Hi H
Thanks for the loan of Calculating God. The book made for some
interesting reading and the plot was intriguing enough to keep
reading. I thought I should write down my feedback if only because it
will help me to clarify my own stand on some of the issues. I figured
you may be interested in a lengthy response since you said you were
intrigued by the characterisation of good/evil in different religions
(a la Rushdie) and their nuances.
First, I usually say that I am a scientist and an atheist, but
that's only because "theism" as interpreted in the USA and many other
countries is very narrow in scope and often refers to belief in some
kind of personal entity that governs humankind and our actions.
Unfortunately, I find that "atheism" also seems to have similar narrow
connotations, instead of meaning, as I had hoped, "non-belief in a
personal savior."
So although I profess to being a scientist, if I was really really
pressed to subscribe to some existing religion, then my choice would
be Buddhism or Hinduism for the reasons below. In this context, I
found some points made by the author of this book worth commenting
upon.
Here are my reasons why if forced to adopt a religion, my choice would
be Buddhism or Hinduism. In either religion, the possibility of
existence of gods such as the one that Sawyer finally describes is not
discounted, but just deemed "irrelevant". On p.131 and many other
places later on, Sawyer (Speaking through Hollus) introduces the
notion of an "imperfect god". An imperfect god, incidentally, is also
compatible with the evils in the universe simply because it is beyond
god's power to stop evil.
Hinduism and Buddhism also both admit any number of gods, so long as
they are "imperfect gods". For instance, Agni, Varuna, Yama, Vayu and
the rest of the devas, their king Indra (Dionysius), and even the
super gods Vishnu, Brahma, Siva, Ganesha, et al., are all subject to
flaws. They all have super human powers though -- they can work magic
and are even immortal. They can make a number of things happen that
ordinary mortals find impossible. But yet, according to Hindu
philosophy they are all "inferior gods" since they possess a
fundamental flaw -- "They want things to happen". These are also
personal gods -- one can pray to them and hope that their prayers will
be answered, just as one can petition a king or a hypothesized alien
intelligence for something.
This also, I think, explains R's remark of a few days ago -- that
polytheistic religions are not intolerant of other faiths, but
typically only monotheistic ones are. The Hindu or Buddhist has no
problem with people worshipping another god or indeed any number of
other gods. If you went to a Hindu and said that he ought to pray to
Allah1 to get something he desires, he will gladly give it a shot,
but only in recognition of the fact that Allah himself is also flawed,
like the many other dieties he is used to. Indeed, Allah's primary
flaw is that he can (supposedly) be affected and moved by prayer!
This is something that Hindu philosophy claims to be incompatible with
omnipotence. You may be interested in
a short article I wrote some years ago about
this concept of god (called Advaita) in Hinduism and Buddhism.
You are, of course, welcome to read it and take it apart! The gist of
the article is that the ultimate god is an inert, impersonal entity.
In the (translated) words of Sankara (an 8th cent. Hindu theologian),
"Indeed, there is no possibility of god ever doing anything at all, for
the very concept of action implies a desire to act and a desire
implies a previously dissatisfied state, which is incompatible with an
all-powerful god. God is by his very nature, forever satisfied of all
his desires and thus could not have been persuaded to create the
world."
It also happens, as one would expect, that this god is also constantly
in the best of all pragmatic states. This state is called
unconsciousness by the Buddhists and "pure consciousness" by the
Hindus2. Of course, such a god is of pedantic interest only. It is
also the same (for all practical purposes) as our own mind (soul) when
it is not conscious of external objects such as in dreamless sleep and
death. Some drugs (and recently discovered surgical procedures) are
also known to induce this state of mind where all individuality
(subj/obj differentiation) is lost.
Well thanks for loaning me the book, it caused all these memories to
come back to me in a flash and I can't say that was unpleasant.
&
1 Of course, most Hindus don't pray to Allah since they could get
killed for blasphemy by Indian muslims if they called Allah a flawed
god.
2 Many Buddhists were lost in India by fighting over this seemingly
trivial semantic distinction. But an astonishing amount of
intellectually stimulating dialectic was generated in the process.
The following is an example of an argument that is presented by
Sankara, (8th cent), in one of his works. The Buddhist claim is that
the term "pure consciousness" is nonsense and that consciousness
itself is an emergent phenomenon that appears automatically only when
the subject and object both exist. Sankara's position is that the
subject always exists and is always conscious, although objects to be
conscious of don't always exist! In a state of deep dreamless sleep,
or after death, Sankara argues that the objects have all disappeared
but the subject and its consciousness still exist, albeit untainted by
anything -- akin to rays of light emanating from a star, but not
falling on any object!
The specific analogy he uses is this -- "Just the absence of object to
be lighted up is not enough evidence to infer the absence of light,
absence of objects to be conscious of is not enough evidence to infer
the absence of consciousness itself."
I have to confess that although I find more sense in the Buddhist
position, I have always been amazed at Sankara's very perceptive
analogy (centuries before the Tyndall effect was discovered).
PS. Oh, a minor (non theological) quibble about the book. Sawyer
says that the Betelgeuse explosion happened in a matter of seconds (or
at most hours) to observers on Earth. Most astronomers would say that
the explosion could easily span several thousand years (which is
relatively just an instant in the life of the star).
PPS. I have ignored the following issues that are irrelevant to the
points I make.
- The argument from design presented by Jericho is flawed. I
won't go into the details here -- Dawkins can do a better job. But
roughly the main objection is that the argument says something like
"Well, what are the odds that I could have won lotto. The balls were
clearly designed to fall in the order they did." *after* having won
lotto. - Objection to the argument from evil. (p.131). Tom Jericho
advances one version of the typical theist objection to the argument
from evil. Richard Swinburne (Oxford -- several links to his works on
google) presents the standard theist viewpoint on the matter most
clearly, but even he is not generally accepted to have solved all
the problems with this objection.