April 13, 2009
Kindle Question
(Jimmy Akin)
My eyes are bad--so much so that when I go into the optometrist's office and hand him my glasses at the beginning of the examination, he takes one look at the lenses and says, "Myyyyyy! You *are* nearsighted, *aren't* you!"
And did I mention that my family gets cataracts really early?
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Books | Permalink | Comments (29)
August 10, 2008
Ender's Game
(Jimmy Akin)
Lately I've been reading my way through Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series. I've got the first major chunk of the series finished, and I thought I'd provide a review.
The series is divided into two main forks, one of which tracks the story of the title character, Ender Wiggin, and the other of which tracks the story of another character named Bean.
I wanted to wait until I'd read the novels in the Ender fork because of some of the religious issues in the novels. I wanted to make sure that what I'd have to say about the way Card handles religion, and specifically Catholicism, wouldn't be contradicted by something in the next novel.
So over the next few days I'll give you my thoughts on the series.
Its foundational book is Ender's Game, which is set a century or two in the future (the exact time is ambiguous), when humanity is terrified that it's going to be wiped out by an insect-like alien race known as the Buggers.
The Buggers have invaded our solar system twice, and the second time we were seriously threatened. A third Bugger war is looming, and humanity is under the gun to produce a military leader capable of saving us from extinction.
What humanity needs is not just another Lee or Grant or Patton or Eisenhower or MacArthur. It needs another Alexander or Julius Caesar or Napoleon. Or better.
It therefore has set up a world-wide program designed to find, evaluate, and train potential military leaders. It wants to find these leaders young so that they can have time to be trained in the intricacies of starship combat and the kind of 3-D thinking that is involved in fighting in a zero-gravity environment.
Earth's government therefore invasively (it's not very friendly) monitors and tests the world's children and, when they find a promising one, they scoop him up and take him off to battle school for training to maximize his potential as a military leader.
Then they find Andrew "Ender" Wiggin.
He is the most promising student they have ever found. The adults are hoping he will become humanity's savior, and they're terrified by the prospect he might not.
This novel therefore falls into the category of "most important child in the world" novels, along with the Harry Potter series and Jerry Pournelle's excellent Starswarm.
As novels of this category go, the first Harry Potter book (the only one I've read) is--to my mind--lame. (You may disagree, which is fine; de gustibus non disputandum est.) It's structured completely wrong for how to tell this kind of story, and it comes off as ham-fisted wish fulfillment. If you've got a kid who lives a dreary life but is, unbeknownst to himself, the most important child in the world, you don't announce this secret and hand him fame and glory on a platter in chapter two.
Instead, you make him work for it. He needs to pay his dues and have the secret of his identity revealed slowly, over the course of time.
That's what happens in Starswarm, which to my mind makes it "Harry Potter done right" (except that it's sci-fi rather than fantasy).
Ender's Game takes a similar path.
The adults around Ender suspect that he may turn out to be a military genius, but Ender only finds out about this slowly, and he most definitely has to work for his place in the world.
Why's that?
Well . . . how do you know if you've got a real military genius, on whose shoulders you can rest the fate of humanity?
You test him, of course.
And that's what the adults in the story do. They put Ender through a series of progressively harder and more impossible situations to see if he can rise to them without cracking under the strain.
They start doing this even before he gets to battle school. On the shuttle up to the orbiting space station where the school is housed (we need a zero-g environment for this training, remember) they turn every single boy on the shuttle against Ender so that he has the decked stacked against him from the very beginning.
And they do nothing to help him.
Their philosophy is that if Ender is to be able to shoulder the responsibility that will one day be his then, above all, he must never--ever--think that an adult will bail him out of a situation. No matter how hard or impossible it gets, he must deal with it on his own. Even when there is a homicidal bully determined to kill Ender.
Only by putting him through a ruthless program in which the rules are changed every time Ender meets a challenge will they find out whether Ender has what it takes to fill the role mankind needs, which requires a unique balance of tactical skill and empathy for others.
A key element in the novel is the zero-gravity combat simulation that is used as a learning tool to help the kids think in terms of the three-dimensional warfare needed in outer space. This one-ups quidditch. It isn't just about kids flying and playing a fanciful game. The physics of fighting in zero-gravity are real, and the combat tactics that Ender comes up with, based on the way the game works, are sound. So, to my mind, Ender's Game beats Harry Potter on this score as well.
But ultimately the story isn't about zero-g combat.
It's about the characters, and the bottom line is that the novel is extraordinarily good.
It deserves the Hugo and Nebula awards that it won. (For non-sci-fi fans, those are the two most prestigious awards in the sci-fi community.)
The thing that makes it so good is not that it involves space ships and aliens and hi-tech and similar sci-fi tropes. Actually, it de-emphasizes all of these.
Card doesn't try to wow us with futuristic tinsel. He doesn't spend time showing off the tech, which is barely ahead of our own. We don't go to exotic alien planets. We haven't even gotten out of the solar system. Ships travel slower than light, so it takes months just to get from one point to another in the solar system. The kids are using "desks" that are recognizable as tablet-style laptop computers. They entertain themselves with video games. And we never even see an alien in the book.
What this book is about is psychology--the psychology of command and leadership and human relationships.
That's what makes it more than just a standard outer space adventure.
It also happens to be readable by kids (though there is some crude language in it, largely related to flatulence--which, as Card points out in an afterword to the audio book edition, is inescapable if you want to write realistically about boys).
NEXT: Speaker for the Dead.
ADDED: Please AVOID SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS for books in the Ender universe in the combox.
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Books | Permalink | Comments (29)
April 13, 2008
Classic Lit Bleg
(Tim Jones)
Hey, Tim Jones, here.
One thing I have wanted to do for a while is go back and read all the classic Western literature I missed in college. They don't exactly require a lot of reading from art students (which is a pity) so I feel impoverished in that area.
What I would like is some guidance. If anyone knows a good list of, say, the top 100 works of Western literature (the Must Read stuff), please let me know and provide a link, if you can. Also, please feel free to make your own classic lit recommendations in the combox.
I'm already primed to read a few by Dostoevsky. That's him, pictured. A portrait by Russian artist Vasily Perov (1834-1882).
(Visit Tim Jones' blog Old World Swine).
Posted by Tim Jones in Books | Permalink | Comments (38)
February 20, 2008
The Tripods are Coming
(Tim Jones)
Kewl! The Tripods,
the science fiction trilogy by John Christopher (real name Samuel
Youd), is one of the stories well known and oft quoted in our
household. My son even named his cat Ozzy, after the character
Ozymandias. We read the books and watched the BBC TV series until the
venerable VHS tape finally gave up the ghost a few years ago. We hadn't
given it much thought for a while, until my son found some video clips
on YouTube. It was fun rediscovering the series and covering old,
familiar ground. I'll have to look around and see if the series may be
found on DVD.
It occurred to me, after reading some comments on YouTube (always an intellectual treat) that the themes of the book could be interpreted as a slam at religion. I'd considered the idea before, but dismissed it, however... that was before Hitchens, Dawkins and Pullman labored to make the world safe for anti-religious bigotry, dragged it out of the closet and onto the New York Times Bestseller list.
For those unfamiliar with the story, the world has been conquered completely by aliens who travel around in gigantic tripods (okay, not terribly original, but consider it flattery to H.G. Wells) and the population are kept in line through the use of an electronic wire mesh "cap" that is stamped onto their cranium around the age of 16 (when young folk typically begin having serious rebellious thoughts) and that makes them content, docile and obedient to the tripods. The cap keeps them from thinking in certain ways, eliminates violent and deceitful thoughts, but also wonder and inventiveness. Human kind is restricted to about an 18th century level of technology. The heroes run away as their "capping day" draws near, in search of a secret enclave of human resistance, based on nothing but a rumor and a map picked up from a "vagrant" (a human whose capping has gone wrong, they are considered insane).
I never interpreted the story as anti-religious, and in fact saw the cap in much broader terms as the common tendency for the Spirit of the Age (any age) to become tyrannical and oppressive, or the readiness of people to give up thinking for themselves in exchange for the promise of peace and safety. These are human themes into which religion of one kind or another might figure... or not.
If the story was meant as a veiled anti-religious screed, it's odd that an unabashed religionist like myself would find so much in the story to relate to and delight in. To me, the Map could just as well represent Holy Scripture, the Resistance the Church, and the Cap atheistic materialism. I always assumed that once a person was capped, religious impulses would be the first thing to go.
I Googled around a bit and couldn't find any blatantly anti-religious sentiments attributable to to Mr. Youd (aka John Christopher), but I'd be interested to hear from someone who may know more.
Visit Tim Jones' blog, "Old World Swine"
Posted by Tim Jones in Books, Film and TV, Religion | Permalink | Comments (41)
January 07, 2008
He's Everywhere!
(Tim Jones)
Old World Swine, at it again;
As other Catholic bloggers have ably pointed out, presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, in his victory speech after the Iowa primary, quoted - and cited - G.K. Chesterton. Okay, technically he misquoted Chesterton, but not badly. It was still heartening to hear.
Any time I see GKC gaining influence in the world, I count that as a good thing. So I was delighted to see him popping up in a book I was given recently, written by Evangelical author Ravi Zacharias.
The book - Can Man Live Without God (Thomas Nelson)- was a Christmas gift from my sister and her husband. They would describe themselves - I think - as Bible Only, non-denominational Christians, or (in their view) just basic Christians. My brother, a pastor who's church they attended for some time, maintained that this faith was not even Protestant... that it was just plain meat-and-potatoes Christianity and had nothing at all to do with any historical Christian "movement" of one stripe or another. He truly believed this.
I was a little leary of the book, therefore. But, one of the things I have hoped to accomplish this year is to read more, and seeing as they were thoughtful enough to give me the book, I was only too happy to read it.
Mr. Zacharias got my attention right away by mulling over the lyrics of King Crimson, one of my favorite bands (although I prefer their later work - Discipline more than Court of the Crimson King). He waits until chapter 8 to begin quoting G.K. Chesterton, but he returns to him more than to any other Christian source - several times throughout the book - as well as drawing heavily on Malcolm Muggeridge and C.S. Lewis.
Few, I think, would have their mind changed one way or another by reading this book. Zacharias says nothing new, which is fine by me (I saw on television a Christian ministry that advertised their charismatic leader had "a message unlike any other in the Christian World!" - exactly what we don't need). What Zacharias manages is to pull together a quick survey of the most dominant philosophical voices of the twentieth century (that is to say, atheists of differing flavors), outlines the major defects of their thought and its disastrous consequences for society, and gives voice to the most able defenders of Truth. He straightforwardly presents Christ as the answer to all of man's deepest longings.
I think Francis Schaeffer did a more thorough job of dissecting atheist philosophy and the ills of modern society (from this perspective) than does Mr. Zacharias. The book is too brief for him to be very philosophically rigorous, but he does provide a workable introduction to these broad ideas and their historical background for those who are not already familiar with them. He quotes Nietzche, Kant, Descartes, Huxley, Bertrand Russel and the like from the Life is Meaningless side, and refutes them using Chesterton, Lewis, Pascal, Muggeridge and others (including contemporaries like Norman Geisler and Peter Kreeft). He has good language for Mother Teresa (Mr. Zacharias is of East Indian heritage) and St. Augustine, and takes no overt jabs at the Catholic Church. The book is forwarded by Charles Colson, a friend of Catholics (or as some would have it, a dirty rotten Papist sympathizer).
On the whole, I was very cheered that the book drew from such sources (especially Chesterton, of course). It ought to make any observant reader want to read both Chesterton and Muggeridge. It also gives me a terrific opportunity to pass on some of Chesterton's writing, from which the world can only benefit.
Have others noticed Chesterton's thought beginning to loom large on the Christian horizon? Is sanity breaking out here and there? Are post-modern, post-Protestant Christians ready now to hear what he has to say?
Posted by Tim Jones in Books | Permalink | Comments (103)
June 22, 2007
In The Mail
(Jimmy Akin)
John Allen's book on Opus Dei actually came out a while ago, but the publisher just sent me a review copy.
I was pleased to get it because I like John Allen's journalistic work, and I'd trust him more than most writers to handle the subject in an informed manner that is fair--neither uncritical nor overcritical.
I look forward to reading it. (When I can find the time!)
In the meanwhile,
GET THE BOOK.
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Books | Permalink | Comments (40)
September 06, 2006
In The Mail
(Jimmy Akin)
I recently received an advance copy of a book called Saints Behvaing Badly by Thomas Craughwell and I'll offer my thoughts on it soon, after I've had a chance to go through it.
The book looks at the human side of saints--the side that is often diminished or dimmed in pious saint stories.
The fact is that the saints were often human, all too human as the phrase goes, and while some might consider it impious to point this out (and while it would be impious to dwell on it obsessively), it also can be inspirational to realize that the saints were indeed imperfect but nevertheless were able to overcome and display heroic virtue.
In that sense, looking at the imperfections of the saints can play a useful and encouraging role for those of us whose salvation is not yet won.
In the meantime,
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Books | Permalink | Comments (9)
May 30, 2006
The Physics Of Star Trek
(Jimmy Akin)
I decided to take a little road trip over the Memorial Day weekend, so I loaded up the truck and I went over to Phoenix. While there I went square dancing with the Bucks & Bows club of Scottsdale, which was very enjoyable, and I also got in a good bit of listening to audio books while shooting through the desert.
One of the books I listened to was Lawrence M. Krauss's The Physics of Star Trek. It was a nice read.
It came out a good while ago, so it didn't go all the way up to the end of recent Star Trek history, but it was nice to hear a professional physicist's take on the show.
It was clear that Krauss enjoys Star Trek and can appreciate episodes even when they contain physics mistakes. He also handled the subjects he considered in a quite balanced way, regularly avoiding the trap of saying "This could never happen" while making it clear that the current understanding of physics would make it very, very hard for it to happen.
One of the things that Krauss was most impressed with was how good the technobabble on the show can be. While a bunch of it is just junk (from a physics point of view as well as a dramatic point of view), there are a startling number of times where the writers of Star Trek seem to have picked terminology for things that eerily mirrors the actual terms scientists use, started using after the show, or might plausibly use in the future. (An easy example is a TOS episode in which the writers referred to something that sounds like a black hole--before the term "black hole" had been coined--as a "black star.")
After discussing warp drive and time travel and deflector shields and inertial dampers and the like, Krauss concludes the book with a couple of chapters dealing with particularly good and particularly bad physics moments on Star Trek.
I was kind of surprised that in the bad physics moments that he picked on a few things that dealt with minor matters of terminology that I wouldn't have included in a top 10 mistakes chapter. I was also kind of surprised that he omitted some of my favorite science errors on Star Trek (like where the heck is Spock getting all of his body mass from as he's rapidly re-growing to adulthood on the Genesis Planet in Star Trek III? I mean, he should be stuffing his face with food every second, if it were even possible for him to metabolize it into body mass that fast.)
But then that's the fun of top 10 lists: Debating whether they actually are the top 10 or not.
Krauss also handles the subject of religion quite well. He's respectful to religious sensibilities and interested in the theological questions that are raised by Star Trek technology, such as the implications for the transporter on the question of whether the soul exists.
In his discussion of this topic, though, I think he makes a mistake in reasoning, though it is a forgiveable one since it would require significant theological background to spot the problem and, after all, "He's a physicist, not a theologian, dammit!" (Please excuse the bad word in deference to Dr. McCoy.)
Here's the issue: If a transporter takes you apart molecule by molecule (or particle by particle), it would seem to kill you. If it then assembles an identical copy of your body (either out of the same atoms or new ones) and that new copy works properly then--one might suppose--it looks like we are nothing more than molecules in a particular, replicable pattern. In other words: There is no soul.
Krauss remains neutral in the book on whether souls exist, but I would take issue with whether the above line of reasoning works.
From a Catholic perspective, everything that is alive has a soul. Not everything has an immortal soul (only rational beings have those as far as we know), but life and the possession of a soul are concomittant.
So if a transporter makes an identical copy of your body and it's alive then it has some kind of soul. If it's clearly rational then it also clearly has a rational and thus an immortal soul. (But be careful here: The reverse is not necessarily true. If it isn't clearly rational then that doesn't mean it automatically lacks an immortal soul. Irrational people still have immortal souls by virtue of their membership in a rational species--mankind--even if their exercise of reason is impaired.)
If a transporter made a down-to-the-particle copy of you and it was not rational then I would say that this constitutes evidence that the soul does exist since clearly something other than a molecular copy of your body is needed for you to be rational.
But if it makes a copy and the copy is rational then I don't think we have evidence one way or the other about the existence of the soul.
Why is that?
Because the evidence is consistent with either the hypothesis that we are nothing more than patterned molecules or the hypothesis that the copy has a new soul (yours presumably having departed when you were taken apart and killed).
To see the basis for the second hypothesis, let's set aside the issue of killing: Suppose that the transporter doesn't destroy your body. It just scans it and makes a copy of you, so now there are two of you. In this case, the transporter is functioning as a kind of high-tech cloning device, one capable of making an identical copy that doesn't even have to grow up and acquire new memories. It's a totally identical clone in the best tradition of bad sci-fi cloning stories.
But this would put the theological issue on the same footing as cloning, which theologians have already had the chance to chew over in real life.
As I've often pointed out before, if you were able to clone a person (either by fissioning an early embryo or by nuclear transfer) and you got a rational being as a result then it would be unambiguous that the clone has a rational soul.
Why is that?
Well, all you've done in this case is come up with a new human body by a morally illicit means. God means human bodies to come into existence as the result of sexual union between a husband and a wife, and at the moment the body comes into existence, he provides it with a soul. That's how he set things up to work for our species, and that's the only way that it is moral for us to bring new humans into the world.
But God has already shown himself willing to provide souls even when human bodies are not generated in a morally licit manner. Humans have had the ability to create new human bodies in immoral ways for a long time (e.g., by premarital sex, by adultery, by rape). Recently we've added some new techniques (e.g., in vitro fertilization). And we may soon add more (e.g., cloning). But it's all the same thing: You're just coming up with a new human body by immoral means.
God has been willing to endow people who were born in such ways with rational souls as is evidenced by the fact that they are both living and rational. Jesus even had some people like that in his family tree (think: the Tamar incident in Genesis 38).
So if--in addition to artificial twinning and nuclear transfer--you come up with a new cloning technology (transporter cloning) then you haven't changed the playing field theologically. All you're doing is coming up with a new human body (a rather mature one) by immoral means, but that won't stop God from endowing it with a rational soul.
So it doesn't seem to me that having a transporter produce rational copies of you would be evidence for the non-existence of the human soul.
It would be evidence for the existence of the soul if the transporter couldn't produce rational copies that were known to be particle-for-particle identical to you. In that case we would have found an instance where God doesn't provide a soul even though we're providing a body. But the reverse isn't the case.
I would thus say that the existence of the soul is to some extent verifiable but not falsifiable by transporter technology.
That doesn't mean I'd be theologically comfortable with transporter technology. If it works as advertised then it's basically a murder/cloning device.
Fortunately, in at least one episode, they indicate that you remain conscious through the transporter process, and if that's the case then it doesn't look like you're being killed at all but simply adjusted in some way that allows you to pass through solid matter without actually being killed.
I'VE WRITTEN ABOUT THAT BEFORE.
So I differed with Krauss's reasoning on this point, but it was still nice to listen to him tackle the obvious theological question that transporter technology would pose, and it was a pleasure to listen to his balanced and informed take on the physics of the show.
If you'd be interested in hearing an actual physicist offer a sympathetic but critical look at the subject then be sure to
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Books | Permalink | Comments (45)
May 15, 2006
How To Judge A Book By Its Cover
(Michelle Arnold)
Perhaps you have heard the old adage that you should never judge a book by its cover. Nonsense! … At least when we’re speaking literally, anyway.
The apologists here at Catholic Answers often get calls from inquirers asking whether we have read such-and-so book and, if so, what do we think about it. Unless the book happens to generate a lot of inquiries -- on the order of, say, The DaVinci Code -- the answers are often “No” and “We don’t have an opinion on it.”
Don’t despair. There are ways to glean a lot of information about a book without having to read the thing. Here are some tips:
Title: What does the title say about the author’s approach to the subject? If you were wandering through the parenting section of your local bookstore, a quick scan of the titles can give you insight into the approaches taken to parenting. The Strong-Willed Child may suggest a more combative approach to childrearing than Raising Your Spirited Child. If you have a gentler parenting philosophy, you’re more likely to be drawn to Unconditional Parenting than to Laying Down the Law.
Author: What else has this person written? What are his credentials in the field? These answers to these questions and many more can be found by plugging the author’s name into Google. These days, when many authors maintain personal web sites as marketing tools, you’re likely to find out a great deal about an author from the Internet.
Cover blurbs: Who is endorsing this book? Have you heard of them before? Do you know their reputation? If we move back to the parenting section example, if names like James Dobson or Dr. William Sears appear on the dustjacket, you’ve found an important clue about the author’s parenting philosophy. In the Catholicism section of the store, an endorsement of a book by Fr. Richard McBrien will suggest one thing, while an endorsement by George Weigel will suggest something else.
Publisher: What other titles has this company published? What is the company’s target audience? What does its web site reveal about the company? If the book is on Catholicism, is the publisher a Catholic company? If so, is the Catholic publisher orthodox, heterodox, or is it a mixed bag? Is the company secular? If so, what other religious titles has the company produced?
Copyright: If the copyright date is old, will there be current information missing? A book on nutrition from decades ago might still talk about the four food groups rather than the newer food pyramid. A Catholic book written before 1983 might reflect the 1917 Code of Canon Law and thus be out of date in some matters of ecclesiastical law.
Notes: If the book is non-fiction, does the author cite sources? Does he cite sources in a uniform manner, or is his citation haphazard? Are the bulk of the sources primary (e.g., studies, academic papers) or does he rely on general information books in his field in which the authors agree with his thesis? (You’d be surprised at how sloppy some researchers can be.)
Bibliography: What titles did the author use for research? Does the author recommend certain titles? If so, do you know anything about these titles or authors?
Acknowledgements: Who does the author thank? Thanks to experts in the field is helpful and the names can be plugged into Internet search engines for information about credentials and philosophy.
Foreword and Afterword: Who wrote introductory and/or summary matter? What is that person’s experience in the field? A book on the liturgy with an introduction by the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger would suggest that the book would be orthodox, while an introduction by Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB, would suggest something quite different.
After your gleaning, take stock. Are there red flags flying? If so, the book may not be worth your time. If you do have time to spare and your curiosity continues to be piqued, you may still want to read the book but you’ll know to rev up your Purity Filter before reading. In any case, you’ll have a pretty good gauge of the book before diving in. So, yes, you can judge a book by its cover!
Posted by Michelle Arnold in Books | Permalink | Comments (8)
March 31, 2006
Shakespeare Sale
(Michelle Arnold)
If you have a spare 3.5 million lying around (pounds, that is; in U.S. dollars you'll need $6.1 million), you may want to consider investing it in an original Shakespeare First Folio that will be auctioned off by Sotheby's in July:
"Hailed by auctioneer Sotheby's as the most important book in English literature, the First Folio is credited with saving for posterity many of the bard's plays including 'Macbeth,' 'Twelfth Night' and 'Julius Caesar' which had never before been printed.
"'The First Folio preserves 18 of his plays, including some of the most major, which otherwise would have been lost for all time,' English literature specialist Peter Selley said as the volume was put on show on Thursday.
"'Relatively complete copies of the Folio in contemporary or near contemporary bindings very rarely come to market. There is only one copy recorded as remaining in private hands,' he added."
Posted by Michelle Arnold in Books | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack
