Abstract
In his great novel The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky has one of his characters (Mitya) say
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- 1.
Chapter 4 (“A Hymn and a Secret”) of Book XI (Ivan).
- 2.
Point Counter Point, Harper & Brothers 1928, p. 135.a.
- 3.
Daniel J. Cohen, Equations from God: pure mathematics and Victorian faith, The Johns Hopkins University Press 2007.
- 4.
In late October 2013 an interesting debate on this very issue erupted on the editorial pages of The Boston Globe. It was started by an essay whose author claimed it is blasphemy to use the phrase “Oh my God” as an exclamation of wonder, and that teenagers who insert OMG into their social media messages risk eternal damnation. Soon after, the following reply appeared on the Letters-to-the-Editor page: “Why is … so concerned about the use of ‘Oh my God’ by others who do not share her faith? When I use the expression, I am not referring to her deity, but to mine: the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”
- 5.
To give this a blunt translation: You are born, you live, you die, you decompose, and that’s all there is. If you don’t like that, the Universe doesn’t care.
- 6.
The entire story is told in a matter-of-fact, deadpan fashion, with Chiang coming at times very close to being flat-out funny. For example, we are told that, when disaster results from an angel visitation, property damage claims are “excluded by private insurance companies due to the cause.” No further elaboration is given but, apparently, this is a sly reference to the typical insurance loophole of not covering ‘acts of God.’
- 7.
When I read these words by Chiang, I was reminded of how SF writer Philip K. Dick described God after recovering (sort of) from his second LSD ‘trip’: “I perceived Him as a pulsing, furious, throbbing mass of vengeance-seeking authority, demanding an audit like a sort of metaphysical IRS agent.” From the Chronology of Dick’s life, in VALIS and Later Novels, The American Library 2009, p. 830.
- 8.
In Chap. 7 (“The Exploiters and the Exploited”) of Part 1.
- 9.
See note 8 in Chap. 5 again.
- 10.
The eternal nature of God is the theme of William Blake’s 1794 watercolor “Ancient of Days,” the name for God in Chap. 7 of the Bible’s Book of Daniel. (A similar usage occurs in holy works of Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism.) In Blake’s painting God’s hand is shown holding a compass to ‘measure the universe,’ and this coupling of a mathematical instrument with faith mirrors the appearance of religion in SF.
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Nahin, P.J. (2014). What If God Revealed Himself?. In: Holy Sci-Fi!. Science and Fiction. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0618-5_8
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