In Memorium: Sir Terry Pratchett

Sir Terry Pratchett has died.  Somehow it falls kind of flat to simply say he was one of my favorite authors.  In fact, Terry Pratchett was one of the wisest, funniest, most insightful and compassionate writers I ever read.  I loved losing myself in his worlds, absorbing his perceptive intelligence and pithy common sense.  

His most famous series was set on the Discworld, a flat planet with waters perpetually pouring over its edge.  It rested on the backs of four elephants who stood on the shell of a great turtle swimming through space.  It was a world of magic, wizardry and witchcraft, trolls and dwarfs and humans and pixies, into which intruded from time to time some of the phenomena of our own world: telegraphs and trains, the movie industry, the banking world and the postal service.  With a cutting, satirical edge that never became cruel or bleak, that never lost sight of the beauty of the universe or the value of the human individual, Pratchett gave us some of the most enjoyable plots and best characters I've ever encountered in literature:  crotchety Granny Weatherwax, honest Commander Vimes, rascally-but-responsible Moist Von Lipwig, and the ever-polite Death with his hood and scythe, endlessly curious about what it was like to be alive.

But Pratchett also wrote a number of other really wonderful, non-Discworld books. Nation is set on an alternate earth where a young islander and a shipwrecked princess cope with the aftermath of a deadly tsunami.  Dodger is about a young entrepreneur in a Dickensian London.  Good Omens (written in tandem with the great fantasy author Neil Gaiman) is about the Apocalypse, the Anti-Christ and the end of the world.  In fact, this author was so prolific that I know there are still some of his books out there I haven't read yet-- and that I will read them someday with the bittersweet enjoyment of knowing there will never be anything quite like this written ever again. 

There are several web posts (like this one) celebrating Sir Terry by quoting some of his funniest stuff. But I'd like to give tribute to him here by quoting some of his smartest stuff: some of the things he or his characters said that has really made me think, that has opened my eyes and widened my horizons.

Sir Terry used humor and fantasy to explore almost every area of human thought, from religion and philosophy to science and invention.  He was not a Christian, but he had a deep sense of morality and a reverence for the beauty of the universe and the preciousness of life.  (The Demaris Film & Bible Blog has a good synopsis/analysis of Pratchett's beliefs if you'd like to read more about them-- but as I have explained elsewhere, I believe that God's grace is over all the world, and that there is nothing to fear from a manifestation of that grace in any person, whether they agree with my theology or not.)

Pratchett understood people as few of us ever do-- and yet despite all our self-induced blindnesses and stupidities, all the things that make us laughable or even pathetic, Pratchett really loved human beings, just for being human.  His character Death never encountered a human that he didn't treat with dignity and consideration-- even the worst of the worst.  Other authors have made Death terrible; Terry Pratchett made him lovable.  

I think that, paradoxically, this is because Sir Terry's books are filled most of all with a zest for living. When he wrote about trains, he wrote with sheer admiration of the power of the engine and the ingenuity of the engineer.  When he wrote about the postal service, that mundane institution suddenly revealed itself as a showcase of the human capacity for interconnection and mutual service. Nothing, it seemed, was mundane to Terry Pratchett.  Everything was fascinating and worth looking at with the fresh eyes of exploration. Perhaps even death was a thing that, when it came, he was curious to explore. 

So here are some of the things he has said that most capture that sense of exploration and insight. Emphases are in the original texts. The title of the source appears after each quote in italics.

On humans and storytelling:

[A]ll men are writers, journalists scribbling within their skulls the narrative of what they see and hear. - Dodger

On death:

[N]o-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence. - Reaper Man

On law and order:

[Y]ou were so worried about legal and illegal that you never stopped to think about whether it was right or wrong. - Snuff

On tribalism and its antidote:

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things. - Jingo

On evil, and how evil happens when the ideology is more important than the person:

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things. And right now it would happen if you thought there was a thing called a father, and a thing called a mother, and a thing called a daughter, and a thing called a cottage, and told yourself that if you put them all together you had a thing called a happy family. - I Shall Wear Midnight

and

[I]t's true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they're doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved. - Snuff

 On fundamentalist, cultic terrorism:

. . . [E]very deviation from the norm was treated as an attack on all that was truly dwarfish. Others had already fled and died, and who could say they knew how many more were left. . . And the trouble with madness was that the mad didn't know they were mad. The grags [leaders] came down heavily on those who did not conform and seemed not to realize that this was like stamping potatoes into the mud to stop them growing. - Raising Steam

 On cognitive dissonance:

Sometimes people fools themselves into believing things that aren't true. Sometimes that can be quite dangerous for the person. They see the world in a wrong way. They won't let themselves see that what they believe is wrong. But often there is a part of the mind that does know, and the right words can let it out. - Unseen Academicals

 On parenthood and commitment:

He'd be home in time. Would a minute have mattered? No, probably not, although his young son appeared to have a very accurate internal clock. Possibly even two minutes would be ok. Three minutes, even. You could go to five, perhaps. But that was just it. If you could go to five minutes, then you'd go to ten, then half an hour, a couple of hours. . . and not see your son all evening. So that was that. Six o'clock, prompt. Every day. Read to Young Sam. No excuses. He'd promised himself that. No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses. - Thud!

On cultural assimilation:

"What kind of name is that, I ask you? Who’s going to take you seriously with a name like that? This is modern times, right?" 

He looked at her defiantly, and she thought: and so one at a time we all become human – human werewolves, human dwarfs, human trolls... the melting pot melts in one direction only, and so we make progress. - Unseen Academicals

 On prejudice:

She thought that being foreign was a crime, or at least some sort of illness that you could catch by being out out in the sun too much, or eating olives. - Nation

 and

Everybody knows trolls eat people and spit them out. Everybody knows dwarfs cut off your legs. But at the same time everybody knows that what everybody knows is wrong. - Unseen Academicals

On religion:

[The old man said,] "Everything I know makes me believe that [God] is in the order that is inherent, amazingly, in all things, and in the way the universe opens to our questioning. When I see the shining path over the lagoon, on an evening like this, at the end of a good day, I believe."] 

"In [God]?" asked the girl. 

This got a smile. "Perhaps I just believe. You know, in things generally. That works, too. Religion is not an exact science. Sometimes, of course, neither is science." - Nation

Finally, these two that I can't locate and don't remember what book they came from, but I have always remembered them, at least in paraphrase:

A good ruler doesn't drive; he steers.

and

Stories are how we humans tell ourselves who we are.

Anyway, if you've never read anything by Terry Pratchett, I hope you will. And I hope you'll be as amused, as intrigued-- and as deeply touched and moved-- as I have been.

But Is It Science?

This week someone close to me brought to my attention an article in the online New York Times called God, Darwin and My College Biology Class, by Professor David P. Barash.

Not surprisingly, Barash refutes the literalist view of the Genesis creation narratives (which I, coming at the issue from the literary rather than the scientific side, actually agree with).  But Dr. Barash goes much further in his claims for evolutionary science; in fact, he stops just short of claiming that it renders belief in God impossible.  Barash takes exception to the view put forth by Steven Jay Gould that science and religion are "non-overlapping magisteria".  A "magisterium" is an authoritative source of knowledge, and "non-overlapping" means that religion and science as sources of knowledge are not actually in conflict, because they deal with entirely separate spheres of human experience.  Gould's view of science and religion in terms of non-overlapping magisteria is called "NOMA" for short.

Barash's article explains how every year he gives his new biology students "The Talk," in which he presents evolutionary science as progressively removing any place left in human thought for the existence of God.  As he puts it:

These magisteria are not nearly as nonoverlapping as some of them might wish. As evolutionary science has progressed, the available space for religious faith has narrowed: It has demolished two previously potent pillars of religious faith and undermined belief in an omnipotent and omni-benevolent God. The twofold demolition begins by defeating what modern creationists call the argument from complexity. . . Living things are indeed wonderfully complex, but altogether within the range of a statistically powerful, entirely mechanical phenomenon. . .

Next to go is the illusion of centrality. Before Darwin, one could believe that human beings were distinct from other life-forms, chips off the old divine block. No more. . .

Adding to religion’s current intellectual instability is a third consequence of evolutionary insights: a powerful critique of theodicy, the scholarly effort to reconcile belief in an omnipresent, omni-benevolent God with the fact of unmerited suffering. . . The more we know of evolution, the more unavoidable is the conclusion that living things, including human beings, are produced by a natural, totally amoral process, with no indication of a benevolent, controlling creator.

All this sounds fairly damaging to religion, and Barash concludes his article by pretty much giving God a pat on the head and saying He hasn't necessarily struck out yet-- but it's clear that in Barash's mind it's the bottom of the ninth and evolution has been pitching a no-hitter.  But what it looks like to me is not that science's magisterium overlaps to the point of overwhelming religion's magisterium-- rather, it's that Barash does not seem to understand the real difference between the two.

Barash conflates the functions of science and religion, treating religion as if it were just another way (a failed way) to answer the questions addressed by science, and treating science as if it were fundamentally capable of answering the questions addressed by religion or philosophy.  Joe Hinman on Metacrock's Blog: The Ideology of Scientism (Part 1) defines this common misconception of the nature of religion as follows:

God is evoked where knowledge runs out. That is a wrong concept because it imposes the wrong view of religion, that religion is failed primitive science. . .The problem with it is that it seems to imply that religion only takes over where we have no facts, thus implying that religion [like science] is also about understanding the workings of the world but it just doesn’t proceed by collecting facts.

But the primary purpose of religion has never been to answer questions about how the physical world works. It's true that humans have at times used religion to answer such questions, but those questions have always been a side issue for religion. The real purpose of religion is to address issues of transcendent value, meaning and purpose, and to mediate spiritual experience.

Science, on the other hand, is defined by the online Webster's Dictionary as:

knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method; such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena.

"Scientific method," of course, refers to the hypothesis-experiment process of collecting information about the world through data.  Webster's again:

principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.

So if science is ultimately concerned with the way the physical world works, why is it treated as if it were the arbiter of all reality, capable of shrinking any possible role religion might have played until it pushes religion out entirely?

Hinman's article explains the problem:

Modern thought tells us science is pure objective observation of facts and direct proof of all that is reality. . . [But] when we examine the nature of modern science, especially in so far as it is used in opposition to belief in God, we find that there is no pure objective science, unsullied by the ideological impulse to impose a truth regime upon reality. . . 

Of course science is about a deeper understanding “of the world.” What does that mean? Is it about understanding the world of metaphysics? Or is it about understanding the world of politics, or the world of meta ethics? What kind of understanding? Is that quotation limited to the “natural” world? Does it mean all “worlds” of our conceptualizing? The more varied the definition the looser they become. We see the definitions drifting away form [sic] the concept of systematic understandings of the workings of the physical world and nothing more. It’s in those “stretches” of definition that are probably designed to allow flexible field of study that we see creeping in various agendas such as the ruination of religion. This is strictly speaking not a goal of science, not even part of science’s business.

However, if we look closely at the kind of claims that Barash's NY Times article is making for evolutionary science, he is actually addressing issues of philosophy or religion.

Any statement about what might or might not exist outside/above or in addition to the physical world is a metaphysical statement.  Even to say that there is nothing except the physical world involves making metaphysical assumptions that cannot be supported by physical evidence.  It cannot be proven scientifically that everything that exists can be proven scientifically.  This is because science by its very nature can only find physical phenomena-- either past or present.  To say science can prove that nothing except the physical world exists, is like saying there is no such thing as air pressure because you can't measure it with a ruler.  Anything non-physical, while it may cause physical traces or "footprints" in the natural world, cannot itself be directly tested or proven by science.  But that doesn't mean it cannot exist.

Science also cannot say that because there is suffering, there are therefore only natural, amoral processes. Barash has set up certain parameters for what kind of world he thinks God would create, and then eliminates God because this isn't that kind of world. But Barash's conclusions are not science, nor do they come from science. The questions, "Is this a good world? or "Is there any meaning in suffering?" are questions of philosophy. Not science.

To claim there is no God because humans are not apparently divinely central to the universe, is the same sort of thing.  Barash says that evolution somehow shows that there is no divine spark in humanity.  But any divine spark in humanity is exactly the sort of thing that science would be unable to find, because divinity is not part of physicality. And to claim there is no God because humans don't appear to be physically distinct from the rest of creation is to make an assumption about what God would be likely to do if God existed.  But "If there were a God, what would God be likely to do?" is a theological question.  Also not science.

Further, the point of religion is not to say something like, "The world is complex because God."  That kind of religion is a straw man that hides fearfully in the ever-shrinking gaps of what we still can't explain about how the physical world works. But religion, though it can be, and has been, used to explain the physical world, is not really about such explanations.  These things are completely peripheral to religion in terms of human religious culture and experience.

So what Dr. Barash has done is claim that religion is losing out to science because religion is meant to do the same things science does, but just doesn't do them very well.  Also that science is defeating religion because its methods alone (and not the philosophical conclusions of people like himself in interpreting its data) are succeeding in answering the questions of transcendent value, meaning and purpose with "no such things," and in mediating spiritual experience by denying it.

Bararsh is committing the error called "scientism."  Scientism is defined in Webster's as:

an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities).

Science can help us in matters of morality by informing us, for example, whether a particular thing is healthier for humans than another, upon which "do unto others" would kick in to instruct us to seek the healthier thing. But science cannot decide whether "do unto others" itself is morally good or not. That takes humans making philosophical or religious judgments.  Scientists make those kinds of judgments just as much as anyone else-- but what underlies them is not science.*

Barash would object to a religious preacher using the Creation narratives of Genesis to teach on matters of science. But I find it just as objectionable for a science professor to use evolutionary science to teach on matters of religion. Science professors should teach science.

Just because a person is a scientist or science professor, does not qualify them as an expert in religion or philosophy. In fact, a man like Dr. Barash, who is in a position of authority, lecturing to students whose grades are dependent on his favor, needs to be very careful on how he uses that authority. Barash's "Talk" is designed to undermine religious belief.  Sure, at the end he kindly gives his students permission to hold onto their religious beliefs-- if they can.  But Barash is a professor, and they are only college kids.  Barash speaks as an expert, while they sit in the position of learners. And these students, especially the young ones just out of high school, probably have not acquired enough understanding to see the flaws in Barash's assertions.

The power differential is completely in the professor's favor.  So I think he should be asking himself, "Is it right for me to attack the religious beliefs of young people who have neither the background nor the authority to be able to rebut me?"

One thing is for certain.  Whatever answer he gives to that question, it will not be science.



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*In fact, from a naturalistic point of view which strives to be objective, it's debatable whether humans thriving is a good thing or not.  It's good for humans, certainly, but has historically been very bad for the thriving of many other species.