I'm reading the huge tome THE GERNSBACK DAYS. It explains so much about the genre at least in America--it should be required reading upon entrance into SFWA. I'm going to try to blog about it one of these days. These are the same arguments that have been going on in the field before there was a field, when Gernsback was peddling fiction in his amateur radio magazines.

I say print SF is dying thanks to video games and TV. That's what killed _my_ reading!

I fully expect, in 2100, there to be something called SF which is on its last legs, embattled, dying, etc., etc., due to the latest technological, economic, and publishing changes, according to contemporary commentators.

Insofar as some forms of SF are REALLY in trouble (some forms always are), it has nothing to do with the war between SF's various (enduring) camps. Everything that happens will always be seen by those who want SF to be harder as evidence that it has gotten too soft, and as evidence by those who want SF to be softer that it has gotten too hard.

Really, things like the horrifying decline in the big genre magazines' circulation have entirely to do with the decline of ALL short fiction magazines in the USA, and the consolidation and standardization of distribution. SF mags can't get on the newsstands for reasons that have NOTHING to do with what's in them, and no newsstand impulse buys means no new subscribers, period. (Charlie Finlay documented this in excruciating detail with publishing statistics on the Tangent ng some years back, and I find it entirely plausible since I know intimately how irrational the duopolisitc world of shrinkwrapped software distribution is). This trend would be the case *regardless* of the content of the magazines (on a soft-hard axis). It is a case where infrastructure determines superstructure.

I like Spinrad, and he writes cris de coeur so well that I am always swept up in the excitement (oh god! SF is dying! to the barricades!) until I actually stop to think. Having thought, I cannot make any sense of his Asimov's screed at all. Wait a minute -- he could find only ONE work of literarily ambitious SF published recently, by a big house, and it happened to be by his ex? WTF? Um... Accelerando, anyone? Hammered? Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom? And on and on? Hello? This made me think that "literarily ambitious, rigorously extrapolative SF is not published any more" really means "my friends are not getting published anymore".

Now, Spinrad and his friends are a great crew, don't get me wrong, and there may be a (albeit well-rehearsed) complaint here, along the lines of "loyalty by the publishing houses to mid-list, middle-aged authors of literary ambition with modest but solid followings is dead". I'm fully willing to suspect that the reason Stross, Doctorow, (Elizabeth) Bear, Wharton, Buckell, Lowachee, et al are publishing literarily ambitious SF at big houses is precisely that they are new and that the upside is therefore unclear -- they could be the next King, Rowling, or at least (Greg) Bear, who knows? Perhaps, once (and if) they plateau enough to give the News Corp/Viacom/Bertelsmann bean counters the data to determine that they are going to stay in the sub-million-copies range, they will be dropped like cold and moldy potatoes. If so, this is clearly some kind of problem for SF as a genre and as a career. But it is distinct from Spinrad's sky-is-falling hyperbole about it.

Megapublisher consolidation, the death of the American appetite for short fiction, restrictions on newsstand distribution -- all these are killing SF, if by SF you mean a publishing and distribution model that crystallized in 1960 and should remain forever static.

On the other hand, though, we have the internet and its new models for short science fiction (loss leader for the Sci-Fi Channel, "museum", "public radio", geek-hipster cred for lifestyle mag), the Long Tail and its collaborative filters to potentially unearth midlist books, we have POD-factory bookmobiles, we have SF writers' increasing access to Dante-style careers in academia and High Letters (3 SF stories in BASS, etc.), we have SF's supremacy in other media (increasingly, to hear my TV-watching friends tell it, we have intelligent and even intellectually ambitious SF/F (Buffy, Babylon 5, "Firefly", whatever the hell that is, etc) on even the small screen; and good, intellegent SF movies nowadays (Eternal Sunshine, 28 Days Later, etc, even Matrix despite its regrettable sequels and inexplicable unwillingness to go with my hard-SF "Morpheus is a lying terrorist wingnut" exegesis of same) blow away pre-Blade-Runner big-screen SF. And what will smart paper do?

I have no idea how this will transfigure SF-as-career, particularly Spinrad's area of interest -- mid-career viability of authors committed to SF as an ongoing conversation involving believable extrapolation, suspension of disbelief in which the reader can envision the events of the story really taking place in our world, and this tradition's potentially revolutionary or cultural-transformational powers. Maybe the production of literarily ambitious SF novels and short stories as a profession will go the route of poetry, or jazz music. I can't say that it won't. Maybe SF of Spinrad's sort will even die, in the sense that the sonnet and the epic poem are dead forms. I doubt it, but I can't prove it. But certainly, being deprived of mass-market Ace Doubles as a distribution channel does not mean artistic death.

And another strategy, of course, as Cheney points out, is marketing SF outside SF marketing. I think Cheney's idea that slipstreamy SF can ONLY be marketed outside official SF channels is absurd -- again, a glance at the 2004 Locus Recommended Reading List will show that the "softies" are not totally left out in the cold either. Stamping Butterflies? The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad? The Year of Our War? Air? I think we can hardly accuse these books, all from core genre, big-budget publishers, of rehashing tired genre motifs of the Space Age. Nonetheless, it's also true that lots of great SF is being written and marketed outside the core SF community, by people who, perhaps, never went to a con and never read the SF classics -- or maybe they did, and their publishers are simply not marketing them to the "core SF crowd". Though even that model -- "marketed to the core"/"marketed outside" -- is falling down when you realize that reviews in Locus and Asimov's and F&SF, and panels at cons, are devoting just as much attention to the novels outside formal SF marketing -- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Baroque Cycle, Cloud Atlas, and so on. Maybe there is no inside/outside, or maybe inside/outside is contentless, an affiliation that should be regarded as being on the level of sports team affiliation -- in-genre or out-genre as Mets vs. Yankees, passionate team loyalty by the fans even though players are traded willy-nilly from one to the other?

Is, as Spinrad would claim, this blurring all leading to an abandonment of traditional SF extrapolative rigor? Perhaps vaguely fanciful or weird things are taking the publishing industry, from high to low, by storm, he might argue -- but what's lost is SF's sense of authentic speculation, of an otherness that Really Might Be So.

Well, there are three problems with this argument.

One is, what does he mean by Might Be? He's at pains, in the book review, to distance his claim of the Loss of True SF from any soft/hard debate. It's not about the physics!

I'm a little skeptical. Is Shirley Jackson's "One Ordinary Day, WIth Peanuts" -- classic 1950s SF, and as slipstream as they come, pure Kelly Link territory today -- SF in Spinrad's view? If not, he is talking about something that was always a minority, embattled model of SF, and if anything is, publishing-wise, stronger today than ever (Killer B's, New Space Opera Brits, etc).

If he's talking SF as broad thought experiment, "Peanuts" or even "Left Hand of Darkness" (with the Hainish seeding of humanity as pure device of convenience, as tongue-in-cheek a device, really, as Le Guin's pun-based interplanar travel in "Changing Planes"), well, then, I defy him to explain how the stuff being published as lit -- "As She Climbed Across The Table", "Time's Arrow", "The Time Traveller's Wife" -- is not SF. It doesn't seem any hand-wavier to me than the flimsy structures on which classic SF's thought experiments are based, and the consequences are just as carefully and rigorously thought through.

And the last objection is, really, the stuff Spinrad is defending as classic-style rigorous SF -- to judge from the examples he gives -- is jsut not plausible to me in that mode any more. Please -- FTL drives? Seeded humanity on distant planets? Robots just as smart as humans, smart LIKE humans, and no smarter... This is all pure macguffin territory -- stuff that I could have regarded as "maybe someday it'll be so" if I lived in 1950 or 1970, but that I can read today only as playful postmodernism -- an affectionate, nostalgic nod to genre tropes, about-the-text not about-the-world. Whereas the stuff that seems *really* speculative to me, stuff like Accelerando and Down & Out, not to mention Riddley Walker and Handmaid's Tale... stuff that actually seems to take on the world and wonder what might come of it, rather than (not that there's anything wrong with this, mind you, God knows I write in both modes) using SF tropes, events, and worlds as a colorful backdrop against which to set thoughts about the world and the human condition that don't really, you know, *follow* from them.

Like "I want to talk about history -- let's put the Roman Empire in space -- so then we need, let's see, ships that can go between stars in weeks -- crewed by biological humans who die of old age around 90 -- and aliens who are only slightly culturally different from them, and at an equal technological level!" -- sorry, for me, in Spinrad's very narrow sense of "about the world, such that we can really envision it happening, and are thus inspired to make it so/not so", that's just *not SF any more*. (We can talk about why, if anyone wants -- it's another topic).

I hasten to add (because I like lots of SF in that mode, recently Karin's Warchild) that certainly *is* SF in the broader definition of SF that I joyfully embrace. But lots of purportedly literary or fantasy books, and lots of slipstream, put me much more decidedly in the mode of "what if it were so" or "holy crap, something like this could really happen" than that "classic" mode of SF.

Take the scene in Lethem's Fortress of Solitude where the black character reflects on the real meaning of his donning cape and magic ring and going out to fight crime, superhero-style, around the ghetto -- when we see that it was all to humor his white friend's naivete, when he muses wryly "the last thing the projects need is a black superhero", I'm like -- yeah! OK -- the device is pure macguffin -- but Lethem here is far more engaged with the world, far more rigorous in following the consequences of his speculation, than many (even many entertaining, satisfying on other levels) current "classic SF" novels or stories of FTL galactic empires.

The question "is SF dying?" is not answerable unless you first answer "what about SF are you trying to preserve"?

You know, Ben, sometimes reading your posts is eerily like reading posts from an AI version of myself overclocked to three times normal speed. :)

I think, though (if I’m reading him right) Matt Cheney isn’t really arguing that slipstream doesn’t get enough respect, or that SF qua SF is rehashing Space Age motifs. He’s arguing that the SF markets close their gates to writing that, regardless of content, experiments with style, language, and form. Bearing in mind that correlation doesn’t indicate causality and so on, there nonetheless does seem to be a certain amount of truth to that — I’ve heard people argue with some justification that there’s a sort of conservation of weirdness, that readers will take a weird fabula or a weird suzhet but not both.

I happen to think Matt’s more of a sucker for a well-turned phrase than I am, and that what he’s asking for wouldn’t necessarily revitalize the genre so much as aim it at a different, smaller, more well-read audience — but I could be wrong.

I hope I wasn't arguing that less obviously hardcore SF stuff doesn't have a place within the SF world, though I may have inadvertently left that impression. I was trying to offer far less of a value judgment than Spinrad does -- the column started from feeling like over the past year many of the books getting a lot of attention outside the SF world were what might have been classified as "literary SF" a decade or two back, and would not have felt out of place alongside, say, the latest from Tiptree. It's not even so much a question of writers "slumming" as SF writers -- it's more like having a bunch of Kurt Vonneguts out there, joyfully using SF material for their own ends.

Is the argument new? Of course not. The evidence shifts and changes, though. "SF is dead" is about as silly a statement as "Poetry is dead", but it can be useful to cleanse the system of old assumptions and intellectual baggage.

I don't disagree with Ben Rosenbaum about anything he writes above, actually. That magazines are struggling for reasons of changing distribution systems makes sense and echoes some of what I've heard from various editors. The readers of those magazines, though (or at least the ones that visit message boards), repeatedly blame the editors for not including more "core SF" stories. But the points about "inside/outside" blurring are absolutely right -- the sort of thought-experiment I was pursuing, and which may be too large for one column, was what will the people who are devoted to "core SF" do in such a situation; will they accept the blurring and revel in the possibilities it offers, or will they regroup and try to impose strict definitions? Spinrad offers a pretty clear answer; a sad one, I think.

Hey, Alan — you’re fairly adventurous, prose-wise — do you think that’s gotten you into trouble with the major markets?

(Shit, Moles has discovered that I've been using his pirated mindscan to generate my posts...)Ahem.

It is indeed true, Matt, that lots of big-hit lit books lately would have felt comfortably at home in SF in the 1970s, and would NOT have felt comfortably at home in lit markets in the 1970s -- cf. Chabon's intro to McSweeney's Mammoth Thrilling etc. -- the high lit world is awakening from the long, cold sleep of realism. So we agree about that.

What we may possibly disagree on is whether those same books would feel comfortably at home in SF of 2005. I would contend they would -- since they get plenty reviewed in Locus... since SH and LCRW and Polyphony and Say and Fantastic Metropolis and so on revel in stylistic experimentation within the genre walls... and since I can publish a story as whacked as "Red Leather Tassels" in F&SF.

It seems to me that whether you are Kelly Link and publish in-genre, or Aimee Bender and publish out-of-genre, now has entirely to do with what community you have ambitions of joining... and nothing to do with the content of the stories in question.

Sure, if you publish irrealist waking dreams as SF, plenty of genre purists will say "I don't like this, it's not SF". That doesn't constitute markets closing their gates, though.

Could Borges, Lethem, Kafka, and Kundera publish in the SF markets of today? They sure could, and in fact they'd have an *easier* time of it than they would have in 1970. Would there be grumbles, when their work made the Nebula ballot among fellow irrealists like Kelly Link, that it wasn't "real SF"? Sure, so what?

--

There may be something to be said for the "weird fabula or weird suzhet" issue, but if so, it's a matter of craft -- it's just harder to do both well, because of problems of ambiguity and metaphor. Trying to express a profoundly strange world in a profoundly experimental language gives you "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" -- brilliant, but not necessarily palatable to the masses. But I think as well as you can pull this off artistically, it's salable -- I'd contend that there are no *artificial* barriers in the market to this combination of speculation and experimental language, beyond it just being hard to do well.

There's also the issue Spinrad's talking about, which I think is essentially the issue of SF as the popular art of a particular religious group -- materialist-rationalists who believe (for what I think are, at bottom, theological reasons) that the world is a beautiful, coherent machine, with an absolute, inviolable reality existing beyond any particular consciousness, following simple, regular rules which can be discovered through experiment. Scientists, to do science, have to make at least an *operational* commitment to this worldview, but I'm not talking about an *operational* commitment -- I'm talking about people who make the personal leap of faith to commit themselves emotionally to the proposition that nothing exists beyond the elegant machine (including their own selves), and that everything about the machine can in principle be discovered.

It's a beautiful, moving faith, in its purest form, like most religious worldviews. A lot of great SF proceeds from it. And there's a natural alliance between this worldview and a "transparent" style of writing, a style which posits a world and describes it, as much as possible, in a way that is accessible to all, verifiable, testable. There's a lot about the modernist, irrealist sensibility which is inimical to this worldview. So part of what Spinrad is mourning is the dominance of this worldview in SF. I am not without sympathy for him in this regard.

This is partly what I wanted to talk about in the zeppelin story. Can you have SF, if the world is a dream and not a machine?

David, I don't know if I've gotten into trouble per se. More than half of the stuff I send out is to literary magazines at any rate. The stuff I've been working on lately (aside from a long, long poem, which is another ball of wax entirely) has been more straightforward on a sentence by sentence level, but perhaps plays with, say, rapidly altering the pacing in the middle of the story (in the service of the story). But I still think it's hard to generalize whether a story like this "succeeds" or not--is a story worth publishing if the failure is interesting?

"Each subgenre of poetry today reflects a different audience, a different community. Disputes as to the 'excellence' of one kind of writing or another are in fact _sub rosa_ arguments as to which social group will dominate the other. What we need to understand is how a subgenre of poetry both
creates and is created by that social construct we call an audience." (Ron Silliman)

I don't always agree with this quote, but I've been mulling it over in my head for awhile as it relates to speculative fiction of whatever stripe. You see this in more pronounced fashion in poetry. Mutable (at times pliant) consensual reality as to what is "quality": the qualities a work should possess. But in poetry the stakes are much smaller--and paradoxically much fiercer.

I used to think that there was an "ideal audience" for every story. Now I'm not so sure. There are just people. Projecting both "writers just writing for other writers!" and conversely "the core SF reader" is just a phantom bet. I have come to think that if a reader DOESN'T like my story, that's not an invalid or unworthy reaction. As long as, hopefully, the story is read with minimal care.

(btw, The only SF I don't send out to literary magazines at some point is my space opera. As you mentioned before in another forum, Atlantic Monthly and Zoetrope REALLY SHOULD have stories about spaceships blowing up. I mean, with interesting characters in said spaceships.)

All of this is to say is that I'm pretty happy now with where my writing is situtated and as I see it moving forward, and don't have many complaints.

I'm kind of bumming no one rose to take the bait of my "SF as the popular art of a particular religious group" remark... :-/

A couple belated comments:

1. In response to one of Ben's comments about old-school SF not being very scientifically rigorous: I haven't yet read Spinrad's screed, but from what y'all say about it, I'm guessing that for "rigorously extrapolative" you can read "conforming to established genre conventions."

2. My impression (without, alas, having read much of the magazine lately) is that F&SF has been occasionally publishing some pretty offbeat/experimental stuff in recent years, including (as Ben notes) "Red Leather Tassels." (The other story that comes immediately to mind is a John McDaid story that I haven't read but have heard good things about.) I gather that Gordon pays attention to what readers tell him they want, and tries to keep enough reader-pleasing material in each issue to keep them coming back, but my impression is that he also likes pushing on some of those boundaries. (This is all guesswork on my part; I haven't actually talked with him about this.)

3. Ben wrote: 'I'm kind of bumming no one rose to take the bait of my "SF as the popular art of a particular religious group" remark...' I'm guessing that's 'cause you're preachin' to the choir. :) I thought you put it excellently well; my only slight adjustments to your comment would be to note that a lot of the members of the group don't realize it's a religious group, and that there's a heavy unexamined reliance on genre conventions that, when examined closely, turn out not to actually fit the tenets of the religion. But I would guess that's often true of religious art.

Btw, I love the phrase "the high lit world is awakening from the long, cold sleep of realism."

Oh, wait, I forgot to add: I'm a lifelong card-carrying member of this religion we're talking about, and it still appeals to me a great deal even knowing that it's a religion. So in case this wasn't clear, I didn't mean to be derogatory about it.

Hey Ben, I'll make you a deal. Post a response to my comment in the Godel entry, and I'll post a response to your comment about science as religion here.

You're on.

And note that I never said that science is a religion -- far from it.

Science, as a profoundly useful machine for finding useful stuff out, is essentially independent of the religious claims made for, on, and about it... the way Jerusalem, as a city you could live in, have coffee in, get a job in, etc., is distinct from the claims made for, on, and about it by the Abrahamanic religions.

(And while I'm not a card-carrying member of the religion in question the way Jed is, I do deeply admire and cherish it and it has had a profound effect on my own religious thinking, so I'm not slamming it either.)

Wow, what Benjamin Rosenbaum said. Just about every word of it.

Ben’s amazing that way.

And note that I never said that science is a religion -- far from it.

Ben, can you clarify what you meant by the following?

SF as the popular art of a particular religious group -- materialist-rationalists who believe (for what I think are, at bottom, theological reasons) that the world is a beautiful, coherent machine, with an absolute, inviolable reality

What are the theological reasons for believing in this, and what would be an example of a non-theological reason for believing in something?

I don’t know if this is what Ben’s talking about, but I’ve found it fruitful to draw a distinction between, on the one hand, presuming the truth of something as a working hypothesis, and on the other, assuming its truth as an axiom or an article of faith. Occam’s Razor leads me to treat the world as a coherent and comprehensible machine, but I don’t feel particularly compelled to evangelize for the idea; and in a Roadside Picnic or “Hinterlands” sort of situation I’d be willing to consider alternatives. And while — Occam’s Razor, again — I wouldn’t see expecting or planning for such a situation as a particularly fruitful thing to do, I also wouldn’t spend any energy arguing its impossibility.

But maybe I’m just lazy.

You're lazy.

;)

--> Ben: SF as the popular art of a particular religious group -- materialist-rationalists who believe (for what I think are, at bottom, theological reasons) that the world is a beautiful, coherent machine, with an absolute, inviolable reality [existing beyond any particular consciousness, following simple, regular rules which can be discovered through experiment.]

--> Ted: What are the theological reasons for believing in this, and what would be an example of a non-theological reason for believing in something?

The theological reasons for believing this are that it stirs a deep chord deep within people, that it's deeply satisfying, that it makes the world feel right. Confronted with a vision of the world which one cannot bring oneself to credit, one feels a certain kind of theological anguish, viz.:

"Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. Quantum theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He (God) does not throw dice." (Albert Einstein, On Quantum Physics, Letter to Max Born, December 12, 1926)

Theological belief is an act of the will and of the heart -- "I commit myself to this belief; I will resist evidences against it with all my might".

(The word "theological" here is a bit of a misnomer, perhaps, since you don't need a "theos" -- I guess you could call them philosophical/aesthetic/existential reasons? -- but that doesn't really capture the quality of passion about your model of the universe which I want to point at, and which, in the Western tradition, has historically often been wrapped up with "theos").

In certain realms, where you're trying to get something done and the truth (in the scope of the problem you're trying to solve) is discoverable, this variety of belief is destructive, which is why we speak derisively of "religious wars" in computer programming (whether to use Java and C++ for a project, say, becoming an article of faith rather than judgement), and why people like us are appalled at the insistence of some religious conservatives on pseudoscientific Biblical-literalist approaches to the physical sciences.

In other realms, though, ones that I think are equally important, theological belief is appropriate and the pose of dispassionately examining the evidence is self-deceptive and inappropriate. Underlying philosophical realms are like this -- epistemology, metaphysics, ethics. Can we know anything at all? Is life real or a dream? What are the proper set of values for me to hold? If you think you are "dispassionately examining the evidence" about these questions, you are fooling yourself. More often, people with a distaste for what I'm calling "theological reasons" simply shrug such questions off as irrelevant or unanswerable (by which they mean, irrelevant and unanswerable within the scope of the knowledge-game they enjoy playing).

(With regards to the fallacy of trying to resolve essentially non-evidential issues, particularly those of the form "what is the good?", through evidence and reason, I'm reminded of one of the things that always pissed me off about Star Trek. You know how they called Spock "logical"? As if there was something more "logical" about being stoic, dutiful, calm, and relatively nonviolent, rather than choleric and passionate like Bones, or violent and rapacious like the Klingons? This is a category error. The values "duty, calmness, peace" are not more "logical" than "passion, authenticity" or "honor, acquisitiveness". Logic (deductive *or* empirical) has nothing to do with the selection of values -- only with determining what follows from them. The logical thing for Bones to do in a given situation would be to yell, the logical thing for the Klingons to do would be to have a fight. Acting like Spock would be, given their values, wholly illogical!)

There are other realms in which, perhaps, neither what I'm calling "theological" nor dispassionate/objective/evidential reasoning are appropriate; aesthetic realms, for instance.

What about the proposition "people are basically good"? As this is usually meant, it's not intended as a falsifiable hypothesis, but rather as a committed interpretation. When the imprisoned political dissident, schooled in all the travesties and brutality of history and of the present, says "beat me, jail me, do your worst, I shall never cease to regard people as basically good", does this seem absurd? Is he waiting for evidence to determine the goodness or non-goodness of people? Or is this a different kind of belief from "I believe the apple in this bag is red"?

A non-theological reason for believing in something is one that is falsifiable -- one which, presented with sufficient evidence, you would easily discard.

A good test of whether you are a member of the religious group we're discussing is the following:

1) Do you believe that the universe is wholly governed by natural laws?

2) What evidence would be sufficient to bring you to abandon this belief?

3) If you did abandon this belief, would you be merely upset and regard it as deeply unfortunate for practical reasons, i.e., what a bummer that we cannot learn to predict things, etc.? Or would the abandonment have a deeper quality of anguish, as if you had been robbed of something precious -- a "loss of faith"?

If you found yourself in the world of "Hell Is The Absence of God" and had the ability to observe it dispassionately (i.e., God did not simply "have you know" things arbitrarily which you were cognitively unable to question), would you, on the evidence, believe the God in question was, in fact, an absolute agent unbound by any natural laws, the entire sum of everything that is subject to His whim? Or would you believe that he was, e.g., an alien with access to advanced technology, or that you were imprisoned in a virtual reality, or whatever -- that despite appearances, somewhere outside the prison you found yourself in, natural law and an orderly universe still reigned?

Would you be *wholly* guided by dispassionate logic and Occam's Razor in making this determination? Or would there be some quality of committed interpretation -- "do what you will, I refuse to believe in so ugly a world!"

For my part, I have an a priori notion of what God is. If some apparently all-powerful being shows up who does not fit the bill (for instance, say, by damning people to eternal punishment for holding wrong beliefs), then he can do what he likes -- as long as there is something left of me resembling me, I am not going to call him God. (I'm damned if I will, you might say, even if I'm damned if I don't.)

There is no empirical reasoning at work here.

Does this make clear what I mean by the difference between scientists holding an operational belief in natural law, reproduceability of phenomena, and so on, *operationally*, as a useful tool, versus having a *religious* commitment to that worldview as an ultimate truth that is "really so"?

I’m not sure it’s falsifiable (and I think there are big holes in the reasoning, such as, e.g., there being more than two choices of what to believe), but Pascal’s Wager might be an example of a non-theological reason for believing in God.

No time right now to go through recent comments here, but I did just happen across something of potential interest: David N. Samuelson's review of various sf anthologies quotes Kathryn Cramer as saying that sf is "the religious art of science" (in an essay in her and David Hartwell's The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF). Is this a common meme that I just haven't happened across before?

The rest of the review's summaries of Cramer and Hartwell's introductory essays are also intriguing; I'm now interested in going and reading those. And possibly in the stories in the anthology as well; I'm not normally that fond of what most people label as hard sf, but I like most of the listed stories that I've read, and part of the reviewer's point is that a fair number of them aren't really hard sf.

The word "theological" here is a bit of a misnomer, perhaps, since you don't need a "theos"

I'd say it's more than a bit of a misnomer. What you're describing seems to me to have nothing to do with theology.

A good test of whether you are a member of the religious group we're discussing is the following:
[snip]
3) If you did abandon this belief, would you be merely upset and regard it as deeply unfortunate for practical reasons, i.e., what a bummer that we cannot learn to predict things, etc.? Or would the abandonment have a deeper quality of anguish, as if you had been robbed of something precious -- a "loss of faith"?

What answer would exclude one from being a member of this religious group? Would one have to shrug, say, "Well, that's a big setback," and then go on?

I think most anyone with a scientific worldview would have a profound reaction to seeing unassailable evidence of God. *Of course* scientists have an emotional investment in their work; they're human beings, not automatons.
But that's not the same thing as being a member of a religious group, unless you're using "religious" in so broad a sense as to have little utility.

I do generally agree with you on the following (except your use of the word "theological"):

In other realms, though, ones that I think are equally important, theological belief is appropriate and the pose of dispassionately examining the evidence is self-deceptive and inappropriate. Underlying philosophical realms are like this -- epistemology, metaphysics, ethics. Can we know anything at all? Is life real or a dream? What are the proper set of values for me to hold? If you think you are "dispassionately examining the evidence" about these questions, you are fooling yourself.

Agreed. However, I see this approach (sometimes known as scientism) as distinct from what we discussed above. One can argue about whether, say, Einstein resisted quantum mechanics "with all his might" or not, without attributing to Einstein the belief that the proper set of values one should hold can be determined scientifically.

(As a side note, acceptance of quantum mechanics does not mean giving up the idea that the universe is "a beautiful, coherent machine," either.)

And let's get back to the original question. Let's consider the segment of the population who, if confronted with evidence of God, would clasp their hands over their ears and shout "la, la, la, I can't hear you." Was SF ever really such a good fit for this audience? The theme of mystical transcendence has been a part of SF throughout its entire history, so such readers would always have had to pick and choose within the genre.

Let’s consider the segment of the population who, if confronted with evidence of God, would clasp their hands over their ears and shout “la, la, la, I can’t hear you.” Was SF ever really such a good fit for this audience?

Probably not, but that doesn’t stop them (or rather, since we’re talking hypotheticals, the people who seem most like that sort of person — see parts of this discussion, for instance) from claiming SF as their own — and redefining as non-SF the SF that doesn’t fit their worldview. They’re pretty good at seizing the discourse — viz. Ben’s original “religious group” remark, which I think doesn’t apply so much to “actually existing SF” as it does SF as imagined by that group.

I'd say it's more than a bit of a misnomer. What you're describing seems to me to have nothing to do with theology.

Do you consider the terms "Theravada Buddhist theology" or "Taoist theology" to be oxymorons? No "theos" there, either.

(Possibly a good term would be "devotional reasons"? As opposed to "theological"?)

What answer would exclude one from being a member of this religious group? Would one have to shrug, say, "Well, that's a big setback," and then go on?

Other possible answers:
* "Wow, cool!"
* "Huh, how do you like that?"
* "Just as I suspected!"

Plenty of working scientists are religious believers, who think that while it's useful to figure out the natural laws that generally apply, there's every reason to think that there are also one-off events, miracles, which are not described by them. Plenty are also authentic agnostics. Plenty of them are what Salon is sloppily calling "postmodernists" in terms of philosophy of science -- people for whom science is an interesting game for finding out useful things, which has nothing to do with ultimate truth.

So when you say "people with a scientific worldview" in contradistinction to "people who believe in God", that doesn't map to "scientists" in the least (in fact, Newton and Einstein both seem to have been motivated in part to be relentless in their pursuit of natural law *by* their belief in God). The set of people whose "scientific worldview" makes claims about the existence of God are precisely the set who I am calling a religious group.

unless you're using "religious" in so broad a sense as to have little utility.

Atheism is not a religion? This seems like an impoverished definition of religion.

My reading of Theravada Buddhism is that the Second and Third Noble Truths (everything is impermanent and without an atman) are *precisely* designed to deny the existence of any variety of God (and that this is precisely what led the extremely tolerant Hindus to consider Buddhists, alone with Jains among all the variants of post-Vedic thought, as schismatics). A definition of "religion" which relies on "God" is strikingly ethnocentric. (And Ursula K. Le Guin, who has invented a new atheistic religion in each of the last five things I've read by her -- the Telling, the Buddhist-like business in Karhide on Gethen, the "being aware" thing in the story "Solitude", etc -- would probably be pretty pissed).

What do you want to call an organized worldview, with a cultural tradition, which makes nonverifiable claims about the final nature of reality, which claims have implications for how humans should live, if not a religion?

One can argue about whether, say, Einstein resisted quantum mechanics "with all his might" or not, without attributing to Einstein the belief that the proper set of values one should hold can be determined scientifically.

I agree, and I did not mean to imply this.

Certainly not. It's not all about the God/not-God, natural-law/no-natural-law thing -- there are infinite variations in people's profound, non-empirical insights about the nature of reality, that they're willing to fight for for a priori reasons. I meant to offer Einstein's abhorrence of quantum mechanics as an analogous example of someone's faith in a particular (scientific) vision of the world for theological reasons. (For Einstein, they were phrased as *explicitly* theological reasons, theos present!)

Let's consider the segment of the population who, if confronted with evidence of God, would clasp their hands over their ears and shout "la, la, la, I can't hear you." Was SF ever really such a good fit for this audience?

Now hold on, I wasn't slamming these people, nor was I saying they wouldn't examine the evidence. As I pointed out, for certain definitions of God, I am one of the people who would say, "nope, try again". The point is that *noone* can prove themselves to be God -- i.e., free of the constraints of natural law. It's a nonverifiable claim. How do we know we're not just in the Matrix, etc.? Whether natural law exists or not, and whether it is total or not, is not something we have the tools to determine empirically: one can offer neither a confirmatory proof (since there can always be an unobserved exception) nor a counterexample (since there can always be a deeper, yet undiscovered, unifying natural law).

Use of the useful idea of "natural law" is a matter of useful practice. Belief in the absolute truth of the idea of "natural law" is a matter of faith.

And I think that Spinrad is right that the idea of natural law, a verifiable observable universe, is very close to the heart of (at least hard) SF. There are outliers, like Dick maybe. But most of the tradition of mystical transcendence in SF, from Stapledon to Stross, is a tradition of *reframing* the idea of mystical transcendence *within the framework* of the idea of universal natural law. When I'm explicitly sitting down to write SF-qua-SF (with the possible exception of the Zeppelin story?), I am, like a working scientist, explicitly choosing to constrain my thought experiment within a science-like framework of linear causation, verifiability, an externally existing reality with underlying, unifying laws. Which is not the case if I sit down to write Borgesian or KellyLinkian fabulism.

[A lot of the brilliance of many of the stories in "Stories of Your Life and Others" (e.g. Tower of Babylon, 42 Letters, Hell Is the Absence of God) is precisely a reframing of traditionally religious ideas into this mode, the mode of a mechanistic universe subject to predictable laws.]

And SF's allegiance to science-as-worldview can be seen in the hoary writer's-workshop advice (also applied to SF-spun-off-fantasy) -- "establish the rules of the world clearly", "magic has to have rules", etc.

Of course there is SF outside this -- "An Ordinary Day with Peanuts", "The Specialist's Hat" -- but these days it gets called "slipstream", and I think it's precisely what Spinrad was grumbling about.

(Possibly a good term would be "devotional reasons"? As opposed to "theological"?)

I kind of like that.

The set of people whose “scientific worldview” makes claims about the existence of God are precisely the set who I am calling a religious group.

That’s a good distinction. I’d define X (where X is “the concept Ben originally referred to as ‘belief for theological reasons’, as I understand it”) as: “belief in the truth or falsehood of nondisprovable premises.”

For what it’s worth, I didn’t read “Hell is the Absence of God” as recasting religious ideas in a mechanistic mode, so much as good ol’ ‘literalizing the metaphor.’

Do you consider the terms "Theravada Buddhist theology" or "Taoist theology" to be oxymorons?

I think "philosophy" would be the more appropriate term. (Note that "Taoist theology" gets 64 hits on Google, while "Taoist philosophy" gets 20,800.)

(Possibly a good term would be "devotional reasons"? As opposed to "theological"?)

Yes, definitely a better choice.

My use of the words "unassailable evidence of God" was probably also a poor choice; I used it as shorthand for what you described as "evidence sufficient to abandon your belief that the universe is wholly governed by natural laws." I didn't intend to sidetrack us into a discussion of religions without gods, and would rather not pursue that.

As for what I meant about using "religious" in so broad a sense as to reduce its utility...

How do we know we're not just in the Matrix, etc.? Whether natural law exists or not, and whether it is total or not, is not something we have the tools to determine empirically: one can offer neither a confirmatory proof (since there can always be an unobserved exception) nor a counterexample (since there can always be a deeper, yet undiscovered, unifying natural law).

You're talking about deep skepticism, which cannot be practiced in a meaningful way. How do you know that fire will be hot the next time you touch it? You don't. Even the evidence of thousands of tests doesn't guarantee that the fire will be hot; it might be cold next time. Yet you still avoid fire.

Is this religious belief? I assert it is not, at least not if we want "religious" to remain a useful term.

Use of the useful idea of "natural law" is a matter of useful practice. Belief in the absolute truth of the idea of "natural law" is a matter of faith.

What makes you say that the idea of "natural law" is useful? Because it has proven useful in the past? That would be relying on induction, which is not proof. (You can't even say that induction has demonstrated its usefulness in the past, because that, too, relies on induction.) One could say that your reliance on induction is based on faith. And yet I would not say you are being religious.

Ultimately, we *all* believe in things that are -- under sufficiently stringent standards -- unfalsifiable. But if we call this religious behavior, then there is no (or very little) behavior that is not religious, and the term is no longer useful.

I assert that there are more useful definitions of "religious," one of which involves belief despite a lack of evidence, or despite evidence to the contrary. I don't deny that there are people whose belief in natural law qualifies as religious, but the more common idea that the universe operates according to natural laws is not religious in this sense.

What makes you say that the idea of "natural law" is useful? Because it has proven useful in the past? That would be relying on induction, which is not proof. (You can't even say that induction has demonstrated its usefulness in the past, because that, too, relies on induction.) One could say that your reliance on induction is based on faith.

I'm really tempted to make a spurious analogy to incompleteness here. :)

This is the point at which I start to throw up my hands and say: "Look, we're using brains that evolved to deal with primate small-group social structures and find nuts and water in the Serengeti. What do you expect?"

"Of course there is SF outside this -- "An Ordinary Day with Peanuts", "The Specialist's Hat" -- but these days it gets called "slipstream", and I think it's precisely what Spinrad was grumbling about."

Why are these even being grumbled about in reference to SF when they aren't even SF? That's what I don't get. It's like complaining that oranges aren't apples. Like why is this supposed SF scientific worldview trying to even apply its parameters to ghost stories in the first place? It's like making a dog wear a shirt. It's just wrong.

Follow-up/clarification:

In his most recent post, Ben said

The set of people whose "scientific worldview" makes claims about the existence of God are precisely the set who I am calling a religious group.

In the original post where Ben mentioned a "religious group," he described them as

materialist-rationalists who believe...that the world is a beautiful, coherent machine, with an absolute, inviolable reality existing beyond any particular consciousness, following simple, regular rules which can be discovered through experiment.

These seem to me to be two distinct groups. The latter group is not described as making any claims about the (non)existence of God. It is this latter group that I would not call "religious."

David said

This is the point at which I start to throw up my hands and say: "Look, we're using brains that evolved to deal with primate small-group social structures and find nuts and water in the Serengeti. What do you expect?"

This is why deep skepticism is not practical. Anyone who is really wondering if they're in the Matrix shouldn't accept any of the evidence that humans are evolved from primates.

Ted's comment "Ultimately, we *all* believe in things that are -- under sufficiently stringent standards -- unfalsifiable" is one of the directions that I'm coming at this stuff from. I find it interesting (honestly interesting, not being sarcastic) that the discussion is being framed in terms of "falsifiable" and "unfalsifiable" -- almost the whole discussion is taking place within the framework of assuming the validity and usefulness of the scientific method and Western European logical systems. As Ted noted about induction, and David sort of suggested in passing earlier, this stuff is all dependent on a set of axioms about not only the way the universe works but the right way to think about the way the universe works.

It so happens that the scientific way of thinking about things appears to provide a particularly accurate and useful model of reality (or at least of the "reality" that's observed using the tools of the scientific paradigm -- it's not very good at modeling the "reality" observed by mystics, for example). But it seems to me that a lot of people (perhaps even more non-scientists than scientists) have a (let's say) "religious-like" faith in the power, objectivity, and truth of Science, coupled with a lack of awareness that their belief system (I guess that's a better term than "religion" for my purposes) is predicated on unproven and/or unprovable axioms.

It's mighty convenient to behave as if Science is the same as Objective Truth, and I generally do -- and I generally get pretty skeptical when others don't. But it does seem to me to be worth keeping in mind now and then that even a consistent belief system that's demonstrably useful in modeling the world is still a belief system.

Does that make any sense? I'm not sure it has anything to do with what y'all are talking about; maybe it's so obvious that you've been taking it as a given, or maybe it's obviously wrong and I'm off on a tangent. But I thought it was worth mentioning.

What Jed said.

(Note that "Taoist theology" gets 64 hits on Google, while "Taoist philosophy" gets 20,800.)

Hmm. Good point.

It's possible that my use of the term "religious" is pretty idiosyncratic. And I'll also admit that my original comment intentionally used "religious group" in a way that was consciously provocative -- if not polemical.

So if I said:

"There's also the issue Spinrad's talking about, which I think is essentially the issue of SF as the popular art of a particular cultural and ideological group holding strong metaphysical beliefs for nonrational reasons -- materialist-rationalists who believe (for what I think are, at bottom, reasons having to do with profound emotional intuitions about nondisprovable, non-evidentiary, but meaningful assertions) that the world is a beautiful, coherent machine, with an absolute, inviolable reality existing beyond any particular consciousness, following simple, regular rules which can be discovered through experiment"

would you buy that, Ted?

I didn't intend to sidetrack us into a discussion of religions without gods

OK.

You're talking about deep skepticism, which cannot be practiced in a meaningful way.

Oops. And I didn't mean my poorly chosen example of the Matrix to sidetrack us into a discussion of deep skepticism, which is absolutely not what I am intending to talk about, except as kind of a limit case.

What makes you say that the idea of "natural law" is useful? Because it has proven useful in the past?

Yup.

That would be relying on induction, which is not proof. (You can't even say that induction has demonstrated its usefulness in the past, because that, too, relies on induction.)

Correct on both counts; I'm tempted to say "my point exactly". We make almost all of our decisions based on heuristics, not formal reasoning. And, in fact, formal reasoning is only applicable inside of a framework we've chosen for intuitive, heuristic reasons. There's always a whole lot of "let's say for the sake of argument that..." or "as every right-thinking person knows..." before you get to your syllogisms.

One could say that your reliance on induction is based on faith. And yet I would not say you are being religious.

Hmm. I don't think I would either, in this instance. It's only if I said "natural law is *inevitably* useful, because it is the Truth" that I would suspect the assertion of being religious -- or if you prefer, "grounded in profound nonrational metaphysical intuition".

I'm talking about ultimate, final claims being religious -- not working assumptions.

Ultimately, we *all* believe in things that are -- under sufficiently stringent standards -- unfalsifiable. But if we call this religious behavior, then there is no (or very little) behavior that is not religious, and the term is no longer useful.

Hmm. It depends on what you mean by "believe". If you restrict "believe" here not to "operational belief", like "I'm going to go in the kitchen for a sandwich because I believe there's some tuna left", or even "I believe that what I experience is really happening, so it's worth it to go into the kitchen for a tuna sandwich", then I'm with you.

If, though, you do in fact mean "we all firmly believe *nontrivial* things about the ultimate nature of reality, which we have a passionate attachment to even though they are neither provable nor disprovable", then yeah, that's what I want to use the term "religious" for, and I think it's quite useful.

It's not useful if you want to use "religion" to divide people into the categories "religious" and "nonreligious" -- but for a variety of reasons, I'm uninterested in the world "religion" as a tool for that job. I think the practice of so dividing people is more misleading than constructive.

It is, however, useful if you want to use "religious" to describe a general capacity of all human beings, and general domain of thought and action -- to use it as a term like "aesthetic", "cultural", "affective", "social", "moral", or "economic", as a term describing a set of behaviors or cognitions which all humans participate in.

(Actually, I'm fine with both usages, the way that "culture" is sometimes narrowly used to refer only to opera, museums, and Shakespeare, or "society" to polite and refined society, in addition to more inclusive usages of these terms. But it's the inclusive usage of "religion" that I'm interested in here).

I assert that there are more useful definitions of "religious," one of which involves belief despite a lack of evidence, or despite evidence to the contrary.

In the sense I am using the term, you cannot have evidence to the contrary. But yes, belief despite a lack of evidence; about things about which one cannot have evidence. I suspect, though I am not 100% certain, that everyone has stong beliefs about such things. And I mean nontrivial beliefs, not just like "I'm really here, this isn't the Matrix."

I don't deny that there are people whose belief in natural law qualifies as religious, but the more common idea that the universe operates according to natural laws is not religious in this sense.

The *idea* that the universe operates according to natural laws, in the sense of "hey, I've got a wacky idea -- let's act like the universe behaves according to natural laws, and see where that gets us!" is not religious. The *firmly held conviction*, despite an (intrinsic) lack of evidence, that the universe *really does* operate according to natural law... I think this is almost always religious in the sense I mean (or "grounded in a profoundly held nonrational metaphysical intuition" if you prefer).

It may seem odd for me to say that there's no evidence that the universe operates according to natural laws, since it's such a commonplace idea in our society that there is. But really, the idea of "natural laws" is highly bizarre when you think about it. Why should the universe be homogenous and describable?

And while a lot of scientists are passionately committed to the reality of such laws, another lot of scientists do perfectly good science while holding Mach's epistemological position -- regarding the "laws" as a convenient and elegant shorthand way of summarizing patterns of events that we have run into so far, but not expecting them to have any underlying reality.

Far from expecting, like Weinberg, that we are *this close* to a Final Theory, Machians assume that the findings of science are wrong and will always be wrong -- in terms of an exact description of reality. They are predictively useful approximations, but then South Pacific Islander's idea of airplanes as divine birds who dropped cargo when properly propitiated was also a predictively useful approximation.

My Dad (a physicist and a Machian) says that the reason Creationism doesn't belong in science classrooms is not that it's wrong -- because, after all, science is wrong. It's that it can't be shown to be wrong; they aren't playing the game. The minute Creationists offer testable hypotheses, beliefs which they are willing to give up if experiments they propose don't work out, they can be science.

[The set of people whose "scientific worldview" makes claims about the existence of God are precisely the set who I am calling a religious group]...[materialist-rationalists who believe...that the world is a beautiful, coherent machine]...These seem to me to be two distinct groups. The latter group is not described as making any claims about the (non)existence of God. It is this latter group that I would not call "religious."

Okay, you caught me -- the word "precisely" was in error. Replace "precisely" with "a subset of".

Materialist-rationalists profoundly emotionally committed to the idea that the world *truly is* a beautiful machine hold what I would call -- in the generic sense -- a religious conviction, whether or not they hold any beliefs about God one way or the other.

I'm willing to accept that my use of the term "religious" is nonstandard and innovative. But I don't think it's so broad as to be useless. On the contrary, I think it's very interesting to explore how a large number of human beings who don't think of themselves as religious make nonrational leaps of faith and commit themselves to metaphysical ideas about the world.

And I think talking about "religion" as "a stubbornly held nonrational set of nontrivial metaphysical beliefs only certain groups hold -- and only certain such beliefs", while it can also be semantically useful, ultimately has some of the same problems as using "culture" to mean high culture or "society" as proper society.

As for deep skepticism, I would submit that while no one can stay in deep skepticism very long, there isn't an "obvious" alternative that everyone returns to. Not in the sense that "when you get tired of playing around with deep skepticism, there's a single, commonsensical practical worldview that everyone not being pedantic really holds" -- except about trivial things like "we're here, so it's worth going into the kitchen".

When you return from a moment of deep skepticism to your arbitrary but practical position about the world, that position isn't quite the same as everyone else's. I'm interested in the process by which that position gets chosen.

(One final side note: some of the helpless paralysis we feel when we think about deep skepticism is really just a symptom of having an impoverished set of cultural tools to deal with it. Hindus managed for centuries to grow up, to get married, fight wars, make money, build temples, and so on, all the while believing that the world is a dream. Just because the world is a dream -- once you get used to the idea, that is -- is that any reason not to go into the kitchen to get a tuna sandwich?)

And I'll also admit that my original comment intentionally used "religious group" in a way that was consciously provocative -- if not polemical.

You already admitted it when you said, "I'm kind of bumming no one rose to take the bait." I decided to take the bait anyway. :)

It's not useful if you want to use "religion" to divide people into the categories "religious" and "nonreligious" -- but for a variety of reasons, I'm uninterested in the world "religion" as a tool for that job. I think the practice of so dividing people is more misleading than constructive.

One needn't classify people into those categories, just behaviors. One could say that a person engages in religious and nonreligious behaviors at different times, and still say something constructive.

It is, however, useful if you want to use "religious" to describe a general capacity of all human beings, and general domain of thought and action -- to use it as a term like "aesthetic", "cultural", "affective", "social", "moral", or "economic", as a term describing a set of behaviors or cognitions which all humans participate in.

I don't think I've seen this broader usage of "religious" before, except perhaps in a metaphorical context.

(Actually, I'm fine with both usages, the way that "culture" is sometimes narrowly used to refer only to opera, museums, and Shakespeare, or "society" to polite and refined society, in addition to more inclusive usages of these terms. But it's the inclusive usage of "religion" that I'm interested in here).

The subject is worth discussing. But you knew that your usage of "religious" would be interpreted in the narrow sense rather than the broad. And confusing these two usages is what causes many people (although hopefully not many readers of this blog) to fundamentally misunderstand science.

And while a lot of scientists are passionately committed to the reality of such laws, another lot of scientists do perfectly good science while holding Mach's epistemological position -- regarding the "laws" as a convenient and elegant shorthand way of summarizing patterns of events that we have run into so far, but not expecting them to have any underlying reality.

Maybe I need to talk to more scientists, but my impression is that most of them hold the latter position. My impression is that the only times most scientists refer to "scientific truth" is when they need verbal shorthand for "theory which is consistent (to several significant digits, where applicable) with the results of thousands of experiments over the years."

Far from expecting, like Weinberg, that we are *this close* to a Final Theory, Machians assume that the findings of science are wrong and will always be wrong -- in terms of an exact description of reality.

Well, it depends on what you mean by "will always be wrong." What sort of situations do you imagine wouldn't be described by the prospective "final theory"? Folks who think about Grand Unified Theories are looking for a theory that would describe events like the Big Bang. It's hard to say, "well, I'll bet your theory breaks down in the really extreme cases."

(Digression that I can't resist: One of my all-time favorite throwaway lines was in a story called "Quiddities" by Ray Brown, published in Analog back in the 80s. It's set in a future in which many new classes of subatomic particles have been discovered, each smaller than the last. A physics student, despairing that he'll never be able to do really ground-breaking research, explains to a friend that no new particles will be discovered in his lifetime. His friend says, "Well, not with that attitude, they won't." He replies, "You don't understand. The experiment that revealed the existence of quiddities produced the Gell-Mann Memorial Nebula. We'll never get that kind of funding again.")

My Dad (a physicist and a Machian) says that the reason Creationism doesn't belong in science classrooms is not that it's wrong -- because, after all, science is wrong. It's that it can't be shown to be wrong; they aren't playing the game. The minute Creationists offer testable hypotheses, beliefs which they are willing to give up if experiments they propose don't work out, they can be science.

I don't know all that much about Mach, but that attitude doesn't sound specific to Mach. Popper was the one who proposed falsifiability as the criterion for scientific predictions, and it's pretty widely accepted by scientists nowadays.

I think it's very interesting to explore how a large number of human beings who don't think of themselves as religious make nonrational leaps of faith and commit themselves to metaphysical ideas about the world.

I agree. I'm just wary of any discussion that describes trust in science as religious faith.

I think talking about "religion" as "a stubbornly held nonrational set of nontrivial metaphysical beliefs only certain groups hold -- and only certain such beliefs", while it can also be semantically useful, ultimately has some of the same problems as using "culture" to mean high culture or "society" as proper society

Theoretically, yes, but in practice, I don't see it. I think the conventional distinction between science and religion is very useful, and can be maintained without denigrating either. I think the line has been blurred by many people, including those who want creationism taught alongside evolution.

One final side note: some of the helpless paralysis we feel when we think about deep skepticism is really just a symptom of having an impoverished set of cultural tools to deal with it. Hindus managed for centuries to grow up, to get married, fight wars, make money, build temples, and so on, all the while believing that the world is a dream. Just because the world is a dream -- once you get used to the idea, that is -- is that any reason not to go into the kitchen to get a tuna sandwich?)

Well, that's not quite the same as deep skepticism. If you accept the utility of inductive reasoning, you can believe that your perceptions are illusory and still be fine in most situations. The premise that the world is a dream becomes important only in occasions where you believe that your actions in the dream will have different consequences than if you were living in reality. Getting a tuna sandwich isn't one of those situations. (Unless you're a vegetarian, and think that eating tuna will have repercussions.:)

It sounds like we generally agree, Ted; you're just worried about one thing, and I'm worried about something else.

I certainly don't have any interest in breaking down the distinction between science and religion -- which is why, when you initially said "your comment about science as religion", I said "I never said that science is a religion -- far from it". Nor am I interested in describing trust in science as religious faith -- if by trust you mean "trust that science is the right tool for this job".

And while I'm interested in taking a relativist position on metaphysics, I am not interested in an abuse of that position that involves destroying profoundly useful tools -- the stance that says "well, since science is based on all this human error and can't prove anything anyway, we might as well throw out all this business about evidence and falsifiability and peer review and call everything science, from creationism to astral projection".

Science is a hell of a useful game. You want to call something science, it has to play by the rules. There are very important reasons for those rules.

But I don't think it's too much to ask, for people to think about the fact that everyone holds some nontrivial aximomatic ideas about metaphysics, without them throwing the baby of the scientific method out with the bathwater of epistemological naivete.

Maybe I need to talk to more scientists, but my impression is that most of them hold the latter position. My impression is that the only times most scientists refer to "scientific truth" is when they need verbal shorthand for "theory which is consistent (to several significant digits, where applicable) with the results of thousands of experiments over the years."

You may be right about "most", but I think at least a large minority are scientific realists -- at least they hold that it is *possible* for science to discover final truth, because the world really is a machine with natural laws -- as opposed to instrumentalists. (While Popper did formalize the falsifiability thing, by the way, Ernst Mach predates him by about a century, and even predates Dewey, and I think of him as really the father of this kind of attitude:

"In reality, the law always contains less than the fact itself...Suppose we were to attribute to nature the property of producing like effects in like circumstances; just these like circumstances we should not know how to find. Nature exists once only. Our schematic mental imitation alone produces like events."

)

And while lots of scientists may be skeptics about the universality of natural law, science fiction readers -- at least of Spinrad's stripe -- are often gung-ho natural-law absolutists.

Recall that I was initially responding to Spinrad's essay, which reads in part:

"Deeper even than the scientific method is the conviction that reality has a knowable nature, that all of creation is of a consistent pattern, that it is all interrelated, that what is is real, and what is real is ultimately knowable, and that the supernatural is therefore a contradiction in terms.

This, I am now prepared to contend, is the root metaphysical assumption of all true science fiction."

I think he's right that it's the root metaphysical assumption of a hell of a lot of SF, and this bears unpacking.

Folks who think about Grand Unified Theories are looking for a theory that would describe events like the Big Bang. It's hard to say, "well, I'll bet your theory breaks down in the really extreme cases."

Actually, I think we talked about this when you critiqued my story "The House Beyond Your Sky". What is the likelihood that, if there is a continuous scientific tradition stretching many millions of years into the future, any scrap of our current scientific understanding will survive to be considered valid? For purposes of comprehension, I wrote the story as if most of it had survived... but I don't really believe that.

It's not so much the "really extreme cases" that will break whatever Grand Unified Theory Weinberg & co. come up with -- it's the next major scientific revolution in physics which will cause the whole edifice to be thrown out and replaced with a different way of looking at things.

The evidence they are considering when they do cosmology is all highly filtered through the whole constellation of current theories. "When we look at the cosmic background radiation -- assuming that the universe is *this* old, that stars age like *this*, that the first few universal instants were like *this* because the structure of subatomic particles is like *that*, we see..."

The whole thing is a house of cards. I don't mean that in a bad way, or in a sense that should discourage "trust in science" (if you mean "trust that science is the best thing we've got going to get the job done of figuring out what the physical world is like"). I mean it's a house of cards the way Newtonian physics was at the end of the nineteenth century. It looks solid, until two guys named Michaelson and Morley do an unassuming little experiment to measure the speed at which the Earth is moving through the ether...

It's like pulling at that one little loose thread in the corner of a sweater, and watching the whole thing unravel.

And I don't actually think that relativity and quantum mechanics, the twin revolutions in physics of the 1900s, were even very *big* as scientific revolutions go. I think we have *lots* more where that came from.... Copernicus-sized revolutions.

And that, see, is the beautiful thing about science. It's foolish to encourage "trust in science" in the sense of "trust that the theories produced by science are right" -- because that spirit is inimical to science. The amazing thing about science, the thing that's almost unprecedented about science in the whole history of human endeavor, is that science is so good at finding out how science is wrong.

[talking about "religion" as "...only certain such beliefs" ... ultimately has some of the same problems as using "culture" to mean high culture] Theoretically, yes, but in practice, I don't see it.

Part of what I'm worried about is the almost total disappearance (abdication?) of religious liberalism -- that attitude toward religion which treats it as a natural faculty of all human beings, rather than a particular set of received beliefs -- in this country, at least in the political scene. We have the odd spectacle of a country founded principally by Theists and other religious liberals, in whose populace are religious liberals as opposed to literalists are arguably in the majority, cowed into believing that their choices are fundamentalism, atheism, or shutting up. (Google hits for "religious left", 54,400; "religious right" 537,000; "religious liberals" 20,300; "religious conservatives" 132,000.)

In this context, talking about "religious sensibility" as something that everyone has, a creative human resource as opposed to a fixed set of dogmas, which yields a whole cornucopia of different and surprising positions on metaphysics, ethics, eschatology, and ontology, and which, in some sense, is an inevitable field of life where almost every human being must wrestle with their own intuitions -- this is explicitly intended as a counterstrategy to the idea that there is something fixed, known as Religion, which some people have, and it's somehow in opposition to Science (even in the sense that, if the same people are both scientific and religious, they are so at different moments -- which is hogwash if you look at Newton and Einstein, say, who are at their most religious, even in the narrow sense, in the precise moments that they are at their most cientific).

The premise that the world is a dream becomes important only in occasions where you believe that your actions in the dream will have different consequences than if you were living in reality.

Important for what? It does in fact make a profound difference to Hindus that the world is a dream, even if it's a dream that simulates cause and effect, because the fact that the world is a dream means the proper attitude to it is one of nonattachment (even in the midst of fighting on a battlefield, as in the Bhagavad-Gita).

I forgot about Jed's post before.

I find it interesting (honestly interesting, not being sarcastic) that the discussion is being framed in terms of "falsifiable" and "unfalsifiable" -- almost the whole discussion is taking place within the framework of assuming the validity and usefulness of the scientific method and Western European logical systems.

That's the only framework I'm familiar enough to conduct a real discussion in. I've read some about other ways of looking at the world, but I'm not the right person to build an argument using one of those worldviews; if I were to try, I'd probably wind up just parroting some stereotypical language.

But if anyone else feels competent to discuss these issues from a non-Western point of view, feel free to jump in.

It sounds like we generally agree, Ted; you're just worried about one thing, and I'm worried about something else.

Probably true.

It's not so much the "really extreme cases" that will break whatever Grand Unified Theory Weinberg & co. come up with -- it's the next major scientific revolution in physics which will cause the whole edifice to be thrown out and replaced with a different way of looking at things.

I tend to think that, in physics at least, the next revolution will indeed arise out of an extreme case. Both relativity and QM diverged from Newtonian mechanics in situations outside everyday experience; extreme cases, if you will. Relativity and QM have both been experimentally verified in very wide-ranging situations. The only situations where their predictions contradict each other require a giant particle accelerator, so I also consider them extreme cases. I suspect the same trend will hold in the future; we aren't going to be verifying the successor to string theory on a table in a basement.

The amazing thing about science, the thing that's almost unprecedented about science in the whole history of human endeavor, is that science is so good at finding out how science is wrong.

I completely agree. Which is why I think it's important, especially now, to distinguish between the type of belief that's required by science and the type of belief that's required by religion.

It does in fact make a profound difference to Hindus that the world is a dream, even if it's a dream that simulates cause and effect, because the fact that the world is a dream means the proper attitude to it is one of nonattachment (even in the midst of fighting on a battlefield, as in the Bhagavad-Gita)

Yes, it does make a difference in many situations, just not when it comes to getting a sandwich, which was your earlier example. One's actions on a battlefield will have very different consequences if you believe that you're in a dream and your death will ultimately send you into another dream, than if you believe your death will be final and permanent.

Note, though, that the belief that you will experience another dream later is far removed from the position of deep skepticism.

Which is why I think it's important, especially now, to distinguish between the type of belief that's required by science and the type of belief that's required by religion.

Resolved [as the high school debating clubs say]: That SF is the popular art of a group that mistakenly applies the type of belief required by religion to science. (And that, for some reason, a lot of the rest of us like it, too.)

That SF is the popular art of a group that mistakenly applies the type of belief required by religion to science.

Except I don't think it's mistaken: I think it's perfectly legitimate to say "not *only* is it useful to operationally accept a rational/materialistic model of the universe in order to do science, I also accept it unreservedly into my soul as my personal, committed metaphysical model of the world."

In fact doing so has produced the *emotional* motivation for a lot of good science, and a lot of good science fiction.

But it is, sociologically, interesting to see the conflict between people with *that* metaphysical model, and people without it -- at least as far as you can obliquely infer people's metaphysical models by their public utterances -- in the tensions between various camps in SF.

As Spinrad made blatant in his review.

But it is, sociologically, interesting to see the conflict between people with *that* metaphysical model, and people without it -- at least as far as you can obliquely infer people's metaphysical models by their public utterances -- in the tensions between various camps in SF.

(Cadence of this sentence brought to you by reading way too much Samuel R. Delany in adolescence)

Hmm. Maybe applying the view isn't mistaken in itself, but it seems to lead to mistakes, and by mistakes I mean mistakes on its own terms. (Or, at least, the most direct evidence I see of it is in the mistakes it leads to.)

An example?

In case anyone's still checking in on this thread, can I get a call on materialism vs. empiricism?

The American anti-evolution crowd seems to be saying these days that the problem with science is that it relies on procedural materialism, which in turn (they assert) teaches metaphysical materialism to the exclusion of other metaphysics, thus impinging on freedom of religion.

Not unrelatedly, the protagonist of (Hugo-nominated!) "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-planes' by Benjamin Rosenbaum" (hereafter "BN:DoN/C+AP,BR") expresses a non-materialist (or super-materialist? super-naturalist?) worldview, yet he is also a strong empiricist:

Yet those who today, complacently, regard the materialist hypothesis as dead — pointing to the Brahmanic field and its Wisdom Creatures, to the predictive successes, from weather to history, of the Theory of Five Causal Forms — forget that the question is, at bottom, axiomatic. The materialist hypothesis — the primacy of Matter over Mind — is undisprovable.

I noted with some pleasure the first time I read the story that this last sentence is exactly the complaint levelled by scientists at the "god of the gaps" class of anti-evolution arguments.

In the awareness that I am probably looking at this the wrong way, I suspect that the crucial strength of science is not materialism but empiricism. You trade away the possibility of absolute certainty in exchange for the possibility of well-tested observations. If replicable experiments demonstrate, say, telepathy, then great, telepathy is more likely than previously thought.

So here's the question: is it possible to have empiricism without materialism? Or is the dominant worldview of "BN:DoN/C+AP,BR" possible only because of the imaginary world that supports it?

Excellent question, and one I was trying to raise in "BN:DoN/C+AP,BR" (just as my alter ego wanted to raise the equally troubling, to him, question of whether materialism and empiricism could be made to be compatible in "DoN/C+AP").

There's a lot, of course (it being fiction) that I dodged around, though. It certainly seems to *me* (not having the benefit of "Benjamin Rosenbaum"'s education) that there's some kind of muddy but strong connection between materialism and empiricism, and that it's related to the activity of measurement.

If, in your example, telepathy seems likely, that's fine -- but we determined it was likely by measuring something. Doesn't that require it to be a certain kind of telepathy?

The activity of measuring requires the declaration that two distinct things are identical in some aspect -- that all inches are the same (in your inertial frame of reference, at least!), that measurements today are somehow comparable with measurements tomorrow, that measurements by you are in principle the same as measurements by me.

So what is meant by philosophical "materialism"? What does it mean to say that the world is stuff as opposed to thought? What is stuff? Is stuff just what we can measure, what anyone can measure -- what is "out there" to measure? What do we mean, indeed, by "out there" if not a place we all can measure?

I'm not sure "materialism" us the word for the thing that empiricism requires -- but it does require something -- mesurability, recurring pattern...?

In the world of "BN:DoN/C+AP,BR", the evidence against the materialist hypothesis is the strong correlation found between different inexorably consciousness-oriented scales of existence. The universe's natural laws, rather than treating of small, hard, elemental bits and their relations, have a lot to do with minds, their passions, plans and goals. "Final causes" have a measurable and coherent reality. "Bad things come in threes" is an empirically testable proposition, and more sophisticated variants of it have been experimentally verified.

Empiricism can perhaps accomodate this, because the laws implied, while they no longer treat the "stuff" of the universe as fully divorced from mind, do treat it as measurable, patterned, in some kind of externally and repeatably verifiable way. The world is a dream, but a very quasi-material kind of dream, e.g. in its predictability. The main difference between the laws in "BN:DoN/C+AP,BR" and ours is that their laws are cross-scale -- you can't (or they don't) get the history and psychology and the literary laws of plot and theme out of the physics and chemistry. They have anti-reductionist, or at least differently reductionist, natural laws.

But moving even farther away from materialism might force you to abandon empiricism. For instance, take miracles. Miracles that are true one-offs, outside the scope of natural laws, not subject to them or predictable by them, are outside the scope of science. Science can never disprove them; they are nondisprovable. They can also not be verified by science, since not having discovered a law behind a phenomenon is no proof of the absence of such a law. Whether we live in a world which contains miracles is uninvestigable by science.

The assumption that observable events are specific cases of general patterns is where science starts. Science cannot question this assumption -- it has no tools to do so. Nor should it want to. The most science can say about the idea of miracles is "that's nice, dear."

Now, of course, it would be ingenuous to propose that science has not had a drastic effect on people's belief in miracles. What science CAN do is offer a more and more compelling alternative to belief in miracles. As science gets better and better at fitting observed events into (ideally) more and more elegant patterns, and as people, generation after generation, get more and more used to the odd and counterintuitive ideas science generates, people feel more and more comfortable doing without the idea of miracles. When there are no good empirically testable rules to explain how the stuff around you got there, the idea that most of it falls outside any pattern -- that someone or something just made it that way "because they felt like it" -- other people's whims being our closest, most intuitively accessible metaphor for the truly arbitrary and random -- is very attractive. Once there are explanations available that fit nicely in a pattern, the sociopsychological demand for, and tolerance of, miracles diminishes.

Two observations on the role of religion in all this:

1) the people who set us down this road were, in fact, the codifiers of religion. Popular religion, and popular techne ("if you want to build an arch, you need one of these") are highly tolerant of one-offs, heuristics, rules of thumb. Left to their own devices, premodern engineers and other plain folks would not have felt the need to tie everything up into a Grand System. The gods of plain folk, the gods of Homer and the Mahabharata and the Torah, just do stuff -- they are passionate, particular, and arbitrary (c.f.: "Why is David chosen?"). The people who set us on the road to science, though, were often, if not exlusively, folks like Philo and Al-Farabi and Shankara and William of Ockham himself -- people who, above all, wanted God to be logical. Without Plato, no Aristotle.

2) Creationism *used* to be a science. In, say, the 1820s, when serious geology and fossil-hunting got underway, there were plenty of people interested in actually testing the hypothesis that the world was 6000 years old and a flood had wiped out all but a few pairs of animals on earth -- as a testable hypothesis. They were engaged in creationism as science. It would be very interesting to go back historically and look at what their hypotheses and empirical assumptions really were, and how they dealt with the evidence presented -- of deep time, say, or of fossils of creatures not mentioned in the Bible. The people we now call creationists, I expect, are only one school of the heirs of the creationists of that era. What did the others decide?

Ben, terrific reply! I am overwhelemed with potential responses. For now, I'll limit myself to two:

* I share your curiousity about the original creation scientists. Perhaps some enterprising History of Science scholar (*cough*cough*) could enlighten us?

* You write:

But moving even farther away from materialism might force you to abandon empiricism. For instance, take miracles. Miracles that are true one-offs, outside the scope of natural laws, not subject to them or predictable by them, are outside the scope of science. Science can never disprove them; they are nondisprovable. They can also not be verified by science, since not having discovered a law behind a phenomenon is no proof of the absence of such a law. Whether we live in a world which contains miracles is uninvestigable by science.

, and I wonder whether you might be over-stating a little. Here's my reasoning, feel free to puncture as needed:

Even as an entirely one-off violation of every known and unknown natural law, a miracle still affects the natural world in some way -- otherwise it's a "nothing happened" situation. In the face of such an anomaly, an empirical analysis suggests that either there is an unknown natural law that governs the exception or that some effects have non-natural causes. Even though the prior probability of the latter hypothesis is low (based on previous examples of anomalies turning out to be governed by new-found natural laws), a miracle would raise its likelihood somewhat. If further investigation reduces the likelihood of an unknown natural law, or further miracles occur that break the rules in unrelated ways, the likelihood of non-natural causes would continue to rise. Science would not be required to explain "the miraculous mechanism" in order to report on a possible instance. (This goes one step further from the telepathy example: telepathy could conceivably be demonstrated empirically while remaining agnostic about a material mechanism for it.)

Because it reinstates the god of the gaps, this isn't a great line of reasoning for religion that incorporates nature as itself one big miracle. Still, a miracle (of the traditional sort) should be one stunner of a gap to contend with.

Even as an entirely one-off violation of every known and unknown natural law, a miracle still affects the natural world in some way

I started to have that reaction, but I think Ben's point wasn’t whether science can say anything about whether a particular miracle occured, but whether it was, in fact, a miracle and, by extension, whether we live in a world which contains miracles. Science can’t distinguish between a miracle and the operation of an unknown natural law. The most it can do is say “this is a phenomenon for which, as yet, we have no explanation,” and there are fewer of those every year.

The people we now call creationists, I expect, are only one school of the heirs of the creationists of that era. What did the others decide?

In general (see Darwin, Teilhard de Chardin, etc.), I think they decided to become evolutionists.

Having been paged by Dan, I'm going to try and wade in here, but I have to confess that I've been reading this whole thing with that kind of fascination that comes from realizing the conversation has gone a little over my head. (Why would we frame a conversation in terms of materialism vs empiricism? Aren't they different axes? But on that point, I do think there's something to Ben's point about a relationship between the two, at least in some common social constructions of science. It's actually fundamentally relevant to the transformation of psychology that I'm writing about in my dissertation, the question of the measurable object.)

As to what happened to the scientific creationists... off-hand the first thing I have is that Louis Agassiz, the Grand Old Man of American Creationism, incorporated Darwin's theories in a limited way. Agassiz believed in what he called "centers of creation", in that God had created life in several different places (which explains the geographical commonalities and differences), but then some evolution of those created forms was allowed for after the initial act of creation. And I think that was a fairly common integration of scientific creationism and evolutionary theory, a blended model that accepted Darwinistic models for everything but the actual, well, Origin of Species. (If any of you have a chance to go to the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, it's still mainly organized around Agassiz's model of centers of creation, with all the animal forms grouped geographically. It was also possibly my favorite place on campus.)

As for other reactions, I don't know. I mean, a lot of creation scientists just refused to accept Darwin--and not in an ignorant way, actually. It took thirty to fifty years for the scientific community to shake the kinks out of Darwin's ideas, and the creationists were at the forefront of intelligent critique. (One of the biggest problems with selection theory was mechanism--it wasn't until the rediscovery of Mendel (or, more relevantly, TH Morgan's fly-room stuff around 1915) that anyone had a good explanation for the actual processes by which natural selection could be carried out. Without a viable mechanism, it's just a pretty just-so story.)

At any rate, I think the two most common compromises struck by creation scientists in the face of evolutionary theory were the "God created life and then evolution shaped it a little" model and the "natural selection is the means by which God creates and shapes life on earth" model. Both of which Darwin himself hated, because they both kind of undermine the really fundamental points of his work.

Ben wrote: An example?

One that comes immediately to mind (and that can be seen operating in the dog marriage discussion I linked to earlier) operates something like this:

Having accepted unreservedly into my soul (hereafter, AUIMS) a rational/materialistic model, I assert that such a model is a normative good, and assume, a priori, that such a model is self-evident. Therefore:

1. I take credit for having AUIMS the R/M model, and assert, on the strength of no evidence, that I would have done so even under other circumstances (e.g., without having been exposed to it, being raised in a different culture, etc.).
2. Anyone who has not AUITS the R/M model (or, in the weak form of the principle, anyone who has AUITS an incompatible model), I will not investigate, in an R/M way, why they might differ from me in this way, but instead dismiss them as irrational, stupid, and/or evil.
3. Likewise, if someone acts in a way which seems to me incompatible with the R/M model, I will not submit their actions to R/M investigation, but will dismiss the actions as irrational, stupid, and/or evil.

Another might generally be described as “confusing theories with laws.” I don’t have a concrete example off the top of my head, but there’s an economist joke that illustrates it:

A neoclassical economist and his student are walking across the campus of the University of Chicago, when the student spots a $20 bill on the ground.

“Look,” says the student. “There’s a $20 bill, just lying on the ground.”

“Can’t be,” says the economist, without looking. “If there was, somebody would have picked it up already.”

Regarding materialism vs empiricism, I'd ask (again :) t