Monthly Archives: March 2022

Answers to the Big Questions – Thinking About Thinking #53

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The investigator in my mystery series, Evan Wycliff, is a young Baptist minister who is beset with doubt. When he was in college, he gave up his studies in the seminary because what he learned of Christian history was far too grim. Then he took up astrophysics and found more troubling questions than answers.

Like the rest of us when we bother to fret about the state of the world, Evan wants to know:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Why is there evil in the world?

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe: Greene, Brian: 9780593171721: Amazon.com: Books

I don’t have any satisfying solutions to those riddles, but I have recently read two books that offer some explanations. The first is Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by physicist Brian Greene. Here’s a more lucid presentation of astrophysics and cosmology than I’ve yet encountered. Unfortunately from the standpoint of traditional religious teaching, Greene seems to side with the “godless universe” theorists, who hold that the dual processes of entropy and evolution, over 14 billion years of chaotic interaction, are sufficient to explain the complexity of our physical world and its dazzling life forms. Greene does stop short of attempting to explain how consciousness arises. He’s as stumped as anyone about whether a computer will ever be able to know it exists. (I’ve written more about Greene’s book here.)

The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex , Morowitz, Harold J. - Amazon.com

The most intriguing and persuasive scientific world view I’ve found so far is in Harold J. Morowitz‘s 20-year-old text The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex. Like Greene, Morowitz is a hard-headed physicist, but he seems to think there is more to the purpose of evolution than random outcomes, however complex or sophisticated. He’s in sympathy with the Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who theorized that all evolution tends toward the Omega Point, the pinnacle of creation decreed by its Creator. The breadth of Morowitz’s analysis is amazing – he begins with quantum particles and concludes with complex brain structure – hinting that the next step in evolution is into the spiritual realm, although he offers no opinions about what intelligent beings can find there.

If you are tempted to dive into Morowitz – and if you’re curious, I encourage you to take the plunge – feel free to skim the chapters on organic molecular chemistry. That’s the author’s specialty, and there’s way too much information here for anyone without an advanced degree in his field. Nevertheless, I promise that making your way through this ambitious book will be a rewarding experience.

Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls – Thinking About Thinking #52

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When I saw this special issue, “The Dead Sea Scrolls: 75 Years Since Their Historic Discovery,” published by National Geographic magazine, on the newsstand, I grabbed it eagerly. I hoped I’d find new revelations based on recent scholarship, which has not received much public exposure.

I was disappointed. This issue focuses almost exclusively on the scrolls that harmonize with the traditional versions of the scriptures. The editors’ mantra must have been to appeal to the broadest possible audience – and offend no one.

But then I read buried in these pages in the brief chapter “The Non-Biblical Manuscripts: The Writings of the Qumram Sect:”

Although a quarter of the Dead Sea Scrolls are copies from the Hebrew Bible, the remainder are non-biblical religious and secular texts that appear to describe the beliefs, rules and activities of the Qumram community. Josephus claims “[the Essenes] equally preserve the books belonging to their sect,” which could refer to these documents, bolstering the identification of the Qumram sect with the Essenes.

Besides the two pages that follow this quotation, the special-issue magazine ignores three-quarters of its purported topic.

For a more insightful treatment of that missing information, see Barbara Thiering’s disruptive and controversial scholarship, most notably in Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. I’ve commented previously on that book here.

Thiering died years ago, and since that time her scholarship has fallen into disrepute in the academic community.

Perhaps because she dared to speak truth to power?

Houellebecq’s Fascination with Schopenhauer – Thinking About Thinking #51

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Here’s my book review of In the Presence of Schopenhauer by French prize-winning novelist Michel Houellebecq. In this novella-length essay, the author describes his fascination with 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

The Frogs is a sculpture by Sergio Bustamante. Can you guess why it reminds me of this book?

Houellebecq asserts that encountering Schopenhauer’s philosophy changed his outlook on life fundamentally. The author was in his mid-twenties. It was as if he’d met a perverse, cranky old man whom he could regard as a father figure – an understanding mentor who could forgive the author for being such a curmudgeon himself.

In her preface to the paperback, critic Agathe Novak-Lechavalier describes the author’s outlook this way:

Schopenhauer opened Houellebecq’s eyes and taught him to contemplate the world as it is in itself – as entirely driven by a blind and endless ‘will to live’ which is the essence of all things, from inert matter to men, via plants and animals. In Schopenhauer, this ‘will’, foreign to the principle of reason, is the basis of the absurd and tragic character of all existence, whose sufferings are at once inevitable (because ‘all willing proceeds from need and thus from deprivation, and thus from suffering’) and devoid of any justification. It also explains the author’s legendary pessimism.

“In other words,” the philosopher might have said to the author, “don’t feel bad about being such a cynic. Michel. Because the only sense you can make of the world is what you perceive through your senses, your opinion is the only one that matters!”

In my posts, I’ve included book reviews of Houllebecq’s novels The Map and the Territory and Submission. I’ve also read Whatever and Serotonin – all before I picked up this little book of admiration for Schopenhauer.

Well, finally, this essay explains a lot. I’ve found Houllebecq’s narrative points of view – whether expressed in the first or the third person – as solipsistic – that is, hopelessly self-centered to the point of self-obsession. His plots often seem pointless. He never explains. It’s as if he has no idea why he wrote the story.

I’d say this point of view agrees not only with Schopenhauer but also with the later French existentialists Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as with some contemporary behaviorists. “The universe is empty and meaningless,” they seem to say. “Make of it what you will.”

Some say this is good news, Recently, I heard physicist Brian Cox say he thought the mission of the human race is to make meaning.

I wonder.

‘The Righteous Gemstones’ on HBO – Offensive to the Reds, Silly to the Blues? – Thinking About Thinking #50

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Granted, some big-time evangelists who founded superchurches have been caught up in scandals and defrocked by the press as crass profiteers.

Notable real-world exceptions have been the Reverends Billy Graham and William Schuller, but that’s going back a couple of generations. Those preachers ministered mainly to The Greatest Generation at a time when national surveys estimated 90 percent of Americans identified themselves as Christians. These days, that survey number has dropped to around 60 percent.

Those two respected leaders have passed on, and their sons are carrying their organizations forward. Their ministries have not so far been beset by scandals, but the main plotline of The Righteous Gemstones has the widowed Dr. Eli Gemstone (John Goodman) grooming his two sons to take over his worldwide evangelist movement – including a grand strategy to co-opt small-town congregations the way big corporations buy out their fledgling competitors.

A major subplot in the series has Dr. Gemstone flashing back to fond memories of the co-ministry he conducted with his wife Aimee-Leigh Gemstone. Real-world models for the couple might have been Jim Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye Bakker (Messner). Jim was eventually sent to prison on convictions of fraud and conspiracy. (As of this writing, actress Jessica Chastain has just won the SAG Award for her leading role in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which I haven’t yet seen but from press clippings seems laudatory overall.)

HBO may be trying to recapture the dysfunctional-family intrigues of its highly successful series Succession, which was about schemes and betrayals centering on a patriarch whose business empire resembles Rupert Murdoch’s. But while that clever family is as sophisticated as they are phony, the Gemstones come across as unscrupulous hicks who got rich leveraging the herd-like mentality and the tax-free status of megachurches.