The ID Arts Blog

 A friend alerted me to this wonderful poem on the brain by Pier Giorgio Di Cicco (1949-) “Brain Litany: Or, Overlooking the Existential Factor”, poet laureate of Toronto and Augustinian priest:

*” … and when we think of coconuts and pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain.” — Gregory Bateson

[ … ]

Where are the pigs Where are the coconuts

The brain is a compendium of holographic mechanisms

Help me find the coconuts Help me find the pigs

The brain is a neuro-physiological metaphor

The brain is an illusionist’s exercise in Euclidean geometry

The brain is a vibrational amplifier for ambient field quanta

Find me the goddamned coconuts the pigs

The brain is a cybernetic miracle with a three-ring triune brain circus at its centre [ … ]

Read the rest here. It is simply the best sendup I have ever heard of materialist neuroscience.

So rarely does a poet actually take on the nonsense rigorously, as opposed to simply sneaking away into some romantic or nihilist haze.  - Denyse O’Leary

PS: If you find the pigs, lose them again, will you, and keep the coconuts for your trouble. - d.

We recently received a large brown envelop from our mail carrier with no return address. Inside we found photocopies of what appear to be internal memos from the Natural Sciences Department at the University of Ivory Tower. A note inside indicated that the sender was a graduate student at the university who felt these documents needed to be made available to the public. The sender simply referred to himself/herself as “Sager”. We will be posting these memos (that our staff dubbed the “Ivorygate” documents) one at a time as we are able to review and authenticate them. Today we are releasing the memo entitled “Educators Guide to dealing with intelligent design“.

Would you go to see a film about a pregnant New York waitress from a deprived background - estranged from her family, dumped by her lover, fired for being late, and about to arrange an abortion? Really?

If you said no, you would certainly be affirmed in your decision by critics at the top Entertainment sections. Independent upstart Metanoia Films’ first effort (Bella, 2006) was roundly trashed, as this sample from Rotten Tomatoes shows: Read the rest of this entry »

by Dennis Wagner

One of the most profound spiritual experiences I’ve ever had was my first encounter with the Hubble Deep Field Photographs. What appears to be a little dark space in the heavens as we gaze up with the naked eye turns out to be filled with hundreds of odd shaped galaxies when examined more closely by the Hubble Space Telescope. You can hear a hundred lectures on how big the universe is, but when your mind starts extrapolating what your eye sees in this photo, you are suddenly overwhelmed by the largeness of the universe and the smallness of your life, and yet somehow you fell connected to that largeness, and privileged to be here to observe it. I think folk guitarist Peter Mayer has captured that experience beautify in his song My Soul from his Midwinter CD.

My Soul by Peter Mayer

There are a hundred billion snowflakes swirling in the cosmic storm
And each one is a galaxy, a billion stars or more
And each star is a million earths, a giant fiery sun
High up in some sky, maybe shining on someone

And deep inside a snowflake, I am floating quietly
I am infinitesimal, impossible to see
Sitting in my tiny kitchen in my tiny home
Staring out my window at a universe of snow

But my soul is so much bigger than the very tiny me
It reaches out into the snowstorm like a net into the sea
Out to all the lovely places where my body cannot go
I touch that beauty and embrace it in the bosom of my soul

And so brief and fleeting is this tiny life of mine
Like a single quarter note in the march of time
But my soul is like the music, it goes back to ancient days
Back before it wore a human face, long before it bore my name

Because my soul is so much older than the evanescent me
It can describe the dawn of time like a childhood memory
It is a spark that was begotten of the darkness long ago
What my body has forgotten, I remember in my soul

So we live this life together, my giant soul and tiny me
One resembling forever, one like smoke upon the breeze
One the deep abiding ocean, one a sudden flashing wave
And counting galaxies like snowflakes, I would swear we were the same

Oh my soul belongs to beauty, takes me up to lofty heights
Teaches sacred stories to me, sanctifies my tiny life
Lays a bridge across the ages, melts the boundaries of my bones
Paints a bold eternal face on this passing moment, oh my soul

Research on how the brain processes music is emerging as a rich and stimulating area of investigation of perception, memory, emotion, and performance. This 25 page paper from the Annual Review of Psychology does an excellent job of reviewing the state of research on music and the brain and provides citations to the original literature for those who want to dig deeper. Based on current knowledge researchers are attempting to build a sound model of how the brain processes music. We’d love to hear the Darwinian “story” about how the musical supercomputer between our ears developed by mutations.

An editorial by Matt R. Ealist

It seems like every time we turn around a scientist is pointing out the genetic similarities between humans and chimps - our closest evolutionary ancestors. For some of us, this constant preaching can grow old. Why is it that scientists feel it necessary to continually remind us that we are not made in the image of God, but in the image of an ape? I propose that they are doing it for our own good. The belief of human exceptionalism is a sin of the worst kind. Most evil and atrocity in the world can be traced back to this belief. The “Fall of Man” was not when humans denied God and became selfish, as the Christians say. It is exactly the opposite. The Fall occurred when humans began believing in a God and started denying their selfish genes. When scientists remind us that we are 98% ape, they are graciously attempting to save us from our sin and restore us to an apish virtue. We should be grateful. However, I believe the reason that many of us have become deaf to the Darwinist gospel is because we are disillusioned. When we hear scientists tell us that we are apes and that morals are an accidental by-product of nature, but then they turn around and talk of human “inalienable rights,” as if there is some objective moral law, we immediately recognize the hypocrisy. Therefore, I think that we owe some praise to scientists who have the courage and integrity to act with an apish virtue before they preach it to others. Although instances of this type of high character are rare, the academic community has recently witnessed just such an example.

Professors in the Astronomy, Physics, and Religious Studies departments at Iowa State University have come under scrutiny for conspiring to unfairly deny tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez (a heretic and advocate for Intelligent Design) and then lying about their reasons. While some simple minded people will criticize the behavior of these professors, I say it is commendable. They are acting consistently with the beliefs they espouse. If it is true that our closest relatives are chimps, then we should not be surprised when some of us exhibit chimp-like behavior. Nor should we apologize for it. Chimps are known to be aggressive, unfair, brutish little bullies at times. The professors’ behavior is strikingly similar. The behavior exhibited by these professors merely corroborates their own hypothesis that they are 98% ape. And while there are some Darwinists who would take that as an insult, the more enlightened ones (the true believers) should take it as a compliment. Why should they feel insulted by someone merely agreeing with a hypothesis that they proudly and boldly profess?

Some of you may be thinking, “What about the bonobo? They are our ancestors too and they are kind, sweet, and fair. Shouldn’t we harness our inner bonobo and shun our inner chimp? Isn’t the bonobo just as much a part of us as the chimpanzee?” Well, no. Our DNA is not as close to a bonobo as it is to a chimp. Furthermore, why should we prefer bonobo behavior over chimp behavior? They are both the products of purposeless processes of nature. To say that one is any better than the other is to imply an objective standard of some sort, which is rubbish.

I know that a lot of this may sound unpleasant. But I am simply stating the facts of Darwinism and applying them consistently. Not all Darwinists have the courage to admit these things, much less the stomach to act upon them. It seems our heroes at ISU have both. Their example stands as a symbol of Darwinian truth for all the world to see. Students can look to this inspirational story and glean from it an important lesson: It may take a real man to admit he is merely a sophisticated chimp, but it takes a real ape to act like one.

by James Hoskins

I recently had the honor of being interviewed for a podcast on idthefuture.com. The main topic of the interview was some short stories I had written that have been featured here on idarts.org. The podcast sparked some fierce debates in the comments between Darwinists and ID proponents. From what I can decipher of the Darwinists’ comments, their main argument seems to be that ID proponents are liars for denying the claim that we believe in ID because we are Christians. Ironically, I addressed this issue briefly in the first Socrates debate, which was featured in the podcast. Evidently, the Darwinists didn’t feel it necessary to read the stories before dismissing them. So, I thought I would go further in depth and fully address this accusation from the Darwinists in the second installment of the Socrates debate series. In order to accurately represent the Darwinist position, I will use some quotes taken directly from some posts in the comments of the podcast.

We are pleased to introduce ID Artist Gil Dodgen. A professional musician earlier in his career, Gil offers up some thoughts on music and ID, along with downloadable copies of his classical piano solo albums:

“As a child and young man, music spoke to my soul in a way that nothing else did. I can’t explain it and won’t attempt to. It seems to me that the arts, and music in particular, present a real problem for Darwinism. How would such an ability come about in a step-by-tiny-step fashion and what would be the survival value of the transitional intermediates, or even the end product? (Never mind what mutations would be required to rewire the central nervous system for musical ability, and the probability of those mutations occurring.) Of course, for Darwinists, Darwinism must explain everything, so they will invent stories about how ancient jungle drummers got the girls, just like rock stars get the groupies. But everyone enjoys music with absolutely no evidence that it offers any survival or reproductive advantage. It just seems to be programmed into us at a very fundamental level.

Music is based on the physics of sound — in particular, the overtone series which is produced when a string or column of air vibrates. The division of the octave into 12 semitones is not an accident or a matter of personal preference; this produces notes that coincide with the overtone series. This is the basis of melody and harmony, and why some sounds are dissonant and some sounds are consonant.

Imagine a world without music: no music accompanying the movies you watch, no music in your church services, no music on the radio or television, no violinists, no pianists, no guitarists, no singers, no songs — no music at all! Wouldn’t your life be indescribably impoverished?

And here’s the weird thing: music is a totally abstract art form, but has tremendous power. When I was in college I took a number of courses in music theory. I remember a chapter in a book about melody. All the technical elements of melodic composition were discussed but there was one final comment that struck me (I paraphrase): Most people associate “melody” with something that cannot be described, but they know it when they hear it, and there is no way to teach how to write a good melody.

In closing I would like to offer some of the great piano music that inspired me, in hopes that it will inspire you as well. You are free to make CDs and distribute the music in any way you like, and I would encourage you to include the program notes when you do. In them I include a tribute to my wonderful music teacher, Ruby Bailey, who taught me from the time I was a child through high school, and then again in college. She was unbelievably gifted as a musician, pianist, and pedagogue, and was a wonderful person in general.

I am something of an evangelist for classical music. When one has been blessed so profoundly by something, one feels compelled to share it with others. Although I no longer perform concerts (with rare exceptions) I do continue to perform classical music informally and play keyboards for a praise band.”

Philosophy student James Hoskins has a knack for turning philosophical arguments about the Darwin v. Design debate into interesting fictional stories. Several of his creative works here at IDArts are featured in this recent Podcast interview including Confession and A Debate Between Socrates and Hector Dawkins.

by Denyse O’Leary

ARN correspondent

I first determined to make a point of reading historian Richard Weikart’s meticulously researched book, From Darwin to Hitler because Darwinists were very clearly upset by the implications of his work. Some seemed obsessed with proving Weikart, who teaches at California State University (Stanislaus) not only wrong but dishonest and irresponsible - which he certainly isn’t.

I am glad I read this magisterial work, because I now understand much better the relationship between 19^th century Darwinism and the rise of Hitler. Weikart unearths so many old, almost buried 19^th and early 20^th century German sources. Indeed, one can only wonder at his patience, systematically reading through the many, many articles and books of long-dead eugenicists, imperialists, pacifists, socialists, and such. Read the rest of this entry »

an editorial by Matt. R Ealist

I recently discovered my outrage at thumbs. Yes, I am speaking of the short, stubby little phalange protruding from the hands of humans and primates. Oh, I shudder at the sight of them! Not only am I convinced of the darkness of these halfling metacarpals, but I intend to start a public campaign to help educate people about the potential danger and inherent wickedness that lurks within their own hands. Allow me to explain how I arrived at this position.

I was reading some of the words of Richard Dawkins, the Oxford Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. First, he explained away belief in God as an evolutionary adaptation, no different than our eyes or feet or, *shivers* thumbs. Then he went on to express his outrage at this particular adaptation. He explained how religion has been harmful to society and is responsible for many atrocities throughout history, and how we would therefore be better off without it. At first, I was a bit confused at how he could be furious at, what he says, is simply an evolutionary adaptation formed by mindless and purposeless processes of nature. Then, slowly, I started to understand, and finally it clicked. He was right! Religion has been responsible for many atrocities throughout history. But, as I see it, he isn’t going back far enough. Dawkins’ outrage is misguided. He is campaigning against the wrong evolutionary adaptation. What first allowed animals to grasp objects well enough to use them as weapons? Thumbs! What trait led to the development of more sophisticated tools, including tools of destruction? Thumbs! What species won the good graces of Natural Selection, placing them at the top of the food chain with oppressive power over all other animals? That’s right, the species with thumbs. Long before humans evolved religious belief they were committing atrocities with the aide of their thumbs. The horrors perpetrated by these dreadful digits are incomprehensible. It is the thumb that allows the murderer to grasp the gun handle; the butcher to clench his chopping knife; and the jockey to lash his horse whip. How many people have died at the hands of thumb-wielding murderers? How many animals have been mutilated by thumb-boasting butchers? How many horses have become humiliated beasts, oppressed and enslaved by thumb-happy horse trainers? I needn’t say anymore.

It is my firm conviction, that if we are going to unite ourselves against any one of our evolved traits and cast it aside, it is our thumbs that need amputating. Dawkins helped me to realize the meaning of the verse, “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” It doesn’t matter that your eye is an accidental by-product of nature. For, “it is better to enter heaven with one eye, than to have two eyes and yet be cast into hell.” Just the same, it is better to enter into non-existence without thumbs than to…..well, enter into it with them! Dawkins would tell us that religion is the adaptation that needs to be expunged. But while it is a matter of debate whether belief in God is to blame for the Inquisition, there is no question as to what made possible the building of the guillotine.

by Denyse O’Leary

ARN correspondent

A sculpture of a mammoth and figures of other animals, the oldest ivory carvings ever found, dated to 35 000 years ago, shed another ray of light into early human culture. (Most existing artifacts are less than 5000 years old.):

The figure of the woolly mammoth is tiny, measuring just 3.7 cm long and weighing a mere 7.5 grams, and displays skilfully detailed carvings. It is unique in its slim form, pointed tail, powerful legs and dynamically arched trunk. It is decorated with six short incisions, and the soles of the pachyderm’s feet show a crosshatch pattern. The miniature lion is 5.6 cm long, has a extended torso and outstretched neck. It is decorated with approximately 30 finely incised crosses on its spine.

What’s remarkable about these sudden flowerings of art is that they show an astonishing level of sophistication that doesn’t appear to have precursors. See also, for example, the Willendorf Venus and the Lascaux Caves. These finds support a top down view of intelligence (mind comes first) rather than a bottom up one (matter gradually morphs into mind).

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

As a Philosophy student, I often enjoy imagining dogmatists locked in a room with Socrates; the master of interrogation and debate. My latest fantasy involves Socrates questioning the archetype of the philosophical materialist, whom I will call Hector Dawkins, on the definition of science and the justification of Guillermo Gonzalez’ tenure denial from Iowa State University.

Just as ID inspires art, so does Darwinism. If there is one place where the Darwinian creation story has been proven true, its in Photoshop skills of artist Daniel Lee. Lee uses the Photoshop software to combine human portraits with animal features in his Manimals exhibition.

by Denyse O’Leary

ARN correspondent

Illustrations

Here are some illustrations riffing off the popular myth of the “Ascent of Man”, and other evolution folklore:

A spoof of the biology text

Devolution of Obese Man

Evolution of Computer Man

Evolution of the Research Grant

For these graphics, hat tip to a correspondent from Singapore!

Cartoons

I’ve also collected these ID-related cartoons along the way:

(Note: The cartoons are not necessarily ID-friendly. Most attracted my attention because they showed genuine wit.)

Eight cartoons

Tax code laff

Manwhile, here is an amazingly ugly cartoon used to promote Darwinism by a classical Darwin lobby!

.. and a Spoof!

For a spoof of Darwinism by ID-friendly wags, you can’t beat the Brites.org, its very name a spoof of The Brights - a group of self-consciously superior Darwinists.

Here are some current entries:

Professor of Pugilism Conway Moore attempts to savage ID-friendly astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez:

CM: … Look. Religious whackos who believe in Intelligent Design believe the earth is only 5000 years old because it says so in the Bible in the book of Guinness. By any standard…

ED: Do you mean Genesis ?

CM: Whatever.

ED: Dr. Gonzalez believes the universe is billions of years old and originated at the Big Bang.

CM: Oh. Nevertheless, …

The “I Love Lucy” petition, insisting that the now (apparently) discredited she-gorilla “Lucy” is really adorable Mum after all:

Professor Yoel Rak at the Sackler School of Medicine’s department of anatomy and anthropology said, “The presence of the morphology in both the latter and Australopithecus afarensis and its absence in modern humans cast doubt on the role of [Lucy] as a common ancestor.”

Rak’s statement infuriates Finch.

“If man didn’t evolve from apes,” offered Finch, “then I am an obnoxious pompous overeducated immature egocentric materialist with goo for brains.”

Also, this sendup of evolutionary psychology’s latest theory on the origin of humor - but the trouble is, evolutionary psychology is so inherently ridiculous that it is genuinely hard to spoof. Still, the illustration of “crude Ardepithecus humor” definitely works.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O’Leary

ARN correspondent

UCLA molecular biologists say they have converted protein sequences into classical music (though some say it’s only pop music):

On the biologists’ site , you can listen to the compositions and even submit your own genetic sequence and have it translated to music. The browser allows anyone to send in a sequence coding for a protein, which will then be converted into music and returned as a MIDI audio file. The research is published in Genome Biology, a major journal in the field of genomics.

This has all the potential in the world for schlock, of course, but on the other hand, one of the scientists found that a piano teacher understood it all better that way. Particularly scary is the sequence for the deadly disease, Huntington’s chorea.

Here are some other items I have posted at the Post-Darwinist and the Mindful Hack:

When they aren’t monitoring themselves very carefully, NASA people say the most surprising things … Read the rest of this entry »

by Denyse O’Leary

ARN correspondent

Just today, I received a most interesting note from a retired Australian poli sci professor Hiram Caton, late of Griffiths University, noting that the Darwin exhibition, developed at the American Museum of Natural History, is hitting the road, and may stop at a museum near you.

Caton explains,

You are well aware of my former colleague Dave Stove’s critique of Darwinism. We are alike in that we have no religious affiliation; also in that we do not believe that Darwinism can provide a basis for ethics or for ‘conservative’ politics, in the manner of Larry Arnhart.

At his site, Caton offers a most useful anti-docent, “Getting Our History Right: Six Errors about Darwin and His Influence,” documenting the following six errors:

For more go here.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O’Leary

ARN correspondent

Before this arts site got started, I had been reviewing movies and books that are relevant to the intelligent design controversy at the regular ARN site. Here are brief intros and links to reviews that this site’s users might enjoy. I will add a link to this post to my future posts, so you can get back here if you are looking for a past review.

March of the Penguins: Why there was a fuss about the “intelligent design” implications of this film

Should you permit your children to see March of the Penguins? Not if you want to raise them as unquestioning Darwinists.

What the Bleep Do We Know?: Well, somehow, I don’t think we know this, anyway …

This film addresses the reasons, based in quantum mechanics, for doubting the radical materialist view of the universe. I’m all for doubting radical materialism, but I don’t quite think this approach is the answer, and here’s why.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose: Why was this tale of devilry linked to intelligent design theory? The only connection - but it is certainly an interesting one - is the film’s portrayal of what happens when an apparent truth cannot be accepted by a society that is committed to an ideology that rules that truth out of bounds.

Science fiction: Rob Sawyer takes on intelligent design in The Calculating God What if the aliens land, and they think the universe shows evidence of intelligent design? Even more remarkably, they are much more interested in Toronto (Canada) than in Washington or New York? Why?

Darwinian Fairy-Tales: Why evolutionary psychology is nonsense In Darwinian Fairy-Tales, agnostic Australian philosopher David Stove minces evolutionary psychology. The problem is that evo psycho is true to Darwinian theory but not to human experience.

Tech guru George Gilder: Why ID is onto something! One thing I learned from covering the ID controversy is that intelligent design makes many more converts among engineers than among biologists. I think that is because engineers have a much clearer grasp of the critical question, “how, exactly.” They must make processes work every day. So, for example, if six different processes involving cellular machinery consisting of hundreds of molecules must randomly self-assemble by means of natural selection, what, exactly, is the probability of success in given time frame? Gilder addresses Darwinism in this light.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Its the same old story–kid goes off to college where everything he was raised to believe is challenged, but Confession, a short story by philosophy student James Hoskins, turns out to be a confession of a different sort. We asked James to give us a little background on himself and the origin of the story:

“After graduating high school in 1997, I started a rock band called Elevator Division. Shortly thereafter, I embarked on a deep journey of philosophical questions concerning my childhood Christian faith. This prompted an ongoing independent study, researching the evidence for and against the existence of God, that lasted the remainder of my time with the band. One record deal, two U.S. tours, and seven years later I decided to quit the band and go to school to become a philosophy professor. So I enrolled at the University of Missouri-Kansas City to study Philosophy, where I am currently.

In the spring of 2006, I attended a seminar at school called “Was Darwin Right?” hosted by the local Muslim Students Association. At the seminar they showed a video promoting the theory of Intelligent Design, with which I was already well acquainted. Following the video was a Q & A session that turned out to be a three-frontal attack on the young Muslim host by Darwinists in the audience. Coming to the defense of the speaker I quickly found myself in the middle of a debate with a biology professor and two biology students. They ended the debate by insisting there is an unknown law of nature that causes matter to organize itself into complex working machines. Realizing this as a last ditch effort on their part, I let it rest and did not pursue the argument any further. However, I did vent my frustration from that experience in a short work of fiction called, “Confession.”

Upon the advice of my English professor, I submitted “Confession” to Number One Magazine, the University’s student literary magazine. They accepted and agreed to publish it. However, they asked me to censor parts of it because they believed it could be offensive. I refused. The magazine’s policy of printing whatever the author wishes worked in my favor and Number One published the story uncensored.

While I still play music with a buddy of mine, in a project we call Chouteau, my main passion now is school and writing – particularly in dealing with philosophy of science issues. Hopefully, other stories and essays that are in the works will get equally effective responses as did “Confession.”

Currently I live in my hometown of Kansas City, Missouri with my wife Lisa. I work and go to school full-time. I plan to graduate next December and will seek admittance to a graduate program in Philosophy.”

by Denyse O’Leary
ARN correspondent

       

My review of Rob Sawyer’ 2000 novel addressing the intelligent design controversy, Calculating God: “The aliens have landed, and they are intelligent design advocates!”       

Also:An interview I did with Rob in 1998        

Other reviews of Calculating God

Rob Sawyer’s key sci fi works.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Rob Sawyer’sWeb site, and quote site.

Rob Sawyer’s sci-fi novels

Neanderthal Trilogy:

Hominids (Tor, 2003)

When a Neanderthal physicist, Ponter Boddit, accidentally finds himself in another universe, in an underground research facility in Canada, it turns out that Neanderthals would develop a completely different civilization.

Humans (Tor, 2003)

Ponder Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, takes a Canadian geneticist back to his universe to see what sort of civilization the Neanderthals would develop.

Hybrids (Tor, 2003)

How would humans co-exist with other species if such distinctions as race and sex divide them?

Quintaglio Trilogy:

Far-Seer (Ace, 1992)

For intelligent dinosaur Afsan, modeled on Galileo, discovering the true arrangement of the heavens is not merely of scientific interest; it is life or death for his entire world.

Fossil Hunter (Ace, 1993)

Toroca, a dinosaur geologist, is seeking unusual metals that can take dinosaurs to the stars. But suppose he discovers instead the true origin of the dinosaurs?

Foreigner (Ace, 1994)

If the mind of a great (alien) scientist were analyzed, what would it show?

Other Novels:

Rollback (2007)

The aliens have sent us a message, and we have responded.

Mindscan (Tor, 2005)

Jake Sullivan has cheated death by copying his consciousness into an android. However … that isn’t the perfect solution.

Calculating God (Tor, 2000)

An alien lands on Earth, in Toronto, bearing the news that God really exists. But maybe Earth soon won’t.

Flashforward (Tor, 1999)

Due to a bungled physics experiment, the entire human race gets a look at two minutes twenty-one years from now. But what if you see nothing?

Factoring Humanity (Tor, 1998)

Asignal from the Alpha Centauri star system is detected in 2007. … it shows amazing new technology that practically eliminates space and time. Could this be a new stage of human evolution?

Illegal Alien (Ace, 1997)

The first time humans contact aliens is when a disabled Tosok starship lands. At first, all is conventional well-wishing. But the a popular scientist is found dead, and one of the Tosoks is the most likely suspect.

Frameshift (Tor, 1997)

A dying scientist accepts the opportunity to raise a child who might be part Neanderthal.

Starplex (Ace, 1996)

Mysterious, artificial wormhole have solved the problem of space travel. These interstellar passages seem too close, too conveniently, for Starplex Director Keith Lansing.

The Terminal Experiment (HarperPrism, 1995)

Dr. Peter Hobson, testing his theories of immortality and life after death, has copied his personality into three electronic simulations. Things don’t go as planned, of course.

End of an Era (Ace, 1994)

To learn how the dinosaurs died, we first must watch them live . . .

Golden Fleece (1990)

Is a mere starship engineer really any match for a murderous computer?

Short Story Collections

Relativity (ISFiC Press, 2004)

Iterations (Quarry Press, 2002)

A great many of the reviewers whose comments I located had a lot of trouble - more trouble, probably, than the vast majority of readers - with Sawyer’s premise that the universe might show evidence of intelligent design.

Many American reviewers also professed to see anti-Americanism in Calculating God .

As a Canadian, I am of two minds about that. Many Canadian authors have been forced to reset their novels in the United States because American readers supposedly refuse to read books set in Canada. Sawyer has - throughout his career - refuses to go along with that and achieved stardom while making a point of setting novels squarely in contemporary downtown Toronto (Canada’s largest city, whose “greater Toronto area” has about 5 million people, or more than one seventh of Canada’s entire population). His choice of setting includes (thrown in for free, if you like) the way Toronto looks at the United States. I suppose many Americans would prefer him to set the story in Atlanta instead, but I am glad he didn’t. Anyway, these factors may have dragged down the book’s ratings, which is unfortunate, but don’t cheat yourself of reading it on that account.

So, here are some other reviews:

Mark Wilson, at Off the Shelf, SciFi.Com :

Provided with arguments for an intelligent creator, the natural human response is dissatisfaction: “Then why did he do this? And this?” Humans want a perfect world, but don’t know what’s meant by that; few see the perfection, interplay and balance of what already exists. Provocative issues and emotions raised in a novel meet as much resistance and misunderstanding as their counterparts in real life. Sawyer has postulated a universe in which the physical and the metaphysical plausibly synergize. Moreover, he provides a role for humanity grander than pure science might suggest for any species riding a microscopic speck of a planet through an incomprehensibly vast cosmos.

Jonathan Cowie, at Concatenation provides some very interesting information about why Calculating did not win a Hugo sci-fi award:

Calculating God was nominated for the 2001 Hugo (World Science Fiction Achievement) Award. Even more importantly it was the most voted for SF novel short-listed! So congratulations Robert you are now technically a Hugo winner. Naturally, World SF Convention fandom may give a double take here. ‘Hang on, mate, Sawyer did not win the Hugo in 2001.’ Correct, he did not. The winner went to one of Rowling’s children’s Harry Potter fantasy novels, purely owing to latitude in the constitution of the World SF Society so as not to exclude works bordering on fantasy. But, as has been pointed out by many elsewhere, given that fantasy novels have their own World SF event and awards it was a bit of a waste conferring the 2001 Hugo on a Harry Potter book let alone an undermining of the spirit of the Hugo. Ho hum. Nonetheless, it is a unassailable fact that the most votes an SF novel received that year for the Hugo was Calculating God and in our book at least Calculating God would have been more of an appropriate and deserving a winner.

Elisabeth Carey, at New England Science Fiction Association says,

Leaving aside a certain amount of stereotyping of Americans, this is an entertaining book, though not as deep and thoughtful as it would like to be.

David Soyka, inSF Site Reviews, praises Sawyer’s readability and ready familiarity with popular science culture:

Thus we are firmly planted in the realm of hard SF, typically characterized less by plot than ongoing dialogues among characters, the purpose of which is to expound upon scientific principles. Unlike some hard SF, which I find can get a bit tedious in constantly providing physics lessons, Sawyer writes well and with a sense of humour that, in the tradition of the old Mr. Wizard television show, proves just how much fun science can be. There’s a host of scientific references (e.g., Stephen Hawking, Stephen Jay Gould, Sagan himself) that anyone interested could consult for further edification, as well as constant mentions of popular culture and science fiction in particular. For example, at one point Tom and Hollus watch Star Trek movies. While Hollus finds fault with the idea of inter-species mating that could result in a Spock (which ironically foreshadows later events), there are some interesting points to be made in contrasting the second and third installments of the venerable series. In The Wrath of Khan, Spock sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise and its crew, complying with the Vulcan edict of the “good of the many outweighs the good of the one,” which is also an underpinning principle of socio-biology. Yet that principle is contradicted by human behaviours such as those portrayed in The Search for Spock, in which the “good of the many” is jeopardized for “the good of the one.”

though he, like so many critics, is uncomfortable with Sawyer’s premise that the universe could show evidence of intelligent design.

Don Webb, ofBewildering Stories, really wishes that Sawyer could accept Yankee materialist boilerplate:

It comes as something of a shock that Steven Jay Gould’s distinction between science and religion is dismissed as “bafflegab.” If Thomas Jericho is the one who is speaking, his reaction is unaccountable in a scientist: the eminent American paleontologist deserves a fair hearing and a reasoned response. And the rudeness is quite un-Canadian.

Maybe Sawyer sees through the “distinction”, as many have? For example, Phillip E. Johnson, American constitutional lawyer and friend of the court for the ID guys, writes,

The realm of value assigned to the church [by Gould] is more like a radio talk show, where all opinions are equal and none is authoritative. Any attempt by the church to assert a genuine teaching authority would have to rest on assumptions of fact, such as the divinity of Christ, and these would be checkmated by science.

For example, Gould says that his settlement would forbid the church to teach that miracles have actually occurred, because that would be a claim of fact within the magisterium of science, which rejects supernatural interventions as a matter of principle. Among the questions of fact which scientists would determine, then, are such questions as whether God directed and guided the evolution of life, whether Jesus actually rose from the dead, and whether there is a factual discontinuity between animals and humans attributable to divine intervention. The answers would all be negative. The rules of NOMA give scientists exclusive authority to say which factual claims are real and which are illusory, and scientists will say that the alleged supernatural events upon which the church bases its magisterium are among the illusions.

Now, Sawyer’s character Jericho might have very different reasons from Phillip Johnson for seeing a problem with Gould’s formulation, but it’s a bit harder to understand why anyone would who thinks very hard about the problem would not see one.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Here’s an interview I did with Rob Sawyer, award-winning sci-fi writer and author of Calculating God, a novel that addresses the intelligent design controversy, which I review here. The interview was for the Fall 1998 number of the sadly defunct Mystery Review , whose editor Barbara Davey was forced to cease publication in 2003 when she learned she had terminal cancer. (Requiescat in pacem aeternam.)

Science Fiction Star Experiments with Mystery/Sci Fi Blend - And It Works

by Denyse O’Leary

Although he is Canada’s best known science fiction writer and the recipient of nineteen awards, including the Nebula for Terminal Experiment (HarperCollins), the Canadian Aurora Award for Starplex (Ace Books) and the Japanese Seiun Award for End of an Era (Hayakawa), Rob Sawyer is not one to just let the space turf grow under his feet.

Recent books such as Terminal Experiment, Frameshift (Tor Books), and Illegal Alien (Ace) intentionally incorporate the mystery novel into the sci fi genre. So far, the fans love it. But for Sawyer it’s a matter not only of personal interest but also of survival in an increasingly demanding publishing world.

Sawyer, who has been able to write full time for about eight years, has thought a lot about science fiction novels and about mystery novels and the curious similarities between the two.

“I find the genres incredibly intertwined both in publishing history and in many of the creative challenges they face,” he acknowledges. “In mystery, very often, the main character is a detective. In science fiction, for a great part of its history, the main characters were always scientists. I still have a tendency to write about scientists. But many of my colleagues beat the bushes to find characters they can write about who aren’t traditional scientists, just as mystery writers beat the bushes, asking “‘Who can I write about, who can I thrust into a crime, that wouldn’t naturally be there?’”

When Sawyer does beat the bushes for characters, he’s pretty thorough. Some of his murderous characters are: an overzealous computer with a talent for lying (Golden Fleece); an electronic entity seeking vengeance through the Internet (); an alien from Alpha Centauri who thinks there is no free will (Illegal Alien ); and far more poignantly, a war crimes suspect pursued by a man dying of Huntington’s chorea (Frameshift ).

One difference between science fiction-based mystery and conventional mystery is obvious from the above list. Only a science fiction writer could introduce any of the first three as possible suspects in a mystery.

How and why science fiction has changed over the years

Another critical difference between the two genre traditions, Sawyer believes, is that mystery fiction has had a close relationship with “serious” literature for a much longer period. “Science fiction, even more than mystery fiction, came out of a pulp magazine tradition,” he notes. “Mystery always had some really great writers. But science fiction through the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties didn’t have any really great English writer.”

In fact, he believes that by the Sixties, the science fiction genre was really faltering. TV and movies had co-opted “outer space” with riveting special effects. How could tales of wonder in mere prose compete with Space Odyssey 2001? And prose science fiction hadn’t yet found something it could do better than celluloid.

But “in the late Sixties in Britain they started to redefine science fiction,” he says, ” The phrase they adopted was ‘the exploration of inner space,’ of human psychology.”

At last, prose science fiction had found something it could do better than movies. Because, as Sawyer explains, “For us it wasn’t just exploring characterization. A good mystery obviously explores characterization. But we could explore characters in situations that had never existed before, that no human being had ever experienced, and have it ring as true. I never knew a man who lived for ten million years, as in one of my books, StarPlex. The inner life of the characters became the real challenge for science fiction writers in the last couple of decades.”

“In one way, it’s great that science fiction started to do that. In another it’s a damning indictment of the genre that it wasn’t until the late Sixties that we should actually be talking about characters,” he adds.

“In science fiction, I’m actually of the right age,” he muses. “I was born in 1960 the first generation that got interested in science fiction through television, as opposed to reading. I discovered it through the original Star Trek and TV series like Lost in Space that were on in the 1960s. In 1968, when I was eight years old, my father took me to see the movie 2001.”

Did he understand the movie?

“It’s incomprehensible to an adult; imagine how incomprehensible it was to an eight-year-old! I found it absolutely fascinating. It was TV - and that movie - that got me interested. My father was a professor at the University of Toronto. He realized that (science fiction) was a way to get his son reading.”

But after graduating from radio and television arts at Ryerson Polytechnic in Toronto in 1982, Sawyer had learned something else: Despite his love of TV and movies, he did not want to write for them. “I am not by nature a collaborative writer,” he explains. “In a novel, you labor over every word. You’re lucky if a screenplay bears some resemblance to what you wrote, yet it may still have your name on it. I found this a source of infinite frustration. Writing books, although it is a less lucrative and less secure profession, was going to be much more emotionally and creatively satisfying for me.”

Career planning: How Sawyer became a sci fi writer

Interviewed early in 1998 in his comfortable condo in Thornhill, full of books and science fiction memorabilia, Sawyer, verging on forty, seems the very picture of genre novel success. His wife, Carolyn Clink, was able to quit her job at a printing company to work as his full time executive assistant a refreshing alternative to the too-common role of the hapless “writer’s spouse” who works to support the other spouse’s writing habit.

But it soon becomes clear during the discussion that Sawyer planned his career as a writer very carefully, which is perhaps fitting for the son of a professor of economics. He knew early on that the odds are against any writer making money, unless the writer is both very good and has an excellent business sense. Sawyer majors in both. His success was no doubt a pleasurable surprise, but it was not by any means a mere chance.

He did some documentary work for the CBC after graduation but then moved into corporate and business journalism during the Eighties. “That was beautiful because I didn’t care at all,” he recalls, “I was doing all of this with a definite goal in mind. The goal was to save a lot of money. I was saving enough. Even before my first novel had sold I had essentially quit writing non-fiction and was writing fiction full time.”

Bankrolling money for a fiction career turned out to be a critical decision, because the young Sawyer soon discovered a sad fact of the writing life: Non-fiction writers seldom write much fiction. “I kept thinking I would.,” he remembers, “But you’re at your clients’ disposal day or night. During the six years I did this, I maybe sold one 1500 word short story a year. I was not finding the time.”

Today’s book market: Go big or go home

Sawyer had both a practical and an aesthetic reason for blending the science fiction and mystery genres in his work. First the practical: The decline of small press runs and small book shops in publishing has endangered writers who appeal only to one genre. Sawyer sees his crossover into mystery as a key to appealing to a large enough selection of readers to stay near the top of the list.

“One thing I stopped doing is setting books in outer space,” he admits, “Only a hard core science fiction fan will read a book set on a starship. I saw the writing on the wall that the mid-list - which was where I was when I was writing books like Golden Fleece - was drying up. You either give up or broaden your audience appeal.”

But Sawyer, whose favorite contemporary author is Eric Wright (he is also a big fan of Robert P. Parker and of Sherlock Holmes), also found an innate sympathy between the two genres. “The classic novel of detection is based on the premise that there is some mystery to be solved through the gathering of clues and the interpretation of facts. In fact, the traditional mystery novel is an intellectual exercise, a work that prizes the rational process. Science fiction is very similar. You very often are dealing with a mystery.”

“The second thing they have in common is a great deal of ‘talkiness,’” he adds. “You read Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks, and you’re fascinated by the way Banks will question somebody and how he will cogitate on what he has learned until he puzzles it all out. I think that the science fiction reader and the mystery reader both understand fundamentally that ‘talking heads’ should not be a pejorative statement. Two people talking about things that have great consequences are interesting!”

“There has never been a more interesting time to be alive,” he insists. “We are faced with issues that Plato and Aristotle couldn’t even conceive of. We’re in an era of ethics and the issues are not clear cut. At the end of the book, you’re still left pondering.”

Truth, fiction, and consequences

Many of Sawyer’s novels deal with science and ethics issues that have great consequences. For example, in Frameshift , a Neanderthal girl is recreated by cloning her from DNA. In the wake of the success of recent mouse cloning experiments, would it be possible today, one wonders? Or what about recreating a tyrannosaur, as in Jurassic Park?

“Can we bring back the passenger pigeon? I think they could do it today,”Sawyer believes. “I also think it’s going to be very easy to recreate things that have been extinct for a few hundred thousand years. We will certainly be able to bring back early forms of humanity. But is it ethical to do so? If you brought back homo erectus, he would be considered, by all the standards of our day, severely mentally retarded. But DNA is very fragile and the chances of pulling off the Jurassic Park scenario are almost nil simply because there probably is no intact tyrannosaur DNA. It’s like asking a thousand years from now if somebody still has a copy of the first issue of the Toronto Sun.”

Right now Sawyer is working on a book called Mosaic [Flashforward ], in which, due to a bungled physics experiment, the consciousness of everybody on earth jumps ahead twenty-one years for three minutes. He explains, “The mystery plot is this: One of the main characters sees nothing. If you see nothing, you’ll be dead. He becomes obsessed can he prevent it somehow? He’s trying to track down people who got a glimpse of who might have killed him.”

Celluloid and novels: Dumberer and still dumberer?

Will any of Sawyer’s books become films any time soon?

Sawyer is ambivalent about the possibility. “The sad truth is that if you look at all the great mystery and science fiction writers of the twentieth century, there’s been no Eric Wright movie, no Peter Robinson movie. What movie there was of Sarah Peretsky’s V.I.Warshawsky stunk. In science fiction, the worst film of last year, The Postman, was an adaptation of a fifteen-year-old novel by one of the finest science fiction writers. It was ruined in the translation to movies. Hardly any writers get a movie made of their work and when that movie is made it is almost always a disappointment to the author and to the fans. The only reason I would want to have a movie made of my work is that I would make hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I prefer writing novels.”

“And,” he adds, “I rankle a little at the idea that a novel is a stepping stone to a movie. A novel is a complete work of art. No more is my novel somehow unfulfilled because it hasn’t been committed to celluloid than Michelangelo’s David is unfulfilled because Mattel hasn’t made an action figure of it.”

Denyse O’Leary (oleary@sympatico.ca )is a freelance writer based in Toronto.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O’Leary

ARN correspondent

If Calculating God hadn’t been written by Rob Sawyer, I would be reluctant to even start it. Why start a book that addresses the intelligent design controversy only in order to end up throwing it at the wall when the author turns out to know far less than a person can find out just by reading a single chapter of what a respected ID theorist actually says.

But it was written by Rob Sawyer, … so I was looking forward to it. A prolific Canadian sci-fi author, Sawyer writes science fiction that draws on science and ethics/philosophy issues taken from the headlines. His premise is usually a what if - and better still, he delights in challenging stereotypes.

What if, for example, the aliens land and, instead of trying to destroy New York or conquer Washington, they send a quiet (six-legged) scientist to a museum in Toronto? What if they are actually here on Earth on a religious quest, of sorts?

I knew I was going to like the book at the point where the spidery being emerges from the space shuttle at the Royal Ontario Museum and says “Take me to a paleontologist.”

But of course. The alien scientist Hollus is researching mass extinctions. There have been five mass extinctions on Hollus’s planet, Beta Hydri, and also on another one - and they occurred at the same time as Earth’s five great extinctions.

A coincidence? Hollus doesn’t think so. Scientists on Hollus’s planet assume intelligent design is the correct interpretation of the features of our universe.

What Hollus wants to know is, what exactly is the design? Because, at a certain point, advanced civilizations - a bit more advanced than Earth or Beta Hydri - simply disappear. Where to? How? Why? Should it be prevented? Can it be prevented?

You can’t choose the ways in which you’ll be tested.

- from Calculating God (2000)

Sawyer’s work usually features lots of heady dialogue, which is okay because he generally links it securely to an action-packed plot. For example, one problem with seeing God exclusively as a designer - as Hollus does - is that most humans want more from God. The paleontologist who starts working with Hollus, Tom Jericho, discovers that he has lung cancer - an outcome of a life lived amid the dust of ancient bones- and thus he has a very limited life expectancy.

So he wants more. He wants a cure for cancer, in fact. Unfortunately, neither the Forhilnors (Hollis’s species) nor the Wreeds (the other intelligent one) know a cure for cancer, or old age either.

Not wanting to die was another universal constant, it seemed.

- from Calculating God (2000)

Somehow, that seems intuitively right. Cancer, an abnormal development in cells, riffs off normal development. Old age is the natural outcome of the fact that we live in time and space in a universe with limited physical resources. We cannot declare war on our universe, or change it dramatically either. Against such things, even the victories of advanced civilizations must be small and temporary.

When new developments in the visible universe suggest that the aliens may actually get a chance to meet God at a certain point in spacetime, Tom decides to go away with them and die there.

How do you define God? Like this. A God I could understand, at least potentially, was infinitely more interesting and relevant than one that defied comprehension.

– Calculating God (2000)

A sub-plot revolves around a couple of fundamentalist abortion clinic bombers - a shade too dumb, in my view - who moonlight by blowing up the “lying” Burgess Shale fossils that fascinate Hollus. But could these guys blow up a beach ball? I doubt it.

It’s interesting to look at the question, post-911. Nine-eleven completely changed popular culture’s idea of a terrorist bomber. No longer is he a sweaty, two-neuron rube griping about liberal values - he is an intelligent Middle Eastern suicide aspirant, disgusted by Western depravity.

Rob Sawyer, a Best Novel Hugo and Nebula Award winner, and winner of an awesome string of other awards, doesn’t disappoint, because he takes the questions he raises seriously and avoids simplistic answers.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada’s Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

The myth Richard Wagner set to music in the opera Lohengrin is a marvelous portrait of romantic chivalry. The mystery of the enduring power of this story may be explained by analyzing it as a dramatic theodicy. A philosophical theodicy poses an answer to the problem of evil in a world supposedly controlled by a God who is good. How atrocities can be permitted under the sun by a benevolent and omnipotent God is a question that does not completely relent under logical analysis. Dramatic renderings of the issue have had wider appeal and greater staying power. One of the oldest examples of dramatic theodicy is the story of Job in the Bible. Job suffers even in his innocence, and his complaint reaches the court of heaven where God permits the ordeal to continue, apparently to negate Satan’s taunt that Job is faithful only because God rewards him for his virtue. Making Job into an object lesson does little to relieve him, but, eventually, there is a thunderous conclusion in the firmament, more in resonance with operatic crescendo than philosophical abstraction.

Elsa, the heroine in Wagner’s Lohengrin, is accused of fratricide and trysting with an illicit lover by her antagonists, Telramund and his sorceress wife Ortrud. These two conspire in a plot as nefarious as that of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Their intent is to usurp headship of the Duchy of Brabant, which rightfully belongs to Elsa’s brother, Gottfried, heir to Brabant’s Christian dynasty. Gottfried, now strangely absent, is presumed dead, and Ortrud is progressively corrupting her husband by her false testimony that Elsa has murdered him. The collapse of Telramund’s nobility under the influence of his wife is a significant subplot of the opera.

When King Heinrich arrives to investigate the strife attending succession of the Duchy of Brabant, Telramund has bought Ortrud’s lies wholesale and takes up her false witness against Elsa. Elsa is called upon to defend herself, but she only replies by relating a dream of a knight who has promised to defend her cause. A herald calls repeatedly for a defender for Elsa’s cause, but none appears. Elsa prays that the chivalric knight of her vision will now come to her aid. At last, transcendence breaks into the world of human injustice. In the romantic illumination of Wagner’s music the knight Lohengrin appears on the River Scheldt in mythic splendor in boat drawn by a swan.

Lohengrin betroths himself to Elsa and answers her prayers for aid on the condition that she will never ask his name or lineage. He announces that he will prove her innocence in mortal combat. King Heinrich prays that justice will be established in the ordeal. Lohengrin and Telramund draw their swords. The contest that follows is brief and decisive. The virtuous knight subdues Telramund. With blade poised above Telramund’s heart, Lohengrin says he will spare the accuser’s life. He exhorts him to spend his borrowed time in repentance for the evil he has perpetrated against Elsa.

The first act of Lohengrin has established the basic premises of a theodicy. Elsa’s innocent suffering poses a dilemma of the sort that, left unresolved, casts doubt on God’s goodness. The premise that God is powerful is assumed. A transcendent being unable to overcome the actions of human malefactors would not be God. Even in absence of Elsa’s prayers, God must act in her defense, or there must be a satisfactory explanation, should God permit the injustice to continue. Theology in a Calvinistic vein that sustains the inscrutable sovereignty of God against human comprehension does not play well on the stage. Sending the defender of Elsa’s virtue shows God’s benevolent intentions, but resolution of the problem in Act I would not provide sufficient time for Wagner’s music to elaborate.

Ortrud and Telramund plot in the night to reverse Elsa’s good fortune. When the opportunity arises, Ortrud attempts to dissuade Elsa from trust in the heroic virtue of her betrothed: if Lohengrin comes anonymously and inexplicably from a place that must remain a mystery, will he not someday depart as abruptly, leaving bereft both Elsa and the Duchey of Brabant of which he now has been proclaimed guardian? Magical in her own right, Ortrud calls upon her spirits to deceive Elsa and overthrow her defender. She invokes the ancient Gods, Wotan and Freia, of the Norse pantheon.

Telramund listens to her oaths of vengeance and her invocations in service of the betrayal of trust she is building with Elsa. Telramund now understands that he was deceived by Ortrud’s lies about Elsa. He laments the loss of his virtue and recalls his valor in defense of land and people who gave him honor, now lost. Yet in full cognizance of the deception that, with Ortrude, his actions sustain, he enlists four nobles to strive with him against his new rival.

To compound the pathos of Elsa’s innocence, she tries to befriend Ortrude, even as Elsa is being undone by Ortrude’s insinuations. She pities Ortrude’s destitution, assuming that her husband invented the accusations from which Elsa was miraculously delivered. She invites Ortrude to join with her in the wedding procession at the cathedral and makes Ortrude her maid of honor. In return, as Elsa’s bridal procession is entering the cathedral, Ortrude and Telramund block the procession and demand to know the name and origin of the groom. Lohengrin’s enigmatic reply is that he is bound to no one, save Elsa, for an answer. Since she, in good faith on her agreement, refuses to ask the forbidden question, King Heinrich and the people of Brabant conclude that the wedding is legitimate and that it shall proceed.

It is clear in the story from which the composer began that Elsa’s faith is the critical factor in her relation to the figure of her redemption. She has every reason to trust the man who confounded the lies of her accusers and saved her from death or exile. As long as she doesn’t waver on her agreement, the romance continues. Ortrude and Telramund are now again in disgrace. The bride and groom retire to their nuptial bed. All is well until Elsa’s trust gives way to the suspicions planted in her by Ortrude. She begins to probe his anonymity. He first evades her queries then reminds her of her vow. She persists, and her inquisitiveness becomes more intent on having an answer. At the critical moment, when she finally insists on knowing her husband’s name and lineage, Telramund and his cohorts storm the house. Telramund’s sword is of no avail even in ambush, and Lohengrin slays him. Instead of the sensual evocation of a Wagnerian climax, this thrust disgorges Telrumund’s entrails on the bridal bed. A determined foe has been slain, but Elsa’s question has dislodged the balance that secures her place of safety in the universe of this drama. Her husband sadly tells her that he will publicly give answers to her questions.

In the morning, the assembled people of Brabant learn the name and status of their guardian. His song begins as the strings evoke the transcendent realm of his origin. “In far off land, to mortal feet forbidden, there is a castle, Monsalvat by name.” In the ethos of medieval chivalry Monsalvat is the sanctuary of the Holy Grail, the sacred challis Jesus shared with his disciples when he instituted the Eucharistic memorial of his death. The Holy Grail appears from the world of Celtic myth in Welsh legendary tales of The Mabinogion. Sir Thomas Malory continued the tradition in English literature with his tales of King Arthur’s Round Table. On the European continent the grail legend had a life of its own. An unfinished 12th-century poem by the French poet Chrétien de Troyes, describes the discovery of the grail by Parsifal. Wagner’s interpretation of the Grail motif comes from an epic by the 13th century German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach. In Spain Cervantes began writing a parody of chivalric ideals in Don Quixote only to find himself captivated by chivalry in the end.

So, in the first utterances of his song, Elsa’s defender and the acclaimed guardian of Brabant identifies his nobility as transcendent in origin. He is a knight of the Holy Grail. His strength comes from participation in a divine order that shares the mystery of the blood of Christ in the castle Monsalvat. “A gleaming temple therein is hidden, so rich as nothing on earth could frame/ Therein a cup most holy powers possessing/ Is guarded as a gift of heaven’s love/ To be to sinless men a boon and blessing/ It was brought to us by angels from above/ And every year a dove descends from Heaven/ The mystic might within it to resolve/ It’s called the Grail/ And purest faith it lendeth to all the knights who in its service strive/ He whom the Grail to be its servant chooses/ It arms with holy supernatural might/ Opposed to him deceit its magic loses/ The powers of darkness he can put to flight/ Though in distant lands the Grail may send him, the cause of injured virtue to defend/ Holy might will attend him, while unknown to all he can remain/ The art that in the Grail is hidden/ Its light no mortal eye can gaze upon/ From every doubt its knight must be protected/ If recognized, he must at once be gone/ Thus compelled, now I reveal my sacred story/ The Grail’s servant to you I hither came/ My father Parsifal reigns in his glory/ His knight I am/ And Lohengrin my name.”

The crescendo in the brass and trumpet flourish that attends this revelation leaves no doubt of Wagner’s intent. He understood this story very well and the effect it would have on his audience. King Heinrich sheds a tear, and Elsa laments paradise lost. Aware that his hope of love in this world is also lost, Lohengrin grieves with Elsa that her sincere remorse is vain. The people of Brabant are bereft of their guardian. Against King Heinrich’s entreaty Lohengrin explains that should he, in disobedience, seek to remain, his power would be gone and his cause would fail. He reassures Heinrich with a premonition: the Eastern horde will not prevail against German lands.

To everyone’s dismay, the swan returns on the River Scheldt. In Lohengrin’s greeting another mystery begins to unravel. If Lohnegrin had been able to remain one year in Brabant, Elsa’s brother Gottfried would have been released from the servitude to which he is bound by Ortrud’s magic. Lohengrin gives Elsa his sword and horn and a ring, which, should Gottfried ever return, will give him strength in battle, succor in danger, and remind him of the one who took up their cause. With this, it is time to say, “Lebwohl”. In the tradition of Knights errant, and rangers in American Westerns, Lohengrin must depart to find service elsewhere and to others.

As Lohengrin heads up the riverbank to the boat, Ortrud explicates the mystery of Gottfried’s fate. She verifies, by the gold chain around the swan’s throat, observable to all, that this swan is Gottfried transformed. The true heir to the throne of Brabant is now engaged hence. This, she says, is vengeance from the gods of the Norse pantheon on the apostasy of a Christian dynasty of Brabant. But the Grail has one final consolation. Lohengrin kneels in silent prayer, and the white dove of Monsalvat hovers over the boat. Lohengrin perceives it with gratitude and springs up to unfasten the chain from the swan’s throat. The swan sinks into the water, and Lohengrin lifts to the bank a youth in gleaming silver garments. Ortrud collapses with a shriek, and Lohengrin steps onto the boat. The dove seizes the gold chain and draws it off Gottfried’s neck while Elsa gazes on him with rapture. He makes obeisance to King Heinrich. The men of the community kneel in homage to Gottfried. He hastens to Elsa’s arms, and she, in joy, turns hastily toward the shore, but Lohengrin is gone.

Wagner didn’t invent this story, but it is his rendition that endures in the modern world. The opera is one of the standards of any company with the resources to mount a production. Singers still aspire to the vocal challenges it presents. The familiar motifs of an inspired quest in defense of the powerless continue in modified form in cinematic drama, and, of course, every film score uses techniques Wagner invented or adapted for his purposes. In the productions of Lohengrin being mounted, however, many directors try to mute the clear demarcation between good and evil evident in the work. In an unsigned essay in a subscribers booklet circulated prior to Seattle Opera’s 2004 production, the author calls Ortrud a “rationalist”. Ortrud is clearly the force for evil in the drama, yet this writer asks, under the heading Wagner’s Moral Complexities, “How do we know Ortrud is so wicked? Her questions about Lohengrin are perfectly sensible. And if her tactics seem ruthless, remember that Ortrud truly believes that the throne is rightfully hers, that it was usurped from her family by Elsa’s. And why do we believe Lohengrin is so wonderful? The trial-by-combat scene in which he defeats Telramund, although sanctioned by King Henry’s medieval government, was as barbaric and foreign to Wagner’s audience as Ortrud’s black magic. By putting this scene onstage, Wagner was asking: Does might make right?”

This analysis is missing a salient theme in medieval literature. At the heart of the Grail legend and the chivalric code is the idea of might for right. If Ortrud is fighting for what she thinks is rightfully hers, she has no moral compunction about destroying the innocent in her ambition. In this vein one might also say of Lady Macbeth that she is fighting for what she thinks is rightfully hers. The opera Lohengrin is not morally complex. Though the composer certainly was morally compromised, he found truths in his art that were probably beyond him.

The essayist, still anonymous, unlike Lohengrin, says “Wagner’s Lohengrin uses this popular pattern, and this old story, to talk about a central issue of the day: the crisis of faith in nineteenth-century Europe. During Wagner’s lifetime, the rise of science, technology, and industry were shaking to its foundations people’s faith in the church, long the mainstay of European society. Wagner shows us how Elsa’s pure faith in Lohengrin’s virtue evaporates when she listens seriously to the intelligent questions of Ortrud, who is competing with Lohengrin for power over the community. Ever the rationalist, Ortrud demands proof, and Lohengrin’s powerful mystique, penetrated by her piercing light of logical inquiry, turns out to be airy nothing.”

Ortrud the rationalist! This is akin to calling her invocations of the Norse deities Logical Positivism—absurd. Elsa’s fragile faith is an important element of the story, but in this drama, at least, the church isn’t in crisis. The crisis is, indeed, correctly identified as within the human soul. It is a crisis of finding the spiritual resources to continue living in an unjust world, not a crisis of the church. In the world of this opera injustice is perpetrated by Ortrud and Telramund as he becomes complicit in Ortrud’s lies. You couldn’t find a less ambiguous case of false witness in the book of Leviticus.

Nietzsche admired Wagner, and for a while they were fellow travelers, but analysis of this medieval plot will be better served by leaving the Nietzschean will to power and its moral ambiguity aside. The profound and truly human question in this story is why the innocent suffer while God remains inaccessible? The answer, in a bald-faced abstraction of the sort that is not consoling in absence of myth like that of Lohengrin, is that supernatural assistance, transparent and clearly evident to all observers, would irrevocably compromise human freedom.

Despite the weight of postmodern ideology and the theory of evolution, there are moral truths, and there is some help to be found in transcendental categories. Suffering, when it has meaning, ceases to be unbearable suffering. This is a reasonable literary explanation for Lohengrin’s extraction of the promise that Elsa never ask his name or lineage. If he were to remain in Brabant after everybody knows that his strength is divinely ordained, his authority would be unquestionable, and human actions could never, for long, diverge from virtue as established by the community. The Christian Dynasty of Brabant would be eschatological.

In this sense the story says the same thing as the Genesis account of the fall, and Elsa’s part resembles that of Eve under the influence of the serpent. A clearer case for archetypes in the collective unconscious could scarcely be found. Thankfully, Wagner is better dramatist than Carl Jung. Whether Wagner accepted the tale, as truth, is certainly questionable; the substance of the issue involved isn’t. Listen to the music with suspension of judgment, and draw your own conclusions. In contemporary productions, you might have to close your eyes to what they put on the stage. (audio-10)

Michael Dodaro

audio-10: Wagner; Lohengrin; excerpted from Deutsche Grammophon recording 2530 176; Kubelik.

The opera Faust had its premier at the Paris Opera in 1859. In a coincidence that now seems a hellish juxtaposition, 1859 is also the year Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. The opera made Charles Gounod the most famous musician in Paris. Since then Charles Darwin has been on the ascendant. The demonology of Faust’s bargain with the devil clangs uproariously against modern materialism, and where scientific reductionism waxes philosophical, The Origin of Species has the status of dogma. Evidence for a cosmology richer than we find in Darwin includes grand opera. Can the theory of evolution account for the moral conflict, human nobility, and ignobility found in the plots of musical drama of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? The character Faust in the title role of Gounod’s opera is presumed to be a man well versed in natural philosophy—science of the era of the Faust legend—as well as medicine and jurisprudence. After a lifetime of study in these fields Faust despairs of finding satisfaction in the Western cultural legacy. Satan offers to disencumber him of his rational and metaphysical inhibitions, and Faust consummates a transaction.

Faust’s search, simply put, is for the satisfaction of a moment that he would wish to sustain. An abbreviated treatment of Goethe’s version of the Faust legend, the opera centers on Faust’s seduction of Marguerite, a peasant girl who soon finds her life in ruins. Faust’s conquest can be seen as an upshot of the materialistic world view. There are many versions of the legend, and several operas based on it. In some versions of the odyssey the philosopher’s quest becomes the life of a sensual athlete, including romps with courtesans of legendary reputations—Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Thäis. In the opera by Gounod Satan serves Faust’s inclinations while amusing himself baiting the bourgeoisie. Using the power Satan puts at his disposal, Faust enraptures Marguerite with jewelry and his transitory affections and then deserts her. But this story resolves on Marguerite’s redemption. Her apotheosis and translation to heaven is musically exultant, ascending chromatically and aimed at an experience of transcendence. (audio-7) It concludes with a chorus of angels singing, “Christ has triumphed over sin and death; there is now no condemnation for those who put their trust in him.”

This traditional Christian cosmology evidently played very well in Paris in 1859. The opera was an immediate success, revitalized French