The Library People

An idea for a short story, told as a sequence of diary entries as written by the first-person narrator. It's called 'The Library People', or perhaps just 'Periodicals'. Maybe it's a screenplay. Maybe it's been done already.

Circumstances force a man to work in the big local library for a significant period of weeks. He finds a nice quiet spot in the periodicals section, which becomes his usual place, despite the occasionally annoying presence of the marginally crazy who spend their days occupied with impenetrable busy-work, obsessive research through newspaper archives, and scribbling in elastic-bound notebooks. It's like a halfway-house for obsessive compulsives, but, hey, they have to spend their days somewhere, so he's tolerant, so long as they don't smell too bad.

He works steadily as the days pass, but from time to time he just sits and watches the crazies around him, trying to figure out what their OCD tasks involve, what the rituals mean and what they're writing. They see him most days, just as he sees them, so inevitably they talk a little, nod with recognition, but they're reluctant to explain what their work is.

One man in particular guards his notebook fiercely and with apparent paranoia. He's crazy, obviously, but our hero becomes more and more intrigued day by day. Becoming less interested in his own work, he spends most of his time looking for opportunities to eavesdrop on conversations around him, and to catch glimpses of what's being written. It's what he looks forward to each day. It's eventually why he comes.

Bit by bit, as if becoming acquainted to the rhythms and cadences of a new language, the scraps of crazy babbling around him slide into focus, and he picks up conversation fragments. And he's more amazed the more he picks up. This isn't babbling at all. In its own way, the periodicals section is a hive of political intrigue. Names of major politicians, bankers, heads of government and state. Talk of plots, coups, assassinations. What are they up to? Who are these people?

One day, an altercation between the seeming head crazy man and a new security guard gives our hero his chance. He slips the man's closely-guarded notebook into his bag and makes a quick exit, dashing home, scarcely even looking behind him. Safely home, he turns every lock, closes every curtain, disconnects every device, then opens the notebook and reads.

And whatever he'd imagined, the truth is so much bigger. The book is essentially the minutes - encoded, but he has the key now - of a secret, shadow world government, pulling the right strings to its own nefarious ends. The book contains irrefutable proof, plus details of its future plans. Within which is the biggest secret you can possibly imagine. A Dan Brown sort of secret, orchestrated by those hiding in plain sight in the periodicals sections of public libraries across the world, because they're the very last people anyone would suspect, in the very last place.

Our hero is shaken to the core, but resolute. He takes what he has to the newspapers, but they laugh in his face. He takes it to the TV people, but they laugh even harder. By now his own work has been neglected, and he's lost his job, but this is important enough that he can't let go of it. What can he do? Perhaps he's the only one who knows, so he must do something. He must get proof. He'll make them believe him.

Obviously he can't go back to the same library - they know him there now - so he hitches to Washington [or London, if this is set in the UK] and heads for the Library of Congress [or the British Library]. Whatever he needs, it'll be here. He heads for the periodicals section, and sets up camp in a space he can make his own, with the few belongings he has left. He begins digging. Within days this is his home.

One morning, a few days later, a businessman, clearly new to the library, sits down at the next table, plugs in and opens his laptop. Their eyes meet, and the businessman's look is one of disdain and pity.

Our hero has, of course, become one of the Library People.

The Wrong Tree

[An augmented version of a comment posted on Boing Boing concerning the public release of Chris Crawford's 'Storytron' interactive storytelling engine. I should write something longer and more thoughtful about this endeavour, because I've never believed that there was anything to be gained from the approach, and yet Crawford's passion is real. I presented a paper years ago at an academic conference at which he was one of the star speakers, and he's the mad prophet of the gaming/interactive fiction world - Howard Beale without the rage.]

I also tend to think that Crawford is barking up the wrong tree. Worse, I have a nagging feeling that there isn't a tree there at all. Notwithstanding his talent for grandiose self-promotion - not that that's unusual in AI circles - his insistence that what he's doing has anything much to do with stories is making a rod for his own back. What he's doing is (still) interactive game design. Nothing wrong with that, obviously, except when it pretends to be something it isn't.

This sort of story-world as pinball machine - build all of this machinery, give the user some small element of input, analogous to flipper control, and then expect what comes out of the other end to be a story - is a problem in all sorts of ways. Firstly, building the worlds is extraordinarily difficult. It's basically the AI world-knowledge problem. That means almost no-one can/will take the trouble, as I think Crawford has discovered. Secondly, a sequence of events - even a perfectly coherent sequence of events - is not at all the same as a story. Stories need an authorial hand, not just the laws of physics.

I'm also far from convinced that 'interactive fiction' is something people even want. Maybe I'm lacking imagination, but the most profound value in fiction is that we don't interact with it. It's a time when we get to enjoy the skill of the author, into whose hands we willingly place ourselves.

What's in a Game?

A trivial but surprisingly passionate argument with A. a few nights ago, which reminded me of the scene in Radio Days in which the fictional Woody Allen describes his parents arguing about which is the greatest ocean, the Atlantic or the Pacific. How we got there isn't important, but our point of contention was whether motor racing is a sport or not. She says it isn't; I say it is.

'Only connect,' said Forster. Me, I always say 'Only oversimplify,' so I was taken to try to characterise the essences that identify a sport and, conversely, those that identify a game.

It seems to me that the participants in a sport, whether or not they compete at the same time as, and/or alongside, others, are basically competing against the physical world - typically time or gravity. Though there isn't necessarily correspondence between sport and Olympic sport, the Olympic motto does serve as a useful rubric. Citius makes time its opponent, while Altius and Fortius are concerned with pushing against gravity, or physical friction, or some combination of those. It's clearly the case that the earliest Olympic sports, and those we still implicitly recognise as the purest, stick to the physical agenda: athletics is human against clock, throwing of discus or javelin are human against gravity.

A game, on the other hand, is about direct competition between humans, whether it's a matter of achieving the highest score in some common but diametrically opposite goal, in which category almost all ball games fit, or one in which score is fought for according to some variant of a zero-sum system - snooker, lawn bowling.

From my perspective, the key here is what's being competed against, and not necessarily how one does the competing. Specifically, the use of technology is mostly irrelevant. It might be pushing the argument to its limit, but running shoe technology is no less technology than Formula 1 racing car technology, nor is the carbon fibre that goes into pole vaulting. They're still all about faster, or higher, or stronger, and are therefore sports.

As ever, the interesting stuff lies on the margins. No athlete competes in a vacuum, of course. The awarding of medals recognises competition between humans, even in events of individual pursuit. But this is a different sense of competition, I think; it refers more to ranking than to direct conflict. Notwithstanding the sorts of psychological intimidation and gamesmanship which are an intrinsic part of sport, a sprinter has no direct power to slow an opponent; the rules allow them no such power. All they have the power to do is to run faster. Their true opponent is the clock.

Things get slightly greyer in timed events where there is conflict for the physical space. Sprinters might get a lane each, but middle-distance runners don't, and the strategic approach which results changes the shape of the event. The cat-and-mouse silliness of sprint cyclists makes the event only very marginally about sprinting. The physical shape of the streets in Monte Carlo directly influences the shape of the Monaco Grand Prix, in which passing is difficult to impossible, and most cars fail to finish after various collisions in the cramped conditions.

Again, I think these are red herrings, for two reasons. Firstly, such practical strategies and expedients are not intrinsic parts of the respective sports. To argue that Formula 1 (for example) isn't a sport because there's competition between drivers for physical space would be to argue that the difference between it being a sport and not being a sport is the width of the track, and to argue that it's less of a sport at Monte Carlo than at Silverstone, say. To argue that competition for limited space on the racing track puts into question its status as a sport is to question the status of the Tour de France, (to some extent) most marathons, and certainly all middle-distance athletics. Indeed, one would have to argue that the moment 800-metre runners break from their lanes after the first 100-or-so metres, the event magically becomes a non-sport.

Secondly, the practicalities of such events are often matters of convention, which change over time, or are overturned by an innovative individual: Dick Fosbury, for example. The state of cat-and-mouse sprint cycling is a non-essential development, and not intrinsic to the sport. One could easily imagine an alternate world in which runners approached the 100-metre sprint in much the same way, only to be thrown completely - if temporarily - by an outsider who didn't share the same assumptions, and set off like a bullet.

I tend to feel that this notion of what constitutes a sport underlies many informal qualms, or stronger objections, to certain Olympic sports. If a sport involves direct competition against the physical world, then there must be a clear, objective measure of success: typically time, or distance, or height. That many sports - even many traditional Olympic sports - fall back on systems of subjective human judging reveals that they're not really sports at all: figure skating, gymnastics, even boxing. There's no direct, quantifiable competition against the physical world. Interestingly, platform diving is a kind of dance with gravity as its partner, an artistic cashing out of potential energy, rather than a pushing against gravity.

Especially clear are the objections to the Olympic status of events which are unequivocally games, such as basketball, volleyball, (association) football and tennis. That boxing turns out to be a game too is startling, because it needs us to set aside an assumption that physical bravery necessarily entails sport-hood.

With the London games coming up, it's been a staple joke for years that the Brits should get darts put into the schedule, and it's not obvious that it shouldn't be considered a sport, notwithstanding the traditionally-poor physical condition of even its greatest exponents. If the inspiration for the Olympic ideal is a primitive simplicity, represented as those skills needed to thrive in a hostile environment - running fast, jumping obstacles - one might have to add accuracy. If the javelin was once a spear, and the goal was to find food, then accuracy probably counted for at least as much as distance. Archery being a surprisingly pure modern incarnation of an archaic life-skill, its system of measurement no less objective than the tick of a stopwatch, it would seem to qualify as a sport without much argument. Is darts merely miniature archery? If it were, would the miniatureness be significant?

Perversely, darts turns out to be the most marginal case I can think of. Think of archery as refined hunting with bows, and darts as refined archery, and it seems to fit. Ultimately, though - and also notwithstanding the astonishing skills involved - what pushes it from sport to game is the scoring system - indeed the very fact that there is a scoring system. Though the process depends on accuracy, accuracy isn't the principal measure of achievement, any more than accuracy with free-throws is the principal measure of success in basketball. One doesn't measure the success of a darts throw with a ruler, but with chalked numbers on a blackboard. Even if one admits accuracy into the Olympic ideal, along with speed and strength and distance, and even if one admits archery according to that criterion, darts is too much of a numerical construct laid on top of its pure heritage, to make a case. It's not just accuracy. One might just as well try to spike a javelin into numbered circles whitewashed onto the grass, or play discus golf.

Storm

Shibboleth on Toast

I don't need to worry any more about drifting towards bastardised mid-Atlantic speech-patterns. Or, rather, I still need to worry about it, but I don't need to worry that it's already happened, because I have what seems to be a foolproof test: if I can ask for some butter at a commercial eating establishment in Los Angeles and be understood first time, the game's over, and I might as well give up.

Fortunately, I keep failing. I was first aware of this one morning in one of the dorm canteens at USC. Missing some butter for my toast ("Nobody," // He whimpered, // "Could call me // A fussy man; // I only want // A little bit // Of butter for // My bread!"), and - not for the first time - seeing none on the serving tables, I approached the staff behind the hot food counter. My first attempt to describe what I wanted having been met with blank looks, I was suddenly aware of the weird alienness of the word as it came from my mouth, and, like the sort of unavoidable rictus that typically results when one is asked to smile naturally for the camera, the second attempt was weirder still. Resorting to the dumb-show of sweeping the index and middle fingers of my right hand as a virtual knife across a piece of virtual toast, I finally made some sort of contact, but with the comic result that thereafter the serving staff would jokingly - though gently - refer to me using the same mime.

And so it has persisted for a number of years, up to and including a few days ago. Without consciously compromising my British vocabulary very much, I don't seem to have any problem getting around, and mostly scarcely notice any failure to communicate, except when there's a need for butter in a restaurant. The word seems to distill many of the particularly British - and especially north-eastern English - pronunciations: the short, almost simian /u/, the fastidiously-sounded /t/ (never allowed to slide lazily into /d/), and the complete, complete absence of any /r/ sound at the end. Even the initial /b/ plosive is often misheard, and I'm asked, bizarrely: 'Water?'

Fortunately the language school of Basil Fawlty and Manuel left me with the security of being able to bring out 'mantequilla' if I need a big gun, but there's still something comforting in being reminded that I'm not from these parts, even if it takes looking like a dick to get there.

One Post at a Time

Apparently there's a name for what I've been doing all this time: Slow Blogging.

A Familiar Face

Lunch yesterday at Wendy's near USC (a large #7 combo with a small chili). I was wandering away from the counter with my tray when the server asked, as if he knew me from somewhere: "Are you a producer?"

"A producer?" He hadn't said what sort of producer, but this is LA, so it was obvious.

"A producer. A movie producer."

"No!" I laughed, a little too loudly. It might even have been a guffaw. "What makes you say that?"

"I dunno. You have a familiar face."

The whole business made me recall the time about twenty years ago when, standing in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, I was approached by a man who seemed to think I was a drug dealer (or perhaps a user - that probably doesn't make it any better). My own situation might not have improved significantly since then, but the person I'm mistaken for seems to be doing very well for himself.

Quote Unquote

I was struck by this piece in Cinematical, for two reasons. Firstly, the piece in the Onion A.V. Club which it references is, after some preamble, in praise of The Rocketeer, a film I've always thought had a rough deal. Notwithstanding some slightly bland casting, it's inventive, playful, and wonderful to look at. Secondly, the Cinematical piece takes time in passing to praise the quality of the writing in the Onion - in this case by Nathan Rabin. At the time I was taken myself by this line from Scott Tobias's review of Michael Haneke's own remake of Funny Games:

Haneke's film, by contrast [with Gus van Sant's remake of Psycho], doesn't play the audience like a piano so much as rap its fingers for touching the keys

That's as elegant as it is incisive; it has a standalone quality, as if on the page of some dictionary of quotations.

Which gives me the opportunity to pop something I've had on my blog stack for a while: my hatred of the exaltation of quotations to the level of mystical wisdom. The misguided elitism inherent in the gathering of Important Words by Important People obscures the fact that there's wisdom everywhere, and that it doesn't need to be synonymous with fame. There's insight in the New Yorker and the Onion both, and good writing in both. Quotation gathering becomes an exercise in taking the pith from the already-famous, rather than recognizing the worth in writing of all forms. The merit of the words, which ought to derive from their intrinsic value and beauty, is borrowed from the standing of their author. It's a form of argument by authority. If reference works of quotations have any value, it ought not to be significantly diminished with the names of the authors removed.

But, of course, in most situations the authors of quotations are the specific point. When I see posters or bumper stickers from Einstein's quote-whore period, the odds are far better than even that the intention will be either anti-science or dismissive of science, so his weighty approval is crucial. I'm weary of seeing "Imagination is more important than knowledge" stripped of its context and its underlying complexity - a recognition that, from a solid and rigorous base of knowledge, leaps of intuition can take us to new areas of conceptual space which we can then acquire rigorous knowledge of (essentially Margaret Boden's model of creativity) - such that what's left is a licence to sneer at the bean-counters of fundamental science. That's only possible by co-opting his massive reputation. The words alone aren't enough.

Having said all of that, here's a quotation I particularly like:

The problem with communism is that its supporters think it works, but it doesn't. The problem with capitalism is that its supporters know it doesn't work, and they don't care.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

Actually, that wasn't Galbraith. I made it up. Come friendly GOOG and search North Gare. There's naught but fake quotations there.

If 'religion is poetry', it's blank verse

[A few months ago, a friend, who is an ordained minister, asked what I thought about a piece at salon.com, which is an interview by Steve Paulson with James Carse, who ran the Religious Studies program at NYU for 30 years, about his book The Religious Case Against Belief. A lot of the issues are the same ones which came up in my comment/post regarding Mark Lawson's recent waste of space in the Guardian, so this is a bit of a companion piece. What's below is the reply I sent to my friend, with a couple of minor tweaks here and there.]

Some general thoughts first, and then some more specific.

It's not a bad interview, in that the questions are good ones, which do well at picking up apparent ambiguities and inconsistencies. Carse's views seem to be an interesting mixture of the sensibly pragmatic and the more, um, vague and wishful. He seems a good example of the sort of intellectual who's become very good at compartmentalising his way of seeing the world, so that he can apply as much critical thinking as he wants over here, but doesn't allow himself to apply so much over there.

The parts about Jesus, for example, seem entirely sensible. But the way in which he suggests in several places that there's something intrinsically wonderful about the mysterious and unknowable is deeply uncritical. It's where I lose him completely.

I also found myself hearing my PhD supervisor asking 'Yes, but what do you mean by that', over and over again, because what might have seemed perfectly clear and formal to me wasn't anything of the sort. It's generally hard for someone in the sciences - even someone as marginal as me - to deal with the hand-waving generalities in a piece like this.

But he's also critical of the new crop of atheists. 'What these critics are attacking is not religion, but a hasty caricature of it,' he writes in his new book, 'The Religious Case Against Belief.'

I think there's a good degree of disingenuousness here. He might have (what seems to him to be) a more sophisticated view of god and religion, but it's very much the case that for hundreds of millions of theists around the world their god is a real figure, who actually created the world, who actually hears prayers, heals the sick, and so on. It's probably true that a good deal of what Dawkins and Hitchins, etc., are attacking, isn't the more vague beliefs of someone like Carse, but that doesn't mean those beliefs don't exist, and I suspect they're far more common. So I don't think it's a caricature.

To Carse, religion is all about longevity; it's what unites people over the millennia.

As is made more clear later on, I think he has this backwards. Rather than religion being defined as that which has longevity, I think it's far more that theism is just a very powerful meme. It persists for all sorts of reasons, which have to do with indoctrination, feelings of community, ritual, comfort, etc., and also poor science education in many parts of the world.

I also slightly resist the implication that longevity is in itself a good thing. To the extent that a belief system or a way of life doesn't change, it often means that it's perpetuating dogma. Things should change, as we find out more about the world, and about life. That's a good thing.

He writes that religion's vitality is based on mystery and unknowability: 'Religion in its purest form is a vast work of poetry.'

I'm not sure what this means. I'm sure that most theists would argue that there is poetry in religion and its rituals, but I'm not sure how many would agree that that's its purest form. This is also where he begins to place ignorance on some sort of pedestal, and there's something offensive to me about that.

Exactly. In fact, very passionate believers are often not at all religious. However, it does happen to be the case that people who hold on to beliefs with great passion begin to describe themselves as religious.

No. I think he fails to qualify this nearly enough. Some might well use vaguely religious-sounding language, but if one equates passion with the religious, then the word 'religious' is being used so vaguely as to lose all meaning. Passions can be rational and truth-based.

A belief system is meant to be a comprehensive network of ideas about what one thinks is absolutely real and true. Within that system, everything is adequately explained and perfectly reasonable. You know exactly how far to go with your beliefs and when to stop your thinking. A belief system is defined by an absolute authority. The authority can be a text or an institution or a person. So it's very important to understand a belief system as independent of religion. After all, Marxism and Nazism were two of the most powerful belief systems ever.

He conflates two very different concepts here, and ends up confusing the issue. I mostly buy his definition of a belief system - in that it seeks to describe something that is 'absolutely real and true'. But I don't think that includes political/social philosophies such as Marxism. I'm not really a political scientist, but I don't think (for example) Marxism seeks to represent some absolute truth. It's just a way for a society to organise itself. There's no meaningful sense in which Marxism could be claimed to be true.

I think he's right that a belief system doesn't have to involve religion, but the difference between a belief system (in his definition) and a political or social philosophy is just as important. One says: 'I believe this is true'. The other says: 'I believe this is a good way to live'. It's the difference between what's true and what's pragmatic.

In your book, you say the only defining characteristic of religion is its longevity. It has to be around for a very long time to qualify as a religion.

Exactly. That's a very interesting contrast with belief systems. Belief systems have virtually no longevity. Think of Marxism. As a serious political policy, it lasted only about 70 or 80 years. Nazism only went 12 years.

He gets very confused here. In contrasting belief systems with religions, he seems to be saying that religions aren't in fact belief systems - which doesn't make much sense. Even by his own definition of a belief system, they clearly are. Following on from what I wrote above, I think a much better dichotomy is between religious belief systems and non-religious belief systems - or between religious belief systems and political/social philosophies.

But even with that dichotomy, you're really trying to compare apples and helicopters. They don't work in the same sorts of ways, and don't have the same sorts of goals. Political/social philosophies appear, vanish, and reappear over and over again across the globe, over millennia. What doesn't happen is that they're somehow proved false and then ditched forever. What we might call 'Marxism' might have been found thousands of years ago, and might be found again thousands of years in the future. It's not so specific a 'belief system' that it's delimited by time and place. It's more general than that, and 'Marxism' is only a temporary name in our society and our time for the concept. A religion, on the other hand, is defined by its specific beliefs, idols, rituals, etc. Religions across the world and across time might share concepts, but they're different religions.

So one can only talk about something like Marxism having lasted 70 or 80 years in such and such a society, at such and such a time. It'll be back, in other places and at other times. His claim that Nazism only lasted 12 years is only true using a very odd interpretation. As a belief system, it's alive and well - albeit smaller. What he's talking about is merely a single instance of a political movement, whose demise owed far more to some terrible military decisions than to some sort of natural lifespan. If Hitler had concentrated more on the Western front than Russia, he'd at the very least have lasted quite a bit longer. I don't think that sort of circumstantial eventuality is really what Carse is talking about.

And his linking of religion with longevity is once again backwards. The point is that religions tend to persist, because of how they're constructed, not that belief systems have to have persisted to be called religions. Should Christianity in its youth have been called a religion? Of course. There was no need for it to wait several hundreds of years to qualify.

The reason the great religions don't run out as quickly is that they're able to maintain within themselves a deeper sense of the mystery, of the unknowable, of the unsayable, that keeps the religion alive and guarantees its vitality.

This is really tantamount to saying that religions persist because they don't make any falsifiable claims. They carve out a safe haven of vague mysticism, which is beyond any practical scrutiny. The difference between that and a political/social philosophy such as Marxism is clear: Marxism can be put into practice, and tested within a time and a society. If it doesn't work - for whatever reasons - it can be rejected. That doesn't mean it can't work, in some other time and place; merely that it's been rejected in that context.

So, I think he has a point here. One of the reasons religion persists is that it hides in constructed mysticism from any practical testing. Unlike him, I think, that position strikes me as anti-reason. It tries to make a virtue of ignorance, which is pretty reprehensible.

But if the only test of a religion is its staying power, are you saying Mormonism, which has been around less than 200 years, is not a religion? Or Pentecostalism, which some religious scholars say is the most important religious movement of the last century?

Those are large questions. Will Mormonism hold out over the centuries? It's a difficult judgment. I don't have an answer for that. What I'd really like to focus on is how extremely long the great traditions are. There are other traditions that aren't that long: Sikhism, various kinds of Middle Eastern religions, mystical movements. Mormonism is an open question. You could even talk about Scientology. Does it really have staying power over the centuries? I would doubt it, but we don't know yet.

He's talking himself in circles here, and he avoids the question, which isn't whether these things will last, but whether the fact that they're still relatively young means that they're not religions. He's begging the question: something has to have persisted to be a religion, and it has to be a religion in order to persist.

Are you religious yourself?

I would say yes, but in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated with the unknowability of what it means to be human, to exist at all. Or as Martin Heidegger asked, why is there something rather than nothing? There's no answer to that. And yet it hovers behind all of our other answers as an enduring question. For me, it puts a kind of miraculous glow on the world and my experience of the world. So in that sense, I am religious.

He's right. His enthusiastic embrace of the 'unknowability' (whether that's how things are or not) strikes me as deeply religious. The scientific mind sees the gaps in knowledge as a challenge, and tries to fill them. If it turns out that some gaps can't be filled, well, that's a shame, and regrettable, but it'll keep on trying. The religious mind leaps all too eagerly to ideas of the mystical, the unknowable, and wraps them around it like a comfort blanket, as if there's something upsettingly dangerous about knowledge. Or it makes stuff up to fill the gap.

In fact, human intelligence has a certain limitation that keeps it from being able to embrace the infinite or the whole. Therefore, every one of our statements about God and the universe is tinged with a degree of ignorance. I would say that I am deeply moved by the thought of an unnameable mystery. If you then ask me, exactly which mystery are you then referring to? I can't answer. That's as far as I can go. But it's got its grip on me, for sure.

See above.

His claim that there's a 'limitation' on human intelligence, which licenses the ignorance that he's so fond of, reminds me very much of the way that the whole new age subculture trots out concepts of quantum physics - which they barely know anything about other than the name - to justify pretty much any crackpot bit of alternative medicine or pseudo-science. As he pretty much admits here, his 'beliefs' are so vague as to be meaningless.

Are you talking about atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?

Yes. There are several problems with their approach. It has an inadequate understanding of the nature of religion. These chaps are very distinguished thinkers and scientists, very smart people, but they are not historians or scholars of religion.

The obvious irony here is that he's only just finished talking with apparent authority about the limitations of human intelligence - as if he feels entirely qualified in that area - yet is quick to deny the validity of the views of others who aren't experts in his own field. That attitude towards science is all too common, unfortunately.

PZ Myers' 'Courtier's Reply' is relevant here, I think.

The basic idea is that theology is largely about intricate argument concerning the exact nature and construction of the Emperor's new clothes.

To be an atheist, you have to be very clear about what god you're not believing in. Therefore, if you don't have a deep and well-developed understanding of God and divine reality, you can misfire on atheism very easily.

Again the Courtier's Reply. It's really not clear what he means by a 'deep and well-developed understanding of God and divine reality', other than what the Emperor's new clothes happen to look like and be made from. It's really like saying to the child who points out that the Emperor is naked: "You really need a deep and well-developed understanding of fabric and tailoring before you can say that the Emperor is naked." Well, no, not really.

And yet, you've just told me that you yourself don't believe in a divine reality. In some ways, your critique of belief systems seems to go along with what the new atheists are saying.

The difference, though, is that I wouldn't call myself an atheist. To be an atheist is not to be stunned by the mystery of things or to walk around in wonder about the universe.

There are two important points here. The first is - once again - that to be 'stunned by the mystery of things' is just a simple-minded embrace of ignorance. It might be the premature leap to a conclusion that something is unknowable when it is nothing of the sort; alternatively, it might be an acknowledgement of the inevitability of certain gaps in knowledge. Either way, to celebrate such gaps is a strange and primitive position.

The second point is that there's a good deal of straw man in Carse's argument. An atheist might not celebrate gaps in knowledge, but they're perfectly capable of finding plenty that's worthy of awe in understanding how the universe works. The implication in Carse's words is that atheism is somehow dulling of the senses, and that's not at all true. To argue that ignorance is somehow more life-enhancing than a true understanding of the processes behind life is backwards indeed.

Even if atheism were somehow dulling of the senses, that would not in itself be an argument for theism, except as a comfort blanket. Something being emotionally appealing doesn't make it more likely to be true.

Respecting the mysterious

[Copying here a comment I just posted to a piece by Mark Lawson on the Guardian website, which seems to me a perfect example - as the first commenter testily notes - of the borderline ignorance of the scientific model among even the best and brightest of those whose intellectual centres of gravity are in the humanities.]

Echoing a couple of other commenters: this is a really woolly-headed mangling of a number of issues.

...it has always seemed vital to me that those who reject the sacred continue to respect the mysteries of how and why we are here.

The idea of 'respecting' a mystery can mean several things, just as the very idea of a 'mystery' means different things to different people. If 'respecting' a mystery means blindly assuming that there is a mystery in the first place, then even this can be a serious mistake. For example, a believer in homeopathy might profess to respect the 'mystery' of how it works, since no plausible scientific explanation exists. The problem with that is that homeopathy very clearly doesn't work. Properly controlled double-blind studies show nothing other than the placebo effect. But if one took as axiomatic that it does work, and then retained sufficient 'respect' for the 'mystery' of how it works, one might resist - or even suppress - the truth that it doesn't work. 'Respect' for a mystery can very easily obscure the fact that there's nothing mysterious at all going on. This has clearly been true of the 'mystery' of the origin of species. Evolution by natural selection removes any such mystery. Nevertheless, the simple-minded, aesthetic, emotional or dogmatic appeal of the 'mystery' is the foundation for anti-scientific nonsense such as 'intelligent design'.

If, on the other hand, something genuinely is a mystery - 'first cause', for example - it's reasonable to propose that the most 'respectful' position to take is the most conservative one: that is, to fill the gap with nothing which isn't consistent with what we do know, and otherwise to claim nothing. In that respect, it seems to me that good science is entirely consistent with the idea of respecting such mysteries. Rather than a self-satisfied pleasure in the gap that a 'mystery' represents - a kind of aesthetic which values ignorance - science approaches such gaps in knowledge as challenges to be overcome. But until and unless they are overcome, its claims are appropriately modest, and gaps aren't in the meantime filled with wishful thinking.