Science, Faith, and Syncretism

Syncretism means mixing belief systems. In the Old Testament we read of people worshipping both God and Baal, for example. These days we do much the same thing, only the other "god" is usually Money, Popularity, Respectability, or something like that. The idea I mentioned last time, that there must be a scientific explanation to support Genesis, is such a case. Unless God jumps through the hoop of our personal expectations, we just won't believe in him.

So there!

I still don't see why Creation is any different from the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection, neither of which gets the imprimatur of science. If God wants to commit a miracle now and then, we can either rely on him to be telling the truth or rely on our amazing fallen minds to find an alternative explanation. This is the major reason I consider Creation Science dangerous on theological grounds: since the goal is to find a cause-and-effect sequence to explain miracles, it tends to deny or minimize miracles on the one hand and support a mechanistic view of God on the other.

Case in point: the Flood. In order to explain where all the water came from, proponents of Creation Science usually conjure up a vapor canopy nowhere attested in scripture and have the earth's crust upthrust, downthrust, and sidewaysthrust without ever generating a really good dance step. I, on the other hand, just figure that if God wants enough water to flood the whole planet, he can just call it into existence. It's called a miracle, and no, I can't make a science out of it.

So what if the science happens to be right anyway--what if God used a vapor canopy without mentioning it? Occam's razor, friend: the vapor-canopy explanation is complex; a miracle is simple. Nor is that always true: quite often positing a miracle is a needless complication. Just not here.

This need for an acceptable mechanism leads in worse directions, though. For example, it is Law-oriented rather than Grace-oriented. Earning your salvation by good works is simple cause and effect; it's a kind of science. Accepting salvation by faith that has been granted by grace is miraculous thinking: it's simply not good cause and effect, because it doesn't provide a good way to manipulate God.

C. S. Lewis talked about this in The Abolition Of Man: science and magic tend to be different ways of gaining power over nature (and thus God) by reducing it to rules you can manipulate. This is the reason the Creation Science crowd doesn't like miracles (beyond the fact they aren't acceptable to the scientific establishment): miracles confer no manipulative power. We can't use them to get what we want; we can't make them happen whenever we feel like it.

That's also why I don't really care about the scientific claims of Creation Science: if they were presented with proper rigor, I couldn't understand them, much less judge their validity, but if they are presented in a looser, more popular style, even a scientist in relevant field couldn't assess the data. So I stick with the theological ramifications--a topic friends and enemies both seem to ignore.

Science, Faith, and Miracles

I'm currently involved in yet another vigorous exchange of views with a friend who apparently has no choice other than Creation Science on the one hand and loss of faith on the other. Creation Science, he says, allows him to disbelieve evolution and thus to believe Genesis.

I admit I don't get it myself.

We agree that evolution and Genesis don't get on well together. I've seen attempts to harmonize them, and those attempts amount to wishful thinking. They also usually involve effectively dismissing those parts of Genesis that seem inconvenient.

But I disagree that cobbling together a "science" is the only way to "save" Genesis. Bear in mind that science is a system of generalizations about what usually happens and why. And consider that science (indeed, the humbler Everyday Experience) tells us that virgins don't get pregnant without changing their status and that dead people don't get better after a few days in a tomb.

In other words, if we must have a scientific alternative (Creation Science) to evolution, we must have a scientific alternative (Virgin Birth Science) to conception and another (Resurrection Science) to postmortem decay. For without such alternatives, we must follow science rather than scripture, apparently, and these doctrines will be lost.

But science is about what usually happens--pretty much always, in fact. And the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection were one-time events, though to be sure the latter presages a much more widespread repeat. In other words, they were miracles, and because miracles are abnormal, they can't be generalized into science.

So what about Creation? Does the opening of Genesis happen a lot? Not so far as we can tell. It's characterized by God speaking and things happening. In other words, it's a miracle. But that means it can't be made into a science.

And that should be okay. The alternative is to say that there are no miracles, which is not something a Christian can agree with. But it suggests a syncretism--a mixture of proper belief with outside views--that is common and troubling. I'll hit that next, all going well.

A Knyght Ther Was

A Knyght Ther Was (also available as an audiobook) is a novella by Robert F. Young. I was already familiar with Young from his novel Eridahn, which I liked and which has the distinction of being one of the few sci-fi novels my mother considers worthwhile.

Like Eridahn, A Knyght Ther Was is a time-travel story with all the twists and turns I at least look for in that sub-genre. After all, why bother travelling through time if you can't mess with your past self on occasion?

Anyway... A Knyght Ther Was features a time thief named Tom Mallory who is going to use another Malory's work to find a suitable point in time to rip off the Holy Grail. He's going to impersonate Sir Galahad, the last guy to deal with the Grail before it was taken up to Heaven--it seems like a reasonable point to take it forward in time instead.

Then the unforeseen problems arise.

The oddity is, I did not think I would like the story. I thought Young would get cute with the Grail, and the tone is initially quite cynical. There were also several plot wrinkles I thought I could predict, and I was right about some of them. I saw the Lancelot twist coming immediately, for example. Others were both surprising and satisfying, especially Mallory's unexpected encounter just after his moment of triumph: it works out exactly as it should. It was at that moment that I knew I would consider the story a classic if he didn't mess it up.

And he didn't! There was a remaining matter he could have completely blown--I thought he would, really; it's another place where he surprised me, because I was sure I knew what he was up to: the mystery of Rowena.

The major surprise was that despite the cynical opening, this takes place in an essentially Christian universe. The two really honest and admirable characters are Christians, and they talk about God in a way that's generally right. And that's all the more peculiar because so far as I know, Young wasn't a Christian himself. (That's not to say I would be surprised if he was.) And I have to admit that this is more Christian than some supposedly "Christian" fiction I've encountered.

It's a short piece, just over two hours as an audiobook, and I'm sure you'll keep coming back to it. Let's have that info again:

A Knyght Ther Was
E-text
Audiobook

The Czar's Spy

The Czar's Spy by William Le Queux is a novel of personal cussedness versus political intrigue. It begins with the putative owners of a luxury yacht getting into a fix in Leghorn, Italy. (A foghorn was not involved, nor were any chickens harmed.) They are so grateful for the locals' help that they ask Our Hero and Narrator, writer Gordon Gregg, famous for writing novels in shorthand for speed-readers, to help them write a thank-you note in Italian. Gregg is filling in for the real British Vice-Consul of Leghorn, so while he is being entertained aboard the yacht, someone decides to raid the consular office. Hard luck: he has already drunk the good booze and smoked the best cigars. Still, they ransack the place.

Gregg, meanwhile, has encountered aboard the yacht the hastily shredded photo of a Mysterious and Beautiful Woman, whose visage (when he reassembles the picture) immediately burns itself on his brain for keeps. This proves handy later on.

Mystery follows mystery in a frankly infuriating fashion. Gordon becomes more or less used to two phenomena: people trying to kill him and people telling him that he is at the edge of an Amazing Mystery, and they could sure give him an earful if only they dared. The killers are more fun. I found myself fantasizing about a more satisfying response to one of these mystery-mongers:

Mystery-Monger: If you could only penetrate the mystery of this matter, you would find that you had uncovered a plot beyond the dreams of the National Enquirer! Of course, I have Important Secret Information that I'm not about to divulge, though I'll sure rabbit on about how much I know.

Gordon Gregg: Fair enough. Then I shall thrash you until you tell me whatever you do know. That shouldn't take long.

MM: But I'm a lady!

GG: Righto! The thrashing shouldn't take long, either, then.

It's pretty much a cheat anyway: most of them don't really know that much, and the only one who knows it all, a lady with an unforgettable face, has been the subject of a fiendish experiment to transform her into a mime. Gordon Gregg gallivants all over in search of the truth, or failing that, a hot date: England, Scotland, Finland, Russia--in palaces and dungeons, meeting the Arch Anarchist, the Strangler of Finland (not to be confused with the Wedgie King of France), and The Face.

Anyway--self-importance aside, it's not a bad yarn, though I found it odd that a couple of lethal devices seemed like practical jokes gone wrong. Still, the suspense and mystery aren't bad, especially when a dead man turns up alive and the narrator gets to fight his way out of a Finnish Bastille and bluff his way out of certain death.

The Czar's Spy is available as a free e-book and as a free audiobook.

The Mystery of the Four Fingers

The Mystery of the Four Fingers by Fred M. White is... Okay, I'll say it: it's about a bad guy getting the finger four times. His own fingers. Mummified. Mysteriously delivered. Oh, and he'll die after the fourth one.

If that doesn't say "quality literature," I don't know what does.

Set in the early 20th century, the story features a number of characters in extraordinary circumstances who act according to a strict personal code of honor (except the villains, who for some reason don't care so much about honor).

A man gets married--it could happen to nearly anyone--and thirty minutes in, his wife leaves him a note saying to forget about her, because she's off for an extended period, but she hopes there are no hard feelings. Of course not. She probably left the oven on, and now she feels honor-bound to rebuild the house brick by brick herself. Or maybe she was drafted by the French Foreign Legion. It could happen to anybody. And since her husband is such a noble sort, when he runs across her three years(!) later--under mysterious circumstances, of course--he plays along when she says she still loves him but has Mysterious Business which involves posing as the daughter of a Bounder and a Cad who is, coincidentally, old enough to be her father.

Did I mention he has no fingers on his left hand? But not to worry: he's getting them back, one at a time. It has to do with the Four Finger Mine, the secret possession of Indians in Mexico. Whenever someone messes with their mine, he loses four fingers, gets them back piecemeal, and dies, usually insane. It could happen to anybody.

But wait! There's more! Counterfeiters who hit on the perfect crime of producing perfect copies of gold sovereigns in real gold--a point where the shoddier counterfeiters tend to skimp. A handsome cripple who threatens to kill people who--it could happen to anyone--fall through a grating into his cellar. A beautiful girl who thinks she's Ophelia or some such because her fiancé is supposedly dead except she knows he isn't.

Practically everyone is related one way or another, but inbreeding is not the proffered explanation. It does lead to some odd bits near the end, where the highly principled characters decide that blood is even thicker than their heads, causing the story to run an extra couple of chapters.

Strangely enough, I actually liked the story. It has good pacing, a lot of twists and turns, and reasonable suspense. It is not a Christian story, but the code of honor is generally good: villains aside, these are fairly decent, honorable people who eventually confront the problem of vengeance and reach a reasonable if not quite problem-free solution.

The Mystery of the Four Fingers is available as a free e-book at Gutenberg and as a free audiobook at LibriVox.

Dark World: On the Road Again

(The story begins here.)

No one spoke until Dvorak Manor was well out of sight. Lassiter grunted slightly as another car turned away from them, heading south. “There goes Antonin. He still gives me the creeps.”

Darren had also been watching the other vehicle. “Dvorak was unwise to isolate himself. And Antonin probably wouldn’t have done anything so dramatic if Dvorak had just listened to him. Combining their interests—organics for control and inorganics for power and precision—might have been the perfect blend, though it probably would have yielded the ultimate horror.”

“Speaking of horrors,” Dr. Fleming said, “we seem to have escaped our weird friends. Nothing truly strange has happened for a full day, and I’m beginning to hope they’ve lost our trail.”

“I do hate to disappoint you,” Darren replied, “but I had an odd experience this morning after you threw me out and before I fetched Lassiter.”

“Great,” Lassiter muttered. “Are we werewolves together, or are you above such things?”

“I believe I’m protected. But this was a more positive encounter: I think I’ve met the priest you mentioned in our first interview.”

“I’d take my chances with the werewolves.”

“Having interacted with both, I disagree. He provided some useful information, though I’m still sorting it out. Basically, there’s a kind of doorway between worlds, and once it opens for you, it never really closes—unless you go through, in which case it shuts you in forever. It tends to draw evil to that other world, though I think it’s letting some out here as well.”

Lassiter merely snorted in response, but Dr. Fleming smiled. “I’m sure Dr. Newman will want to hear all about it; he’s always interested in the duality of good and evil in human nature. He even uses Christian terminology, though I’m sure you would disagree with precisely how he uses it.”

Darren glanced back; Lassiter was either very quick at falling asleep or very determined to ignore and be ignored. “So if neither of us is likely to agree with this Dr. Newman, why bother with him?”

“He has relevant knowledge. Dr. Adam Newman—yes, go ahead and chuckle; I am well aware it’s an alias—Dr. Newman pursues unorthodox means, but he sometimes succeeds where others fail. He specializes in rehabilitating criminals, and his work there is quite impressive. It’s rumored that a certain well-known doctor—more of a modern Renaissance man, really—has funded his establishment in upstate New York where he reforms criminals and helps them become useful citizens. But he also believes in some kind of transformative power. I never actually listened, but he seems to think a strong enough psychological change or disturbance can produce physiological changes. He probably would accept the possibility of lycanthropy.”

“So would I,” Darren retorted. “So would you—now. Why go to someone we both consider questionable? Are you really so determined to find even a pseudo-scientific explanation and cure?”

“It may not be so much a false science as a real science sloppily pursued and documented, much like mesmerism. Perhaps I have been too quick to dismiss him and his views, just as I initially rejected the idea of lycanthropy. But in any case, we shall soon see for ourselves whether Dr. Newman’s ‘Better Angel Foundation’ is genuine or fraudulent.”

Next: How Firm a Foundation?

[I really am behind in my book reviews, so I'll pause the story for a few days.]

Dark World: Aftermath

(The story begins here.)

“My workroom!” Dvorak screamed.

Dr. Fleming opened the door, but it was Darren who pulled it wide—until he too saw the interior and froze.

Metal fragments protruded from the walls and lay on the floor. The mechanical arms showed varying levels of damage, and Darren concluded that they would not be playing the piano anytime soon. A shriek of dismay and rage told him that Dvorak had shaken off his assistant and wheeled himself forward for a look.

Darren ignored the man. “Victor, was there a radio in that thing?”

Dr. Fleming shook his head. “I doubt it. No, it was designed to play a recorded message and self-destruct when someone probed the less innocent parts of the machine. If there had been a radio, the remote killer would have detonated the bomb when we were gathered around Karel this morning: it should have been obvious that he was going to survive, and the blast would’ve eliminated all witnesses.”

“Why didn’t he use a bomb to begin with?” Antonin asked.

“The same reason he used the knife,” Darren said. “Misdirection and intimidation: a phantom German assassin who can enter locked rooms would keep the police occupied for some time. Victor’s right: the bomb meant that the ruse had failed and the killer had to destroy the evidence and an investigator.”

“I don’t care about any of that,” Dvorak snapped. “He practically did kill me—though it looks like some of the manipulators can be salvaged. If I can get a proper version of the new machine, I can rebuild it all.”

“Avoid the ornaments this time,” Dr. Fleming said. “I suspect that their real purpose was just to distract you from other oddities in the construction. You should investigate the man who insisted on producing them.”

“A waste of time. If they were innocent pawns, they’ve been killed; if not innocent, they have fled. I know these people.” Turning to Antonin, he added, “I should have known you, too. It is pointless to have an assistant who disagrees with my goals. You are dismissed. I’m sure Victor can find a place for you in his vehicle; I would let him stay—perhaps even Mr. Christopher—but I haven’t the energy or patience for their ‘transforming’ friend. I see now that I am better off alone here with my machines, which at least are rigidly ethical—they are essentially decent.”

“And one day,” Antonin muttered, “you will punch a card incorrectly, and they will kill you for it—without even knowing they have done so. I have a vehicle of my own, sir; I shall not burden Dr. Fleming and his party.”

Lassiter grunted. “At least I’m getting used to wearing out my welcome. May I hitch a ride with you two?”

“Of course,” Dr. Fleming replied, not even looking in Dvorak’s direction. “We aren’t done with you yet. I suppose I shall see what Dr. Newman thinks of you. For now, you can help Darren and me remove our effects to the car.”

Next: On the Road Again