Regruntled.com

I’m reading The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron.  Her thesis is that creativity comes from the Creator, and the book’s subtitle is “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity”.  I think this is totally wrong.

It’s true that we use the same word, “creator”, for both artists and gods, but it does not follow that artists and gods do the same sort of thing.  The Genesis story is “Let there be light”.  There are no preliminary sketches, no outlines, no rough drafts, no prototypes, no models… the Creation was definitely not the work of an Artist.

If we focus on the adjective, “creative”, it’s clear that evolution is a much better model of the creative process.  Evolution builds on what has gone before, and introduces new ideas in the form of mutations.  Genetic combination tries out many, many ideas at the same time, and natural selection culls the ones that don’t work.

Artists do the same thing.  They don’t create something from nothing, they build on what has gone before.  They try out new ideas.  They throw out the bad ideas and they keep trying new variations on the good ones.

The book succeeds in part by flattering the reader: what you are doing is god-like.  God as artist implies artist as god.  I confess to enjoying the god-as-mathematician and god-as-programmer versions of this theme, but a flattering analogy is not necessarily an accurate analogy.

I keep getting into this recurring argument about software projects: there will be some kind of problem, and someone will say “we can fix this by adding another table to the database and adding a few more buttons to the user interface.”  I will say, “no, no, we can’t fix this by making the system more complicated, we have to fix it by making the system simpler!”  I typically lose the argument.  The system becomes more complicated, which leads to additional problems, which are addressed by adding even more complexity.  And so it goes.

Mouse’s piece on Practical Demonology got me to thinking about this in relation to religion, which, after all, is cultural software.  Monotheism is very simple, which I like.  Nice, minimalist design.  And yet, complexity creeps back into Catholicism:

• The hierarchy of angels: Raphael, the archangel in charge of healing.
• Demonology: Leonard or “Master Leonard” is a demon or spirit in the Dictionnaire Infernal, Grand-master of the nocturnal orgies of demons.
• Patron saints: St. Gertrude of Nivelles, invoked against fever, rats, and mice, particularly field-mice.

While I’m at it, let me mention the proliferation of superheros with obscure powers, as opposed to the simple, all-purpose Superman.

So I’m reading in Scientific American about the differences in color vision between African primates and South American primates.  The authors present a plausible explanation involving common ancestry, followed by genetic isolation 40 or so million years ago when South America and Africa drifted apart, followed by different random mutations on each side of the Atlantic.

All of which got me thinking about the Argument from Design.  I understand why people find deliberate design more plausible than a series of random accidents.  But suppose you frame the question in a different way:

Which is more plausible, a series of random accidents, or a deliberate plan to make things look like a series of random accidents? 

Because that’s really the Creationist alternative: on a Thursday afternoon 6,000 years ago, God created primates in South America and Africa and made their DNA just similar-but-different enough to look like they had a common ancestor 40 million years ago and had different random mutations since.

So: randomness for No Reason, or the appearance of randomness for a Hidden Reason?  Either way, you end up at Just Because.  I prefer the simpler version.

Reader jde of the Regruntled Tokyo Bureau sends a legend of Jesus’ burial in Aomori Prefecture, Japan.

According to the local legend, Christ first came to Japan, aged 21, during the reign of the 11th emperor, Suinin, and landed at the port of Hashidate on the Japan Sea coast. Apparently, he settled in Etchu province where, under the tutelage of a great master, he studied Japanese language, literature and various other subjects. The Legend of Daitenku Taro Jurai (Daitenku Taro Jurai was the name Christ is said to have later taken) claims that at the end of his 11-year stay, Christ returned to Judea, aged 33, where he taught about the “sacred land” of Japan. But, unfortunately, “Christ’s teachings about Japan were considered too radical,” and he was condemned to death.

The New Testament teaches Jesus was crucified at Golgotha, rose from the dead after three days and later ascended into Heaven. However, according to the legend of Herai, Jesus escaped this fate, and instead his brother Isukiri was nailed to the cross and died. Christ, meanwhile, fled with his disciples and went into hiding, carrying locks of the Virgin Mary’s hair and his brother’s ear. After an arduous journey across Siberia, Christ finally returned to Japan and settled in Herai where he changed his name, married a Japanese woman called Miyuko, fathered three daughters and lived to the age of 106.

It sounds like a tall tale, but no stranger than stories of burning bushes, the parting of the Red Sea and water being turned into wine.

I’ve heard of Jesus spending his Missing Years in India, and there is a competing grave in Srinagar.  There are also stories of Jesus in southern France, some of which are used in The Da Vinci Code.  Jesus in Japan is new to me.  I am reminded of two American phrases: “George Washington slept here” and “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?”

From SMBC comics. This almost makes Young Earth Creationism sound more plausible.

Information Age Prayer offers to say your prayers for you for a small monthly fee.  By machine.  Of course, one never knows if something like this is a spoof or not, and in fact the best spoofs hover right on the edge of plausibility. 

But if Scientology is not a spoof, maybe this is not a spoof either.  Spoof or not, it is very elaborate:

Information Age Prayer was founded in 2009 with the aim of helping those who are unable to pray as frequently as they would like. By using the latest technology in text-to-speech synthesizers we are able to provide the service at very affordable rates.

 

All Jewish prayers are voiced in English, with the computer speakers facing Jerusalem.

 

All Muslim prayers are voiced in English, with the computer speakers facing Mecca.

 

Your privacy is protected, all prayers are not audible outside of the Information Age Prayer location. While it is certain that God hears the prayers, we cannot guarantee that other supernatural beings do not overhear or otherwise obtain knowledge of them.

That last part is unsettling.  Another supernatual being… listening in… taking notes… making a list and checking it twice.  I suppose that could happen without the computers, too.

See also: Spamming God.

The title was irresistible, and I recognized the author from his Finite and Infinite Games.  The author compares and contrasts belief systems and religions.

Belief systems are about answers; belief systems are total, in that they have answers for everything.  Belief systems are characterized by boundaries, with a false certainty within the boundary and a willful ignorance about everything outside the boundary.  For example, the Young Earth Creationists are certain that the earth is 6,000 years old and are willfully ignorant about geology and carbon dating.

Religions, on the other hand, are about questions ( a “higher ignorance”) rather than answers, and have horizons rather than barriers.  A horizon is not a fixed barrier; as one approaches the horizon, the horizon recedes, revealing new territory.  In the author’s view, Christianity as a whole is a religion, encompassing the Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and Evangelical belief systems.

The horizons vs. boundaries imagery is very intriguing, but the author is not very clear on what, other than beliefs, constitutes a religion.  In a way, one can’t fault him for being vague, since he says religions are more about questions than answers.  This seems just a bit too convenient.

It turns out that the boundary metaphor is recycled from Finite and Infinite Games.  The higher ignorance is rather similar to Nicholas of Cusa’s “learned ignorance” from the 1400s.  And Wikipedia says of the author:

He does not believe in any God, but describes himself as religious “in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated with the unknowability of what it means to be human, to exist at all.”

That explains it.  “In the sense that…”  This animal is a cat, in the sense that it barks at the moon.  I’m not sympathetic.  The purpose of philosophy is to clarify our thinking,  and abusing the English language doesn’t help.  The book should be titled The Philosophical Case against Belief.  A religion without beliefs is indistinguishable from philosophy.  A religion with beliefs is on its way to becoming a belief system.

I picked up this book in the New Arrivals section at the library, which is a great way to find things that you weren’t looking for.  The book is billed as a refutation of the New Atheism (Dawkins, etc.), but it is nothing of the sort.  It is in fact an exposition of Scholasticism, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Augustine, drawing on Aristotle.  Scholasticism is full of arguments like:

X, and therefore Y, and therefore Z, which is another name for God.

The problem is that Z is never quite equal to the God of the Bible.  The Scholastics took Aristotle as their starting point, Catholicism as their end point, and tried to fill in the details.  Not surprisingly, the result is a godawful mess.

The author thinks that human philosophy reached its apex in 1300 AD and has been going downhill ever since.  He thinks that Science was a big mistake because it valued experiments over reason.  At the same time, he thinks that the Reformation was a big mistake because it valued  faith and revelation over reason.  Now this is an interesting philosophical position to be in, where you find Intelligent Design and Evolution to be equally deluded.

A more interesting book would put Aristotle in the 21st century and see what happens.  I like to think that Aristotle would recast his philosophy in terms of information theory and produce something that appeals to computer nerds and science fiction fans.