Reasons to Believe

C. S. Lewis places the following words in Puddlegum's mouth in the The Silver Chair.

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars ans Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made up things seems a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies making up a game can make a play world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I am going to stick by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as much like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.

This is easily the most theological statement in a book that is remarkably free of theology (at least in the first 220 pages that I have read so far). This same character makes many statements claiming that nothing happens by accident - a pretty bold claim but less so in a fantasy setting.

From what I have read if Lewis' conversion to Theism the above quote seems almost auto-biographical. Lewis came to the conclusion that if you have a desire for something it must be real. Here he is saying that if what you want to believe sounds better than reality than it is worth behaving as if it were. There is a subtle difference - in the first case he was arguing for the actual existence of something while in the second he was arguing for governing your actions as if something existed. It reminds me of Pascal's Wager, "What do you have to lose if God turns out not to exist?" In Lewis example you should act as if Christ were real not just because it is an appealing thought but also because it makes you a better person.

I find this kind of interesting because I have long believed that one must choose to live as if Theism is true or as if God does not exist. Agnostics can talk about doubt at their dinner parties but they can not live doubt, they have to make a choice.

I knew him, Horatio

The other day I found myself wondering what would replace Java as a programming language. Many are so entrenched in Java (or the latest cool new tool) that they just ignore the fact that all things come to an end. C seemed so entrenched that it was hard to imagine anything else eclipsing it (no pun intended).

What got me thinking about this was my philosophical frustration with String vs StringBuffer. String is the base class for handling text but to do anything even as banal as concatenation, you are supposed to use StringBuffer. I understand that immutable Strings were introduced for efficiency but they lie like a pustule festering in the heart of the language. Nothing will ever make them elegant.

And now we have Annotations in Java 5 (or is it Java 1.5?) We are told that XML is banished and deployment descriptors are a thing of the past (see here). The trend now is to entangle your code with deployment information (WebService and Entity annotations). Ironically, the instructor in the Core Spring class I recently took tried to sell us on the ways that Aspect Oriented Programming would disentangle our code. He followed this up by indicating all the Spring-specific annotations that we should add to our code! I can't escape the feeling that we are going to be deluged with new annotations when every framework will insist on their own, unique attributes. In order to port our so-called POJO to a newly released framework (or new version of an old one) we are expected to recompile our code. Imagine the stack of Annotations required to make our Plain Old Java Object deployable on the wide variety of possible environments our clients may be using. Alternatively we could try to tell CitiGroup that they have to use the technology that we chose to Annotate. Good luck! This smells like an attempt to solve a short-term problem (That Evil XML) with a long-term solution.

In Java 1.7, there is talk of multiple object return types. This may be the final sign that Java has Jumped the Shark. Are the developers of the language compelled to pile more and more stuff on the specifications to show that the language is growing or something.

And thus begins the gradual decline of Java.

More Stupid Programmer Tricks

Am I dense or just not one of the cool kids?

This is from JAX-WS FAQ page (https://jax-ws.dev.java.net/faq/index.html#jaxwsdiffJaxRpc)

Q. What is the difference between JAX-RPC and JAX-WS ? One of the main difference between JAX-RPC and JAX-WS is the programming model. A JAX-WS based service uses annotations (such @WebService) to declare webservice endpoints. Use of these annotations obviates the need for deployment descriptors. With JAX-WS, you can have a webservice deployed on a Java EE compliant application server without a single deployment descriptor.

Excuse me, but the @WebService anotation is the deployment descriptor, except now the deployment is entangled with the implementation!!!

The Power of Self-Delusion

I was curious about the rumored doubts that C. S. Lewis expressed in A Grief Observed reflecting on the loss of his wife.

I came across this excerpt:

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels — welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?

Is there a better expression of an experience where it is made clear that God is a creation of our own perception of our internal state. The shadow we took for a giant turns out to be an ancient oak tree when we are forced to approach it more closely. We create God in our image and find that he is not there when we actually need aid from outside ourselves.

In the flesh

I read somewhere else that C. S. Lewis defended accusations that he was writing "allegory" by saying that he was merely exploring how Christ might have incarnated in a world like Narnia. Fair enough. Although you can't really say that Aslan's Christ is a different Christ from Jesus' Christ so the application of Aslan's behavior to our world is direct (although Aslan implies that the children mush learn to understand him under "a different name" at The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.)

I think a slight extension to Lewis' description, above, would be that Aslan explores what the world would be like if Christ actually returned to Earth and hung around. There is no Holy Spirit as intermediary here. Aslan bails people out and advises them in the flesh, not as some feeling or strangely-warmed heart.

Perhaps this exactly what Lewis intended and makes this clear somewhere else.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I read somewhere on the net that C. S. Lewis was “a first rate literary critic, a second rate fantasy writer and a third rate theologian.” In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Theology starts moving up the rail. Theology recedes further in to the background in Lewis’ third volume. More’s the pity. Another commenter has posited that Lewis had missed the previous 100 years of biblical criticism when he started his apologetic career. As evidenced by his Narnia series, he didn’t keep up with modern literary technique either.

By the fifth outing in the series (they were, of course, written out of order), I have become somewhat accustomed to the patronizing quality of Lewis’ writing. Perhaps I am not as familiar with children’s literature from the 1950’s (outside of Dick and Jane) but his way of addressing the reader seems to be archaic by at least a generation. Even the Hobbit, published in 1937 and noticeably written as a children’s book, does not wallow in the syrupy nostalgia as do the Narnia books. The closest analog with which I am familiar is Winnie the Pooh (1926). Furthermore, Lewis seems trapped between the nursery and Oxford. On the one hand he harps on about how familiar the good reader is with stories about dragons and dwarves but juxtaposes this against the Eustace character who serves as a caricature of everything that Lewis finds foolishly modern. Kind of awkward to explain to a young Winnie the Pooh fan.

All this was present in the previous Narnia books but The Voyage of the Dawn Treader introduces yet another archaicism. When I think of some of the books I read as a young person, some (i.e. Isaac Asimov and Tolkien) written in the 1950’s or before, I remember stories with overarching story lines and well crafted plots. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader we get a series of unconnected events, each one trying to dazzle us with bizarreness alone: the one-legged Dufflepods. Ramandu, the vacationing star (think astronomy, not Hollywood), the pool that turns objects to gold. Perhaps Lewis is consciously or unconsciously casting the story in the style of Danté’s Inferno. In any case, it made for dreary reading in this context.

As to the Theology of this book, I was not so surprised. Perhaps I have become as accustomed to thoughts on faith as to his style. Leaving aside Aslan’s Land which has no real theological content of interest, I groaned at the very end when a Lamb appeared to the children and offered them fish cooked over a fire and then appeared as their beloved Aslan! This story is weird enough in the Gospel of John. What is a child supposed to make of it? The claim that Lucy and Edmund have become too old for Narnia and must learn to find Aslan in their own world was pretty mild stuff. It came across as an acknowledgment that the nursery must be left behind. I can take that, may be even apply it to my own midlife wanderings. The most interesting theological motif, one that has appeared before in Lewis’ stories, is Aslan’s statement to Lucy when she causes him to appear via a magical spell, “Surely you think I would obey my own laws.” (paraphrased). If God/Christ is to be constrained by his own laws, then miracles such as the Virgin Birth become impossible. This is a whopper of a theological blunder and should be unsustainable by a serious religious thinker, at least one touted as the greatest Christian Apologist of the 20^th Century. Alas.

I intended this post as a micro-review but apparently I had more to say than I had at first thought. As stated before, I intend to see Narnia through to the bitter end, or Last Battle. The later written volumes (The Horse and His Boy, The Magicians Nephew) were better than the earlier efforts so The Silver Chair may not be such a disappointment.

C. S. Lewis and Theology

I have finished the fourth book in the Narnia series, Prince Caspian, and have had just about as much Thomas-the-Tank-Engine storytelling as I can stand. However, each book seems to be introducing new tidbits of C. S. Lewis' amateur theology. We have moved from the crudely told resurrection "analogy" to a story of Jesus (Aslan) forcing events by pretending to attack horses and riders to the previously visible Savior being invisible to his greatest supporters (and friends) because of their unfaith or something (the reason is not completely clear). I have developed a morbid curiosity to see what comes next. What will happen in the last book, ominously entitled, The Last Battle? I'm all a-quiver... or should I be dreading his clunky prose and awkward proselytizing?

It remains to be seen if all this will convince me to make another attempt at Mere Christianity, this time with the detachment necessary to prevent me from screaming and throwing the book across the room.

Meta-Intelligence?

Another in my continuing ruminations regarding Wisdom.

Is Wisdom Meta-Intelligence?

Wisdom is ...

A) ... the knowledge of the limits of intelligence? (humility)
B) ... the knowledge of the situations where the application of intellect is appropriate?
C) ... the knowledge of which problem solving techniques are appropriate to a given task.
D) all of the above

This does not easily encompass an area that I have always considered a kind of wisdom: the ability to deal effectively and "intelligently" with irrational human beings. This may be where Solomon's "cleverness" in dealing with the two prostitutes and the baby falls.

Recycle or Merely Discard

Now reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

C.S. Lewis recycles the bogus Liar, Lunatic Lord argument from Mere Christianity on page 48. Liar, Mad or Truthful may work with real human beings that you know personally, as in the context of the story, but I am beginning to wonder if Lewis believes that this is such an irrefutable bit of logic that it can be applied widely. I can't shake the feeling that it doesn't hold up much better in the Narnia context either but I'll have to ponder that for a while.

A lifetime in their moccasins

Just finished reading Dr Bart Ehrman's God's Problem about the ol' theodicy issue. It is an interesting mix of analysis of how different Biblical authors view the problem of suffering and Dr Ehrman's own views on the matter.

In the last chapter, Ehrman sums up and points out that some suffering in the world is avoidable. When he states that the income and goods in the world could be redistributed if we had the will I was thrown back in my mind to my days in Junior Achievement and my attendance of the National Convention in Terre Haute, Indiana. One speaker claimed that if the incomes of the millionaires in the US were redistributed it would amount to such-and-such an amount, implying that it would be a pittance. I don't know if this was true but I have noticed that people who make arguments about how happy the poor are or how money can't buy happiness or how a few thousand dollars isn't going to make a difference to the poor, these people NEVER offer to trade places with the poor. If being poor is so satisfying and so little different from being affluent, why do these people pursue affluence so eagerly. The same argument goes for school funding. If "throwing money at the problem" is not an excuse for taking no action at all, then let's just reduce the school budgets for their precious children to the level of Alabama's Black Belt or the Mountains of Honduras. There is a certain minimal level of food, medical care and educational resources below which life is really hard or a child's education will be incomplete. There is probably a point where "enough" needs are being met and anything else is just tennis teams but of the worlds 6 or so billion people, how many are getting enough.

I am no saint and am haunted by my own laxity, greed and inability to do anything but, shit, at least acknowledge the issue people!