One two many

[The title of this post was supplied by my cousin, who hasn't read any of it but just wants me to be done with it.]

I was going to blog about something else, but then I finished reading Pratchett's Nation circa 11pm on Saturday and felt so happy and so sad that I had to write about it.

But first I finished reading Dawkins's The God Delusion, which I'd started a couple weeks ago, and went to sleep. I got up and blogged a bit, then church and family time intervened. Next I wrote some more, and it was sleep again, and work, and hanging out, and family time, and sleep. Then you all stopped reading my blog.

And then you came back! And right now I have a two-hour wait for a follow-up appointment about my scary acne medication, so we're at Saturday evening again. I bask in your enthusiasm.

I felt happy because Nation is a dazzling book, and you want to read it. Trust me. I felt sad because the person who writes these books that I love does not know the God Who loves him.

It doesn't seem fair. I am a scrubby undergrad who judges new acquaintances, unintentionally sounds pompous, frets about boys and wonders if she if developing a double chin; Terry Pratchett, OBE, is a distinguished author who writes the funniest, humblest fantastical satires. His only apparent fault is phenomenal popularity, which makes him a tinge less cool. Surely he deserves to know the Master of the Universe so much more than I do.

But I guess the thing is that no one deserves to know the Master -- no more than readers like me, who respond as much to a book's incandescent story as to its author's perceived spirituality, deserve to know Terry Pratchett. And you never get to know why you are thus privileged. And as long as your time-bound life lasts, you have to be content with this ignorance.

Richard Dawkins is a man who is not content with ignorance -- a brilliant man, to whom Pratchett repeatedly pays tribute in Nation. In The God Delusion, Dawkins makes a case for the extreme statistical improbability of God's existance and discusses its pernicious effects. My understanding of it is:

1. Life is improbable, and life must have come frome somewhere.
2. If this improbable thing called life were created, the thing that created it should be even more complex, ergo even less probable.
3. However, natural selection is a process that builds on each anomalously surviving organism, which give rise to increasingly intricate and anomalous biological entities. Thus human life.
4. Additionally, our planet's capacity for fostering life is also highly unlikely, say 1 in X.
5. However, there may be a multiplicity of universes with differing physical laws. Also, within our universe there are a lot of planets, many times more than X.
6. It is self-evident that the physical laws of at least our universe, and perhaps others, are in concert with life. Further, the fact that we are thinking about existance means that our planet is indeed one of the (1/X)*[however many planets in our universe] that can host life.

I don't see how different this if from St Anselm's argument for God that Dawkins's discounts, apart from a conflation with the cogito principle. I'm also not a fan either the Dawkins or Anselm positions, but really shouldn't be talking like this because I've only taken one semester of philo formally. Besides, I'm in the hospital.

That made no sense, but making sense all the time would set too high a bar for my rambles. I'd be unseemly...ly happy to argue about these arguments in person, but I always get really nervous about setting things down in text where I don't get to respond to people's responses.

But yes, to the point. In a testy adolescent girly discussion, one of my O Level classmates floored us with: "You can't argue faith." You can argue religion (historically psychologically socially etc) and you can try to argue God (ontologically relationally etc), but by definition you cannot argue faith.

Faith is the gift of believing in something that is too big to grasp. When faced with vastness, we find recourse in narrative and metaphor, as in the Usborne (I think) illustrated children's somethingy that someone gave us when I was six, which depicted sex using robots with spring extensions. Hence bread and wine, the word and light, marriage. The language of faith does not coincide with the language of reason, so calling someone stupid for not having received faith is unreasonable -- just as it would be unreasonable to call a lawyer stupid nor not understanding quantum. (Whatever you reasonably choose to call lawyers is not my business.) (Probably not a good time to mention that I'm angling for a scholarship to law school.) (Never to pratice, though.)

Umm. Yes. It's not an issue of nonoverlapping magisteria (which Dawkins disagrees with in his book), or disjoint sets of science and religion. It's not that God isn't the province of reason: reason is the province of God. It wouldn't be logical for the God who created the intellect to toss it aside -- He trumps it.

And it's always so hard for us to remember that God wins, because we're engrossed by the chronology of gameplay. We forget about the manual that tells us how the game unfolds, and how it's really not a game, because the stakes are our lives. And we forget that the everytime God -- into Whom omniscience and and omnipotence, free will and determinism collapse -- keeps inviting us to the winning side.

But it is so hard to be ready to claim this easy triumph, so God lets us play. Because, as any worthy kindergarten teacher would tell you, we learn through play. Besides, there's inherent value in that fun. And so we frolic and conspire in what Dawkins calls Middle World. More often than not we are unaware of higher dimensions, like the goodly square in Edwin Abbott's Flatland, which Dawkins alludes to and which my professor recommended in response to a Descartes paper I wrote during that one semester of philo.

God knows (I think) that I still need to play; I'm terrible at learning my lessons and often operate in an inefficiently circuitous manner. For example, I picked The God Delusion to be able to justify the Dawkins aversion I'd developed after reading some of his interviews and articles. And then I really really wanted to blog about The God Delusion fifty pages in, but restrained myself because that would defeat the whole point of me reading the book.

As with Nation, the ending of The God Delusion made me feel happy and sad. Dawkins writes:

Could we, by training and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World, tear off our black burka, and achieve some sort of intuitive -- as well as just mathematical -- understanding of the very small, the very large, and the very fast? I genuinely don't know the answer, but I am thrilled to be alive at a time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.

Dear Professor Dawkins, I pray for the day you and Sir Pratchett discover this Infinity. And I desperately hope that the hiccoughs and egotism in this post will not impede anyone's discovery.

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On a related, though not pertinent, note: one reason why I'm glad that Pratchett is British is that "the pants of time" just sounds silly.