning the reader’s expectations about how things will or won’t be in the future. (p20.2) (Another intervention later in the book concerns the Overlords’ directive to stop killing animals, except for food, i.e. to stop hunting for sport. This strikes me as another example of the tendency of SF to bequeath attitudes on superior aliens that humans, or at least the author, idealize themselves.)

Later, the UN secretary-general challenges his Overlord liaison, Karellen, about the Overlords’ refusal to reveal themselves. Karellen replies, “They know that we represent reason and science, and however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods…” (p23.4) And, “Believe me, it gives us no pleasure to destroy men’s faiths, and all the world’s religions cannot be right, and they know it.” (p23.8)

Clarke, over his career well-known for his interest in the sea-depths and in scuba-diving, and who wrote at least one whole novel about it (The Deep Range), manages to get an underwater scene in this book. (chapter 11)

Once the Overlords have revealed themselves, we get more description of [Clarke’s] notion of an idealized world (chapter 10): The age of reason arrives; humans have great amounts of leisure time, and are well-educated; most people have two homes; there’s little crime, and no militaries. Sports are big, and entertainment. But people ask, Where do we go from here?

(The key failure of prediction here is the idea that higher standards of living lead to greater amounts of leisure time. Our present society has standards of living unimaginable only a century ago… but human nature drives competition, and people seem busier, not less busy, these days compared to the past — a past which is now, ironically, idealized.)

Later, more about how culture develops (chapter 15), on an island colony called New Athens, that has rejected the 500 hours of radio and TV available every day (p141t, a remarkable anticipation). On this island with no vehicles, only bicycles, painting languishes, music is experimental, and cartoon films become indistinguishable from photography. (Another anticipation.) And a new medium of “total identification” seeks to expand film to all the senses.

There is a passage near the end, as Jan, the last man, who witnesses the dissolution of the Earth, is all alone, and listens to music to find peace. (p209m) He listens to Bach. There is a similar passage in 2001.

It turns out the Overlords’ initial purpose was to keep humanity from destroying itself, and secondarily, to stop early 20th century investigation into paranormal phenomena, those hints of humanity’s true destiny. They explain how, tragically, they cannot participate in a similar uplift; but describe what they understand this destiny to be:

We have glimpsed only the vague outlines of the truth. You called us the Overlords, not knowing the irony of that title. Let us say that above us is the Overmind, using us as the potter uses his wheel.

And your race is the clay that is being shaped on that wheel.

We believe—it is only a theory—that the Overmind is trying to grow, to extend its powers and its awareness of the universe. By now it must be the sum of many races, and long ago it left the tyranny of matter behind. It is conscious of intelligence, everywhere. When it knew that you were almost ready, it sent us here to do its bidding, to prepare you for the transformation that is now at hand.

All the earlier changes your race has known took countless ages. But this is a transformation of the mind, not of the body. By the standards of evolution, it will be cataclysmic—instantaneous. It has already begun. You must face the fact that yours is the last generation of Homo sapiens.

(p183-184)

So here is what the best science fiction does: it alerts your mind to the possibility that everything you know and assume about what you think is true is but a tiny fraction of what may be real. We, the human race, may be as fish living in a pond who are not aware of the presence of water, much less that there are other realms apart from water, like air — not to mention other ponds.

In the final pages, the last human narrates, for his Overlord sponsors, the dying moments of Earth.

Everything we ever achieved has gone up there into the stars. Perhaps that’s what the old religions were trying to say. But they got it all wrong: they thought mankind was so important, yet we’re only one race in—do you know how many?

Posted in Arthur C. Clarke, Cosmology, Evolution, science fiction | Comments Off on Clarke, Childhood’s End, part 3 – passages

Clarke, Childhood’s End, part 2 – themes

Posted on Friday 6 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Last week I started my discussion of re-reading several classic Arthur C. Clarke novels, and summarized the plot of Childhood’s End, in this post.


Now some comments on themes. My purpose in these rereadings is not to explore the history of science fiction necessarily, in the sense of identifying influences (in Clarke’s case, of course, Olaf Stapledon was a huge influence), or of following the development of ideas in these books through the history of the genre. Rather, I’m taking these texts at face value, as examples of science-fictional thinking, and relating such thinking to current issues of how humanity understands or thinks of the universe, especially, to put it crudely, the divide between science and faith – the theme of this blog. And between the speculation of these 50 and 60 year old novels, and how reality turned out.

So as I reread Clarke’s Childhood’s End last month, I took extensive notes, and will here summarize them into some broad themes.

First — the book’s central premise is that humanity’s current state is but a prelude to a higher order of being — an ethereal, non-physical realm of pure intellect. Given this idea’s prominence in the later 2001 (1968), I suspect this is an idea that Clarke held dear [perhaps inspired by Stapledon], rather than extrapolated. Because while in this book, he tries to justify this premise with the history of mankind’s ‘paranormal’ experiences, there’s no allusion to that in the later book.

So here’s the first big issue: A central theme of this book is that the history of humanity’s parapsycholical events presages this ‘uplift’. That is, incidents of precognition, telepathy, and so on, are taken as evidence by the visiting Overlords that humanity is on the verge of transitioning to this higher state of being. The idea that there was something supernatural about mankind’s mental state was a theme taken very seriously in the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s, to the extent that even the hard-headed editor of the pre-eminent ‘hard SF’ magazine of the era, John W. Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction (renamed Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact in the early ’60s), promoted this theme well into the 1960s.

Without claiming to be a scholar on this subject, my impression is that this theme has been abandoned by serious SF writers. After all these decades, the actual scientific evidence for precognition, telepathy, and so on, has not materialized. On the other hand, these themes are taken as assumed premises for the currently very popular genres of paranormal romance, in which young female protagonists have various paranormal powers. (This is just one reason I have no interest in these books.)

A secondary theme is how science fiction imagines aliens — that is, other intelligent races who have evolved independently on other planets. There’s always the recognition that it’s impossible to imagine truly alien aliens. As human beings, anything we can imagine about other intelligences, independently evolved, is necessarily filtered through our own understanding of what such an intelligence might be. In the history of SF, a number of writers have done impressive jobs about such imaginings — but as readers, we always understand this fundamental understanding is likely impossible. If we truly meet other intelligences, it is just likely that they will be completely incompressible to us.

(On the other hand, there are arguments that suggest that intelligence necessarily drifts to certain correspondence with reality; Voltaire-like, perhaps — only certain kinds of intelligence are possible.)

Still, it’s a common meta-theme in science fiction to see portrayals of alien beings as idealized imaginings of how human beings might be better. In this book, examples include an Overlord order to stop killing animals for sport, and a mention that they read very fast, a page every 2 seconds.

A third theme is how Clarke himself imagines an idealized future. In a crucial sense, science fiction isn’t about prediction — not about what SF writers *predict* will happen — but about what they might like to imagine will happen. It reveals their own idea of what they would like to come to pass. In this novel, there is a revealing chapter about the effect on human culture of the Overlords’ appearance. This is in the first chapter of the novel’s Part II, after the Overlords have revealed themselves as devil-like:

War and poverty are gone; production is automated; life has slowed. Education continues through life. Contraceptives and certain identification of fathers change sexual mores. Aircars take anyone anywhere. The world becomes secular. A device from the Overlords that images any event from the past 5000 years — revealing the true origins of all the messiahs — undermines religion.

And in this world, creative art diminishes.

The idea the religion would diminish as humanity matures is a central Clarke theme through all his books — and it is one that impressed me, at an impressionable age. (I’ve since had back and forth opinions about the plausibility of this premise. I would like this to be so as well, but I suspect a fundamental premise of the human genome, given lack of education, is a susceptibility to superstition and thus religion.)

Other thoughts about this book:

  • Technology — however far-ranging some SF writers are about the vast future, they tend to under-imagine technological advances. In this book [though remember, this was relatively near-future, from 1953], we have references to fax machines (page 29.6 in my Ballantine edition), and a whole roomful of them (37b, i.e. bottom of page 37), though on page 38.6 we see that words typed appear on a screen.
  • A very interesting and rather progressive social premise appears several times: on p79b it is mentioned the men are fundamentally polygamous. Later it is mentioned that one of the main characters, George, while he is committed to his wife Jean, has “no intention” of abandoning his other girlfriends (p105m). There is a repeated understanding about what we would now call open relationships.
  • [On the other hand, while we know now that Clarke was openly gay, as far was possible in his time, there are no hints about that in this book, as there were in his later novels, beginning at least with Rendezvous with Rama (1973), in which one character is described as having a very close male friend, without any further explicit details; an idea that reappeared, not much more explicitly than that, in his later novels.]
  • There are other social speculations, some of which did, or did not, play out. While in stories by Asimov and Heinlein of that era and before, men were always smoking cigars (!), Clarke barely mentions this, only once, i.e. that people still smoke, on p89t (top of page 89 in my edition).
  • And on p90.7, he indicates that the word ‘nigger’ is no longer taboo — a big fail, as it’s turned out.
  • This book indicates that terminology about the universe was not so precise as what we use today, e.g. p136m: “You are looking at your own Universe, the island galaxy of which your sun is a member…” indicating that “universe” was a synonym for what we today call “galaxy”.

As I reread this book, I hit upon one passage that I have remembered all my life, without necessarily remembering from what book it was from. There is a passage at the end in which a human stowaway takes passage to the Overlords’ home planet. He discovers that they have a museum devoted to mankind, and he is taken in and asked for advice.

Jan spent several hours there, talking into a recording device while the Overlords presented various terrestrial objects to him. Many of these, he discovered to his shame, he could not identify, His ignorance of his own race and its achievements was enormous: he wondered if the Overlords, for all their superb mental gifts, could really grasp the complete pattern of human culture.

We fantasize about alien beings and cultures, without appreciating the diversity of human culture here on Earth. I am certain that I could not pass Jan’s test, and I doubt than anyone else on Earth could, either. (Though in the microculture of the SF field, I gather that the diversity of SF writers and stories has been expanding, much for the better, in the past couple decades.)

Finally, let me summarize. Despite its easily antiquated aspects, Childhood’s End is still effective after all these years. Its dramatic arc plays on two emotional themes — the tragedy of the “uplift” involve the death/disappearance of children, and the tragedy of the Overlords, who however advanced, are intrinsically unable to participate in the transcendence they can only witness.

For all their achievements, thought Karellen, for all their mastery of the physical universe, his people were no better than a tribe that had passed its whole existence upon some flat and dusty plain. Far off were the mountains, where power and beauty dwelt, where the thunder sported above the glaciers and the air was clear and keen. There the sun still walked, transfiguring the peaks with glory, when all the land below was wrapped in darkness. And they could only watch and wonder; they could never scale those heights.

(As always with substantial posts like this one, this is a first draft, which I might well revise in the day or two.)

Posted in Arthur C. Clarke, Book Notes, Personal history, Reviews, science fiction | Comments Off on Clarke, Childhood’s End, part 2 – themes

Mathematics and Reality

Posted on Friday 6 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

A new book called How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, by University of Wisconsin professor Jordan Ellenberg, is getting some attention.

Here’s an NPR interview.

And Slate has been posted several excerpts of the book by Ellenberg (I see there are earlier posts on Slate by Ellenberg as well), including How to Lie With Negative Numbers and Does 0.999… = 1? And Are Divergent Series the Invention of the Devil?.

This second item reminds me of the suspicion of the concept of infinity expressed by Christian apologist William Lane Craig (in this previous blog post) over certain non-intuitive results of dealing with infinite series. I’ve gathered there is a whole strain of doubt among religious conservatives about not just modern science (evolution, cosmology, etc), but also about certain branches of mathematics, including the notion of infinity — because, you know, the only infinity is *God*, and therefore any abstract consideration of the idea of infinity is… blasphemy. While I can’t find, offhand, a link to any particular article about this, I suspect Conservapedia has something to say about this.

It seems the notion of parallel worlds is true, at least subjectively. The divide between those who try to honestly negotiate with reality and those who filter existence through ideology is so extreme (it seems, these days), that it indicates a de facto set of parallel worlds, in which visible reality is but a superficial shared illusion behind radically different fundamental realities.

I shall be reading the Ellenberg book soon.

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No One Can Be An Expert on Everything

Posted on Friday 6 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

This post by Andrew Sullivan, about GOP denialism of climate change, raises fundamental epistemological questions about how we know *anything*.

I’m not a scientist either. I have no expertise in measuring carbon levels back thousands of years; I have no clue how to balance measurable heat in the oceans as opposed to the deserts; I cannot say what would likely shift in weather patterns if we keep boiling our planet like the proverbial frog; and on and on. But I can read temperature charts and I can read the IPCC report and I can glean something relevant from the crushingly overwhelming majority view of the relevant climate scientists.

And that simple act of amateur reasoning is all we ask of ourselves as citizens, and it is all we can ever ask of our elected representatives. We elect them to make decisions about the future of Afghanistan, the sectarian conflict in Syria, the intricacies of Internet regulation, and any number of complex questions usually grasped only by experts. Sometimes, they can become kinda experts themselves. But what’s vital is that they simply use reason – a core democratic practice – to figure stuff out.

Sullivan’s jabs at Republicans, however well-deserved, aside, there’s a basic, unexamined issue here of how any person decides, however provisionally or certainly, whether he or she takes something to be true. No one is an expert on everything, or even (with rare exceptions) any one thing; no one can travel the world and verify the existence of every place in the world. (Certain creationists train their children to challenge evolutionists by asking “where you *there*?” – a cartoonish, reductionist version of this epistemological question. Was there really an Abraham Lincoln? Is there really a city called Paris? How do you know, were you there?)

There must be some skill or basic instinct that guides human beings to make provisional judgments that are more or less accurate – for the sake of survival, in an evolutionary sense. This leaves judgments about things that don’t necessarily affect survival, judgments that are realized via certain kinds of superstitions and religious beliefs, that survive in a no-harm no-foul sense. (E.g. there’s little harm in avoiding black cats or walking under ladders.)

But our society seems to have entered a realm where such beliefs have hardened into ideologies that actively resist understanding of and engagement with the real world. An extreme example, vis a vis climate change: the fundamentalists who are so sure that God created the Earth just for human beings, and couldn’t possible let it come to harm, that they refuse to believe that human activity could be having the effects that climate scientists claim. Or even worse: the fundamentalists who so welcome the imminent apocalypse (apparently including the long-delayed second coming of Christ, and their own [of course] ascent into heaven) that they *welcome* the calamity of climate change. These are the people who are truly dangerous, and could possibly drag the rest of us down with them.

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Clarke, Childhood’s End, part 1

Posted on Saturday 31 May 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I have been re-reading several classic novels by Arthur C. Clarke, published in the 1950s and ‘60s, because they were books that I read in my formative years (i.e. ages 13 to 15), and so influenced my early thinking and worldview. Some four decades later, I’m revisiting them mostly in the spirit of reconsidering them in the context of my current worldview – the theme of this blog, which is about how science fiction informs the tension between traditional and exploratory approaches to understanding the world. To some extent also, to re-examine these books’ premises and speculations, to consider how they hold up in the light of 50 or 60 years of scientific and cultural advances.

The first thing to say about Arthur C. Clarke, for anyone who has never read him (or these particular novels), is that he is a writer of great scientific discipline and of great appreciation for the vast expanse of the universe. Moreso than the other core SF writers of his era (Asimov, Heinlein), Clarke evoked vast expanses of time and space, often in portentous tones, and set his stories in those contexts.


[The cover image shown here is of the 1969 reprint in paperback by Ballantine Books, the edition I just re-read; one of five Clarke reprints they did with similar covers — all obviously inspired by spaceship images from the just recently released film 2001: A Space Odyssey]

For example, in Childhood’s End (1953) the prologue concerns near-future [from 1953] efforts by the US and the Soviet Union to be the first to launch a rocket into orbit. The opening line, concerning the site of the US attempt, is this:

The volcano that had reared Taratua up from the Pacific depths had been sleeping now for half a million years.

In The City and the Stars (1956), the first page prologue delays the reveal until the last paragraph—here are the first two and last lines of that:

Like a glowing jewel, the city lay upon the breast of the desert. Once it had known change and alteration, but now Time passed it by. … They had lived in the same city, had walked the same miraculously unchanging streets, while more than a billion years had worn away.

A city that’s existed unchanged for a billion years!!? (Clarke does provide some plausibility for this claim, but that’s for a subsequent post.)

And the opening line of the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968):

The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.

Everything is set in the context of vast amounts of time. This was very impressive to me as a kid who until then had been told Bible stories about events that had happened a mere 2000 years ago. And it’s still impressive now, or should be – though having read many Clarke novels over the years, I have to admit that a little of this portentous tone goes a long way.

*** Spoiler alerts to what follows, for anyone who has not read this 60-year old novel ***

Childhood’s End, to summarize briefly, is about advanced aliens who appear above Earth in huge spaceships, hovering above all of Earth’s major cities. Their presence alone affects Earth’s culture in many ways. Moreover, the ‘Overlords’ are reluctant to reveal themselves – none of them ever appear in person before the human public; their appearance is a mystery. There’s a big reveal about a third of the way through the book: that the ‘Overlords’ appearance is that of devils, complete with wings, horns, leathery skin, and barbed tails. (I think this might be the most memorable take-away from this book, even though it’s not really crucial to the novel’s central theme.)

Decades pass, during which humanity still does not understand the purpose of the Overlords’ visit. In an island society ‘New Athens’, in the Pacific Ocean, one of the Overlords takes special effort to save the life of one child from a tsunami. It develops that the Overlords have come to supervise mankind’s transition into a higher order of being, of which this child is a harbinger. The history of paranormal phenomena among humankind was evidence of mankind’s destiny.

The children of the world gather and ascend to a higher state of being. And disappear. One man, who’d snuck away on an Overlord spaceship to see their homeworld, is back on Earth to witness its collapse and destruction, as it implodes with departure of those children. Once this happens, the Overlords having observed, they move on.

—

This theme strongly presages that of 2001 — that humanity’s current form might give way to an advanced state of being. In Childhood’s End, it is inevitable, while in 2001, it is triggered by alien interventionists, in an ‘uplift’ procedure, an idea that became a recurrent SF theme, especially in the novels of David Brin.

A subsequent post will explore themes and details.

Posted in Arthur C. Clarke, Book Notes, Personal history, science fiction | Comments Off on Clarke, Childhood’s End, part 1

Sean Carroll: The Meaning of Life

Posted on Saturday 31 May 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I was checking out Sean Carroll’s blog today, and saw this post with a YouTube excerpt of comments he made during a debate with Michael Shermer, Dinesh D’Souza, and Ian Hutchinson. Can’t resist quoting extensively, since he summarizes much of my own thinking, and the themes of this blog.

…Religion and science have gone their separate ways over the years. 500 years ago this debate would not have been held; there was no demarcation between what we would now call science and what we call religion, there was just attempts to understand the world.

And what happened is that science came about by developing techniques, methodologies for gaining reliable knowledge about the world, and the reliable knowledge that we got was incompatible with some of the presuppositions of religious belief.

The basic thing that we learned by doing science for 400 years is something called naturalism — the idea that there is only one reality, there are not separate planes of the natural and the supernatural, there is only one material existence and we are part of the universe, we do not stand outside it in any way.

And the way that science got there is through basically realizing that human beings are not that smart. We’re not perfectly logical; we as human beings are subject to all sorts of biases and cognitive shortcomings. We tend to be wishful thinkers and to see patterns where they’re not there, and so forth. And in response to this science developed techniques for giving ourselves reality checks, for not letting us believe things that the evidence does not stand up to.

One technique is simply skepticism, which you may have heard of. Scientists are taught that we should be our own theories’ harshest critics. Scientists spend all their time trying to disprove all their favorite ideas. It is a remarkable way of doing things; it’s a little bit counter-intuitive, but helps us resist the lure of wishful thinking.

The other technique is empiricism. We realize that we are not smart enough to get true knowledge about the world just by thinking about it. We have to go out there and look at the world. And what we’ve done by this for the last 400 years is realize that human beings are not separate, that the world is one thing, the natural world, and it can be understood.

This is very counter-intuitive; it is not at all obvious, this naturalism claim. When you talk to a person, they have thoughts and feelings and responses. When you talk to a dead person, a corpse — hate to be morbid here — but, you don’t get those same responses, those same thoughts and feelings. It’s very natural, very common-sensical to think that a living person possesses something that a corpse does not. Some sort of spirit, some sort of animating soul or life force.

But this idea as it turns out does not stand up to closer scrutiny. You are made of atoms. You’re made of cells which are made of molecules which are made of atoms, and as physicists, we know how atoms behave. The laws of physics governing atoms are completely understood. If you put an atom in a certain set of circumstances and you tell me what those circumstances are, as a physicist, I will tell you what the atom will do.

If you believe that the atoms in your brain and your body act differently because they are in a living person than if they’re in a rock or a crystal, then what you’re saying is that the laws of physics are wrong. That they need to be altered because of the influence of a spirit or a soul or something like that.

That may be true — science can’t disprove that — but there is no evidence for it. And you get a much stronger explanatory framework by assuming that it’s just atoms obeying the laws of physics. That kind of reasoning is a big step toward naturalism.

…

The argument is finished; the debate is over. We’ve come to a conclusion. Naturalism has won. If you go to any university physics department, listen to the talks they give or the papers that they write, go to any biology department, go to any neuroscience department, any philosophy department, people whose professional job it is to explain the world and come up with explanatory frameworks that match what we see — no one mentions God. There’s never an appeal to a supernatural realm by people whose job it is to explain what happens in the world; everyone knows that the naturalist explanations are the ones that work.

And yet — here we are. We’re having a debate. Why are we having a debate? Because, clearly, religion speaks to people for reasons other than explaining what happens in the world…. People turn to religious belief because it provides them with purpose and meaning in their lives, with a sense of right and wrong, with a community, with hope.

So if you want to say that science has refuted religion, you need to say that science has something to say about those issues. And on that I have good news and bad news for you.

The bad news is that the universe does not care about you. The universe is made of elementary particles that don’t have intelligence, don’t pass judgment, do not have a sense of right and wrong. And the fear is, the existential anxiety is, that if that purpose and meaningfulness is not given to me by the universe, then it cannot exist.

The good news is that that fear is a mistake. That there’s another option. We create purpose and meaning in the world. If you love somebody, it is not because that love is put into you by something outside; it is because you created that from inside yourself. If you act good to somebody, it’s not because you’re given instructions to do so, it’s that’s the choice that you made.

This is a very scary world. You should be affected at a very deep level by the thought that the universe doesn’t care, does not pass judgment on you. But it’s also challenging and liberating that we can create lives that are worth living.

I’ve never met God; I’ve never met any spirits or angels. But I’ve met human beings, and many of them are amazing people. And I truly believe that if we accept the universe for what it is, if we approach reality with an open mind and an open heart, that we can create lives that are very much worth living.

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