Who is This God Person Anyway? (Fit the Seventh - The Fall)

I haven't done one of these in literally years, and Becky's recent post about the risk of a Christian author's work turning people away from God just reminded me that it's actually quite fun to deliberately do the exact opposite...

Arthur listened for a short while, but being unable to understand the vast majority of what Ford was saying he began to let his mind wander, trailing his fingers along the edge of an incomprehensible computer bank, he reached out and pressed an invitingly large red button on a nearby panel. The panel lit up with the words Please do not press this button again.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Similarly (well, similarly enough for the purposes of a blog post anyway) Eve, being unable to understand the vast majority of what God was saying, began to let her mind wander, reached out and took an invitingly large red fruit from a nearby tree...

OK it's a flawed parallel, not least because, unlike Arthur Dent, Eve had been warned of the consequences before she took the fruit. Arthur was technically tempted by the unknown rather than the explicitly forbidden, although I think a good rule of thumb would be that if you've never been in a spaceship before, pressing buttons as soon as you get the chance is not going to go down well with the spaceship's owners.

So, let us suspend our disbelief for a moment and agree that the temptations were broadly similar, and take a look at the outcomes. Now, poor old Eve, she would have been straight out that air-lock, snatched away from her space-borne Utopia with President Beeblebrox and made to fend for herself in the big wide universe. What does Arthur get?

A second chance.

To my thinking, that polite little warning the Heart of Gold gives him seems even more tempting than an unmarked red button. But he is given a pause to reconsider, reminded that buttons is spaceships are not there for the entertainment of earthmen, and asked not to do it again. He is given the Sirius Cybernetics equivalent of grace.

How many of us, when God's Heart of Gold tells us not to do something, think 'Well that wasn't so bad. I wonder if I can get away with it again...'? How many times can we press that button before the airlock opens and we, too, are snatched away from the Heart of Gold by certain death?

Hat tip also to Exploring Our Matrix for inspiring this post, and (indirectly) for the image :)

Don't forget your towel!

Whatever you're doing today, make sure you know where your towel is, in celebration of perhaps the most remarkable, certainly the most successful book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - more popular than The Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than 53 More Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters: Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

Yoda and I will be taking our towels to a classic car show, so I should look suitably random.

Hoopy Towel Day banner by Travis Avery.

Who is This God Person Anyway? (Fit the Sixth - The Total Perspective Vortex)

So we make a long-awaited return to the increasingly occasional series plucking at the spiritual threads of Douglas Adams' writings.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about the Total Perspective Vortex:

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.
To explain--since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation--every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula--for that was his name--was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex--just to show her.
And into one end, he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other, he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain, but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

I was sort of going somewhere with this, like to parallel the Vortex with the way getting too close to God would annihilate the brains of Old Testament Jews, but really I just wanted to let the universe speak for itself.

Who is This God Person Anyway? (Fit the Fifth - Biscuits)

Readers familiar with the Hitchhiker trilogy will probably remember the story of Arthur Dent's biscuits. It's a story he tells Fenchurch, about an encounter with a stranger and a packet of Rich Tea at a railway station. You can find it in Chapter 20 of So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, but to summarise:

Arthur was waiting for a train, sitting at the table with the Guardian on one side, a coffee on the other, and a packet of Rich Tea in the middle of the table. Sitting opposite him was a perfectly ordinary businessman. He didn't look as if he was about to do anything weird.
But he leaned across the table, picked up the packet of biscuits, tore it open, took one out, and... ate it. Arthur ignores this in his usual English manner, right up to the point of trying very hard not to notice that the packet was already mysteriously open when he came to take a biscuit himself.
The two of them went through a packet of eight biscuits, each taking one in turn, until only an empty packet was left between them and the stranger left to catch his train. And when Arthur's train was announced, he finished his coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and, of course, sees his own packet of Rich Tea, unopened.

Douglas Adams always claimed that this was based on something that actually happened to him, although that claim may well be apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate.

Wherever the story started, it seems to have developed a life of its own. Being overfamiliar with Douglas Adams' version of the story, I had to have an ironic chuckle when I heard evangelist J John give his version of the story - the crux of which is that God owns all the Rich Teas. We may think he's mean, expecting us to share our Rich Teas with the church, with this or that charity, or with Joe next door who is running a bit short on snacks this month, but if the time comes that we really need more Rich Teas, he will provide them. Like the stranger in the station, we are called to share, and not necessarily receive any thanks.

It's not quite as good as seeing it in person, but there's a transcript of a J John sermon including his take on the biscuit story here. (The biscuit part is about two thirds of the way down, and has a man eating doughnuts in the airport.)

More Deep Thoughts from the Hitchhiker trilogy next week.

Who is This God Person Anyway? (Fit the Fourth - Sorry I'm late...)

I'm still a bit caught up in all the excitement of getting my new and improved website, well, improved, so I still haven't prepared that detailed sermon on the theology of HHG. Sorry. Still, just to prove I haven't forgotten about the whole exercise, here's a little nugget of truth, refined from a chunk of Adams-esque humour:

... one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change ...

Well, it does kind of reflect Jesus' message, or at least part of it. Obviously it was this that inspired two of the greatest philosophers of our age, Ted 'Theodore' Logan and Bill S. Preston, Esq.

Of course, we know the DNA just liked to play around with religious ideas, like having the 'minor deities from the Halls of Asgard' booking a table at Milliways, where the Great Prophet Zarquon also makes his final triumphant Second Coming, only to disappear along with the rest of the Universe. (Presumably this was a side-effect of arriving by supernatural means, rather than the more 'scientific' front door of time travel.)

At this point I would like to embark upon a detailed discussion of the merits of the Zarquonist religion, however, due to his rather poor punctuality little is really known about the Great Prophet or his teachings. In fact, all we know is that his followers expect him to return at some point in the Galactic grand scheme of things, but in the meantime his name makes for good swearing.

Zarquon's singing fish, is that Douglas Adams poking fun at Christianity, perchance?

Who is This God Person Anyway? (Fit the Third - Exodus)

Moses said to God, "Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' Then what shall I tell them?"

God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM."

- Exodus 3:13-15

"My name is not important."

- Slatibartfast

And so we are introduced to the architects of the Earth, first in the Bible, and then in Hitch-hikers. And, apart from that, and being suitably mysterious about their names, they have one or two other things in common. Slartibartfast, in the TV series, is every child's image of God: a kindly old gent with long white hair and matching beard. And both, having created the world, then go on to save it.

But first the creation bit, and I think Slarti inadvertently solves one of modern Christianity’s ongoing debates:

“[New Earth is] only half completed I’m afraid – we haven’t even finished
burying the artificial dinosaur skeletons in the crust yet, then we have the
Tertiary and Quaternary Periods of the Cenozoic Era to lay down, and…”

I like the image of God’s creation as a vast building project (Magrathea’s factory floor was a highlight of the so-so movie version for me too) and, well, why not? It’s gotta make as much sense as the more widely accepted theories.

Millions of years later, Slartibartfast returns to Earth and, in the absence of a scarf-wearing, jelly baby-toting saviour, single-handedly (well, Trillian and Arthur help a bit) saves the Universe from the evils of cricket. Sorry, Krikkit.

So there you have it: a creator turned saviour whose name, at least in its original form, we dare not speak.

Finally, to bring us back to the ever-so-tenuous Exodus link (you think that’s tenuous, wait till next week…) here’s Bop Ad, from Life, the Universe and Everything:

[Slartibartfast] was marching out on to the pitch with a terrible purpose in his gait, his hair, beard and robes swept behind him, looking very much as Moses would have looked if Sinai had been a well-cut lawn instead of, as it is more usually represented, a fiery smoking mountain.

Who is This God Person Anyway? (Fit the Second - Genesis)

In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being calle dthe Great Green Arkleseizure.
However, the Great Green Arkleseizure Theory is not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI and so, the Universe being the puzzling place it is, other explanations are constantly being sought.

I suppose, to a radical atheist, this may not seem much more bizzarely improbable than 'God said "Let there be light," and there was light.' But the Universe according to Hitchhikers got into its current state through evolution, which is referred to repeatedly, from the throw-away gag:

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

to the creation of the super-evolutionary Haggunenons, who will 'quite frequently evolve several times over lunch', and the disruption of evolution on Earth by the arrival of the Golgafrinchans on the 'B' Ark.

But I'm not going to embark on a creation/evolution debate - personally I don't care how the Universe was created, the fact is it's here and we've got to deal with it. Instead (and I may end up jumping forward a bit here) consider:

"...you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."

- Genesis 2:17, NIV

and consider the fact that, in trying to establish the Question to the Ultimate Answer, Arthur Dent ultimately secures his own death. Although, of course, it is a well-established fact that the Question and the Answer cannot both exist within the same Universe, presumably because such knowledge would lead to certain death on a cosmic scale. And finally, another quote from DNA on the subject of knowledge:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

Incidentally, I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep up follwoing the books of the Bible - any suggestions for what Leviticus should cover will be gratefully received.

Who is This God Person Anyway? (Fit the First - DNA)

Douglas Noel Adams was famously an atheist. He was fascinated by religion in all its forms, but did not consider his atheism in terms of belief or non-belief. He was, in his own words, 'convinced that there is no God'. Which could be why, in the first sentence of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series, we are introduced to Oolon Coluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters: Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes, and Who is This God Person Anyway?

I've long fantasised about writing a book with that last title. A volume on theology, perhaps, in the style of Hitchhiker's. A sort of Hitchhiker's Guide to Eternity. The Gospel According to Zaphod Beeblebrox, that sort of thing. Maybe I should give up on science fiction and set about my own trilogy of philosophical blockbusters. For now, though, I'll settle with this little series of posts.

Douglas' facination with religion is apparent throughout the Hitchhiker trilogy, from that opening sentence to the wierd missionary antics of Huma Kavula in the movie version, and then overspills into the world of Dirk Gently. And that Hitchhikers has at its heart a quest for the meaning of life almost goes without saying. Some of his writings seem to have been adopted into atheist folklore:

...if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: I refuse to prove that I exist, says God, for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.
But, says Man, the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.
Oh dear, says God, I hadn't thought of that, and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

It's hard to fault the logic there, and Adams has brilliantly twisted a 'theist' argument to suit his own atheist worldview. This is, of course, a load of fetid dingoes kidneys, not least because God has never, to my knowledge, refused to prove his existence, or used the 'proof denies faith' argument in his own defence. On top of which we could always use the counter argument - that proof does not deny faith, but in fact confirms it.

It is just possible, of course, that Adams used this illustration simply for the sake of a joke, as the passage finishes:

Oh, that was easy, says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Well, that about wraps it up for atheists, it would seem.

Further musings on the Gospel according to Douglas Adams will follow next week, in the meantime you can get an insight into his beliefs (or convictions) in his interview with The American Atheist here, also published in The Salmon of Doubt.