SF Gospel

Richard Dawkins and religious discrimination

Regulars here know I'm no fan of Richard Dawkins, but even I was surprised at his latest article for Boing Boing. Discussing the recent lawsuit between astronomer C. Martin Gaskell and the University of Kentucky, Dawkins goes lower than I thought he dared, stopping just this side of libel against a fellow scientist. 

 

Some background: in 2007, Gaskell was up for a position at the University of Kentucky. He was a hot contender, but one of the members of the search committee researched his religious beliefs and concluded that he was "potentially evangelical." He was questioned about his faith in his interview, and ultimately didn't get the job-- despite, according to one committee member, being "breathtakingly above the other applicants in background and experience."  E-mails sent among the search committee submitted as evidence in the case make it clear that Gaskell's religious beliefs-- which don't play a role in any of his peer-reviewed work on quasars and supermassive black holes-- were pretty much the only factor in the committee's decision not to hire him. Gaskell is not a creationist, and accepts the theory of evolution-- things which would be unlikely to turn up in his work anyway. All of which renders that phrase "potentially evangelical" even more chilling. Gaskell was rejected not because he wasn't the right guy for the job, and not even because his beliefs conflicted with his duties. He wasn't even rejected for beliefs that he actually held. He was rejected because of his membership in a group that also contains individuals whose beliefs are in conflict with a related department to the one in which he was applying to teach. It was a clear-cut case of religious discrimination, and the school has settled the case out of court for $125,000.

Enter Dawkins, who concludes from this that all kinds of beliefs, religious and otherwise, should justly and rightly serve as grounds for dismissal or rejection of employment, laying out several hypothetical cases-- none of them bearing more than a superficial resemblance to the Gaskell case-- in which he feels discrimination would be just. He even laments that "the word 'discriminate' carries such unfortunate baggage." The piece reads like an opening salvo in a witch hunt for "the creationists among us": it is a call for greater prejudice. 

The entire argument rests on the faulty assumption that religious ideas are protected and non-religious ideas are not. I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that if I were dismissed from my job because I believe in a subterranean super-race of mole people, I would start taking notes for my wrongful dismissal suit. Unless that belief interferes with my completion of assigned tasks (I am an excavator operator who will not break ground on a building project for fear of angering the mole people) or it interferes with my coworkers, clients, or customers (sales are down at the hardware store because I keep scaring people away with talk of their underground masters when all they wanted to do was buy a hammer). My personal beliefs-- religious or otherwise-- are personal, and if they don't interfere with my job, then there is no cause for termination. 

In the Gaskell case, of course, it's even more preposterous: Gaskell doesn't believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old any more than he believes that the mole people are preparing to reclaim the surface world. But Dawkins' entire article is framed to mislead the reader into believing Gaskell is a secret creationist. The attempt to paint Gaskell with the creationist brush has its roots deep in Dawkins' views of religion in general, and the idea of God in particular. Dawkins will only grant that Gaskell "claims... that he is not a full-blooded YEC [young earth creationist]." For Dawkins it can only be a "claim," not a fact, and that use of "full-blooded" shows that he is only capable of considering religious people as holding some degree of creationist ideas. Dawkins includes a selectively-clipped quote from Gaskell, " I have a lot of respect for people who hold this view because they are strongly committed to the Bible," Dawkins quotes. A-ha! A creationist! But here's the remainder of the quote: "...but I don't believe it is the interpretation the Bible requires of itself, and it certainly clashes head-on with science." Gaskell does what Dawkins cannot: see multiple ways of reading a text.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins misdefines the word "God" as denoting an intelligent designer. He builds creationism into the very idea of belief in God. Thus he is beyond perplexed at someone like Gaskell, who believes in both God and evolution. He simply can't comprehend people who find meaning in the Bible without also believing that the Earth is 6,000 years old. Dawkins has drawn boxes for us all to fit in-- "deluded creationist," "'bright' atheist." When presented with someone who doesn't fit in those boxes, his brain shuts down. This is a fact: not all believers are creationists. The data do not fit Dawkins' theoretical model. But rather than reframe his hypothesis, Dawkins continues to insist that his model is correct. His ideas about faith are nothing more than bad science.

The worse thing, though, is the other thing that Dawkins' article intends to do: to suggest that the Unversity of Kentucky's discrimination against Gaskell was justified. If you read waaaaay down into the comments section, he backpedals, claiming that "Nowhere in my article did I say that Gaskell himself should not have got the job," and that he did not intend to discuss the Gaskell case-- begging the question of why, if his hypotheticals don't apply to the case at hand, he bothered to frame the article with it at all. But even if we take those hypothetical situations as "preposterous examples," we are left with the distinct sense that Dawkins is not content with his quest to rid the world of religion. He also wants to rid the world of the strange, the eccentric, and the wacky. I have long felt that Dawkins must be, at heart, a profoundly boring person, for his insistence that the world must actually be as he conceives it. This article cements that opinion. I would not want to live in Dawkins' perfect world, because it would be a world of profound and fathomless sameness. We need our eccentrics. We need preposterous ideas, for how else will we be shaken out of our false beliefs, unless challenged with what we know must be impossible? Give me the bizarre, the preposterous, and yes, the delusional: better that than the bleak unity of a world squeezed into neat, pseudo-empirical boxes. 

Disching religion: The Word of God

I've been dreading reading Thomas M. Disch's The Word of God since I first heard about it. The book, subtitled "Holy Writ Rewritten," is Disch's tongue-in-cheek declaration of his own divinity, and includes a not-too-pretty picture of Philip K. Dick. Disch, the author-turned-deity, tells us that Dick has been languishing in the suburbs of Hell thanks to a letter he wrote to the FBI in a fit of paranoia in which he declared his suspicion that Disch was a communist agent. (A broader picture: the day after that letter, Dick wrote Disch a fan letter declaring his Camp Concentration to be the best novel he'd ever read, which makes me wonder if the whole thing wasn't intended as some kind of bizarre prank.) In any event, I'd heard the book was disjointed, mean-spirited, and just plain confusing—and Disch's suicide in the immediate aftermath of its release made the whole thing seem even more unpleasant.

And yet. I mean, how could I not read it? Science fiction author (or, to be fair, former science fiction author) declares himself God? Onetime friend of Philip K. Dick pondering the state of that great author and mystic's eternal soul? This is pretty much all of my obsessions in a nutshell, albeit a slightly tough one to crack. But trepidation remained, hence my waiting a year or so after The Word of God's release to actual take a look.

The book is a self-aware hodgepodge: part memoir, part collection of stories and poems, and part a novella about the aforementioned Philip K. Dick, who reincarnates himself as a young Nazi in 1939 to kill Disch's fictional father, the German novelist Thomas Mann. (Really.) It's all over the place in terms of subject matter, and it's also of varying quality: the memoir bits are frequently great, though they can also be bitchy; the previously published stories and poems are generally good; the Dickian novella is... well... terrible, frankly. I've generally preferred Disch as a critic and non-fiction author rather than a novelist—his history of SF, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, is great (with one caveat I'll discuss below). His fiction, though multiply-award-winning, never quite grabbed me, and this book doesn't change that fact.*

But what I really ought to be talking about is the religion. How does the theology of Dischianism stand up? Not too well, sadly. Disch has never been a friend of religion, and his discussions of the subject throughout this book give his basic reasons, most of which boil down to criticisms of closed-mindedness and violence. He views religion in general—and Christianity in particular, but Islam too—in harshly extreme terms that preclude any kind of complexity or nuance. To Disch, one is either an atheist or a creationist who bombs abortion clinics; there is no third option (well, besides the worship of Disch himself). One gets the sense that Disch only knows about religion through reading books—books like the mid-'70s creationist textbook Scientific Creationism. He's read the Bible, sure, but only through the most conservative lens imaginable. Like that grand alliance of Richard Dawkins and Ray Comfort, he believes there's only one way to read Scripture, despite a grand and varied history of competing and conflicting hermeneutics. And through Disch's lens, all religion gets blurred into a vast, ugly sameness. He attacks the Catholic Church, Islam, and American evangelicalism in the same breath, in a way that suggests that he really believes they're all the same. Dawkins believes that, but he at least tries to make a case for it; with Disch, it seems he hasn't bothered to ponder the distinctions. And there's no sense that he ever, y'know, talked to anybody about their religious beliefs—that might have disrupted his insistence that religious faith requires that one be a bomb-planting maniac or a dimwitted yokel.**

That same shortsightedness seems to be behind the very impulse that led to his satirical declaration of his own godhead. The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of has a chapter on religion in SF, for which Disch gives us three main examples: L. Ron Hubbard, Philip K. Dick, and the Heaven's Gate community. One of these things, if you'll forgive the musical intrusion, is not like the others; but Disch sees no qualitative difference between them. Dicks' religious experiences were strange, to be sure, but he didn't found a cynically money-driven church on them, nor did he attempt to convince anyone to commit ritual mass suicide. But Disch can't see the difference; he even implies, quite falsely, that Dick had a temptation "to parlay the muddy revelations of the Exegesis into official doctrine and a church." He only begrudgingly admits that, no, Dick didn't try to launch a church or begin a vast evangelical mission to convince people that he had The Truth, but he implies that Dick would have, had he lived longer. Disch can't seem to comprehend the concept of religious ideas outside of ideas of power and authority; indeed, he seems confused by the fact that Dick didn't believe he had The Truth—just many shards of a complex and confusing truth that he was never quite able to figure out. Disch doesn't see any distinction between having a mystical experience (as Dick did), presenting oneself a prophet (Hubbard), and declaring oneself God. Thus I can't help but think that the central conceit of The Word of God is based on a basic misunderstanding of the last few years of Dick's life; for Disch, believing that God has spoken to you is no different from believing that you are God.

The book review column in the April/May 2009 issue of Asimov's was an extended essay on The Word of God by Norman Spinrad, who was a friend to both Dick and Disch. Asimov's has made the full text of the essay available online—thankfully, because it's highly recommended reading for anyone who wants to understand the factors that culminated in Disch's suicide and his dying-breath slander of an author he once admired. Read it. Now. Even if you never plan on reading The Word of God, it's a powerful piece, and does much more to reconcile the contradictions of Disch's life and death than I ever could. What emerges, both in Spinrad's piece and in Disch's final work, is a portrait of an extremely intelligent, extremely funny and extremely cynical man—but it's the cynicism that won in the end. And I think it's that same cynicism that painted such a starkly-divided picture of what faith is and does in The Word of God. If Disch hadn't been that cynic, if he had allowed for a bit more nuance in his understanding of the things in the world he didn't like, he might still be alive today. But then, would he have still been Thomas Disch? I'll leave that question for people who knew him better—either personally and as a writer. The view from the sidelines (where I am) is that Disch's cynicism demanded a sad ending to his life, and The Word of God is a central part of that tragedy.

*I'm planning to give another shot at his early novels soon. I did rather like Echo Round His Bones, and I have high hopes for The Genocides and White Fang Goes Dingo (or The Puppies of Terra, or Mankind Under the Leash, or whatever they're calling it this week).

**I'm talking here about the tone of his writing, not attempting to state facts on matters of which I am quite ignorant. If I'm wrong, if there is any person out there of faith—any faith!—who conversed with Disch about matters religious, please let me know. I'm curious. 

Robert J. Sawyer to high-school student: "Skepticism can be dogma"

Robert J. Sawyer reports on his blog about a letter he received from a 12th-grade student writing an English paper on The Terminal Experiment and Calculating God. The student asks, "Are you a religious man yourself?" Sawyer's responded that he's not—but, unlike many non-religious, his skepticism is open to new evidence: 

I liked playing with the notion of whether skepticism/atheism was really a reasoned position, or simply another belief system that would endure regardless of the evidence, or lack thereof, for its veracity.

Read Sawyer's full response here.

Also worth checking out: Sawyer's roundup of a variety of reviewers' comments on the philosophical depth of his novels. They're all right.

You can also read my review of Calculating God here. And I wrote a bit more about both that novel and The Terminal Experiment in The Gospel According to Science Fiction.

A month's worth of links

I seem incapable of reading all my RSS feeds more often than monthly, unfortunately. But hey—that means big linkdumps like this one, and everyone loves those!

• SciFi Scanner interviews Ronald Moore about the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica, and roughly half of the interview is about the role of religion in the show. That's the good news. The bad news is this:

The journey is not over, but certainly both sides are suddenly faced with the prospect, "Maybe it's all been for nothing. Maybe there is no God, and if that's the case where do we go from here? What does it all mean and what are we going to do with ourselves?" which I think is a great place to take the characters.

Sure, Ron, it's a good place to take them. Just don't leave them there, OK? 'Cause if the whole point of this occasionally very upsetting journey has been that there's no point to anything... well, let's just say BSG won't be on the list of 14 awesome things about 2009.

• I knew Richard Dawkins was a humorless bastard, but this takes the cake: he suspects fantasy novels might have an "insidious affect on rationality." The best part? This whole discussion takes place in the context of Mr. "Do-Not-Indoctrinate-Your-Children" announcing that he's going to write "a children's book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking." 
• Also in the Humorless Bastards Department, the Fourth Annual Christian Filmmakers Academy will focus on the theology of SF film—and not in a good way, from the sound of things. Founder Doug Phillips states: "The popular genre has been responsible for persuading American thrill-and-chill- seekers that fictional speculation is reality—especially in regard to the creation of the universe, life on earth, and the 'certainty' of extraterrestrial life." This is pretty much the same anti-SF stance given by James A. Herrick in his polemical book Scientific Mythologies (review coming within a month, really!). One wonders what these anti-SF evangelicals will say when bacteria are (inevitably) found elsewhere... Oh, and to give you a sense of just what kind of Christian filmmakers make up the Christian Filmmakers Academy, they've declared Ben Stein's histrionic and generally dumb Expelled to be one of "the year’s most groundbreaking films." Yeeeeeaaaah.
• In the wish-I'd-thought-of-it category at Holy Heroes, Elliot explores crucifixion imagery in the work of Grant Morrison. Man, I love that Animal Man cover...
• The Crotchety Old Fan reviews... SF Gospel! Well, not just me. He's reviewing every site that was included in that ginormous SF Book Reviewers meme that started a few weeks back (and has been turned into a song—I'm in the last verse.) COF goes into a bit more depth on SF Gospel than on some of the other sites. On his comments I say: 1) Oops, you're right—Klaatu didn't speak to the UN in the original; 2) I'm aware of Wise's opinion, but I stand by my interpretation (particularly since Wise didn't write the screenplay); 3) I hope you won't disagree with everything here, and in fact I can guarantee it right now: The original The Day the Earth Stood Still is a darned good movie. See, we agree on at least one thing.
• Auxiliary Memory takes a look at Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End with an eye to its religious overtones—including a comparison or two to the aforementioned The Day the Earth Stood Still.
• As soon as I have time to play video games again, I'm getting this: "The You Testament," an early church simulator by indie game designer MDickie in which you play one of the first disciples of Jesus. You get to wander around Israel preaching, praying, and possibly getting crucified. 

Grasping for the Wind on religion in SF

SF/F review blog Grasping for the Wind hosts a roundtable discussion on religion and SF, asking:

Does the very nature of science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) automatically preclude fair treatment of religion? Must religion always be seen as an outdated and outmoded way of thinking, or are there authors who can and have included religion (whether real or imagined) in its pages without forcing an either/or proposition between religion and science?

The discussion is similar to that in the recent SF Signal Mind Meld post on the same topic (in which I participated, natch). As with that discussion, there are a lot of assumptions buried in the phrasing of the question. The respondents generally discuss SF's surface treatments of religion: priest heroes, preacher villains, and god-spaceships. I think the real meat of the interaction between SF and religion runs deeper, on the level of themes rather than plot elements. That being the case, I think most of the responses, and the question itself, are barking up the wrong tree (or at least the wrong branches): the depiction of religious individuals and institutions isn't as interesting as the depiction of religious ideas (which may not be clearly identified as such). The responses name some good books, including a couple that are new to me, but for the most part they're talking about the likes of Creationism, eternal damnation, and other fundamentalist bêtes noirs, which are far from the most interesting topics in the SF-and-religion realm.

Read the full discussion here.

Apologies for the dearth of posting lately, which is mostly the result of three things: 1) my preparation for and participation in Cornell University's recent conference on hip hop (I was part of a panel presentation on the creation and use of Cornell's hip hop archive), 2) the fact that my son can now crawl, which means he can wreak much chaos, which makes working difficult, and 3) the fact that I am 600 pages deep in Neal Stephenson's Anathem. There will be a review, oh yes.

Religion in the Golden Age: Astounding, July 1939

Golden Age science fiction was atheistic. 

Right?

Or, if not atheistic, at least radically secularist. Its authors presented religion as a dangerous, irrational opponent of scientific inquiry and, therefore, human progress.

Right? 

That's what the conventional wisdom seems to hold, at least. In God in the Movies, Albert J. Bergesen states that SF "turns potential grace experiences into science-like puzzles," de-mystifying the mystical. SF critic Darko Suvin has argued that SF that attempts to incorporate religious ideas produces only "fairy tales." More recently, Books Under the Bridge described, as a foregone conclusion, "the lack of any serious portrayal of religion in science-fiction." And this all started, it seems, in the rationalistic humanism of the authors of SF's golden age, prominent, anti-theist names like Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke, whose stories frequently describe the struggle of science against faith. 

But does that attitude accurately describe the golden age? As a test, let's examine the magazine that's often credited with ushering SF out of its Gernsbackian adolescence and toward its maturity: the July 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. What makes this issue stand out? Two stories, primarily. The issue contains A.E. van Vogt's first professional sale, "Black Destroyer," which is probably best known these days as the (very loose) inspiration for Alien. The July 1939 issue also includes Isaac Asimov's "Trends," which wasn't his first story, but was his first sale to uber-editor John W. Campbell, who was to the '40s and '50s what Hugo Gernsback was to the '20s and '30s.

"Trends" certainly seems to support the theory that the golden age was an age of secularism. The story concerns a would-be astronaut named John Harman whose attempts to launch a manned space mission face opposition from a powerful religious zealot. Otis Eldredge, the story's preacher-villain, embodies an extreme vision of faith-reason conflict, stating that "science has gone too far... We must halt it indefinitely, and allow the world to catch up." A newspaper editorial supporting Eldredge's views puts forth an opinion on space travel similar to that of C.S. Lewis:

"It is not given to man to go wheresoever ambition and desire lead him. There are things forever denied him, and aspiring to the stars is one of these... In allowing [Harman] to carry out his evil designs, we make ourselves accessory to the crime, and Divine vengeance will fall on all alike."

The story's conclusion sees rationalistic science triumphant over irrational faith. The point of the story, as suggested by the title, is the swinging of society's pendulum from radical to reactionary and back again—an idea that turns up again, in a more complex manner, in the Foundation series. But the story makes no bones about which side of that swing is better for society. The story is secularist, humanist, agnostic (if not explicitly atheist)—all the things that the conventional wisdom ascribes to Golden Age authors as a whole. Asimov clearly didn't think much of religion, and "Trends" is a powerful statement against the tyranny of dogmatism. 

What of the other era-defining story in this volume? Does "Black Destroyer" have anything to say about religion and society? On the surface, it would appear not. It is a taut adventure story about a group of astronauts who are terrorized by a predatory alien—no preacher-villains here. Where "Trends" wears its philosophy of religion on its sleeve, "Black Destroyer" is more subtle, but it stands in stark contrast to Asimov's story. When the astronauts arrive on the decaying planet of the deadly Coeurl, they ponder the forces that have led to the world's decline:

"There is no record of a culture entering abruptly into the period of contending states. It is always a slow development; and the first step is a merciless questioning of all that was once held sacred. INner certainties cease to exist, are dissolved before the ruthless probings of scientific and analytic minds. The skeptic becomes the highest type of being. 

"I say that this culture ended abruptly in its most flourishing age. The sociological effects of such a catastrophe would be a sudden vanishing of morals, a reversion to almost bestial criminality, unleavened by any sense of ideal, a callous indifference to death."

For van Vogt, religion isn't an opponent to progress, it is the glue that holds a functioning society together. Without it, things fall apart, and the sleep of faith breeds monsters like the Coeurl. Van Vogt's attitude toward religion is one of Protestant rationalism, an almost Weberian consideration of the societal benefits of shared faith. 

The role of religion at the inception of the golden age of SF gets even more complicated with the consideration of the nonfictional content of this issue of Astounding. In 1939 Asimov wasn't just an author, he was also a fan and letterhack, and the magazine that boasted his first sale to Campbell also contains a letter from the young writer. In responding to another reader's comments on the role of women in society (and, by extension, in SF), Asimov shows a very different attitude than that presented in "Trends":

"Who says that only men are responsible for war and repression?... How about Catherine II of Russia? How about Catherine de Medici of France? How about Semiramis of Assyria? How about Queen Elizabeth of England? A sweet lot—not... On the other hand, the great philosophers and the great religious leaders of the world—the ones who taught truth and virtue, kindness and justice—were all, all men."

Of course, the most apparent thing about this letter is its unabashed sexism.* But it's telling that Asimov's example to show the inherent superiority of women over men doesn't come from science, it comes from religion. He presents the highest expression of human achievement as spiritual—quite a surprise from someone who is, today, considered wholly atheist. Taken in this context, "Trends" takes on the appearance not of an attack on faith itself, but on a particular kind of faith, a close-mindedness that has forgotten the wisdom of those great teachers of "truth and virtue, kindness and justice." 

So let's ask it again: was golden age SF atheistic? SF certainly became mystical in the '60s and '70s, and that spirituality had not yet developed. But, more importantly, neither had atheism. The spiritual visions of later authors like Philip K. Dick, Robert Silverberg, and Samuel R. Delany the anti-religious sentiment of Arthur C. Clarke and the later Asimov both grew from seeds planted in the soil of the golden age. But that soil nurtured both equally. The authors of the golden age had a variety of attitudes toward religion, and individual authors could present what seem to us contradictory arguments. The golden age may have had individually atheistic authors, but their attitudes changed over time and were often more complex than present-day understandings of the term allow. Atheism has changed a lot over the last few decades, and assuming Dawkins-style attitudes of even the most secularist of golden age authors is ultimately anachronistic.

*My initial thought on reading this was just how wrong he is, too. The first preacher in Christianity was a woman, for cryin' out loud.**

**My second thought was—wow, is that the first use of "not" as a single-word, humorous negation? Should we add to the list of Asimov's achievements the accurate prediction of Wayne's World?

Illustrations: cover by Graves Gladney; "Trends" illustration by Paul Orban; "Black Destroyer" illustration by Kramer.

Analog, September 2008

The September 2008 issue of Analog opens with a refreshingly positive depiction of faith in Henry G. Stratmann's "The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskay." The title character is a fairly conservative Christian who is stranded on Mars with her fiancé, Martin Slayton. (They wound up there in "The Paradise Project," a story in the November 2007 issue.) The story is an extraterrestrial transposition of Jesus' temptation in the desert (Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 4:1-13), with aliens taking the diabolical role. They don't understand why Katerina won't sleep with Martin before they're married, or why she won't break her Lenten fast to eat the food they offer her:

"There is no need to fast if you are hungry and food is available. It is not intelligent to blindly obey rules that inflict unnecessary pain.

"Reflexively she clutched the cross hanging from the gold chain around her neck. 'My obedience isn’t blind. Fasting helps me practice self-control. We humans can be tempted to indulge desires that could cause unnecessary suffering later for ourselves and others. Eating this food now wouldn’t directly injure me. But by not eating it I make it easier to resist temptation when it really could cause harm.'

"That explains why you do not mate with your companion though you strongly desire him.

"Katerina wondered if the aliens understood what a blush meant. 'Yes, I want us to share our love in that way. But doing that now could put the new life we might create in danger. And if our unborn child or me died from a medical problem beyond our ability to deal with on this world, I know Martin would feel terrible pain too. As difficult as it’s been to abstain, it might be far worse if we didn’t.'

"Delayed gratification. An interesting concept."

The story presents Katerina's faith a bit bluntly— Martin is a bit too fond of regarding her cross pendant and saying things like "You may have faith that things will turn out okay, but..."— but it's miles beyond the "religion-means-narrowminded" shorthand of, say, Bond Elam's "A Plethora of Truth" last month. [It's interesting to note, however, that Analog has cropped the illustration for the story on their website, shown above. The original in the magazine extends for a good inch lower, and we see that the object Katerina is holding in her hands is a cross. Were they worried about what their more anti-religious readers would think...?]

Given the greater nuance on display in Stratmann's story, it's particularly dismaying to see the tired clichés that Tom Eastman trots out in his book review column. In discussing the National Academy of Sciences' Science, Evolution, and Creationism, he drops this doozy:

"Scriptural explanations definitely do conflict with scientific explanations, and to the extent that religion and science endeavor to explain the same things, they do conflict. Only when religion confines itself to the discussions of the nonexistent (the supernatural, or the spiritual), does it not conflict with science, which can only say about such things, 'No evidence.'"

Why is it that atheists are so dogmatic about the meaning of Scripture? Do they really think that there is no interpretation that goes into a so-called "literalist" reading? Is there no room for poetry in the soul of Tom Eastman? And that passage ain't got nothing on what follows it:

"Does that sound harsh? So be it. The only value of religion that I have ever been able to discern is that it helps people live amicably together, and that tends to work best in religiously homogeneous societies. In pluralistic societies, it far too often breaks down."

Eastman seem to think that all faith is fundamentalism, that all believers wish that our society was "religiously homogeneous," and that pluralistic society forces these authoritarian aspirations to "break down." (This seems to be a pretty popular paranoia among atheists, and it's something I hope to write more about soon.) So, when Eastman (grudgingly?) acknowledges later in the same paragraph that creationists are a minority among the faithful, it comes across as more than a little self-contradictory. If he knows that creationists are a minority, does that mean he thinks that Congregationalists secretly want to overthrow the government? A 200-word book review is hardly the place for the sort of pontificating that Eastman attempts here, and he ends up sounding deeply uninformed and more than a little pompous. (Does that sound harsh? So be it.)

Terry Pratchett clears things up

Discworld creator and longtime atheist/agnostic/what have you Terry Pratchett caused a bit of a stir a few weeks ago when he made a comment in an interview that suggested that he now believes in God. In an essay for the Daily Mail, he clears up what he meant. Ignore the headline, it kind of misses the point, which is a bit Schleiermacherian.

"For a moment, the world had felt at peace. Where did it come from? 

"Me, actually - the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis's Spem In Alium, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it's what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2. 

"It's that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn't require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds. 

"I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from."

Read the whole thing here.

So what does "atheism" mean, then?

Get Religion reports on an odd wrinkle in the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life's big ol' survey. You may have heard about this survey's results indicating that atheism is the fastest-growing faith in America. But a closer look at the statistics reveals a real oddity: fifty-seven percent of self-identified agnostics and twenty-one percent of self-identified atheists answered "yes" to the question, "Do you believe in God or a universal spirit?" About the same number said they pray. Eight percent of atheists were "absolutely certain" that God does exist. Which brings us to the title above: What the heck does "atheism" mean, then?

Well, Steve Waldman at Beliefnet theorizes that this means that "Atheism has become a cultural designation, rather than a theological statement. Some are likely declaring themselves atheists as a statement of hostility to organized religion, rather than to God." Which sounds plausible to me.

Get Religion shares some rightful criticism of the survey's question phrasing, methodology, and general tendency to overreach. (I had some similar thoughts, in the context of a bigger criticism of the Atlantic Monthly's religion reporting, in a post for Religion Dispatches a couple months ago.) But nevertheless, there's something odd going on in those numbers-- something that should make anyone pause and think about what the word "atheist" really means in today's culture.

Mark Chadbourn: "Richard Dawkins is Killing SF"

Mark Chadbourn, author of Jack of Ravens, has written an intriguing post proposing a causal relationship between the rise of uber-rationalism and the decline of SF readership.

"Dawkins... [is] on a crusade to stamp out irrationality wherever he might find it. He has stated that any irrationality is a threat, even if it’s a lightly held belief or a half-hearted curiosity about things he believes could never, ever be true.

And he’s wrong. Utterly. We need our mythos. We need our irrationality. We are built to need it. Cultures before ours managed to integrate both into the same world-view quite easily; it’s not an either/or situation. If you’re interested in magic, it doesn’t mean you think Einstein is a charlatan. (On the fringes, some may, but we’re talking about ‘real’ people here). The more people are unable to find irrationality in the culture around them, the more they will be driven to seek it out through their imagination.

In other words, every time Richard Dawkins kicks a quivering new ager, a hard-pressed science fiction writer loses another sale."

I was thinking about this recently while looking through a few anthologies of SF on religious themes, all from the '70s and '80s. Where is today's mystical SF? Where are the 21st century Silverbergs and Zelaznys and Dicks? We have Robert J. Sawyer, admittedly (and thank goodness), but mystical and mythological SF was an irresistable tide in the '70s—until it got crushed by pessimistic cyberpunk and nuts-and-bolts hard SF.

(Or should that be "Zelaznies"?)

Hat tip: SF Signal.