Seventh Son

by Orson Scott Card

•p. 73:
“…If Mama believes in God and Papa doesn’t, how do I know which is right?”
…“How do I know things like that, when Mama says one thing and Papa says another?”
…“Al, I got to tell you, I wisht I knew. Sometimes, I figure ain’t nobody knows nothing.”

        I can understand a twenty-two-year-old (or anyone) not knowing the answer to this, and I certainly understand a six-year-old not knowing, but I know, and if Card doesn’t, this explains just about everything that bothers me about his work.

[Thursday, March 13, 2008 9:38 PM: I don’t mean anything esoteric by this, just that if you don’t know what the truth is, about religious questions or anything else, you try to figure it out, by gathering evidence, weighing it, and trying to come to a conclusion using your powers of reason. This seems obvious, and it is, but it seems to me that for many people, it simply does not occur to them to use the same method they would use to answer any ordinary question to answer questions of religion or faith.]

•p. 94: “He thought of writing down that thought, but decided against it. It had no traces on it save the prints of his own soul—neither the marks of heaven, nor of hell. By this he knew that it hadn’t been given to him. He had forced the thought himself. So it couldn’t be prophecy, and couldn’t be true.”
        Is this what Card believes? Is he truly that simple in matters of faith, probing and prodding, pushing at the boundaries of his belief but never allowing himself to question the center? Or—gasp—does he not believe at all, and set these traps within his works so only the very intelligent will see the flaws in the logic an begin to question their own beliefs, while anyone else simply sees a believing man asking intelligent, hard questions? He did say that he was strongly influenced by Ayn Rand, after all.
        Unfortunately as always, the most likely explanation is also the most mundane: He’s an intelligent believer who has many doubts, and these doubts and questions come out in his work. But I can always hope. He seems too intelligent not to see the flaws in his logic.
        Heres a case in point, the best example I’ve seen of him coming so close, then missing:

        I’ll do the Wyrms thing later. That’s it, it has to be, the Ayn Rand theory is true. It’s a goddamn puzzle, and he’s done it again, just like in Wyrms: He’ll ask a question, give the wrong answer, and then, several pages later, give the right one! He’s smarter than I ever imagined. [I don’t think I ever did “the Wyrms thing.” I think I know what I was going to do, but I’ll have to reread the book to lay it out. Sometime. The below is the aforementioned case in point.]

•p. 132: “Everything possible to be believed is image of truth. If it feels true to me, then there is something true in it, even if it isn’t all true. And if I study it out in my mind, then maybe I can find what parts of it are true and what parts are false, and—” [emphasis added]
        Which is the precise answer to the question that started this discussion, umpteen pages back. He goes on:
‘…if something just plain didn’t make sense to Alvin, he didn’t believe it, and no amount of quoting from the Bible would convince him.’

The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB)

•p. 7: “…modern study of these books (the Pentateuch [the first five books of the Old Testament]) has revealed variations of style, and repetitions, and contradictions in the narrative, which make it impossible to ascribe the whole work to a single author.”
        If this is true, this is a complete killer to the idea of a bible code.

Update: Saturday, January 5, 2008 9:34 PM
•See Cracking the Bible Code for my more recent thoughts on the Bible code subject.

The Bible Code

•As absolutely astonishing as this letter-skip Bible code is, I am convinced that there is more even underlying that. There are many ways to encode text.

•I must know if there are ancient Egyptian texts—the Book of the Dead, perhaps?—that show the same sort of coding.

•p. 31: no. No, no way, absolutely not, no. I have had no problem with anything up to this point—there was nothing to have a problem with. It was all facts, no opinion—except with the authors’ opinion that Rabin’s murder could have been averted—which is the same issue I’m addressing here.
        Einstein—“The distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.” Hawking—“Time travel might be within our capabilities in the future.” NO. Time travel is not theoretically impossible like creating matter or energy, it is logically impossible, like Mike (tho’ I disagree) says the sort of prophecy exhibited in the Bible code is, or like, if I understand it properly, Einstein says travelling faster than light is.
        No amount of change in our understanding of the Universe changes logic. What we call Time is merely duration, and duration is only change. Time I suppose, is simply the measurement of the rate of change versus some other rate of change (change being relative movement).

Update: Saturday, January 5, 2008 8:51 PM
•See Cracking the Bible Code for my more recent thoughts on the Bible code subject.

•The discussion on Time is a little confusing. How I would say that now is that Time (or time; I’m not making a big deal about the capital letter) is a measurement of relative change, in the same way that Distance is a measurement of relative position.

Cracking the Bible Code

• p. 83: This accuracy/inaccuracy in the Jewish Lunar Month is, although this will surely be ignored by everyone, the greatest confirmation—yea, proof—of my theory that the Torah is the product not of myth and mysticism, nor of God, but of an incredibly advanced human culture (the same logic also rules out aliens). The proof is simply this: The Jewish calculation was more accurate than anyone else's—in fact as accurate as theoretically possible without going into space—but it was inaccurate. God—or aliens—would have known the correct value. Unless the decoding was wrong, or the Moon has slowed since then, or the value somehow got changed by this insignificant amount (in God's name, how?), or the satellite data is somehow wrong, this is conclusive unless you are willing to accept God the liar or God the fool. I would very much like to know what the Egyptian values for this are.
        Indeed, the very fact that only the first five books of the Bible are encoded in this fashion is strong evidence to support my thesis. Of all the Bible—even of all known religious works—the books written by Moses are the only ones with this sort of coding. Why? Why would God never do this again? I say it is because it was Moses himself, not God, who composed the pentateuch and the code within, based on his great arcane knowledge he learned from the Egyptians (Much thanks to Graham Hancock and his The Sign and the Seal, particularly chapters 12 and 13, for the inspiration for all of this).


Update: Monday, July 25, 2005
I have come to the conclusion that the entire Bible Code is fraudulent. Though I haven't made an extremely extensive study of the matter, the very method that is used to find coded material (deciding what you want to find and then looking for it) pretty much shows the entire Code to be spurious. You can (and people have) find any number of things in a complex work like the Bible, but that doesn't mean that they're authentic or prophetic. The Code only tells us what we want to hear. What finally convinced me was a History Channel special that, while it doesn't set out to debunk the Code, lays out far more clearly than the book mentioned above does the incredibly subjective and non-scientific way the Code's messages are "discovered." Too bad. And it fit in so nicely with Hancock too.

Reason.com has some more information on the subject.

Atheism: The Case Against God (Part 2)

• p. 29: “What is the theist attempting to establish the existence of?” He isn’t. He’s not. He won’t. It is not the conclusion of the theist that God exists, it is his premise. It’s a given. It’s the basis of all he believes, put there by non-rational means. He is not searching for truth, he is not willing to accept any contradictions to his beliefs, unless the emotional contradictions become too overwhelming to ignore.
• p. 30: “Even if it is demanded that the existence of god be accepted on faith, we must still know what it is that we are required to have faith in.” Not true. You must have faith now, in whatever I tell you, now or later.
• p. 31: “…to state that ‘god exists’ is to communicate nothing at all; it is as if nothing has been said.” Dammit, stop talking as if the religionists were rational. They’re not, almost by definition. You will understand nothing about religion until you accept this. You believe what you’re told to believe, because you have been told to believe it, because you’re evil if you don’t. This works because man, while capable of rationality, is not inherently rational. Pure rationality is often not as good a survival tactic as doing what you’re told. Religion is there to ensure that a person’s rational, selfish tendencies are quashed in favor of behavior that benefits the community as a whole.
• p. 32: “and it is instructive to note that, historically, more blood has been spilled in religious wars between theists of different persuasions than between theists and atheists.”
• • Have there been any wars between theists and non-theists before the communists? More to the point, did there exist a group of atheists large enough to wage war? Until the advent of science, atheism, in my view, was not a tenable stance.
• I’m beginning to regard this guy as either an idiot or as blindly attached to his beliefs as the religionists are to theirs. Obviously, someone who believes in the deity of Earth or Nature believes these things to be living, intelligent entities capable of deliberately affecting the world we live in and the lives of believers and/or nonbelievers. I’m sorry, but that qualifies as a god for me.
• p. 36–7: “To further illustrate the importance of the supernatural or transcendental element in theism, consider the following hypothetical situation. In another solar system, we discover an alien form of life, a form which is superior to man in all respects. These advanced creatures have an immense life span, superior strength, agility and mobility, and a superior capacity for memory and abstract thought. Does it follow, in virtue of these superior capacities, that these creatures should be designated as gods? No. Because despite the superiority of these creatures in relation to man, they are nevertheless bound by the natural laws of the universe. They are subject to the same physical and logical laws as man. If we did choose to call these beings ‘gods,’ this would mean that any creature who is superior to another creature thereby becomes a ‘god’—which would clearly lead to a chain of absurdities. A dog would be a god with respect to a plant. A man would be a god with respect to lower life forms. A genius would be a god in relation to a man of average intelligence, who would himself be a god when compared to a moron. These uses of ‘god’ may have a place as poetic metaphors, but they are chaotic nonsense if employed philosophically.”
• • Look: Probably the best overall definition of a god is a being of such transcendent power that we as humans cannot touch that power, and they can dispose of us as they will, with only the interference of other gods to stop them. The ancients, when they created these gods, had no inkling that they were violating physical laws—would probably not have created gods that could do the impossible. Godhood is about power levels and creation—that’s all.

And at that I stop reading, at least for now. For if he doesn’t realize the truth of what I’ve said above, I don’t see what value the rest of his work can have.

Atheism: The Case Against God

(I got sick of Art of War)

• p. 9–10: “Properly considered, agnosticism is not a third alternative to theism and atheism because it is concerned with a different aspect of religious belief. Theism and atheism refer to the presence of absence of belief in a god; agnosticism refers to the impossibility of knowledge with regard to a god or supernatural being.”
• • I disagree strongly with his presumption that agnosticism necessarily indicates that God or the existence of god is unknowable. I think that many agnostics (myself included, in the past) would disagree with this presumption, and say that it can only mean that it is unknown—by anyone, or merely by them. His definition of atheism as including most agnostics is good, but there is no reason for everyone to accept it. I see no reason why three divisions work any less well than two.

• p. 11:

“Whether this account represents the exact position of Thomas Huxley is not entirely clear. At times, as we have seen, he seems to indicate that the existence of the supernatural, while possible, is unknowable. Elsewhere, however, he writes that “I do not very much care to speak of anything as ‘unknowable.’” And in summarizing the fundamentals of agnosticism, Huxley does not refer to anything as unknowable or “insoluble.”

…it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism.…the application of the principle results in the denial of, or the suspension of judgment concerning, a number of propositions respecting which our contemporary ecclesiastical “gnostics” profess entire certainty.

This passage suggests that, in Huxley’s opinion, there is not sufficient evidence to justify the belief in a god, so one should suspend judgment on this matter. In discussing whether the existence of a god is unknowable in principle or simply unknown at the present time, he writes:

What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I know nothing; and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my faculties. But whether these things are knowable by anyone else is exactly one of those matters which is beyond my knowledge, though I may have a tolerably strong opinion as to the probabilities of the case.

Huxley is reluctant to uphold the absolute unknowability of the supernatural, and he wishes to maintain instead that, as far as be knows, knowledge of the supernatural lies beyond the power of man's faculties. It would not be stretching the point to say that, in Huxley’s view, the knowability of the supernatural is itself an issue which is unknowable.”

• • How odd—I understand completely what Huxley is saying. He believes that the truth in this matter is unknown, not unknowable, but that the problem may just be beyond human capacity to solve. But this does not equate to the truth being theoretically unknowable; merely that we may not have the ability, as humans, to find and understand it. The concept focuses on the limitations of humans, not of the Universe.        In fact, I cannot argue with Huxley’s position. Do I, can I, know for sure that there is no god or God? No. Neither can I know with certainty that fairies do not exist, or that alien abductions do not regularly take place, or that white mice don’t secretly run the world. I merely know that there is insufficient evidence to indicate that these things are real, and that there is significant evidence against these ideas. In fact, the only real evidence for Christianity is that so many people believe in it. If not for that, it could easily be dismissed as foolishness.

• He is (p. 11, e.g.) being ’way too pedantic and repetitive. I’ve got it already. This is a trap I could easily fall into in my writing, as I do in my speaking. Bᴇ ᴄᴀʀᴇғᴜʟ! Have others read it to make sure.
• Rule: Don’t fuck with other people’s definitions unless you have a damned good reason. On page 13 [–14: “Atheism may be divided into two broad categories: implicit and explicit. (a) Implicit atheism is the absence of theistic belief without a conscious rejection of it. (b) Explicit atheism is the absence of theistic belief due to a conscious rejection of it. (a) An implicit atheist is a person who does not believe in a god, but who has not explicitly rejected or denied the truth of theism.”], he divides atheism into implicit and explicit. Implicit atheism is identical to traditional agnosticism! He’d better have a damned good reason for changing the splits around like this.
• • 7/11/2013 3:05 PM (quote continued from above) “For example, a person who has no knowledge of theistic belief does not believe in a god, nor does he deny the existence of such a being. Denial presupposes something to deny, and one cannot deny the truth of theism without first knowing what theism is. Man is not born with innate knowledge of the supernatural; until he is introduced to this idea or thinks of it himself, he is unable to affirm or deny its truth—or even to “suspend” his judgment.        “This person poses a problem for the traditional classifications. He does not believe in a god, so he is not a theist. He does not reject the existence of a god, so, according to this meaning which is commonly attached to atheism, he is not an atheist. Nor does this person state that the existence of a supernatural being is unknown or unknowable, so he is not an agnostic. The failure of the traditional labels to include this possibility indicates their lack of comprehensiveness.”
    • No, it indicates the author’s insistence on changing traditional definitions then imposing them on others. Such a person would traditionally be considered an agnostic, and by the sense of the word—a gnostic; one who doesn’t know—(odd that he uses the literal definition of “atheist,” but refuses to do so with “agnostic”), that would be true. Someone who denies that knowledge of god is possible could be called a strong agnostic. This changing definitions, pretending others were using the new definitions when they wrote, and then accusing them of thereby not making sense is absolutely maddening.
• p. 14: “As defined in this chapter, the man who is unacquainted with theism is an atheist because he does not believe in a god. This category would also include the child with the conceptual capacity to grasp the issues involved, but who is still unaware of those issues. The fact that this child does not believe in god qualifies him as an atheist. Since these instances of nonbelief are not the result of conscious rejection, they are best designated as implicit atheism.”
• • I’m really not sure I agree with all this. These are all definitions, and therefore arbitrary, but 1) it could be equally argued that atheism requires knowledge of theism to have something to not believe in. Lack of knowledge about theism would make you an agnostic, one who “doesn’t know.” By the same logic, lack of knowledge about gnosis, or lack of knowledge about knowledge, would create a fourth category, “None of the above,” which would include rocks, trees, stars and babies, which I would think appropriate, as it seems silly to call a rock an atheist, which you would have to by his definition. And 2) you can’t get away with calling all babies atheists—that is entirely the point of baptism right after birth, to bring these unthinking creatures into the arms of God and to make them theists, not atheists, by default.
• p. 21: “From the mere fact that a person is an atheist, one cannot infer that this person subscribes to any particular positive beliefs.” This, in my view, is the major inherent flaw of atheism. It takes away beliefs, but offers nothing to fill the void. It is simple negation. This is a horrible thing to do to a person: to remove their beliefs and then to leave them empty, with no purpose or meaning or direction. I’ve been there; it’s not fun. I had to go through it, being the philosopher himself. Most people don’t need it, nor would they be likely to find their own way out. Theism, by itself, does imply a set of morals and values and reasons and answers, which vary according to which branch or sect you subscribe to. There is no such thing as simple theism. Atheism isn’t even an “-ism”—it’s the negation of others’ beliefs. Simple negation is not enough. Atheism must be only one facet of a new belief system.
• Can we honestly analyze atheism without a deep analysis of why people believe in God? And yet he seems unwilling to do so, instead focusing on the reasons why they’re wrong. P. 24–25: Let us all now cry at the unfairness of the world. Bah. Let’s ask why, with an uncritical eye, these people behave this way. We know they’re wrong; let’s discover why they insist on this wrongness. “…these are the issues to which a theist must address himself if he wishes to confront the challenge of atheism.” And yet this is not true! These are the questions that the theist knows must not be raised, or confronted directly, for he fears the answers. This sentence of his presumes that his opponents are rational, and yet “…the average believer…was persuaded to believe for emotional, not intellectual reasons,” and “is impervious to arguments against the existence of a supernatural being, regardless of how meticulous and carefully reasoned these arguments may be.” Not the picture of a rational person who would respond to a challenge of this nature.
• p. 26: He seems to believe that the simple absence of religion—the absence of any beliefs at all, in fact—would be better than the existence of theistic religion; that theism is inherently almost completely evil. I say that it is not enough to merely deny God; one must consider why theism exists, how it is used, how it is useful, and what its good as well as bad points are. To deny that religion has any good points is to call humanity as a whole incredibly stupid. I’m sorry, but we’ve lasted too long and done too well to be so stupid. There must be reasons. [7/11/2013 3:21 PM Rereading that page now, I no longer see it that way. He seems to be suggesting that if we got rid of supernatural belief, we would be forced to come up with better answers (“By severing any possible appeal to the supematural—which, in terms of human knowledge, means the unknowable-atheism demands that issues be dealt with through reason and human understanding; they cannot be sloughed-off onto a mysterious god”). Then again, I’ve only reread bits; the entire book up until this point may give a different impression.]