Irregular Apocalypse

The other Red Ken has a new book out. The Night Sessions is set in a future where the USA and UK have pretty much abandoned religion as a bad job. In the book's alternate history, the War on Terror became the Faith Wars, which culminated in tactical nuclear exchanges as part of a tank battle in the Valley of Megiddo (ya, rly). The US/UK won a Pyrrhic victory, and the people of those countries decided that it wasn't just the neo-cons who were to blame, but religion. Thus began what the churches referred to as the Great Rejection. Christians were persecuted, Muslims sent to filtration camps. The book opens in 2037. In the independent republic of Scotland, religion is now ignored as part of a policy of official "non-cognisance". Then a Roman Catholic priest is murdered by a bomb, and the Edinburgh police (some of whom were in the "God Squads" which put down protests by Christians about the closing of churches and church schools) have to investigate.

No More Mr Nice Guy

MacLeod's future Edinburgh seemed a bit like Iain M. Banks's Culture, writ small. The religious people are the ones who have, prior to the opening of the book, learned the hard way that you "don't fuck with the Culture". The coppers are aided by sarcastic demilitarised combat robots, who attained consciousness on the battlefield as the result of getting better and better at modelling other combatants' minds. There are the polybdsmfurrygoths in their silent nightclub (which used to be a church, naturally). The Great Rejection seems like unrealistic atheist wish-fulfilment.

God Told Me To Do It

Still, MacLeod has fun with his setting. The American fundies have buggered off to New Zealand and set up a creationist theme park, where one of the protagonists, John Campbell works. In the prologue, we meet him on a flight to Edinburgh, where he introduces a fellow passenger to the delights of presuppositionalism. If you doubt that people like Campbell exist in real life, check out what this guy thinks of people who allow evidence to modify their beliefs: I don't know MacLeod's own religious experiences, but he's done his research. There are jokes you probably need some acquaintance with Christianity to get.

MacLeod isn't silly enough to portray the religious characters unsympathetically. Campbell turns out to be a sensitive soul, rejected by one sect after another for increasingly hilarious reasons, who can't quite understand why people find his theology hard to get on with. Grace Mazvabo, an Christian academic who studies the history of her religion, is well drawn.

The first part of the story is a sort of police procedural with lots of satisfying SF stuff about the kit the coppers have access to. Other reviewers say that MacLeod deliberately avoided making DI Adam Ferguson a hard-drinking future-Rebus, which is fair enough, but he and the other police seem a bit thin, somehow (the one exception being the, ahem, undercover agent who spends a lot of time around the polybdsmfurrygoths).

In fact, my main criticism of the book is that everything's too thin. I wanted to know more about the world, and more about the characters. Maybe I've read too much Neal Stephenson, but I found the book too short. Still, it's a mark of how much fun I had with it that I wanted more. Worth a read.

One of my friends did that "grab the nearest book to you and post the Nth sentence on page M" meme. I grabbed the nearest book (Keller's The Reason for God) and her sentence was the same as mine! This is clearly a sign from God that I should finish my review of the book (the first part of my review is already generating a lot of discussion in the comments). So, here goes. As in the previous part, we're following the book's chapters.

Intermission

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I'm a bit of an amateur too, as it happens, so I'll leave the epistemology there, and refer you to the professionals, or at least, the professionals in training: Chris Hallquist's review concentrates specifically on the philosophical problems with Keller's book. Let's look at some of Keller's specific arguments.

The Reasons for Faith

The Clues of God

This chapter deals with hints that God exists, as Keller correctly points out that this is a necessary pre-cursor to Christianity. He deals in clues, as he accepts that these arguments are not conclusive, although he thinks some of them are strong. Let's look at Keller's clues:

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The knowledge of God

Keller argues that we already know God exists, deep down. Not, as the New Testament says, from what has been made, but, as C.S. Lewis's New New Testament says, from our moral sense.

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The problem of sin

Keller identifies sin as placing something other than God at the centre of our lives. Keller claims that anything other than God placed there will ultimately let us down, and the worship of these things may even lead to harming ourselves or others. Keller talks about identity, and how investing our identity in something leads us to despise people with a different identity (whether it is politics, race, or interestingly, religion).

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Religion and the Gospel

Keller says that Christianity is not a religion. What he means is that Christianity says you're not saved by doing the right thing and earning merit with God. The nice thing about this chapter is that Keller speaks to people who've experienced what he calls Pharisaiac Christianity (recall that in the New Testament, the Pharisees are the self-righteous hypocrites, possibly because they were engaged in founding modern Judaism to the exclusion of Christians at the time the gospels were written).

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The Resurrection

Keller says that the Resurrection is pretty much the only explanation for the beginnings of Christianity. Drawing on N.T. Wright's work, he argues that people in the 1st century weren't simpletons who believed in any old nonsense, that the resurrection of the body of a single person was something neither Jews or Pagans believed could happen, that nothing else can account for the sudden change of the disciples from a frightened rabble into bold preachers.

Finally, we've found a chapter about evidence, but it's not evidence most of us are qualified to judge. Convincing people that the Resurrection happened is a popular apologetic technique among evangelicals, yet according to the Christians who commented on the first part of this review, God doesn't require us to become experts in ancient literature. But how else can someone judge this evidence? We can look to other experts rather than becoming experts ourselves, I suppose, but they disagree, so I don't think the evidence can be as clear cut as Keller says. gjm11 tells a parable which points out the problems with Keller's argument which are apparent even to non-experts.

And the rest

I'm afraid I got bored at this point. The rest of the book is an explanation of orthodox Christian doctrines without much evidence in, er, evidence, followed by an altar call. So, Jesus's death on the Cross is necessary for forgiveness because we all recognise that forgiveness costs the forgiver; the Trinity makes the statement that God is love meaningful, and never mind that the Bible is equivocal on it and it's impossible to talk about without committing some heresy or other. Finally, if you want to know more, why not go to church?

Summing up

The second half of the book is mostly a statement of what Keller considers Christianity is, without much evidence that it's true. Elsewhere, robhu said that he thought that, though rational arguments have a role, the main way that people come to Christianity was to hear the good news about Jesus (what Christians call the "gospel") and respond to it, so that his main evangelistic method as a Christian was to present the gospel.

The gospel as evangelicals understand it is composed of factual claims. A bare presentation of the gospel (which is quite similar to Keller's book, since it turns out that he spends most of the second half of his book saying what Christianity is) asks people to accept those factual claims based not on good evidence, but on an inner conviction, a feeling that the claims are right. To the extent that someone does this, they've abandoned even the everyday rationality which we use to judge other claims (that Daz washes whiter, or that the used car had one careful owner). Clearly this works on some people (including me, at one point), but I suspect it's because rationality is a discipline that most people don't learn, or even see the value of applying to religion. As far as I'm concerned, Keller fails to offer good reasons for God.

Timothy Keller is pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, a successful church in New York. He's written a book, The Reason For God, which he says is for people doubting Christianity, and for Christians wanting to answer questions from their non-Christian friends. nlj21 lent me the book, and I read it while on holiday recently. If you'd like to see Keller in action, you can watch his talk at Google, which rehearses some of the arguments from the book.

The success of Keller's church sounds surprising when you learn that the church is pretty evangelical in theology, because (going by the people he quotes objecting to Christianity) New York is apparently full of the American equivalent of Guardian readers. But having seen Keller's style, I can see why he's successful. He deals sensitively with the human problems people might have had with the church or with conservative Christians as well as the factual arguments. He admits where arguments are only suggestive rather than conclusive, and he mentions the arguments against his position. He admits that there's no argument that will persuade everyone, so the best thing is to look for arguments that will persuade most of the people, most of the time.

Ultimately, though, I think Keller shows more good will than reason, which makes the title a bit of a misnomer. Keller shows that you can construct a Christianity that hangs together, that a belief in God isn't completely crazy. That's certainly necessary, but hardly sufficient, for a reasonable person to believe it. A lot of the book is assertions without evidence for them, when evidence is precisely what is required.

That said, since the book is better than most Christian attempts at evangelism I've read or seen lately, I thought I'd do a couple of posts on it, of which this is the first.

Arguments against God

The book is divided into two parts: one dealing with the arguments against God, which Keller wants to show are faulty; and one dealing with the arguments for God. We'll look at his responses to objections, using the chapter headings from the book.

There can't be just one true religion

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How could a good God allow suffering?

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Christianity is a straitjacket

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The Church is responsible for so much injustice

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How can a loving God send people to Hell?

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Science has disproved Christianity

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You can't take the Bible literally

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Summing up

Some of the objections Keller gets from New Yorkers are ill considered, and Keller bats them aside easily. In other cases (theodicy and Hell), his method is to argue that there's still a chance that Christianity is true, so the objections aren't completely conclusive. I don't find this that impressive, because the sensible objector isn't claiming that their objections are conclusive, merely that they're strong evidence. To defeat that, one must produce stronger evidence, which as we'll see in the next part, Keller fails to do.

I did a reasonable amount of holiday reading in Mallorca, in between walking along the front and falling asleep on the sofa.

Jed Rubenfield's The Interpretation of Murder is one of those murder mysteries using historical characters, which are popular at the moment (if you like them, Giles Brandreth has done a couple of good ones where Oscar Wilde fights crime). In this book, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung visit New York in 1909 and are soon caught up in the investigation of a murder and a very similar assault, where the victim survives but can't remember her attacker.

The book evokes the New York of the era convincingly, a bustling and corrupt city. Modern New York is coming into being: the builders of skyscrapers are vying for superiority, while cars are beginning to replace horse-drawn carriages on the streets. Rubenfield has obviously researched the details, down to the colour of the taxi cabs.

This isn't a ghastly "Freud and Jung: together they fight crime" story (with car chases), but rather a weaving of their theories and disagreements into the plot, transplanting real debates to the time of their real visit to the USA (although the crime is fictional). With Freud it's all about sex and death, and so it is with the book, which makes it perfect holiday reading.

John Irving's Until I find you has all his signature tropes: the wrestling, the young man sexually initiated by older women, the death of a family member, the bizarre and sometimes hilarious set-pieces involving sex or death which make it perfect holiday reading (maybe not quite all the tropes: I don't think this book had any bears in it). Initially, the book follows the toddler Jack Burns, illegitimate son of an organist and choir girl, as he and his mother trek around Europe in pursuit of his father. Jack's mum is a tattooist, so we get an insight into the odd world of tattoo parlours, as well as a tour of Europe's great church organs. Jack's settled in a girls school, before training as an actor and eventually making his way to Hollywood. Eventually, he sets off again in search of his father, realising that things weren't quite as they appeared to his younger self.

To say the book is about memory and loss makes it sound terribly portentous and gloomy, but it's neither. Irving's an accomplished story-teller, whose work reads to me as if it was made to be read aloud, with the author interjecting asides as the story unfolds. The humour and sadness of the book arises from events described in a straightforward way, without embarrassment or embellishment. I remain a fan.

Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana was a bit a curate's egg. It's another book which explores memory, this time in the most direct way, following the narrator, Yambo, as he recovers from a stroke which has caused his episodic memory to fail him. Yambo is a book dealer, and still remembers things he's read. He tries to construct a past for himself, turning to his family and friends, and then to his childhood house, full of the books, records and comics he had as a child. Like Irving's protagonist searching for his father as an adult, the return of Yambo's memories in the latter part of the book causes him to re-interpret what he thought he knew about his past.

Yambo was a child during the Second World War, so the book focuses on the rise of fascism in Italy and the necessity to appear to be going along with it, even while resisting privately. The war stories were the most interesting part of the book for me. There's an awful lot of examination of Yambo's comics and storybooks which I didn't care that much for, formative though they were to his character, and the ending left me unsatisfied.

Jan Mark's The Eclipse of the Century came with a recommendation from Philip Pullman on the cover, so I thought it'd be worth a go. The protagonist, Keith, has a near death experience, but instead of seeing heaven, he sees Quantoum, a remote town in Central Asia. Once he's well again, he decides to go there. Walking down the disused railway track, he finds a ghost town, abandoned by imperial powers. What remains is a museum inhabited by a bunch of oddballs and deserters of various armies, and the camp of the Sturyat tribe, nomads with a strange religion.

Keith's arrival and his struggle to work out who's who are a little slow, as everyone is deliberately obscure in a way which makes the story longer, even the people who don't really have a reason to hide things from Keith. As things start to get weird, Mark picks up the pace, making it a more satisfying read. There's some fun mockery of New Age woo-woo in there, too. Unfortunately, the book ends abruptly in the middle of the denouement without resolving what's going on. I wondered whether there were pages missing from my copy, but I don't think there were. You've got enough clues to figure out what might possibly be happening, but to cut off at that point left me unsatisfied with the book, alas.

Anathem is Neal Stephenson's latest novel. Told in the first person, it's the story of Erasmus, a young member of a monastic order dedicated to philosophy and science. Erasmus lives on Arbre, a world rather like our own. The monks aren't religious (quite the reverse, for the most part), but their monasteries use many of the trappings of religious orders, like ritual, sung music, a set of rules of discipline, and seclusion from the outside world. It's not a boy's club, though: male and female monks mix within the monastery, and certain kinds of relationship are allowed by the discipline.

The monks are grouped according to how often they have contact with the outside world, which can be every 1, 10, 100 or 1000 years. As the story starts, it's just before a 10 year Apert, where the 1 and 10 year monks will mingle with the populace for 10 days. Erasmus, a "tenner", finds the monastery's astronomical observatory closed, and gets the first hints that the secular and monastic authorities are conspiring to keep a pretty big secret. Together with his cohort of young monks, he gets drawn into solving the mystery.

Saunt Descartes was a drunken fart

In the early part of the book, Stephenson draws the reader into the world of Erasmus's monastery. He uses the common SF trick of making up words for things: the monks are the "avout", the outsiders "saecular", the monasteries are "concents". Some people don't like this sort of thing, but for the most part I was content to let this wash over me as part of the book's scene setting, the measured pace of which parallels the life of the avout. (There's also a glossary at the back, which helps). The avout are serious seekers of knowledge who learn the stories of theoreticians as religious monks might learn about the lives of saints (the avout word for a great thinker is "saunt", a contraction of "savant"). They engage in debates which are intellectual duels, the sort of stuff you get in the better debating places on and off-line. Stephenson has placed real philosophy in the book under the names of the saunts who thought of it on Arbre: it's fun to try to work out the real world analogues, among whom are Plato, Faraday, Occam, and Einstein. The philosophy isn't just there for show, it becomes important later: Stephenson is the second SF author I've come across who has written a story which hinges on the idea of the Platonic world of forms (the other is Greg Egan).

Modern life is rubbish

In comparison with the concents, the saecular world Erasmus encounters in the 10 days of Apert is unthinkingly religious and commercialised, a parody of modern American society right down to the thugs in sportswear (anyone who remembers the thetes in The Diamond Age might think that Stephenson has a thing about this) and the drugs which keep everyone happy but somehow blunted. Erasmus observes several times that clever people tend to end up inside the walls of the concents. The book seems to describe a vicious circle of anti-intellectualism leading to the intellectuals hiding away, leading to further distrust of intellectualism in the outside world, which eventually leads to the concents being sacked every few thousand years. The initial retreat into concents happened because of some cataclysmic events in the past. You can see Stephenson drawing on A Canticle for Leibowitz here, with the difference that the avout aren't just preserving old books they don't understand.

The first part of the story is a more erudite version of a Harry Potter book, with the young avout (Erasmus is 18 as the story starts) ranging over the old stone buildings they live in, talking about philosophy and science, and finding ways around authority with the help of some wiser older monks. We see more of the saecular world as Erasmus is thrust into it in the later part of the book, and finds that things aren't a total cultural desert out there. Stephenson dislikes the unthinkingly religious and so Erasmus does too, but the religious contemplatives that Erasmus meets show the other side of Stephenson's opinions, where religion provides people with a code which keeps them from the feckless behaviour of most people outside the concents.

Ninja monks in space

The final part of the book is page-turning SF stuff with ninja monks in space, a long way from Erasmus's quiet life as the book begins. Stephenson draws the philosophical threads from earlier in the book into a satisfying conclusion. The popular notion that he can't write endings was disproved by The System of the World, but sceptics will be pleased to hear that Anathem has an ending too.

A positive effect of the narrator's voice is that the book is less frenetically digressive than Stephenson's earlier stuff. Some of Stephenson's wild tangents are fun (my favourite is the wisdom tooth removal in Cryptonomicon), but they make his books longer without advancing the plot. At about 900 pages, Anathem is long, but most of it is world-building or action (if you count the philosophy stuff we're going to need for the later revelations as "world-building"). Other reviewers have complained it's slow to get going, but the avout are sympathetic characters, so I didn't mind reading about their lives at the start of the book. I think it'd be quite cool to be one of them, in fact.

Anathem is a fun mix of philosophy and action. Recommended to people who read the sort of stuff I write here on LJ :-)

Bhikkhu Nanamoli's The Life of the Buddha is a telling of the Buddha's life using excerpts from the Pali canon.

In the Pali canon, the world is an abundantly supernatural one, a cosmos with many worlds and many deities. The Buddha's birth is foretold to sages by deities, and he himself converses with various supernatural beings. He also does miracles, like reading minds, turning people invisible, vanishing into one of the many heavens, and so on. You get the impression that the miracles aren't unique to him: it seems there were lots of ascetics and teachers around at the time, each with their own disciples, and this sort of stuff is par for the course. The Buddha describes Devadatta, the villain of the piece, as "stopping halfway with ... the mere earthly distinction of supernormal powers", and seems to see them as tricks that are well known.

In the book, there's little mention of the Buddha's early life, although some passages about living in a palace are quoted. After his birth, we're straight into his quest for enlightenment. He tries asceticism for a while but decides it's not helping, and disgusts the small number of followers he's acquired by taking food and drink. He goes off and thinks about stuff, and has a series of insights about how one thing leads to another thing, Star Wars style (a process known as dependent arising), and with that, realises how to stop it. He thinks about keeping the knowledge to himself, as most people won't be able to get it, but a brahma persuades him not to. He begins to teach people the dharma.

The book then follows the growth of the sangha, the community of monks. The community grows, and sometimes finds favour with merchants and royalty, who give the monks land. It seems they live by receiving alms from the lay people, to who receive talks on the dharma in return. We don't see much of the lay people in the book, as it mostly concerns the teachings given to the monks. We do see the community undergo growth, dissension and outright mutiny (Devadatta again).

The chapter on the dharma itself was pretty hard going. The translation could probably have helped there, but Nanamoli writes in the preface that he's attempting to provide as true a translation as possible, without interpreting too much. I found contemporary paraphrases easier to understand. If one can sum up a large body of teaching in a few sentences, the Buddha thinks that dukkha (usually translated as "suffering") is real; suffering is caused by our inability to get what we want or keep it, or prevent what we don't want; suffering can be prevented by giving up the desire for these things, which can be achieved by following the mental and ethical teachings summarised as the Noble Eightfold Path.

The scriptures bear the signs of being passed on orally: there's a lot of repetition (one of Nanamoli's few concessions to the reader is that he elides some of this), speech is often stylised, and teachings often use numbered groups of things (four noble truths, noble eightfold path). According to Wikipedia, there are a number of schools of thought about how much of the canon represents the Buddha's words. Manuscript evidence isn't helpful, as the earliest ones are apparently 8th century.

There's a sense in which this doesn't matter as much as it does to, say, Christianity, because the point seems to be the teaching, which is said to be something people can experience for themselves. In orthodox Christianity, at least, the scriptures recording important miraculous events which are to be believed in, so that the evidence for them is important, and the teaching of Jesus rest on his personal authority. I don't think one can eliminate questions of authority from any religion, though: there are so many religions that ask you to "try it and see" that there's not enough time to try them all.

More problematic to me was the way much of the Buddha's teachings are phrased as ways to avoid rebirth, since (a) it's not clear what rebirth means when one of your other doctrines is that there's no fixed self, and (b) it's not clear how anything of us survives after death, such the the results of our actions (known as karma), in a way which could be passed on to another person.

It also wasn't clear from the book how detachment was meant to be practiced by people who weren't monks. The monks need the lay people, or they'll starve, but the householder's life seems second class when it comes to attaining enlightenment. Apparently there are Buddhist scriptures which do address the lay people, so it'd be interesting to read those.

In summary, the book was interesting, but hard to get into. I got bogged down in places and ended up skipping bits. A more dynamic translation might have been easier to read, even if such a translation did end up reflecting the biases of the translator more than Nanamoli's did.

My wife has been blogging about ancient literature. She's started with The Epic of Gilgamesh and moved on to the Old Testament, starting with the similarities between the Flood and creation stories in Genesis and Gilgamesh. More will be appearing on scribb1e's journal in future.

As part of some sort of cultural exchange programme, I've been reading Bhikkhu Nanamoli's The Life of the Buddha, a telling of the Buddha's life using excerpts from the Pali canon. It's interesting, although very strange in places, mostly because of the cosmology of the time. I think it could do with a glossary explaining some of the Pali words which Nanamoli chose not to translate. I'd not realised the Buddha had superpowers (he regularly reads minds, and occasionally does cool stuff like preventing a robber from catching him even though the robber's running as fast as he can), or that lots of supernatural beings were present at his birth. I'll probably write more about it when I've finished it.

Metafilter had a posting on the ideas behind His Dark Materials a while back. It contains links to the video of a documentary where Melvyn Bragg interviews Pullman, as well as to articles discussing his literary influences, from Blake and Milton to Arthur Ransome.

The Plot

This set me to reading the books again. I enjoyed them. Pullman's a craftsman, and the books show off both his skill in writing and his imagination. I still found the ending, the final separation of Lyra and Will, rather forced. Nick Lowe wrote The Well Tempered Plot Device, which partly deals with authorial insertions, not of a character who stands for the author, but of an object which stands for the Plot, so that, for example, we can say that "Darth Vader has turned to the Dark Side of the Plot" (this is also the essay which introduced "Clench Racing", a sport for as many players as you have Stephen Donaldson books). scribb1e riffed on this, explaining that at the end of His Dark Materials "there can only be one hole in the Plot", the one which leads out of the land of the dead.

Pullman's stories are satisfying because they borrow from the greats: the Bible, Milton, Book of Common Prayer (where else does anyone learn the word "oblation"?) and the the English hymnal ("frail children of dust"). I doubt the Bible's or the BCP's authors would approve of His Dark Materials, but, as lisekit says, great art is characterised by its ability to sustain more than one interpretation.

The authors

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that God doesn't exist, and that evangelicalism is like fandom (the latter wasn't entirely an original idea of mine: livredor defines midrash as Biblical fan fiction). All these people who claim to be in a relationship with God obviously aren't, so what are they doing? I think they're not writing fan fiction but living it, creating their own stories in a world they see as belonging to the divine Author, stories which occur after their canon has ended.

In fandom, inserting yourself into the world you're writing fan fiction about is seen as passé by the experts. There's a disparaging term for characters who are obviously authorial self-insertions, Mary Sue. In religion, it's not quite the same. You can and should insert yourself into the story, but you'd better not get too far above yourself if you do, unless you're very convincing (this isn't that dissimilar to fandom, since the real objection to Mary Sues is that they're too perfect). C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that Christians do not know whether they will be given bit parts or starring roles, but their job is to play them as best they can.

The disagreements within religions which are based on the same book are similar to the disagreements within Harry Potter fandom before the final book came out, about whether Ginny or Hermione should end up with Harry. The bitterest disagreements are always about sex, as illustrated by the perpetually imminent division (Rilstone wrote that in 2004) of Anglicanism into the ones who believe God hates shrimp and the ones who don't believe in God.

Unlike Potter fandom, in Bible fandom there's no-one who can produce the universally recognised Word of God, settling the matter with a final book (if you want to remain within the canons of your religion, that is: the Mormons and the Baha'i have taken the approach of adding a new book, as Christianity itself did to Judaism), so people end up grouping themselves into communities which more-or-less share a view on the One True Pairing, and the ideas of each community become fanon to those within it. The Bible is rich soil for this sort of thing because it is great art and so admits multiple interpretations.

The Story

What's the point of living this way? To be in a story with meaning. lumpley speaks of the fun of roleplaying games as coming from three possible sources: one, wish-fulfilment; two, strategy and tactics; and three, "the fun of facing challenging moral, ethical, or socially informative situations". He splits up games into two approaches:

Approach one: "made up journalism." The conceit is, the characters and events of the game are real. The lives of the characters don't have meaning, the same way that our real lives don't have meaning. Approach two: fiction. Fiction, unlike life, is all meaning all the time. I prefer approach two. In particular, it's very difficult to take approach one and yet get fun type three.

What does he mean by "our real lives don't have meaning"? That shit (notably death) just happens. Wash's I'm a leaf on the wind/I'm a leaf on a rake death scene in Serenity is shocking, and Anyone Can Die is a rare trope in fiction (except if you're watching something by Joss Whedon), because we expect fiction to give us meanings for significant events.

So then, God is the Plot, in Lowe's sense of the word, and if you believe, the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse. If you die, it's what the Plot wanted. Your community knows they're reading the canon the right way, that Harry really loves Hermione, that God disapproves of gay sex, or whatever, and everyone else has misunderstood the Plot. Of course, it's not just about reading the book: you have the spirit of a dragonGod in you, however odd that sounds.

The reason Lowe can mock the Plot is that bad fiction leans on it so hard that it becomes ridiculous. The reader becomes too aware that they're reading fiction and loses their suspension of disbelief. Why lose it? Because all readers know deep down that reality doesn't come invested with meaning in that way.

Karen Armstrong's book is a potted history of the Bible and its interpretation, starting around the time of the Babylonian exile and continuing up to the present day. Armstrong's writing is succinct: the book is short (229 pages in the main text of my copy) and easy to read.

Armstrong sees both the Christian Gospel writers and the Judaism of the first and second centuries CE as profoundly influenced by the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Their conflicting ideas on the future of Judaism can be seen in the attitude of the Gospel writers to the Pharisees as it became clear that the future of Judaism did not lie in a belief in Jesus as the Messiah, but in a revitalised Judaism which the party of the Pharisees would lead.

The parts of the book which deal with interpretation were most interesting to me. Armstrong interweaves chapters on Christian and Jewish interpretation. Later texts start out as reactions to earlier texts, drawing on them to find something useful in the writers' times. The later texts may eventually come to be seen as scriptures themselves. Armstrong applies this idea to the Christian New Testament and to the Jewish Mishnah, as well as to modern commentaries like the Scofield Reference Bible, the source of much of fundamentalist Christian theology on the End Times.

Armstrong discussion how later commentators draw out meanings which they believe are hidden within the text, a process which she describes as pesher, referring to the commentaries produced by the Essenes. The methods of interpretation are often quite strange to modern readers, but reflect the belief that scripture was infinite, containing a variety of meanings. Sometimes passages are re-interpreted in the light of the Golden Rule, as in the case of Rabbinic punning on scripture to show God's compassion, or Augustine's statement:

"Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbour does not understand it at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived."

Some Christians, such as Origen, viewed the Old Testament as a commentary on the New, rather than vice versa, and produced detailed allegorical interpretations of OT events, which were taken to refer to Christ or the church (a tradition they could claim was started by the apostle Paul, in letters like Galatians).

The book contains some uncomfortable facts for someone in the modern evangelical wing of Christianity (as I once was). If evangelicals insist their approach is the only correct one, they must conclude that the church has been doing it wrong for most of its history. Worse yet, for evangelicals who claim to use only scripture to interpret scripture, is realisation that the New Testament writers would be seen as terrible exegetes by modern evangelical standards.

As I said, these are not comforting thoughts for evangelicals. While I was writing this, I found an interesting review of Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament by Peter Enns. Enns has written a book which, if the review is anything to go by, talks about these exegetical problems and tries to address them, still remaining within a reformed Christian theology. Enns does this by drawing an analogy between the humanity of Jesus and that of the Bible. For this, he is well on the way to being drummed out of the seminary where he holds a professorship.

Back to Armstrong. As her story moves closer to the present day, she writes about modern scriptural interpretation with dissatisfaction, albeit tempered with some sympathy for fundamentalists who feel threatened by, well, practically everything that's happened since about 1800. In the book's epilogue, she calls for a return to Augustine's principle of charity as the means of interpretation, arguing that "hurling texts around polemically is a sterile pursuit", and that rather, the entire Bible should be interpreted as a commentary on the Golden Rule. She rejects criticism of the Bible by "secular fundamentalists", presumably in the knowledge that in the past both Christians and Jews have seen the violent or otherwise "difficult" passages as an invitation to look deeper rather than as an invitation to imitate God or Israel's bad behaviour.

I'm a little sceptical, because I think the horse has bolted, at least as far as Christianity is concerned (I'd be interested to hear what Jewish people think). Since Luther, the authority of the church to interpret the Bible has diminished. Everyone is their own pope, vigorously defending their interpretation and eager to anathematise the people closest to them (as Enns's case illustrates), even more so as believers feel threatened by modern developments and batten down the hatches. I'd like it if Armstrong's vision became reality, but I'm not sure how she intends to bring it about. More people reading her book might help. I recommend it.

Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with "a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's". Damn. As minnesattva says, "Even more than it's excruciating for any person to "lose his/her mind," it would — will — be a tragedy to lose the specific and wonderful mind that calls itself Terry Pratchett."

At the end of his statement, he writes:

I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as 'I am not dead'. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think - it's too soon to tell. I know it's a very human thing to say "Is there anything I can do", but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.

I've recently finished reading Between Silk and Cyanide, The Atrocity Archives and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Between Silk and Cyanide is Leo Marks's memoir of his time working as a code-maker for the Special Operations Executive during World War II. SOE agents were parachuted into occupied countries with the job of organising the resistance to the German occupation and of carrying out assassinations, sabotage and the like, "setting Europe ablaze", in Churchill's words. The agents communicated with Britain using enciphered messages sent in Morse code on their portable radio sets.

The ciphers used by SOE were keyed by words chosen from poems memorised by the agents. Marks instituted the use of original compositions, to prevent the enemy cryptographers from deducing which poem was in use and hence breaking all future messages. The book is peppered with his poems, including The Life That I Have. Eventually, Marks instituted the move to random keys printed on silk (so that keys which had been used could be cut away and burned), which, while they still keyed a weak transposition cipher, gave the agents some more security. He also independently invented a way of using one time pads to encipher text.

Marks narrates a story of brave men and women let down, in some cases fatally, by incompetence, bureaucracy and infighting among those who notionally had a common aim. His description of his struggles to improve the security of agents' message is by turns funny and tragic, with passages which might have been taken from Spike Milligan's Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall alongside brief but nonetheless horrifying descriptions of the atrocities perpetrated by the Gestapo. Between Silk and Cyanide is a fascinating and moving book.

Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives deals with a fictional successor to SOE, an organisation known as "The Laundry". Stross draws his inspiration from the idea of a Platonic universe where mathematical reasoning can change reality (familiar to readers of Greg Egan) or break your brain (as in David Langford's short story, Blit). In a stroke of genius, Stross combines this with the horror trope of "things Man was not meant to know" to create a universe in which Cthulhu lurks in the folds of the Mandlebrot set. National governments know about this, but it's all hushed up, of course. The Laundry is Her Majesty's Government's thin grey line of civil servants, who keep the rest of us safe from unspeakable horrors who want to eat our brains. From there we get the book's other influence, the spy novels of people like Len Deighton and John le Carre, where, as in Marks's factual story, infighting and petty malice mean the people on your side can be worse than the enemy itself.

The book contains The Atrocity Archive, as well as the follow-up short story The Concrete Jungle (link to the full text) and an essay by Stross on the links between Cold War spy fiction and horror. The Atrocity Archive itself is darker than The Concrete Jungle, being closer to A Colder War, Stross's earlier work along similar lines. There are some some nasty set-pieces among the geek references and spycraft. The story takes its time introducing the world before anything much happens, but when things get going it's gripping stuff.

The Concrete Jungle is more of a romp from the start, where the truly sinister is absent, and instead we get a spy action story combined with Dilbert in a universe where magic works, a world in which Bond might check out a Hand of Glory from Q while worrying about whether he's filled in his TPS report. Stross has done his research, from the code-word compartments on secret documents to the name Dansey House for the Laundry's HQ.

I enjoyed both stories. A follow-up, The Jennifer Morgue, is out soon, so I'm looking forward to that.

Medium-sized Potter spoilers coming up...

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I recently finished Andrew Hodges's Alan Turing: the Enigma. The book is a definitive account of Turing's life and work. In some places I found the level of detail overwhelming, but in others I admired the way Hodges uses his obviously extensive research to evoke the places and people in Turing's life. The book is well worth reading for the perspective it gives on Turing, something which is absent from other, purely technical, accounts of his work.

Hodges portrays Turing as a man ahead of time, conceiving of the Turing machine as a thought experiment before the invention of the general purpose electronic computer, and inventing the Turing test when computing was in its infancy. Turing's naivete was reflected in his refusal to accept what other people said could be done, but also in a lack of interest in the politics of his post-war work on computers and of his own homosexuality. A proto-geek, Turing was prickly, odd, and seemed to expect that the facts alone, when shown to people, would lead them to the same conclusions as he found.

Turing's suicide is placed in the context of a move from regarding homosexuality as criminal to regarding it as a medical problem, and an increasing suspicion of homosexuals in classified government work. Hodges seems to conclude that Turing felt he had nowhere else to go.

You can't help but wonder what else Turing might have accomplished had he not committed suicide. Greg Egan's short, Oracle, is an entertaining what-if story, which also features a character very obviously based on C.S. Lewis. What if Turing had received help from a friend? It's a pity that in reality there was no-one to lead him out of his cage.

Happy New Year to you all. December was busy. We visited my family in Yorkshire, saw gjm11, Mrs gjm11 and the new sprog, went to the CDC Christmas Dinner Dance, and to Safi and Mike's wedding. We had 9 people over to ours on Christmas Day, and I spent New Year showing people how to tie a bow-tie.

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Boingboing pointed out that Peter Watts has put another novel on the web. I liked his previous two, and enjoyed his presentation on the biology of vampires.

I've just finished reading Blindsight. It's a first contact novel, but ultimately the aliens are secondary to the interplay between the humans, and to the book's take on evolution and consciousness (which, unlike the result of Strictly Come Dancing the other week, I won't spoil for you). Readers who bought Watts's books also liked Greg Egan, as Amazon might say (they probably liked autopope too), so it helps if you don't mind the exposition and are conversant with your Searle, Penrose and Dawkins (or at least, not worried by having to look stuff up). At least one reviewer I've seen totally failed to understand what was going on, it seems: it's the SF writing Singularity again.

The book is bleak, hard science fiction, full of ideas, and leaves you with that slightly altered-state aftertaste you get from the best science fiction. Plus, you know, vampires in space. I liked it.

It seems the right way to respond to Dawkins if you're a believer is to claim that he's not actually talking about the God you believe in, but rather the God that only people who don't have theology degrees or Americans might believe in, laughable simpletons that they are. I'm thinking of Giles Fraser in the Church Times and Terry Eagleton in the LRB.

As I mentioned previously, gjm11 has responded to the Giles Fraser review, so I thought I'd write about the Terry Eagleton review. Both of these are postings to uk.religion.christian, a surprisingly sane Usenet newsgroup (surprising because most other Usenet groups with "Christian" in the title are full of nutters), which you can look at most easily via Google.

I've not seen any reviews by evangelicals yet. It'll be interesting to see what they say, as they can't really pull off the "not my God" argument.

I've read a couple of Richard Dawkins's books recently, namely his latest, The God Delusion and A Devil's Chaplain, an earlier book.

A Devil's Chaplain

A Devil's Chaplain is good holiday reading (just as well, as we took it to Venice with us). It's Dawkins in bite-size chunks, a collection of articles on his favourite subjects: evolution, science, pseudo-science, and religion. Most of the articles have been published elsewhere, but enough of them were new to me to make the book interesting.

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The God Delusion

The God Delusion must be the book that Dawkins has been wanting to write for years. It's well timed. People like Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris have prepared the ground, and in this country we're in the middle of a debate about the role of religion in public life (not to mention that any passenger who is parched on a UK to USA flight might find themselves fondly imaging nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too).

Dawkins lines up his definition of theism and then proceeds to knock it down. He's carefully not to fall into the trap of claiming he has proved that God does not exist, but rather, he argues that God's existence is overwhelmingly unlikely.

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Dawkins is currently promoting the book all over the place. His interview with Jeremy Paxman was particularly good.

The Foundation

Dawkins has also established The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. This looks like it'll be a lobbying and educational body, both in the UK and the USA. You might not think we need such a thing in the UK. If so, I suggest you read rosamicula's recent posting, and remember, it's describing a British college. But at least such colleges aren't teaching nonsense as a matter of policy, unlike the government-funded Emmanuel College in Gateshead, who hastily removed their science teaching policy from the web after Dawkins pointed it out in the Telegraph.

One thing Dawkins doesn't address is the way societies remain religious despite the advances of science. As Andrew Brown puts it:

Some people may ask why, if I am so pessimistic about religion, and believe so much in its destructive power, I am then so rude about Dawkins. Sam Harris, and similar atheists. Don’t they agree with me? Yes. But they’re optimists. They hold out the hope that there can be democratic, peaceful societies committed to the (costly) effort of reason and self-criticism even when this has no obvious benefits, and irrationality no obvious costs. Actually, their assumption is stronger than that. They believe this is the natural, equilibrium state of any society that has discovered science. And it seems to me that this is one of the beliefs that has been completely exploded since about 1950. Or, as Housman put it, the love of truth is the weakest of all human passions."

I keep thinking there's a need for a grass-roots movement to do what religion does for people on the small scale. I'm not sure whether it's a realistic, given that the only thing atheists have in common is the lack of a belief, but it sounds like a nice idea. We could call it the Culture, say.

This is mostly a link dump of the stuff I've been reading lately, but I'll try to say something interesting while I'm about it.

The Post-Evangelical

In the pub on Friday, my spy in the ranks of the enemy told me excitedly that she'd read a book I must read also. It turned out to be Dave Tomlinson's The Post-Evangelical. So I went and read it again to see whether I agreed with what I thought 6 years ago, when I liked the bits about evangelical sub-culture but thought his epistemology was crap.

I still think Tomlinson is at his best when he is describing the pressure towards conformity in evangelicalism and pointedly remarking on the astonishing similarity between evangelical mores and those of middle-class society. There's nothing wrong with being middle-class, in my book, but to elevate the most caricatured aspects of it to the status of a religion is probably taking things too far. Tomlinson's thoughts about that weren't new even in 2000, as Pete Broadbent pointed out (apparently Pete's a bishop these days, so there is something the Church of England got right).

I still don't know quite what his proposed alternative to both evangelicalism and liberalism actually is. It might be something which takes those parts of evangelicalism which aren't the middle-class bits and uses them as guidelines rather than as axioms. For example, Tomlinson tells us that post-evangelicals don't believe in Biblical inerrancy, but do retain the belief that God will speak through the Bible.

Or it might be an attempt to make the whole thing fuzzy, using, in Tomlinson's terms, "poetic" rather than "scientific" language. Regular readers will know that anyone who behaves like a scientist and starts asking questions about what their religion actually means and whether it's really true must end up an atheist. In that case, perhaps the best way for religion to survive is to avoid finding the answers to questions. If evangelicals are caricatures of the middle-classes, are the post-evangelicals and emerging church people caricatures of arts students, as holyoffice tells us (you'll need to search for "The Emerging Church")? I suppose I'd need to ask a real live post-evangelical to be sure: is there one in the house?

While I was looking around the web to see what other people had said about the book, I came across Maggi Dawn's blog. She's currently the chaplain at Robinson college, but was one of the people who worked with Tomlinson in setting up a church in which meets in a pub. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the archives of her blog. A couple of things which caught my eye were an evangelical critiquing the idea of a personal relationship wtih Jesus, and the story of how the Christian Union at Birmingham University fell foul of Student Union rules.

Textual criticism

Rev Dawn also linked to the Washington Post story on Bart Ehrman, a university lecturer on the New Testament. Ehrman's a former evangelical Christian who became an agnostic after studying the history of the Biblical texts. The Post does a good job of evoking what it must feel like to be in his position.

The comments on the article on Rev Dawn's blog rapidly dissolve into the standard liberal vs evangelical slanging match ("by this all men will know you are my disciples, if you flame one another on the Internet", as Jesus once put it). There is an interesting question she poses there, though, which is why people who have left Christianity devote so much time to criticising it instead of moving on.

LOL furriesChristians

There's something in Tony B's comment, I suppose: even if you've decided it's not true, there's an intellectual fascination there, and the feeling that it'd be nice if all manner of things really will be well. But there's also something like the stuff Sam Harris talks about. Even moderate religion gives cover to fundamentalists by making belief in an invisible friend strangely more respectable than believing in alien abduction or that Elvis is alive, and by propagating the idea that criticism of a person's religious beliefs is taboo in a way that criticism of any other belief strangely is not. The latter is a defence mechanism evolved by religions, as Douglas Adams rightly says. People who've left a religion have already broken stronger barriers than that, so it's not surprising that they're occasionally a little outspoken (who, me?)

The Fabric of the Cosmos was given to me by one of the many ex-physicists at work. I'd previously read Greene's The Elegant Universe, and found it interesting but perhaps a bit long: I suspect that attempting to get a whole book out of explaining string theory without using mathematics might have been a bit ambitious.

The Fabric of the Cosmos is lovely to read. Greene takes a couple of questions as his theme: Are space and time a "thing", or merely about the relationship between things? Where does our perception of an "arrow of time" come from? He begins with Newton and Leibnitz and works forward through Special Relativity, General Relativity, quantum mechanics and modern attempts to unite the latter two, introducing concepts like entropy and inflation theory along the way.

Greene has a gift of explaining technical concepts clearly. Sometimes he chooses an appropriate analogy, but more often it's a straight explanation written with the clarity of someone who has a deep understanding of the subject themselves but still retains some idea of how hard it was to learn it. I learned some things which I'm pretty sure were new to me rather than things I knew and then forgot (for example, I don't think anyone ever explained that a flat, Ω=1, universe can either be spatially infinite or have toroidal topology).

Personal digression into "when I was at Cambridge" nonsense: My own, somewhat limited, success as a physicist relied mostly on my ability to do really evil calculus: given some likely looking equations, I'd just dive in and emerge, gasping, with the answer. My supervisors were always writing remarks like "more words, please!" on my work (oddly enough, these days my code is pretty well commented). Nevertheless, I did OK on the Cambridge course, which was basically about testing your ability to do this stuff really fast in an exam and to think on your feet in supervisions. This was fine until the later years when they started to ask questions which tested actual understanding, and I hit my head on stuff like the Feynman path integral like Asimov hitting calculus and realised I couldn't just do the maths anymore. I don't really have a physicist's intuition, but in my defence, I mostly didn't have people like Greene as lecturers (with some notable exceptions), but rather the "101 Great Moments in Calculus" sort. They almost certainly had the deep understanding, but they weren't so good with the the words either. I've no idea whether it's still like this, and it's probably my fault for not reading around the subject in the stupidly long vacations that Cambridge undergraduates get. Nevertheless, there should be more educators like Greene.

Greene also conveys something of the wonder and strangeness of the universe. Space is big, as someone once said, but it's also odd. Its constituents behave in ways which are so different from everyday objects that it's hard to believe these objects are built up of such stuff.

I was reminded again that the majority of the universe is so unlike Earth that it beggars belief that some people could believe it was all put here for our benefit ("He also made the stars", apparently) or that an entity who could create the whole thing would be concerned with the inhabitants of an insignificant little blue-green planet.

Rant over. Green writes engagingly. I'd recommend the book to people who want to know the secrets of the universe.

Continuing my theme, there was story a little while back about a quantum computer that can do calculations without actually running. I was annoyed that nobody in the popular science press seemed to get further with an explanation than "ooh! quantum! straaange!". Luckily Sean Carroll rides to the rescue, with an explanation involving puppies and lettuce. Great stuff.

scribb1e and I went to Cornwall, where we stayed in a cottage with a sea view.

We saw the Eden Project. I'd been before, and not thought much of the place, but it's much more fun when it's not raining and you can do the outdoor parts as well as go in the huge geodesic domes. We found the Lost Gardens of Heligan, which were pretty and, considering the amount of work and though which had gone into them, downright impressive. Their farm shop also sold us some fine rump steak.

Continuing the gardens theme, we visited some Japanese Gardens, which were very tranquil until a coachload of white-haired old ladies went on the rampage through the place. We'd already looked around by then, and had settled down to have lunch, so their calls of "Cooeee! Deirdre!" did not disturb us too much. After that, we went to St Michael's Mount on foot, and, as you can see from the photograph, had to return by boat.

We also found a tiny beach you could only reach on foot, and imitated Jack Vettriano paintings.

The weather was pretty warm most of the time, so I borrowed scribb1e's Tilley hat.

Holiday viewing was Buffy season 5, which we felt was tightly plotted and much better than the previous season. I got started on re-reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. On my second pass, unrushed because now I know how it ends, I'm savouring the expansiveness of the writing rather than just wishing he'd get on with it. The Diary of a Manhattan Callgirl, which we found in Tescos, failed to either titillate or to arouse much other emotion: it's sort of Brigit Jones with hookers.

Peter Watts came up with the presentation on the biology of vampires I mentioned a while back. He's finally published two of his novels, Starfish and Maelstrom, on the web. You can download PDFs of them on his site.

The books tell the story of some physically and chemically modified deep sea divers, working on a powerstation built on a geothermal vent in the deep ocean, who find something unexpected down there (and no, it's not aliens :-). The books have been described as dystopian, but I didn't find them particularly depressing, possibly because I was enjoying the ideas so much. Watts's characterisation is better than that of certain other writers with great ideas, though, with people who are believable, if not always very pleasant.

The other night at bluap's, I was muttering at somebody about parasites which alter a host's behaviour to benefit the parasite, and mentioned that I'd read on Watts's site that a parasite which affects rats and cats also affects humans, making women more friendly and less choosy sexually, and making men cantankerous and unkempt. I couldn't remember the name of the beast, but it turns out that the organism in question is toxoplasma gondii, which is a parasite endemic in cats. According to the Times, it has the effects in humans I remembered. I think I was making slightly ranty comparisons to the unequally yoked doctrine of evangelical Christianity at the time, as that was where the conversation had started. Unlike Unequally Yoked, it's not clear whether toxoplasma does benefit from modifying human sexual behaviour, or whether that's a side-effect of the lack of caution it induces in the brains of the other mammals which host it. Still, it's fascinating stuff, and the sort of thing which Watts explores in his books.