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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

greg egan has this story (Oracle) in which ~c.s. lewis loses a debate against ~alan turing and then is visited by a future version of himself who tells him "you're wrong about everything, god is dead, science is the only truth" what a rude and tacky thing to do to a dead person

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

1. greg egan in the '90s absolutely fucking hates religion, spirituality, all humanities subjects and the people who study them, with an intensity i find jarring. i guess this might've made more sense during the height of the atheism wars but it strikes me as ridiculous now

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

(not to mention "in this timeline your wife is alive because science") it takes a stunning amount of arrogance to assert so forcefully that religion has no redeeming value the way greg does. you have to believe that almost every human being who ever lived was a fucking moron

1:12 PM · Jul 7, 2022Twitter Web App

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

Replying to

it's also becoming clearer that a big part of why greg thinks science deserves the level of worship he offers it is that he sees it as where all the real miracles come from; the path to acquiring real godhood

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

for someone born in 1961, 16 years after the atom bomb, 8 years before the moon landing, i can see where he's coming from. but for me, born in 1990, the biggest technological story of my lifetime seems like the rise of smartphones + websites that drive their users insane

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

that's a much less positive development than the discovery of penicillin or whatever else people want to point to. there have also been no big developments in fundamental physics, no fusion, no big medical tech advances that i know of... science has been a poor god in my lifetime

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

physics as a religion also suffers from having a deeply unsatisfying cosmology with tons of gaping holes. what caused the big bang? nobody knows. what caused cosmic inflation? "the inflaton field" ie nobody knows. what are dark matter and dark energy? nooooobody knoooows

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

there's just nothing in fundamental physics about how a person living in macroscopic reality dozens of orders of magnitude away from atoms let alone quarks ought to live their lives. it's very unsatisfying if you aren't constantly getting new technology out of it!

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

greg egan's stories just do not contain an explanation of why taking physics as your religion does not inevitably collapse into nihilism *other than* the possibility of sustained rapid technological progress being a sufficiently exciting distraction

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I agree it's somewhat tacky. But it's no more tacky than C.S. Lewis' work in Perelandra, for instance, where the villain is a strawman long-termist utilitarian who decides selling his soul to the devil is the best policy.

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Like in his other stories -- Oceanic, for instance -- doesn't seem to think all religious people are morons. He thinks they're wrong, but making comprehensible mistakes.

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The ~lewis character in Oracle is not really an innocent victim - he went out of his way to denounce ~turing as a satanist, accusing his science of attempting to overthrow nature, and the knowledge itself as satanic. I read it as a critique of rel. dogmatism rather than religion

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