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I love Stephen Batchelor’s writings on Buddhism, and his tastes in it are very much like my own, although we each came to them via very different roads. Batchelor immersed himself completely into Buddhism, becoming an ordained monk in the Tibetan tradition and later training at a Korean Zen monastery, spending a total of about ten years in robes (i.e., as a monk).
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I will talk about these two major works of his out of their chronological order, because I read his later book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist (2010), first, and then I read his famous earlier one, Buddhism without Beliefs (1997), last.
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Confession of a Buddhist Atheist really grabbed me and I could not put it down. I love intellectual biographies, and this book takes us on a guided tour through Batchelor’s intellectual journeys within Buddhism and his personal evolution. He is a few years younger than me, but we have a lot in common as far as our early reading experiences: The Doors of Perception, Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, and Kerouac’s books.
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Batchelor, as a young man, left his native Britain and went to Dharamsala, India in the early 1970s. This is the Dalai Lama’s residence-in-exile and the center of free Tibetan (Vajrayana) practice. Batchelor is good with languages and did some important translations of Tibetan scriptures. He also got the chance to try something quite different while there by attending a vipassana meditation retreat taught by an Indian meditation teacher, and this experience gave him a lifelong curiosity about other schools of Buddhism such as Theravada and early Buddhism, and their meditation practices. He had a restless, inquisitive spirit even then.
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Later he went with a Tibetan teacher to Switzerland, to help establish a Vajrayana center there. In Europe he also studied some Existentialism and took Jungian analysis on the side, continually curious. He tells of some of the deep sectarian religious disputes in the Tibetan Buddhist community (which is no surprise, since all religious sects and secular ideologies tend to split asunder and then splinter off again and again into warring sects).
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Ever searching, he traveled to Korea to train at a Zen monastery there for a few years. Zen, as a sect in the Mahayana tradition, is a bit different from Tibetan Vajrayana and Theravada/ Hinayana. He loves Zen’s aesthetic dimensions – as I do. At this monastery he met a French woman who had been a nun and translator there for a while, and eventually they both disrobed (i.e., formally left the monkhood) and later got married. They have ever since been active lay Buddhist teachers and writers in England and France.
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Batchelor’s evolution toward Buddhist atheism was rooted in his ability to think critically and independently. He saw the many contradictions in Buddhist doctrines, but the primary driver was his inability to believe in outrageous supernatural claims, especially in rebirth (sometimes also called “reincarnation”). Try as he might, he could not believe in human or animal rebirths after death. Yet he admits that “the entire edifice of traditional Buddhist thought stands or falls on the belief in rebirth.” (p.37) And, I must agree it does. This left him as a heretic outside the Buddhist fold, and I’ve always felt that way, too.
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I never really believed in survival after death, be it resurrection to Heaven/Hell or rebirth here in the real world – except for one independently imagined moment as a small child, before ever hearing of reincarnation, resurrection or rebirth. My knowledge of human death at that time was represented by an old photo, in my grandmother’s room, of my maternal grandfather, and this grandfather had died a year before I was born. I never met him, but I saw him in the photo as representing a unique individual personhood who was now gone.
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At this same time, I was a young farm boy who saw the death of animals all the time, and I thought of my grandfather’s death within this knowledge of frequent animal death. I remember one evening as my father was milking the cows; a kitten that I loved and played with every day was coming down with the symptoms of distemper, a disease that killed over half of our cats at that time. My father saw me squatting down to look face to face with my beloved kitten as it sneezed weakly and hung its head. He told me that I must understand that the kitten would most probably die soon (as it did and as I knew it would) and that I should be ready for this.
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I looked at my kitten friend, so soon to die, and I thought a kind of wordless childhood equivalent of: “What is death? What will happen to this kitten that has a unique personality of its own? I know that its body will rot into nothing, but does its personhood just disappear into nothing? Or does this person/soul jump from one life to another? Can this kitten, living now but so soon to go, be my dead grandfather’s person that has somehow jumped into this kitten’s body/life to die once again, and will it soon jump into another body/life of some kind after this kitten dies? Is this my grandfather facing me now?”
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I – a child – had independently invented for myself the notion of the reincarnation of a person/self/soul after death. I know of no outside influence on this and can explain it no other way. It is hard to let go of a self, such as my beloved kitten, into a death with no future. This early memory is a very strong one. I understand how fundamentally rooted such ideas of the survival of death are to human religions through the ages. Even Plato fell for it.
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Later, I learned a vague notion of resurrection to Heaven or Hell after death, as pushed by my family’s Christian religion, but I never really bought it completely. The stories of New Testament characters coming back to life after being dead for a while never seemed sensible at all, given my knowledge of death and decay here in the real world.
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But I was temporarily scared by hell-fire and brimstone tent-show evangelists, artists at scaring folks. One time, as a kid, my father and I attended a tent-meeting in the old gravel parking lot of the Methodist Church, and the evangelist roared on about once personally meeting the Devil face to face. He was a great stage-man, a born actor. As we left the tent-meeting to walk home, the wind was gusty and the night shadows from blowing branches were terrifying. I said to my father, “I’m scared,” and in his unvarying honesty he said, “Me too.” Monsters I could imagine, but Heaven or rebirth, no.
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I discovered Buddhism when I was 17, the same year I realized that I had been an atheist (or a “non-theist”) for some time and no longer had any interest in Christianity, theism, or supernaturalism of any kind. I was drawn to two aspects of Buddhism: 1. the story of the Buddha’s incomparable integrity and his arduous lone independent quest for truth; and 2. the rambling esthetic quality of the Beat Zen of Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, with mountains, forests, and lonely wilderness haunts.
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This was the same time that I discovered Western rationalist philosophy via Ayn Rand, and she gave me the solid beginnings of a classical Western education. I somehow digested them all together without too much indigestion.
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The Buddhist rebirth myths and grand supernatural Mahayana mysticism were never interesting to me, and I still don’t have the slightest clue what the Vajrayana Tibetans are talking about. Zen (aka Chinese mountain “Ch’an”), mixed with a bit of Taoism and absent any supernatural elements, has been my constant spiritual center for 45 years.
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The “selfish” Hinayana (aka Theravada) schools also appealed to me, as they still preserve the ancient Pali Canon, the oldest Buddhist texts and those closest to the time of Siddhartha Gautama, the Sakyamuni Buddha, and I still like this tradition mostly for its possible insights into the actual historical Buddha – the man, the teacher and the therapist. Batchelor has gravitated back to the spirit of early Buddhism, as I have to some extent. The Pali Canon reveals what looks very much like an authentic personality portrait of this great Gautama sage.
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Batchelor can articulate, in just a phrase or two, decades of my own experiences as a bumbling practitioner. It is such a comfort to read someone of like mind.
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Batchelor’s earlier masterpiece, Buddhism without Beliefs, is distilled and sharp. Without insisting on belief in any dogma or mysticism, he introduces us to Buddhist basics: meditation and Buddha’s own primary aim, teaching us how to deal with Dukkha (aka the anguish, disappointments and sufferings that are integral parts of life as we are born, are so often disappointed, age, get sick, and eventually die). The Buddha – in his early Pali Canon discourses – frequently insisted that the heart of his whole message was recognizing Dukkha and the means of its cessation through his Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Noble Path, and that the surrounding religious edifices were mere chaff compared to this central healing advice. The immediate point is release from the grip of Dukkha, and this can be learned and practiced.
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The First Noble Truth is in understanding Dukkha/anguish and embracing it as an integral part of life, and the Second Truth is seeing Dukkha’s origins and causes (i.e., clinging to irrational, unrealistic desires, cravings and obsessions) and then letting go of them. Batchelor writes that the challenge of Truths One and Two “is to act before habitual reactions incapacitate us.” This reminds me of modern cognitive psychology.
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Buddhist metaphysics, cosmologies and theologies are just irrelevant distractions, of no importance. As the Buddha advised in the Pali Canon: imagine a man wounded on a battlefield with a poisonous arrow embedded in him; a surgeon wants to immediately remove the arrow and clean out the poison to save his life; but the wounded man says: “Stop! Before you remove the arrow, I want to know who the man was who shot it. What clan does he belong to? What kind of bow did he use to shoot it? Who fletched the arrow?” Etc.
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The Buddha said that before such useless questions could ever be answered, the man would die of the poison. The all-important immediate task is to remove the arrow and have the surgeon treat the poisoned wound. All the other questions are completely unimportant and absurd. The treatment for Dukkha is all-important right now, and the rest is useless. This gets down to the basics. Buddha said that metaphysical questions “Do not tend toward edification”, and he ignored them when asked.
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Batchelor also emphasizes the Pali Canon’s Kalama Sutta, where the Buddha tells the Kalama people not to believe something simply because it is legend, tradition, scriptural, or coming from an authority. Rather you should determine to “see and know for yourselves” that some actions or qualities are skillful, blameless, and lead to welfare and happiness, while other actions or qualities lead to the opposites. (Many traditionalists – often themselves wannabe authorities – claim that this sutta is misused to give people a doctrinal carte blanche and thus they criticize anyone emphasizing it. Yet it appeals to heretics such as Batchelor and me, who are not impressed by dogma.)
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Batchelor has several simple meditation exercises sprinkled throughout the book, and they are very well selected. One of these is, after earlier learning to concentrate on one’s breathing (the Buddha’s favored focus of meditation) and on releasing physical and mental tensions, to contemplate this thought: “Since death is certain and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?” (p.29) We are all impermanent and we will all certainly die, so what do we do with our time here and now? I think of this when I observe many traditional Buddhists focusing almost mechanically on a better rebirth somewhere down the road rather than on the spiritual enrichment of this precious life we have right now.
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I wish that I had read these books when I was 17. Yet Batchelor was only 14 or 15 at that time and he had not yet discovered all this. He cuts through so much of the massive superfluous stuff in traditional Buddhist culture and belief, yet in his compassion he doesn’t put the traditions down. His writing is quite often very poetic, and his refinement of all of his life’s experiences and scholarship into readable texts makes it all so rich and beautiful.
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-Zenwind.
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28 April 2012
16 April 2012
Geocentrism: Were Copernicus and Galileo Wrong? Creationism: Was Darwin Wrong? The 1985 National Bible-Science Conference
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This is a wild but true story. I was there. I’m fascinated by weird pseudoscience and cultic belief systems. As a seriously interested skeptic I took a weekend in the summer of 1985 to attend this “Scientific Creationist” 1985 National Bible-Science Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. A very small group of skeptics, monitoring Creationism’s claims, had organized to attend this conference as a minority of observers, and I hooked up with them.
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One of the attractions of this conference was that along with the regular Creationist presentations would be some by Geocentrists, i.e., those who believe that Copernicus and Galileo et al were wrong and that the Earth is the immovable center of the universe with the Sun and everything else revolving around it – because the Bible says it’s so. In the West, almost all Creationism is Bible-based, but so is most Geocentrism and Flat Earth belief. (See the work by the late science writer and skeptic Robert Schadewald, whom I mention here later.)
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I had been following the early-1980s resurgence of anti-evolutionary proselytizing in my rural area and had started to investigate it. I bought many core books by the major Creationists of the day as well as books by scientists and scholars who defended Darwin and evolutionary science. I studied most of the Creationists’ main arguments – especially the ones dealing with geology and paleontology. I also subscribed to newsletters from scientists monitoring the Creationist movement, and that is how I learned of the skeptics’ plan to attend the Cleveland conference. I contacted these skeptics and, based on some things I had written earlier, was invited to attend with them.
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I tried as much as possible to be open-minded and objective about both sides in the controversy, hence I immersed myself deeply in Creationist lore, but it became obvious who the real scientists were and who the true-believers and/or charlatans were. The “Scientific” Creationists’ books and arguments were transparently weak and often dishonest. When they quoted famous scientists, they quite often did a lot of misquoting, quoting out-of-context, and even “creative quotation” (i.e., ripping out words and phrases, and then pasting them together to make meanings totally the opposite of the scientist’s original meaning). The Creationists tended to lack scholarly integrity, but they had lots of faith.
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As I learned their arguments I had to learn more about the sciences involved, especially about geology, paleontology, and the fossil record of life on Earth. This got me to attend college again to take geology courses, and from there I went on to study the philosophy of science and then to complete my philosophy degree – and eventually to teach high school history and philosophy. The controversy shook me out of my intellectual sloth. Outrage can be a powerful motivator.
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The Bible-Science movement is quite old, with many different affiliated groups. The Creation Research Society (CRS) has been around a long time. Branching off from it, and becoming one of the dominant Creationist organizations in the 1980s, was the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). Representatives from both of these outfits were there. They believe in a very young earth, under 10,000 years old (from Bible clues), and they believe in a scenario called “Flood Geology,” where the entire geological column and stratigraphic rock record (with what the entire mainstream scientific community sees as the evolutionary fossil record) was all caused by Noah’s Flood some mere thousands of years ago.
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Re: the Geocentrism at the conference. To be fair to the Creationist mainstream, Geocentrists are a very small minority in their larger belief group as well as at this conference. But they were there because they too claim (with justification) to be Bible-based and fellow Creationists (although the publicity they generated embarrassed the Creationists enough that Geocentrism was absent at the 1986 convention in Pittsburgh).
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The Cleveland conference that I attended had multiple presentations scheduled to pick from, most of them Creationist themed. Engineer R.G. Elmendorf gave a paper defending Geocentrism which I (and my skeptic friends) found confusing and impossible to follow, except when he used the Bible to back up his theories. Two computer scientists based in Cleveland are prominent in the Geocentric movement. (I must mention that modern Bible-based Geocentrists are usually Tychonian, not Ptolemaic, and much of their theory agrees with naked-eye observations.)
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The crowning event of the weekend conference was a big debate on Sunday night to wrap it all up. It was to be a debate on Heliocentrism vs. Geocentrism by two pair of Bible-scientists. Of the pair defending Heliocentrism, one would present the scientific case (i.e., Galileo et al) and one would argue the Biblical case. Of the Geocentrism defenders, one would present the scientific case and one the Biblical case.
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Unfortunately for me, I had to be at work at 11pm Sunday night and would have to miss this debate, as I had a three-hour drive. But I did order cassette tapes of the debate, which are now in an attic in the States. My fellow skeptics later told me that the hall was packed and that it was a truly bizarre affair, debating science that had been largely settled three centuries ago by Newton. Our skeptic appraisal of the debate is that the Heliocentric side won the scientific argument, while the Geocentric side won the Biblical argument.
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Other subject matter presented at the convention was also interesting. I was disappointed that there was not much at all about the fossil record, because the famous Creationist fossil “expert” Duane Gish was not there. I had read his books closely, and it was one area I had some solid knowledge.
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But there was a presentation on the latest Bible-science expedition to find Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat in Turkey. I jumped at this because of my background in mountaineering and the many Creationist books and other books I had read on the history of both the ascent of Ararat and the search for the Ark. Mt. Ararat is close to 17,000 feet above sea level and glaciated at the top portions. It lies in the corner of Turkey that is militarized and politically volatile because it is close to the borders of Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan (the last two being still “republics” within the USSR in 1985).
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The main presenter had led one of the most recent expeditions. He described how they climbed up to a summit saddle and tried to dig through the ice cap with chainsaws (because they lacked ice drills). They tie their hopes to the Ark being under the ice cap since the bare rock slopes do not reveal it. My fellow skeptic Frank Zindler heard the presentation with me, and he emphasized to me afterward that they were looking in the wrong place. If the Ark had indeed landed on the summit of Ararat, after several thousand years under the accumulating glacier ice it would have been carried slowly but surely down the mountain slope as the glacier moved with gravity, and it would have been ground to fragments by the glacial pressure over the rock. If they hope to find anything, they should study glaciology and look amongst the ground-up rock beneath the glacier.
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I made one friend among the Creationist faithful because we had a lot in common. He briefly spoke about the Ararat expedition, as he was their mountaineering expert. It turns out that he was a veteran US Marine and had a lot of mountain climbing experience – much more than me, and on higher mountains. Even though we were in different ideological camps, we remained friends throughout the conference. He told me that on Saturday night he had a phone call from some expedition members who were on the flanks of Mt. Ararat when he last knew, and now bandits in that unruly area had plundered their equipment in base camp and burned whatever they couldn’t take. The expedition had to withdraw.
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Another presentation I went to was about a new Creationist research station on the northern rim of the Grand Canyon area of Arizona. Earlier, there had been a high-profile legitimate scientific study in the news about a unique species of squirrel living on the northern rim of the canyon. Because of this squirrel’s longtime geographic isolation (by the huge canyon gap) from closely related squirrels on the southern rim, its adaptation to a different environment was showcased as a great example of Darwinian Natural Selection. It was big science news at the time. So the old Creationist Research Society (CRS) decided to do its own study, hoping to refute the evolutionist interpretation. Also, because they believe in Flood Geology, they announced that they would do research of the Grand Canyon’s stratigraphy looking for evidence contradicting the fossil record of evolutionary paleontology. The whole presentation was sad more than anything else.
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The presenter was a venerable old CRS fellow, but the audience was very small. He attempted to impress us with the seriousness of their research. The CRS had moderately decent resources, so they outfitted a “research station” on the desert north rim. He used an overhead projector to list the assets of their station. (Now, to be fair, this was 1985 and technology was not nearly what it is today.) He listed an IBM-compatible computer, a good semi-portable model in that era. Then he saved the best for last and triumphantly listed a telephone!
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That was it. The idea that any Creationists would run around the desert trying to study elusive squirrels was a joke. They just don’t have their feet in the ground of strenuous empirical scientific research. Were there any squirrel experts within the CRS? I felt acute embarrassment for the presenter and for the small Creationist audience. It was pathetic.
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Our small group of skeptic observers would meet up several times a day and then get together in our hotel room after the last presentation late in the evening. Finally alone together, we howled with laughter about the mad absurdities we had witnessed that day. On Saturday night, hotel security had to come to our door twice to tell us we were too noisy and disturbing people next door. (Why can’t they ever build hotel rooms with sound-proofing?)
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One in our little group of skeptics was the late, great Robert Schadewald (1943-2000). Bob was a fine gentleman and an internationally recognized expert on weird science. He had one of the world’s finest personal libraries of Flat Earth writings, and he had interviewed the president of the Flat Earth Society – which is Bible-based. (I first read Bob’s stuff in a wonderful chapter, “The Evolution of Bible-science,” in Scientists Confront Creationism (1983), ed. by Laurie Godfrey; and also in articles around that time in Skeptical Inquirer. Science writing lost a master when Bob passed away much too early.
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Sadly, I could not attend the next year’s Bible-science conference in Pittsburgh. By then the Creationists had realized that treating Bible-based Geocentrists as legitimate allies was bad PR, and they excluded them from the next conference, which was called The 1986 International Conference on Creationism. I read the reviews of it by Bob Schadewald and other Creationist watchers.
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It seems that the internal controversy dominating this 1986 meeting was Young Earth Creationists vs. Old Earth Creationists. Young Earthers (CRS, ICR) believe the Earth to be less than 10,000 years old, using the Bible as an “inerrant” source. They believe that the entire rock/fossil record is just a jumbled up chaos of sediment from Noah’s Flood and that there is no rhyme or reason to how the different strata were laid down, and to them there is certainly no ordered layers of this geologic column that records, over long eras, more primitive life forms at the bottom (older) strata and more modern ones in the newer (upper) strata as evolutionary scientists see it and predict it.
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Old Earth Creationists usually agree with mainstream science that the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old and that the sedimentary rock fossil layers show a definite change through time, but they also believe that life was divinely created – perhaps through divine fiat, perhaps through divinely directed evolutionary processes (theistic evolution, etc.), depending on the person’s beliefs – just as the fossil record shows. And these guys often really know their geological science.
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A high point of the 1986 conference for the skeptics was the presentation by a respected Creationist geologist – an Old Earther. He has had a successful career as a genuine petroleum geologist who did routine exploratory research to find oil-bearing rock strata, by identifying the ages and layered order of strata by their fossil content just as the evolutionary scenario would predict and just as accepted by all paleontologists and geologists – but directly contradicting Young Earth Creationism. His presentation was dramatic.
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He said that he had hired two recent (and naïve) geology graduates from ICR (the fundamentalist Young Earth school) for a season in the field as apprentice petroleum geologists under his wing, because their common ground is Christianity. At ICR, these grads had been taught that the geologic column – as geologists and evolutionary scientists and paleontologists find it, documenting the evolutionary history of life dramatically – was a pure fiction by deluded evolutionists who were motivated by a “religion of secular humanism.” The ICR grads were taught Flood Geology and were totally unprepared for real-world geologic work.
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As they worked with this senior geologist, the grads sampled the drill-cores of these all-important micro-fossils to identify and correlate the rock strata according to these index fossils (in order to fix the age/order of the strata and search for known oil-bearing strata), and they saw – every single day – that the heretical geologic column, used by evolutionary scientists and paleontologists, was consistent and real, where earlier life forms are found lower and more modern life forms are found higher in the strata, just as the geologists, paleontologists and evolutionary thinkers predict. The empirical evidence was irrefutable, and he said the two grads had to admit its truth, and that they had severe “crises of faith” as they acquired this reality.
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No shit. Sometimes evidence has to hit you on the head like a rock.
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-Zenwind.
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This is a wild but true story. I was there. I’m fascinated by weird pseudoscience and cultic belief systems. As a seriously interested skeptic I took a weekend in the summer of 1985 to attend this “Scientific Creationist” 1985 National Bible-Science Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. A very small group of skeptics, monitoring Creationism’s claims, had organized to attend this conference as a minority of observers, and I hooked up with them.
.
One of the attractions of this conference was that along with the regular Creationist presentations would be some by Geocentrists, i.e., those who believe that Copernicus and Galileo et al were wrong and that the Earth is the immovable center of the universe with the Sun and everything else revolving around it – because the Bible says it’s so. In the West, almost all Creationism is Bible-based, but so is most Geocentrism and Flat Earth belief. (See the work by the late science writer and skeptic Robert Schadewald, whom I mention here later.)
.
I had been following the early-1980s resurgence of anti-evolutionary proselytizing in my rural area and had started to investigate it. I bought many core books by the major Creationists of the day as well as books by scientists and scholars who defended Darwin and evolutionary science. I studied most of the Creationists’ main arguments – especially the ones dealing with geology and paleontology. I also subscribed to newsletters from scientists monitoring the Creationist movement, and that is how I learned of the skeptics’ plan to attend the Cleveland conference. I contacted these skeptics and, based on some things I had written earlier, was invited to attend with them.
.
I tried as much as possible to be open-minded and objective about both sides in the controversy, hence I immersed myself deeply in Creationist lore, but it became obvious who the real scientists were and who the true-believers and/or charlatans were. The “Scientific” Creationists’ books and arguments were transparently weak and often dishonest. When they quoted famous scientists, they quite often did a lot of misquoting, quoting out-of-context, and even “creative quotation” (i.e., ripping out words and phrases, and then pasting them together to make meanings totally the opposite of the scientist’s original meaning). The Creationists tended to lack scholarly integrity, but they had lots of faith.
.
As I learned their arguments I had to learn more about the sciences involved, especially about geology, paleontology, and the fossil record of life on Earth. This got me to attend college again to take geology courses, and from there I went on to study the philosophy of science and then to complete my philosophy degree – and eventually to teach high school history and philosophy. The controversy shook me out of my intellectual sloth. Outrage can be a powerful motivator.
.
The Bible-Science movement is quite old, with many different affiliated groups. The Creation Research Society (CRS) has been around a long time. Branching off from it, and becoming one of the dominant Creationist organizations in the 1980s, was the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). Representatives from both of these outfits were there. They believe in a very young earth, under 10,000 years old (from Bible clues), and they believe in a scenario called “Flood Geology,” where the entire geological column and stratigraphic rock record (with what the entire mainstream scientific community sees as the evolutionary fossil record) was all caused by Noah’s Flood some mere thousands of years ago.
.
Re: the Geocentrism at the conference. To be fair to the Creationist mainstream, Geocentrists are a very small minority in their larger belief group as well as at this conference. But they were there because they too claim (with justification) to be Bible-based and fellow Creationists (although the publicity they generated embarrassed the Creationists enough that Geocentrism was absent at the 1986 convention in Pittsburgh).
.
The Cleveland conference that I attended had multiple presentations scheduled to pick from, most of them Creationist themed. Engineer R.G. Elmendorf gave a paper defending Geocentrism which I (and my skeptic friends) found confusing and impossible to follow, except when he used the Bible to back up his theories. Two computer scientists based in Cleveland are prominent in the Geocentric movement. (I must mention that modern Bible-based Geocentrists are usually Tychonian, not Ptolemaic, and much of their theory agrees with naked-eye observations.)
.
The crowning event of the weekend conference was a big debate on Sunday night to wrap it all up. It was to be a debate on Heliocentrism vs. Geocentrism by two pair of Bible-scientists. Of the pair defending Heliocentrism, one would present the scientific case (i.e., Galileo et al) and one would argue the Biblical case. Of the Geocentrism defenders, one would present the scientific case and one the Biblical case.
.
Unfortunately for me, I had to be at work at 11pm Sunday night and would have to miss this debate, as I had a three-hour drive. But I did order cassette tapes of the debate, which are now in an attic in the States. My fellow skeptics later told me that the hall was packed and that it was a truly bizarre affair, debating science that had been largely settled three centuries ago by Newton. Our skeptic appraisal of the debate is that the Heliocentric side won the scientific argument, while the Geocentric side won the Biblical argument.
.
Other subject matter presented at the convention was also interesting. I was disappointed that there was not much at all about the fossil record, because the famous Creationist fossil “expert” Duane Gish was not there. I had read his books closely, and it was one area I had some solid knowledge.
.
But there was a presentation on the latest Bible-science expedition to find Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat in Turkey. I jumped at this because of my background in mountaineering and the many Creationist books and other books I had read on the history of both the ascent of Ararat and the search for the Ark. Mt. Ararat is close to 17,000 feet above sea level and glaciated at the top portions. It lies in the corner of Turkey that is militarized and politically volatile because it is close to the borders of Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan (the last two being still “republics” within the USSR in 1985).
.
The main presenter had led one of the most recent expeditions. He described how they climbed up to a summit saddle and tried to dig through the ice cap with chainsaws (because they lacked ice drills). They tie their hopes to the Ark being under the ice cap since the bare rock slopes do not reveal it. My fellow skeptic Frank Zindler heard the presentation with me, and he emphasized to me afterward that they were looking in the wrong place. If the Ark had indeed landed on the summit of Ararat, after several thousand years under the accumulating glacier ice it would have been carried slowly but surely down the mountain slope as the glacier moved with gravity, and it would have been ground to fragments by the glacial pressure over the rock. If they hope to find anything, they should study glaciology and look amongst the ground-up rock beneath the glacier.
.
I made one friend among the Creationist faithful because we had a lot in common. He briefly spoke about the Ararat expedition, as he was their mountaineering expert. It turns out that he was a veteran US Marine and had a lot of mountain climbing experience – much more than me, and on higher mountains. Even though we were in different ideological camps, we remained friends throughout the conference. He told me that on Saturday night he had a phone call from some expedition members who were on the flanks of Mt. Ararat when he last knew, and now bandits in that unruly area had plundered their equipment in base camp and burned whatever they couldn’t take. The expedition had to withdraw.
.
Another presentation I went to was about a new Creationist research station on the northern rim of the Grand Canyon area of Arizona. Earlier, there had been a high-profile legitimate scientific study in the news about a unique species of squirrel living on the northern rim of the canyon. Because of this squirrel’s longtime geographic isolation (by the huge canyon gap) from closely related squirrels on the southern rim, its adaptation to a different environment was showcased as a great example of Darwinian Natural Selection. It was big science news at the time. So the old Creationist Research Society (CRS) decided to do its own study, hoping to refute the evolutionist interpretation. Also, because they believe in Flood Geology, they announced that they would do research of the Grand Canyon’s stratigraphy looking for evidence contradicting the fossil record of evolutionary paleontology. The whole presentation was sad more than anything else.
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The presenter was a venerable old CRS fellow, but the audience was very small. He attempted to impress us with the seriousness of their research. The CRS had moderately decent resources, so they outfitted a “research station” on the desert north rim. He used an overhead projector to list the assets of their station. (Now, to be fair, this was 1985 and technology was not nearly what it is today.) He listed an IBM-compatible computer, a good semi-portable model in that era. Then he saved the best for last and triumphantly listed a telephone!
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That was it. The idea that any Creationists would run around the desert trying to study elusive squirrels was a joke. They just don’t have their feet in the ground of strenuous empirical scientific research. Were there any squirrel experts within the CRS? I felt acute embarrassment for the presenter and for the small Creationist audience. It was pathetic.
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Our small group of skeptic observers would meet up several times a day and then get together in our hotel room after the last presentation late in the evening. Finally alone together, we howled with laughter about the mad absurdities we had witnessed that day. On Saturday night, hotel security had to come to our door twice to tell us we were too noisy and disturbing people next door. (Why can’t they ever build hotel rooms with sound-proofing?)
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One in our little group of skeptics was the late, great Robert Schadewald (1943-2000). Bob was a fine gentleman and an internationally recognized expert on weird science. He had one of the world’s finest personal libraries of Flat Earth writings, and he had interviewed the president of the Flat Earth Society – which is Bible-based. (I first read Bob’s stuff in a wonderful chapter, “The Evolution of Bible-science,” in Scientists Confront Creationism (1983), ed. by Laurie Godfrey; and also in articles around that time in Skeptical Inquirer. Science writing lost a master when Bob passed away much too early.
.
Sadly, I could not attend the next year’s Bible-science conference in Pittsburgh. By then the Creationists had realized that treating Bible-based Geocentrists as legitimate allies was bad PR, and they excluded them from the next conference, which was called The 1986 International Conference on Creationism. I read the reviews of it by Bob Schadewald and other Creationist watchers.
.
It seems that the internal controversy dominating this 1986 meeting was Young Earth Creationists vs. Old Earth Creationists. Young Earthers (CRS, ICR) believe the Earth to be less than 10,000 years old, using the Bible as an “inerrant” source. They believe that the entire rock/fossil record is just a jumbled up chaos of sediment from Noah’s Flood and that there is no rhyme or reason to how the different strata were laid down, and to them there is certainly no ordered layers of this geologic column that records, over long eras, more primitive life forms at the bottom (older) strata and more modern ones in the newer (upper) strata as evolutionary scientists see it and predict it.
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Old Earth Creationists usually agree with mainstream science that the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old and that the sedimentary rock fossil layers show a definite change through time, but they also believe that life was divinely created – perhaps through divine fiat, perhaps through divinely directed evolutionary processes (theistic evolution, etc.), depending on the person’s beliefs – just as the fossil record shows. And these guys often really know their geological science.
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A high point of the 1986 conference for the skeptics was the presentation by a respected Creationist geologist – an Old Earther. He has had a successful career as a genuine petroleum geologist who did routine exploratory research to find oil-bearing rock strata, by identifying the ages and layered order of strata by their fossil content just as the evolutionary scenario would predict and just as accepted by all paleontologists and geologists – but directly contradicting Young Earth Creationism. His presentation was dramatic.
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He said that he had hired two recent (and naïve) geology graduates from ICR (the fundamentalist Young Earth school) for a season in the field as apprentice petroleum geologists under his wing, because their common ground is Christianity. At ICR, these grads had been taught that the geologic column – as geologists and evolutionary scientists and paleontologists find it, documenting the evolutionary history of life dramatically – was a pure fiction by deluded evolutionists who were motivated by a “religion of secular humanism.” The ICR grads were taught Flood Geology and were totally unprepared for real-world geologic work.
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As they worked with this senior geologist, the grads sampled the drill-cores of these all-important micro-fossils to identify and correlate the rock strata according to these index fossils (in order to fix the age/order of the strata and search for known oil-bearing strata), and they saw – every single day – that the heretical geologic column, used by evolutionary scientists and paleontologists, was consistent and real, where earlier life forms are found lower and more modern life forms are found higher in the strata, just as the geologists, paleontologists and evolutionary thinkers predict. The empirical evidence was irrefutable, and he said the two grads had to admit its truth, and that they had severe “crises of faith” as they acquired this reality.
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No shit. Sometimes evidence has to hit you on the head like a rock.
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-Zenwind.
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13 April 2012
Book Review: Science Fiction of Charles Stross
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English science fiction (SF) author Charles Stross has got me hooked after reading the three novels mentioned below. I first heard of him from a list of nominees and winners of the Prometheus Award from the Libertarian Futurist Society, always a good recommendation. These novels are hard SF, and Stross has an understated dark sense of humor that sneaks up on you and that I like.
.
The two novels making up the “Eschaton” series are Singularity Sky (2003) and its sequel Iron Sunrise (2004). After a “technological singularity” occurs in our near future, suddenly the people of Earth find that 90% of the human population has disappeared overnight. After the humans left on Earth finally recover their economic and scientific strength, they venture out and discover that the missing humans are scattered throughout the galaxy on various worlds.
.
The cause of all this is that an apparently super-strong Artificial Intelligence, calling itself “the Eschaton,” had developed yet farther into the future, and after developing faster-than-light travel and time-travel, it/they came back and intervened in human affairs for the sole reason of preventing human use of time-travel. If humans acquire the ability to travel in time (“violating causality”) they may interfere in earlier history and cancel out the conditions that originally gave rise to the Eschaton’s very existence, deleting it from history and the future.
.
After dispersing humanity, the Eschaton has left everyone alone, except for leaving one message (in monumental letters) wherever humanity lives:
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“I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.
I am descended from you, and I live in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.”
.
Any of the scattered human civilizations who try to time-travel are hammered. Hard.
.
Two of the main characters in the series are Martin Springfield and Rachel Mansur. They are from Earth, which is described by the more totalitarian human civilizations elsewhere as “old anarchist Earth.” (p.3). These two characters are tasked with trying to keep stupid human civilizations from violating causality.
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Rachel is a real heroine, a tough combatant and a weary idealist. She is an agent for the Earth’s UN – but this future UN is expressly a “non-government,” a “talking shop” more descended from the Internet Engineering Task Force of today than from today’s UN that was viewed as a “quasi-fascist world government” by “fringe anarchists” of the 20th and 21st centuries, “when strong governments were in fashion….” (p.281). [Am I a fringe anarchist?]
.
When asked if she had ever done prison time on Earth, Rachel replies: “Yeah. Spent eight months inside, once, banged up for industrial espionage by an agricultural cartel. Amnesty Multinational made me a prisoner of commerce and started up a trade embargo: that got me sprung pretty quick.” (pp.122-3). This is the type of humor one finds occasionally in Stross’s work. Rachel remembers an evolved form of Islam on Earth, a murderous fundamentalist sect of Algerian Latter-Day Saints, who kill cosmologists for blasphemy against the prophet Yusuf Smith and who thoroughly suppressed the “Tiplerite heresy.” (p.115).
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An agent from the totalitarian and conservative New Republic considers Rachel, who is an openly individualistic woman, to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” (which of course is the description Lady Caroline Lamb used for Lord Byron).
.
Although Stross does not consider himself to be a “libertarian,” there are enough strains of that worldview in his work to attract libertarians. For instance, Martin Springfield gets in trouble with the repressive New Republic government for telling people in a bar that “the concept of tax is no different from extortion” (p.113) and “a social contract enforced by compulsion is not a valid contract.” When hauled in before an official for this, he is asked, for dossier purposes, what governmental jurisdiction on Earth he is subject to, and he tries to explain to them that he is not a subject of any government. When they cannot comprehend this, he states: “I am a sovereign individual; I’m not owned by any government” (p.114). (This is in the true spirit of “Freeborn” John Lilburne, the great 17th century English Leveler.) Rachel later mentions a “home-grown libertarian underground” on New Republic.
.
The sequel, Iron Sunrise (2004), introduces us to a teenage girl nicknamed Wednesday. She is a rebel, and her story adds to and continues that of Singularity Sky. Both were very enjoyable reads.
.
* *
.
Stross’ novel Saturn’s Children (2008) is the first of a proposed series, with a sequel in the works with a 2013 publishing (working title: Neptune’s Brood). In this far future, all humans have become extinct, but their technology and their androids of various kinds survive and have created a kind of feudal society with aristocrats and workers. Our heroine, Freya, is a female android courtesan of the type originally designed to sexually service human men. There is also a Jeeves Corporation providing a courier service, and every representative office is managed by an android Jeeves. (I envision Stephen Fry in this role.) The ending is nice, and I look forward to the proposed sequel.
.
*
Read any Charles Stross’s novels that are in a series in their proper order. His stand-alone novel, Glasshouse (2006), won a Prometheus Award from the LFS, but I have not found a copy yet. Another stand-alone novel, Accelerando (2005), I have just acquired but not yet read. I intend to search out anything he wrote, as I am a real fan.
.
-Zenwind.
.
English science fiction (SF) author Charles Stross has got me hooked after reading the three novels mentioned below. I first heard of him from a list of nominees and winners of the Prometheus Award from the Libertarian Futurist Society, always a good recommendation. These novels are hard SF, and Stross has an understated dark sense of humor that sneaks up on you and that I like.
.
The two novels making up the “Eschaton” series are Singularity Sky (2003) and its sequel Iron Sunrise (2004). After a “technological singularity” occurs in our near future, suddenly the people of Earth find that 90% of the human population has disappeared overnight. After the humans left on Earth finally recover their economic and scientific strength, they venture out and discover that the missing humans are scattered throughout the galaxy on various worlds.
.
The cause of all this is that an apparently super-strong Artificial Intelligence, calling itself “the Eschaton,” had developed yet farther into the future, and after developing faster-than-light travel and time-travel, it/they came back and intervened in human affairs for the sole reason of preventing human use of time-travel. If humans acquire the ability to travel in time (“violating causality”) they may interfere in earlier history and cancel out the conditions that originally gave rise to the Eschaton’s very existence, deleting it from history and the future.
.
After dispersing humanity, the Eschaton has left everyone alone, except for leaving one message (in monumental letters) wherever humanity lives:
.
“I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.
I am descended from you, and I live in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.”
.
Any of the scattered human civilizations who try to time-travel are hammered. Hard.
.
Two of the main characters in the series are Martin Springfield and Rachel Mansur. They are from Earth, which is described by the more totalitarian human civilizations elsewhere as “old anarchist Earth.” (p.3). These two characters are tasked with trying to keep stupid human civilizations from violating causality.
.
Rachel is a real heroine, a tough combatant and a weary idealist. She is an agent for the Earth’s UN – but this future UN is expressly a “non-government,” a “talking shop” more descended from the Internet Engineering Task Force of today than from today’s UN that was viewed as a “quasi-fascist world government” by “fringe anarchists” of the 20th and 21st centuries, “when strong governments were in fashion….” (p.281). [Am I a fringe anarchist?]
.
When asked if she had ever done prison time on Earth, Rachel replies: “Yeah. Spent eight months inside, once, banged up for industrial espionage by an agricultural cartel. Amnesty Multinational made me a prisoner of commerce and started up a trade embargo: that got me sprung pretty quick.” (pp.122-3). This is the type of humor one finds occasionally in Stross’s work. Rachel remembers an evolved form of Islam on Earth, a murderous fundamentalist sect of Algerian Latter-Day Saints, who kill cosmologists for blasphemy against the prophet Yusuf Smith and who thoroughly suppressed the “Tiplerite heresy.” (p.115).
.
An agent from the totalitarian and conservative New Republic considers Rachel, who is an openly individualistic woman, to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” (which of course is the description Lady Caroline Lamb used for Lord Byron).
.
Although Stross does not consider himself to be a “libertarian,” there are enough strains of that worldview in his work to attract libertarians. For instance, Martin Springfield gets in trouble with the repressive New Republic government for telling people in a bar that “the concept of tax is no different from extortion” (p.113) and “a social contract enforced by compulsion is not a valid contract.” When hauled in before an official for this, he is asked, for dossier purposes, what governmental jurisdiction on Earth he is subject to, and he tries to explain to them that he is not a subject of any government. When they cannot comprehend this, he states: “I am a sovereign individual; I’m not owned by any government” (p.114). (This is in the true spirit of “Freeborn” John Lilburne, the great 17th century English Leveler.) Rachel later mentions a “home-grown libertarian underground” on New Republic.
.
The sequel, Iron Sunrise (2004), introduces us to a teenage girl nicknamed Wednesday. She is a rebel, and her story adds to and continues that of Singularity Sky. Both were very enjoyable reads.
.
* *
.
Stross’ novel Saturn’s Children (2008) is the first of a proposed series, with a sequel in the works with a 2013 publishing (working title: Neptune’s Brood). In this far future, all humans have become extinct, but their technology and their androids of various kinds survive and have created a kind of feudal society with aristocrats and workers. Our heroine, Freya, is a female android courtesan of the type originally designed to sexually service human men. There is also a Jeeves Corporation providing a courier service, and every representative office is managed by an android Jeeves. (I envision Stephen Fry in this role.) The ending is nice, and I look forward to the proposed sequel.
.
*
Read any Charles Stross’s novels that are in a series in their proper order. His stand-alone novel, Glasshouse (2006), won a Prometheus Award from the LFS, but I have not found a copy yet. Another stand-alone novel, Accelerando (2005), I have just acquired but not yet read. I intend to search out anything he wrote, as I am a real fan.
.
-Zenwind.
.
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