Myth and, er, God

or Where did I put my Cynicism?

This is a response to rockinlibrarian‘s lj post, on the Death of Myth, in which, importantly, she points out that all religious stories can be termed ‘mythology’ and it doesn’t mean they’re just silly stories, it means they hold symbolic, but not literal, truth.

*

(So I had a lot of thoughts. And they are disparate and incoherent, and this is the one I’m going to focus on.)

IF (and I haven’t made up my mind yet, but bear with me) IF myth is ok, (and not, say, a dangerous vehicle for misunderstandings and propaganda*)…

…then we can believe in the reality of Darwin’s evolution, but also the symbolic truth contained within religious (Christian?) mythology (again; ‘mythology’ in the sense of stories which communicate symbolic, but not literal, truths; not as in ‘stupid stories believe by ignorant, pre-civilised peoples and kids’).

I speak, by the way, as an atheist. Or, if you will, an Exceedingly Sceptical Agnostic.

BUT why stop there? Why stop with just reading the Old Testament symbolically (which, incidentally, Christians have been doing ever since they wrote the New Testament, never mind since Darwin wrote The Origin of Species,) or the whole bible symbolically (ie. no, Christ didn’t really perform all those miracles, they’re just symbols for the power of God, and the values he holds dear; like self-sacrifice, or, say, feeding hungry strangers even if there’s five thousand of them, or trying to do stuff even if everyone thinks its impossible and finding you can walk on water).

What if we just go one step further and say that God is a Myth. But the good kind.

If we say, then, that God is as real as (to take Amy’s example) Persephone. The Greeks didn’t really believe in Persephone. A few ignorant peasants might have. Mostly she was just a useful symbol of springtime, a way of embodying and understanding the things in the world – which also had a scientific explanation – on an emotional level (see Everflame’s lj on the importance of emotion in human decision-making). She was not real, but what she meant was. (No one ever really believed in Proserpina though. Poor thing.)

I don’t believe in a literal God. I certainly do not believe in a God whose word is supposedly the Bible. I don’t need to rehearse the various inconsistencies or moral cruxes in the Bible, a kazillion people have already done that for me. The Bible is too small, too flawed, too human, too outdated, to be a universal word of God for all time. It is Old Mythology. Mythology is always renewing itself for new societies in new contexts with new values. (Mutation. Survival of the fittest. Just like genetics.) That is why Persephone is now just a ‘stupid story only believed by ignorant, pre-civilised peoples and kids’.

I like the Indian story of the Blind Men and the Elephant. The Elephant is God. The Blind men touch different parts and decide it is a tree, a wall, a snake, a spear. God is bigger than any of these things, and they cannot grasp all of it at once.

If there is a God, it is beyond anything we conceive. It doesn’t have a special place in its heart for Earth, because the universe is much bigger than that, and there is Probably Life Somewhere. If it cares about each of us as individuals, then it also cares for every animal, every insect, every amoeba as an individual. Alternatively, to it we are amoeba and irrelevant. Its morality is, again, more sophisticated than we can possibly understand or hope to emulate. Maybe it is a creator, maybe not. Maybe it is a controller, maybe not. Maybe it has powers to change the laws of the universe, maybe not.

Possibly the most defining feature of God as it (he, usually) is understood by most (all, probably) human religions, is that he is a conscious, thinking being.

Funky Quarkism

As an atheist, it is easy to say that religion is designed to fill in the gaps of what we cannot yet explain, with, erm ‘magic’ or else ‘something spiritual’. BUT all good scientists know there is a limit to human science. We can find out the physical laws that govern the universe, and the tiny particles that make it up. We can even find reasons why those laws are so, by discovering new tiny particles (quarks) and new laws (quarks come in flavours, which must occur in certain cuisines combinations). But however far we push it there will always be another ‘why?’ And the ‘why’ that we will never be able to explain; to which the answer is ‘just because’; the final set of laws that govern everything in the universe, no exceptions; these are the ultimate Unexplained, and can, in a way, be labelled ‘God’.

But… they’re not conscious.

Incidentally, if there is a conscious God, I think he/it is superconscious. Whatever that entails. We are vegetables in comparison.

Back to the mythological God.

The Christian God is insufficient to convey truth to many modern, civilised humans, because he jars with modern science and modern morality, blah blah. I mean, his mythology is a good 2000 years old. That’s twice as long as that of the Ancient Greeks lasted. Good going, hey?

But that doesn’t mean that some sort of god mythology is not still useful, cannot still convey truth, to modern humans. We are not beyond God.

I mean, science has its prophets: Newton, Einstein. Dawkins is a zealous priest. Darwin, perhaps, is its Christ (a ‘myth’ of modern science: that the whole Victorian religious doubt thing started with Darwin’s Origin of Species, and the modern age of science begins 1859. In fact, it was a general feeling growing up among a growing community of educated men who were part of the development of scientist from an amateur pursuit to a professional career. Lamarck suggested species adaptation over time in 1809. Lyell, a geologist, argued that the world was many thousands of years older than the Bible allowed, in 1830. Darwin couldn’t have published, couldn’t have been listened to, unless a few people, at least, were already willing to hear. His Origin, you might say, is a modern mythical symbol.)

The old God symbolised a benevolent universe, a commonality between all men, reassurance in the shared inevitability of death, a reminder that in life all humans are as important as each other and deserve to have their problems heard, and a reason to be a nice to other people.

And these are good things. And this God-the-Symbol is one I am willing to believe in (provided we understand that he is symbolically, not literally, true, and he therefore avoids becoming a dangerous vehicle for misunderstandings and/or propaganda**).

But he remains an outdated myth.

And, er, I tentatively move that Darwinism (perhaps with some Quantum Physics thrown in, mostly because that I dig that shit) is the new (and better, partly because it’s a little more true, but mostly because it has evolved for our times) ‘mythology’.

* on which more later. Perhaps.

** as above.

Magic as science (Science as magic)

Thoughts from the Diana Wynne Jones Conference 2009

On Saturday 4^th July, Helgard Fischer, a microbiologist who has qualifications in International Relations, and for whom English Literature is also a passion (do I hear a … ‘polymath’?) talked about the scientific nature of magic in DWJ’s Year of the Griffin, which is set inside a university for magical studies.

She pointed out the necessity of scientific knowledge and logical thinking to successful magical creation. Wizard Derk creates hybrid and adapted or mutated creatures, such as his griffin children, made using his own and his wife’s DNA, who talk and think like humans, but whose bodies are nonetheless half lion, half eagle. In order to do this Derk needs an understanding of zygotes, enzymes, etc. We are not quite sure where he learns this; but it is knowledge he has, and without it, his magic would be unsuccessful. He cannot create a griffin child simply by wanting to, he first has to understand, scientifically-and-magically, how.

Similarly his wife’s miniature universes rely on her understanding of physical and biological laws in order to construct replicas, or, more impressively yet, replicas-with-imaginative-modifications, of the universe. Once again this is not something she is able to do without a high level of scientific understanding’ the laws of gravity and motion, and in the case of construction of miniature cities, of human biology, ecology, architecture, etc. In fact, this requires the scientific knowledge of a god.

This was compared, by another attendee, to magic in Harry Potter. In The Year of the Griffin the teaching of magic is critiqued, and DWJ raises the importance of learning theory alongside practical magic. In Harry Potter, by contrast, there seems to be no theory of magic, or certainly not one which is learned. Learning magic is a process of rote-learning ‘tricks’ and spells, which accumulate over the course of one’s education. There is no apparent university post-Hogwarts (if there was one, it seems certain we would have heard tell of it from Hermione at least), and this perhaps reflects the fact that there is no room, or no perceived room (by JK and/or the wizarding community), for analysis, experimentation, creation, or even criticism, in magic.

That is no to say that there is no creation or logical thinking in magic use in the Harry Potter universe. Being an effective magic user seems not just about being able to use a spell correctly, but by thinking of the best spell, sequence of spells, or magical method, to overcome a problem or achieve a goal. This is most aptly demonstrated in the Triwizard Tournament, where each contestant must think of the most efficient way of achieving their ends using what magical knowledge they have. Thus, in order to breathe underwater, two contestants use the Bubblehead Charm, Krum transfigures his head into that of a shark, and Harry swallows gillyweed, each of these methods drawing on a different area of magical expertise, and enabling their candidates to complete the task with varying degrees of success.

Nor is the creation of magic impossible. As we see clearly in Half Blood Prince, Snape has not only adapted potions to make them more potent – something we can imagine as akin to adapting recipes, through individual taste and experimentation – but he has invented spells himself. Voldemort, similarly, invents the spell that makes him immortal in Goblet of Fire. In either case invention serves as a force for bad, which is somewhat disheartening. My sense is that, in Harry’s world, most of the spells that need to be invented, have been, especially the good ones. All that’s left to do is to think of new and ever more horrible ways of hurting your enemies. I seem to remember that the jellylegs curse can be found in a book that advertises itself by the fact that it contains ‘new’ ways of getting at your enemy (it is curious that its readers are assumed to have an enemy at all; but that, perhaps, is a subject for another time). This introduces the idea that spells do get created (or perhaps recreated) and even go through stages of fashionableness.

In either case, inventing magic is seen as an extra; something only clever (and, usually, cruel) magicians do, but which is so uncommon a pursuit among witches and wizards that Hogwarts doesn’t see fit to teach it.

In The Fentons I have explicitly treated magic as an aspect of science; it is an everyday part of a modern world, and it seems logical that the people in that world would have sought to find out how it works as much as we have sort to find out how electricity works, and the body, and space, and gravity. If you know anything about quantum physics you’ll know it’s pretty bizarre, and doesn’t make sense by ‘common sense’  laws. And although we can try to work out how it works, without allowing for some sort of higher being, we can’t know why. And, even then, we can’t account for the why of the higher being, so all in all we’re stumped.

On a more mundane level, it has long being pointed out that modern technology such as TV (moving pictures in boxes with voices?) and the internet (being able to talk to anyone, any where, any time, instantly?) are pretty much magical; certainly would appear magical to someone time travelling from even 100 years ago.

Besides which, science hasn’t explained everything. The brain, consciousness, thought, free will (or not) are things we still don’t understand, things we still have to explain with ‘magical’ names like ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’. Percy Shelley points out that we have always used words metaphorically for things we can’t explain literally, and I like his theory. The ‘soul’ exists; but it is not some sort of mystical, never-to-be-explained ‘essence’. It is simply a name, a signifier, a metaphor, standing in for something we haven’t understood yet.

This is becoming a digression. Tangentially, I argue that, based on the above examples, science is magic.

To return to Helgard Fischer, and books, she liked DWJ’s university of magic because it united the creative, the personal, the practical, and the analytical. In other words it was neither art nor science, but a meeting of the two. Trained in both biology and politics, with added interests in philosophy and literature herself, this is clearly a meeting Fischer would welcome warmly, in all areas of academic study.

Wouldn’t we all? Personally, I have always seen the process of understanding a piece of literature as similar to the process of solving a logic puzzle. You have to find clues and read symbols and put things together and tease things out to come to some sort of reasoned conclusion. Moreover, criticism teaches you never to take the world just as it presents itself, but to interrogate it, to make sure everything fits, that what you perceive is what is true. Naturally this is a useful skill to scientists. It would be to be blinded by stereotypes for me to assume that all science is descriptive, orand to believe every study stating that scientists always see the results they want to see.

Speculative fiction proves a safe space in which our fantasies for, and mysteries in, real life, can be played out, tested, and indulged in. Until every puzzle in science is solved, and every social tension resolved, we will continue to write about ‘magic’.