Philosophy – Page 27 – Auxiliary Memory

The Human Family Tree – National Geographic

The Human Family Tree is a 2-hour documentary that explains why race is an optical illusion. The show will be repeated 09/06/09 at 1pm, but is also available on Netflix now. Because of the wonders of DNA and genetic markers, scientists are able to trace the migrations of human populations back to their origins in Africa. Be sure and watch the show until the end, where the filmmakers do a wonderful trick with their participants. At the beginning of the show, project director Spencer Wells visits a street fair in Queens, New York and his team takes cheek swaps from crowds of people, all claiming to be immigrants from all over the world. Many people volunteer and their stories get told during the documentary. Most of these people expect the DNA to confirm their family genealogy that they cherish and has been handed down to them by word of mouth and photos.

At the end of the show the filmmakers meet outdoors in a giant field and have all the volunteers stand in groups based on the prominent markers in their DNA. The groups are roughly arranged like a map of the world. Many of the people whose stories were featured on the show are surprised by what their biology reveals, like one black man grouped with the Europeans and one Puerto Rican woman grouped with Native Americans.

The show is full of wonderful computer animation, beautiful high-definition filmed sequences from all over the world and staged scenes that act out what life was like tens of thousand of years ago. Science really has learned vast libraries of statistical knowledge from combining anthropology and DNA research. What it shows is racial characteristics are insignificant compared to all the rest of our traits. Essentially humans are almost identical, far more so than other animal species. We may look very different, but our DNA tells us otherwise. In fact, one of the more interesting tidbits to come out of the show is that Africa is the most genetically diverse continent because it’s population is the oldest.

Watching this documentary makes an excellent companion to the book I am listening to, The Evolution of God by Robert Wright, which explores the rise of religion across the globe starting with hunting and gathering societies. Wright measures the development of religion by how well it deals with ethnic diversity. Even though humans are all alike, we’ve always been very xenophobic, and the presentation of The Human Family Tree would be in accordance to the highest spiritual development in religious philosophy as explored by Wright.

It would be fascinating to chronicle the religious history against the histories of the various migrating populations that the DNA markers reveal. Would it be possible to follow the paths of memes like paths of genetic material in our blood? The majority of the world’s worshipers in God build their beliefs on the political and social conflicts of one tiny group of people, living in one tiny part of the world, concerning events that happened two and three thousand years ago, while ignoring all the religious practices of vast hordes of people that migrated all over the globe. But then most of those religions were tied to local ethnocentric and highly xenophobic tribes. We are becoming global on so many levels.

The Human Family Tree makes social, philosophical and political statements through it’s work with exploring the science of DNA, with implications that are far greater than teaching us about human migration patterns. As graphically illustrated in the show, everyone has two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and if you follow the math it doesn’t take that many generations until you are related to nearly everyone on Earth.

Most people don’t know much about their ancestors beyond their grandparents or maybe one of their great grandparents, so they imagine their heritage coming from one individual. But if you go back a few hundred years and had to picture yourself the product of 128 or 256 individuals, what can you claim to be? It’s hard enough to spot traits you get from two parents, so why imagine yourself to be the product of any race, culture, country, or other identity? All we can be is the human we are at the moment and any cultural heritage is just silly pretending.

JWH – 9/4/9

Making SETI Chit-Chat

Humans have been playing galactic wall-flower, afraid to make first contact with our alien neighbors, but what happens when a neighborly little green alien sends us an interstellar text message, what will we type back? Linguists aren’t even sure if interstellar communication is even possible, but let’s say we overcome the language barrier rather quickly. What will we say? Yeah, I know, all those pesky scientists will want to send boring mathematical messages to see if our brains are bigger than theirs, or heaven’s forbid, it’s the other way around.

No, let’s say we can get down to some intelligent species to intelligent species chit-chat, what would you want to ask our new space alien buddies? I think the first question I’d ask is, “Do you guys know many people from around here?” I think the first thing I’d tell them would be, “Man, it’s been very lonely in this neck of the galaxy. Geez, I was afraid we were the only sentient beings in the universe.”

Would we have enough in common to carry on a long distant relationship? Another question I’d be anxious to ask, “Hey, you guys got television?” Can you imagine the The Alien Channel? I wonder if they have a better Monday comedy lineup than “How I Met Your Mother,” “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory.” And what would they think of the human race if they could see “True Blood,” “Big Love,” “Dexter” and “Wipeout.”

SETI gurus assume we’ll have mathematics in common, and that might be true, but what might two intelligent cultures, separated by light years, share? Music might be a possibility. But imagine if giant redwood trees were big brain thinkers, with IQs of 300, but only they live in a world of little activity, with long slow lives. What would they think of us hummingbirds?

Like the geek boys in Sixteen Candles, when asked what kind of proof they would accept, I’d also have to answer: Video! Even if we couldn’t understand our B.E.M. friends’ Monday night TV lineup, it would be great to watch anyway, like watching nature documentaries without sound. Can you imagine the alien porn channel – “Whoa, did ya see that egg depositor on that giant beetle babe with the gold bikini last night!” And would aliens feel like African Americans watching old movies with racial stereotypes when watching our science fiction films?

That brings up censorship. Should we try to put on an act and project some kind of high minded normal view of human behavior, or just let it all hang out. And would alien cultures be as diverse, bizarre and brilliant we we are? What if we could load up some super laser canon with petabytes per second bandwidth, and blast all the daily human culture into the sky, what would they make of us?

What if they were brilliant mathematical lizards, but mainly lazed around laying eggs and thinking big thoughts about reality, would we blow their minds? What if our alien neighbors made us feel like a race of Mother Teresas? What if their pop culture is so vibrant that all we can do is form a cargo cult?

We have thousands of years of far out history that our children find boring. We have magnificent sciences and mathematics to study, but our kids prefer listening to Lady Gaga or playing Call of Duty. Most of our pop-culture is about mating, which I doubt has much interest to other intelligent species. Will we have much to say to each other? I don’t speak any other languages and seldom read web pages that aren’t based in the United States. What does that say?

Science fiction always show alien diversity, with humans boogieing with all kinds of strange looking creatures, going on adventures, smuggling cargo, and being all PC BFF. Einstein’s speed laws will make such joy riding very unlikely, but even if we could get close, would we want to? Homo sapiens have all kinds of bacteria and viruses living in, on and around us. Would we want to chance Wookie cooties? And what’s the likelihood of becoming chums with another sentient race that enjoys the same mixture of air, temperature, gravity and atmospheric pressure as we do?

Science fiction has always assumed everything would be easy, and if we weren’t trying to exterminate each other, aliens would make great friends. But I don’t know. That might just be overly anthropomorphic, like imagining bears will be like Winnie the Pooh.

I want to know that aliens exist. I want to share science and mathematics. Passing tech tips back and forth will be great too. But how much chit-chatting can we really expect?

Reality

If we’re lucky, and I mean really lucky, like life on Earth lucky, we’ll one day detect an intelligent message coming from a not too distant star, hopefully within a few hundred light years. At first only scientists will understand the signal, because it will probably take a great deal of abstract knowledge to understand the unnatural patterns in the signal from the rich existing energy patterns of our universe – and probably much of public will refuse to believe our eggheads.

Slowly the science community will build their case that will convert the unbelieving. It will take years, decades or even centuries to partly decipher the message, and when it’s revealed, the communiqué probably won’t be all that exciting to the average woman and man, but just knowing we’re not alone will mean a lot philosophically. Over vast periods, that span many lifetimes, we’ll slowly development interspecies communication. And one day we might even get video, the real proof for the unbelievers. Eventually, the excitement will die down, because it’s doubtful we’ll ever meet our new friends, and human life being what it is now, won’t make us that broad minded across light-years, because most of us are focused on the moment, the near and now.

We might be alone in the universe. Then again, we might not. But if we do discover other intelligent life, it won’t take away our existential loneliness. Humans swarm over this planet by the billions, but most of them feel very lonely, because each of us is a singular soul, living as a solitary island castaway, tossing messages in bottles onto the sea, hoping for a little communication. When the bottles must cross the distant shores trillions of miles away, it won’t feel any different.

Song of the Moment

JWH – 7/28/9

How to Introduce Physics to Your Friends?

My friends know I’m a bookworm and often greet me with, “What are you reading?” This past week I’ve been causally replying, “A book on physics.” To which all my friends give me a strange look that asks, “Why the f#@* would you want to do that?” Last night, when Janis asked, and gave me the same facial response, I felt compelled to try and explain myself, but I came up short. How do you quickly sum up the beauty of physics in a few sentences?

Later, while driving home, I wondered if there were any books to give my friends that would introduce them to physics. Is there any physics book that the average person would be willing to try? I flipped through some popular titles and textbooks on my bookshelves and immediately knew they wouldn’t do. I went to the bookstore and looked at intro books like Physics for Dummies, Physics Demystified and Head First Physics. The answer was still a big “No Way!”

Is there a way to introduce physics in a short blog essay? Physics is a very big subject, beginning with the smallest objects in reality and ranging up to the very largest. This made me think of the videos Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames and Cosmic Voyage, the Imax movie narrated by Morgan Freeman. If my friends could watch those videos on a big screen television and study them I think it would be a fantastic start. They are easy to understand but have a huge sense of wonder impact. However, I’m not sure if the crude versions found on the Internet will be that inspiring. I did find a DVD copy Cosmic Voyage at Amazon for $8.99.

Thinking about these impressive films got me to wondering if it might be possible to introduce physics by showing DVDs that illustrate the most exciting aspects of physics. Are any physics documentaries good enough that if I lent them to my friends they’d come back and ask if I had any more great DVDs like that one? I’ll order Cosmic Voyage and give it a try.

How Big is the Universe?

I do believe understanding the Powers of Ten is a key starting place. I have the original Powers of Ten book by Charles and Ray Eames and studying it really helps to grasp the scope of the world of physics. It’s very important to teach people the size of the universe, from the very smallest to the largest and get a feel for scientific notation. Recently The National Geographic Channel showed the documentary, “Journey to the Edge of the Universe.” This beautiful film uses state of the art computer animation to survey the macroverse from Earth to the edge of the Universe.

The value of the visuals is diminished by not knowing the numbers behind glorious images, so that’s why I think a good understanding of the Powers of Ten video should come first.

Time

Physicists now think in terms of trillions of years. Right now, I can’t think of any documentaries to teach about time. I love all those analogies about the history of the universe and life on Earth, comparing time since the Big Bang to one year, and then explaining that human civilization is just the last couple of seconds of that year. I need to track down a great documentary on time.

Motion

Classical physics is about motion. Knowing about distance and time prepares us for studying movement. Again I can’t think of any standout documentaries. DVD courses like “The Great Ideas of Classical Physics” from The Teaching Company come to mind, but I don’t think I’ll get my friends to sit through its 24 lectures.

If only the series The Mechanical Universe were easily available. If you follow the link you can register and watch small Windows Media coded versions online for free, but it costs $450 for a set of 52 thirty minute episodes on 12 DVDs. Again, not something my friends are likely to pursue. The great thing about The Mechanical Universe, the 1985 PBS television series, is its an introductory course to physics from California Institute of Technology. What made the show really stand out was the mathematical animation by Jim Blinn – if only all math courses included such animation. It’s sad that the tiny free Internet versions also have tiny impact.

Electromagnetism

You’d think I wouldn’t have to promote the teaching of electromagnetism because our society depends so much this technology that was first discovered in the 18th and 19th century and turned into tech magic in the 20th. But how many people know that magnets are used to generate electricity? Or that electricity can be used to turn a piece of iron into a magnet? I think when Arthur C. Clarke said his famous phrase, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” he was referring to far future technology, but for the average person, all modern technology is magical. Does the public even understand the relationship between quantum physics and televisions?

Weak and Strong Forces

Exploring the world of the very tiny means understanding the building blocks of nature. It also brings us closer to understanding how something came out of nothing. And isn’t it strange that the only science that fundamentalist terrorists pursue is the one that leads to atomic bombs? Again, I can’t think of a good film to illustrate this area of physics, although quantum physics is often covered in documentaries. I’m hoping the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will generate tons of news and documentaries in the coming years so maybe my physics pooh-poohing friends will even remember its name.

Gravity

Probably most people have seen documentaries about gravity. All kids are taught about Galileo and Newton, but I doubt people know that NASA is planning a series of gravity probes like LISA and Big Bang Observer. These deep space instruments will study colliding stars, ripples in space-time, and echoes of the early universe. There is no way to explain the magnitude of this research. The only analogy I can think of is if Christians built a time machine and went back to the Garden of Eden to interview God. The more science studies the Big Bang the closer we come to understanding the Genesis of our physical reality. How can my friends think this is boring?

How Limited is Your View of Reality?

An earlier draft of this essay pursued the idea that people who ignored physics chose to have a small view of reality. I referenced my earlier blog post, “What Shape is the Universe?” where I was going to chide my friends for living in a small dinky universe of only a few magnitudes of dimension. I can’t help think that many of the failings of our societies on Earth are due to only reacting to nearby reality without trying to see the big picture. Would Israelis and Palestinians be killing each other if they all understood how big reality is and how small their feud? Shouldn’t the whole Arab-Jew conflict resolve when they see their religions disappear in the light of science? Israel and Gaza are probably less than two electrons in comparative size if we relate the size of our world to the Universe.

On the other hand, if humans are the crown of creation, the pinnacle of 13.7 billion years of evolution, then we are big things indeed. But if we kill each other like viruses are we really all that evolved or intelligent? As long as our guiding knowledge comes from speculation about reality derived three thousand years ago by nomadic people closer to cave men than to us, is there any wonder why science is ignored? Most of my friends are well educated, with very few even concerned with religion, but people who base their knowledge on the humanities and literature are still stuck in the past. Most of our social customs and beliefs developed during the Middle Ages. Science is the only systematic pursuit of knowledge that consistently succeeds in explaining reality, but it’s a relatively recent development and hasn’t fully integrated into human behavior and thought.

We build our society on the handmaiden of science, technology, but we ignore the wisdom of science. I’m intrigued by the idea of The Third Culture proposed by John Brockman. Brockman gets his idea from C. P. Snow who wrote a book called The Two Cultures, comparing literary intellectuals and scientists, and suggests that a third culture would form when the two merged.

This makes me think of flipping through a university catalog of courses. You can divide them into science base courses and all others, usually what we might call the humanities, or practical courses like business and law. What Brockman seems to be saying, until the humanities and the rest of university courses are based on science, even with areas like the study of English literature, we won’t begin to see the true value of science pervade society. Now the idea that science might infuse with all areas of knowledge could be a science fictional dream, but it is something I hope for, because until then the average person will think physics is boring.

JWH 1/11/9

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

Childhood’s End holds up extremely well in the 55 years since the book first appeared in 1953. I just finished listening to the new Audible Frontiers audio book edition from Audible.com, and I was surprised in several ways. First, I was surprised that a science fiction book from 1950s worked so well as a whole. I’ve been re-reading a number of classic SF novels from the 1950s this year and many of them are fix-up novels, made by gluing short stories together, stories that were first published in the pulp magazines, and the results feel episodic. The original idea of Childhood’s End started out as a short story, “Guardian Angel” from a 1950 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, but it works well as a novel even though it’s a series of encounters with different characters over time that could be also criticized as episodic. It cohered for me perfectly.

Second, I was surprised how so much of the story had stuck with me since my last reading in 1985, showing how memorable the story is. Third, I was surprised by how many classic SF ideas Clarke included in his novel. Fourth, I was surprised by how many social issues Clarke dealt with that would explode later in the 1960s. Finally, I was very surprised by Clarke’s belief in the limits of mankind. Unlike Heinlein, Clarke suggests that man isn’t the toughest alien around, and is unfit to be the alpha creature of the galaxy.

Childhood’s End has to be somewhat inspired by the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still. In the film, Klaatu, a traveler in a flying saucer from a distant alien civilization comes to help the Earth. In the book, Karellen, the leader and his crew from an advance alien civilization come to help Earth in flying saucers. Of course, Arthur C. Clarke takes the idea much further than the “Farewell to the Master” story by Harry Bates which inspired the film. And strangely enough both stories have deep religious undertones, with Klaatu acting out the Christ role, and Karellen and his crew acting out the role of angels, messengers of God, even if they look like Lucifer.

Klaatu came to Earth, preached about our evil ways and told the people of our planet to get their act together or face retribution from a higher power. Karellen came to Earth and stayed, gently guiding the transformation of human society with miracle powers. Both the film and book preached that human society is severely flawed, that the human race is a danger to itself, that our governments can’t help and that individuals are full of weak behaviors (the seven deadly sins). Clarke is very philosophical about the future of mankind, and if you haven’t read the book yet, stop reading here because I’m going to give everything away.

To carry the religious metaphor further, both stories suggest that aliens from the stars will bring salvation to mankind. Arthur C. Clarke goes even further, and suggests that mankind must be reborn before we can travel to the heavens because our current minds and bodies are too limited to see the wonders of transcendental society of higher beings.

Clarke explores what will happen to people when the aliens solve all of our big problems. We fall back onto finding meaning in art, music, sports, sex and self education, but that isn’t enough. Karellen won’t allow people to travel beyond the Moon, and Clarke says without the final frontier our lives will become meaningless. In other words, life on Earth isn’t the real show, and it’s only until we evolve into a higher being that finally we will really understand our true purpose. Isn’t that same exact message religion gives to us poor mortals. Is this message built into our DNA? Is it some kind of ancestral memory?

When I was young, back in the 1950s when I first saw the film The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the 1960s when I first read Childhood’s End, I believed in what Clarke was saying. Science fiction was my substitute for religion. I’ve been a religious skeptic since I was 12, but it’s taken me much longer to become skeptical of the preaching of science fiction. Childhood’s End is a wonderful story, but so is the Bible. I don’t believe either. Whoever we are as a species, and as individuals of that species, is all we’ll ever be. Nobody will save us but ourselves, and if we are condemned to oblivion, then we only have ourselves to blame.

We might not be alone in this universe, but for now, we stand alone. Clarke really must have believed in higher psychic powers and that mankind would evolve into a super-being because the same message was replayed in his 1960s story, 2001: A Space Odyssey. ESP was a major theme in 1950s science fiction. Science fiction writers obviously believed, or wanted to believe, than humans would one day evolve their own miracle powers and become god-like ourselves. This is one hell of a wish fulfilling fantasy! Of course this same fantasy appears in both religion and regular fantasy novels. The same year 2001 came out, shows like I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched were hits, and those power fantasies are still just as popular in various forms of entertainment today.

In the year 2008 I think we need to psychoanalyze Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke and his fans, rather than evaluate the novel as science fiction. It is a metaphysical fantasy that needs to be interpreted. Do people really believe that we can’t solve our own problems and need God or alien overlords to save us? Will life on Earth always be meaningless without a purpose delivered from a higher being? Is frail mortal life so worthless? Do people really believe that homo superior will be telepathic? Or that any adaptation of nature to our evolution will include ESP powers?

Arthur C. Clarke was a scientist, so could he have been savvy enough to have written Childhood’s End for the masses, well knowing Marx’s dictate that religion is the opium of the masses and fashioned his SF novel to addict science fiction readers in the same way and sell more books?

This is why back then, I was a disciple of Robert A. Heinlein. He was “a better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” kind of guy, believing mankind would build it’s own spaceships and the Klaatus and Karellens of the sky better get the fuck out of our way, for we are a jealous people.

JWH 12/30/8

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

A Case of Conscience by James Blish is the 1959 Hugo award winning novel that was recently produced as an unabridged audio book by Audible Frontiers, the science fiction and fantasy publishing imprint from Audible.com. The book is wonderfully narrated by Jay Snyder. When I became addicted to audio books back in 2002 I constantly searched for classic science fiction books on audio. There weren’t many available. For about a year now Audible Frontiers has been cranking out far more SF audio books than I have time to listen to. Even today, when I go through the audio sections at book stores, I seldom see many science fiction titles for sale.

You can buy A Case of Conscience as an audio book through Amazon, via a link back to Audible, or from the iTunes Store, for $17-19 dollars, but the cheapest way to get it is to join Audible.com. To get those bargain prices requires committing to a 1 or 2 book-a-month plan. I buy an annual 24-pack deal and get books for $9.56 each. To get some idea of why you might want to join Audible.com, look at Hugo Winners on Audible and Heinlein on Audio. The catch is you have to be tech savvy enough to listen to audio books on your iPod or MP3 digital player. Audible.com does allow you to burn CDs, but that takes some tech know-how too.

Now, do I recommend you go buy A Case of Conscience? I enjoyed the book, but I’ve got to warn modern readers about 1950s science fiction. A Case of Conscience is a fix-up novel, combining the 1953 novella set on the distant planet Lithia, with newer material, with the same characters back on Earth continuing the story. Many classic science fiction novels, like Foundation by Isaac Asimov, and City by Clifford Simak, were fix-up novels. They feel like reading short stories rather than novels. The second warning I have to give is about the nature of classic SF, especially books from the 1950s. They are idea driven, rather than plot driven. My guess is young people today who love action driven science fiction might grumble about these older cerebral stories.

James Blish does some excellent world-building with Lithia. It’s a planet poor in heavy metals like iron, but the intelligent beings there have learned alternate routes to scientific discoveries and have engineered a technologically advance society. The Lithians never discovered magnetism and electricity, but have created technology based on static electricity, and pushed the limits of biology further than we have. Blish did a great job creating a fascinating planet and culture, but that’s only the setup for the real idea that’s central to the book.

A Case of Conscience combines science fiction and religion to make for a philosophical story. A team of four scientists are sent to evaluate Lithia, but the biologist, Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, is a member of the Society of Jesus, a Jesuit, and he makes a startling claim about Lithia and the Lithians. The Lithians have no concept of God, afterlife, sin, or even things like fiction or lies. They are logical. Their culture is an atheist’s utopia. I love what Blish does with this, and I won’t spoil any of his story. I’m very appreciative to Steve Feldberg and Audible.com for bringing this book to audio. I tried to read A Case of Conscience twice before in my life and didn’t get into it either time. This wonderful audio reading made it completely accessible to me. Blish’s style was too dry for me to read, but lovely to listen to. I don’t know why.

The real reason I want to recommend this book is because we should think about contact with alien culture and religion. What if SETI makes first contact and our new friends have never even imagined the concept of God? That is possible. What will they do when we tell them about our spiritual theories? What if they have theories about the origin of the universe that we never thought about?

Most fundamentalists cannot handle even minor variations in their own religion, much less deal with ecumenical diversity of world religions. Their narrowly focused personally held concepts would probably be blown away by ancient ideas in the many dead religions in our history, so how would they react to a true alien spirituality? So what happens if the nightly news programs are bombarded with religious ideas from light years away? What if these alien missionaries have existed for millions of years and know a lot more about everything? Will we form cargo cults in reaction to these superior wisdom, like primitive people in the 20th century when encountering modern westerners for the first time?

In the next ten thousand years we will probably never meet any aliens face to face, but there’s a good chance of finally having some success with SETI, and initiate interstellar texting sessions with dialog response times in the decades, centuries or even millennia. Even if we detected an alien signal today, it could take so long to respond and develop a way to converse that it could be centuries before we get down to chatting about vague philosophical concepts. The novelty of the alien existence will wear off before we know what they think.

Today, because of science fiction, I believe most of the world assumes that there are intelligent life forms elsewhere in the universe. We also assume we’ll share the same mathematics, physics and chemistry, but will probably diverge with biology. But what kind of overlap will be possible for philosophy, religion, art and music? Music has a relationship with mathematics and physics, so it is possible there could be strange alien music we could hear and think of as melody. Art connects with vision which also connects with physics. The idea of creating beautiful objects that nature didn’t could be common.

Alien religion and philosophy are harder to imagine. James Blish essential creates an alien world and then forces a John Milton like Catholic interpretation upon it. Mary Doria Russell explores the same ground in her magnificent novel, The Sparrow. Is it possible to evaluate an alien religion without seeing it through our own glasses made from our religion? Can we even see a religion without being religious? Do dolphins and whales have religion? They are the closest thing we have to alien intelligence and we know so little about them.

Is worship the defining characteristic of religion? Is it possible to have religion without gods, either seen or unseen? If all aliens have the same image in their homes, do we consider that a sign of religion? Would aliens exploring our world think of religion when they count all the photos of Brittany Spears?

We often talk as if God is the same deity whether the Earthy believer is Christian, Muslim or Jew. Would our alien friends see that? Would they assume our God is their God? For most of this planet’s history, our believers believed their God made this world, but they never knew it was just one of billions upon billions of worlds. Does each world get their own creator? Or is their one God that knows about every sparrow on this world, also know about every sparrow like creature on every other world?

In the end, we have to judge James Blish on how he handles his religious problem in A Case of Conscience. Does the ending imply that Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez was right in his judgement of Lithia? If that is true, then we have to believe that Blish does believe, at least for this story, that it’s possible that our God is supreme, that our Earth is the center of reality, and that all the rest of the universe is part of a lesson to teach us about God’s word. Isn’t it rather strange that God would build such a big school-house just for us?

What would a universal religion be like that covered a universe fourteen billion light years across and was home to billions of intelligent life-forms and their planets. Knowing as much astronomy as I do I find it hard not to be an atheist, but I could be wrong. I believe religion is only practical at the tribal level, but again I could be wrong. But if there is one God and his territory covers all of the cosmos, then I can’t help believe that mathematics, physics, chemistry and all the other sciences is the true Bible of this God.

JWH 12/21/8