About Richard Bowker

Author of the Portal series, the Last P.I. series, and other novels

Polls and Pundits

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Richard Bowker

One of the interesting aspects of the presidential election is the gap between the reporting on the horse race and the way statistical nerds view the race. Today’s New York Times has an article about the narrowing presidential race, based on an analysis of a single national poll. But at the same time on the Times’s 538 blog, Nate Silver shows what he’s been showing for some time — the odds of Obama winning are about three to one, and they’ve been growing steadily since a dip after the first debate. Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium is even more certain that Obama is going to win, giving a probability of over 90%. Here is another site run by a political science professor that comes up with similar results.

These guys aggregate polls and apply sophisticated mathematical models to the results. And they have been successful. 538 correctly predicted the results in all but one state in 2008; the Princeton Election Consortium doesn’t predict individual states, but they came within one electoral vote of the actual result in 2008. But with the success has come criticism:

[David] Brooks doubled down on this charge in a column last week: “I should treat polls as a fuzzy snapshot of a moment in time. I should not read them, and think I understand the future,” he wrote. “If there’s one thing we know, it’s that even experts with fancy computer models are terrible at predicting human behavior.”

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today, Joe Scarborough took a more direct shot, effectively calling Silver an ideologue and “a joke.”

But it is self-evidently not true that experts with fancy computer models are terrible at predicting human behavior. They do it all the time, as Silver and Wang have proven. Statistics works — that’s why polling works. Prediction is imperfect — that’s why none of these sites say with certainty that Obama is going to win; but data-driven prediction is surely better than Morning Joe talking to a bunch of other media types about the enthusiasm level at Romney rallies and the rising confidence level of Romney advisers.

I was watching TV at the gym today without the sound, and I saw a brief report on the presidential race on the local news. There was one statistic displayed–Romney ahead by three in the latest national poll from the station’s network. This was followed by brief clips of Obama acting presidential in the hurricane aftermath and Romney lifting a case of bottled water that had been collected for hurricane relief at his rally; then there was a 15-second comment from some Politico pundit. And that was it.

There are many reasons why I don’t watch TV news anymore, and this is one of them: it just makes you stupider. Silver, Wang, and others like them may end up being wrong, but ignoring them or mocking them just seems stupid. About as stupid as thinking that Mitt Romney’s latest position about anything is what he really believes.

My ebooks: sales, prices, reviews

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I handed over my ebook pricing to a publisher in return for having them perform some sales magic. The magic appears to be working. First they made Senator free on Amazon, which got it near the top of the top of the “sales” list for free political novels. Then they raised the price to $0.99, and now it’s up to $2.99. In the meantime it’s gotten a bunch of great reviews. Here’s a five-star review I liked because, when I started reading it, I had no idea how it could possibly end up being a five-star review:

The beginning of this book put me off. I generally do not care for novels written in the first person, and the first chapters were tedious, another overworked story of the dead mistress whose murder threatens to ruin her high-placed lover. However, once all of the players were identified, I found myself relating to the protagonists and many supporting characters on the same kind of personal level as when I first read Presumed Innocent so many years ago. Bowker creates the flawed hero of the classics, a man driven on the one hand by ambition and on the other,by a sense of honor. Even at the end, the Senator possessed strengths and weaknesses that are not entirely resolved. In other words, he is human. This is not just a fine tuned murder mystery, it is a journey into the very complex issues of guilt and innocence-good and evil. For nearly a quarter century, I was a prosecutor of serious felonies, a position not without personal as well as professional challenges. It was not uncommon for me to sometimes relate to the defendant sitting one chair away at counsel table on a very human level. That did not change the nature of my mission–I was considered a tough prosecutor– but it made me reflect upon the difference between the concept of legal guilt and that of moral evil. This is not a story in which the murderer is arrested, tried and convicted, but its resolution is gratifying. In the past 18 months I have downloaded more than 415 books on my Kindle, and read all but a very few. This is one of the better ones, perhaps when it comes to a political mystery, the very best.

Anyway, Senator is now #22 for political genre fiction on the Kindle store, in between a couple of novels by Vince Flynn–should I know who he is?–and two positions ahead of a volume containing Animal Farm and 1984, with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens. Yoicks! The book is also #2515 on the overall Kindle bestseller list.

So that’s pretty good! On the other hand, my other current ebooks, Summit, Pontiff, and Replica, are still mired in the lower reaches of the Kindle sales list. Maybe it’s time for my ebook publisher to do something about them. You can help, of course. If you’ve read any of them and liked it, please write a review! It doesn’t have to be as detailed as the one I quoted above. Reviews on other sites besides Amazon are also welcome.

Books without any reviews just seem sort of lonely. No one wants to hang with them. They eat lunch by themselves in the cafeteria. They go home and watch infomercials on high-number cable channels. They buy costume jewelry from QVC.

Please consider helping them out. They will be forever grateful.

Mitt Romney and Moderation

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Richard Bowker

There was an article in today’s Boston Globe (not available on the Internet) about Mitt Romney’s move towards moderation in the late phases of the presidential campaign. It’s not a bad article, but it’s typical of mainstream media pieces of course it completely lacks a moral dimension. The article mentions the word Etch-a-Sketch about fifteen paragraphs in, and it quotes opponents decrying Romney’s cynicism, but it also quotes wily political veterans approving the pivot to the center.

What else can a reporter do? Apparently you can’t say that someone so utterly lacking in core convictions, so self-evidently willing to say whatever he has to say to get elected, is therefore manifestly unfit for office. In the same paper, though, the Globe editorial endorsing Obama gets it right: “Identifying the real Romney on any major issue — social, economic, or foreign — is impossible.”

I have been watching Romney for eighteen years now, and as far as I can tell, he has only one core conviction: taxes for rich people need to be lower than whatever they happen to be at the time. Absolutely nothing else seems to matter. This doesn’t mean he can’t get things done in a technocratic, numbers-driven way. But at this point, how can you believe anything the man says?

Barney Frank, in his delightful over-the-top way, gets it right. Seven years ago he called Romney the most intellectually dishonest person in the history of American politics. He stands by his statement today, except he’d strike the word intellectually.

I think politicians are by and large pretty interesting characters — that’s why I wrote a novel about one. Obama is a deeply interesting guy. The Clintons surely are as well. So are Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, in their own ways. But Romney somehow just makes me sad. He’s obviously smart, and a decent guy in his private life. But beyond that, he’s got nothing. If he’s elected, I may have to retreat to my Arctic Fortress of Solitude and rethink my obsession with politics.

Sandy, 3:45 ET

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Winds here on the South Shore of Massachusetts are gusting very strongly. Lots of branches are down in my backyard, but that pine tree next to my garage that we decided not to cut down is still holding out. The power is still on, with just a few flickers. At company where I work, pretty much everyone logged in remotely today, but I lost the connection to my desktop at work about half an hour ago.

Here’s the view out my front door (I don’t like the look of those phone lines):

Here’s the view out back (showing the husks of our sunflowers):

And here’s the sky:

Everybody stay safe!

Final thoughts about eternal damnation

Posted on October 28, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Not that I’m dying or anything, I just have one blog post left in me about hell before I focus on politics for a while (which is its own kind of hell). Or maybe hurricanes.

Anyway, here is another quote from the New York Times article about hell getting a makeover:

While the catechism says that Jesus spoke of hell as an ”unquenchable fire,” it says hell’s primary punishment is ”eternal separation from God,” which results from an individual’s conscious decision.

”To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him forever by our own free choice,” the catechism says.

This argument–that a loving God doesn’t send you to hell, you basically send yourself there–is familiar to me. But it has always struck me as completely bogus. First of all, God makes the rules about who goes to hell. Second, He doesn’t publish the rules. I learned a lot of rules growing up, but those can’t be the right rules, because otherwise everyone is going to hell. For example, I learned that missing Mass on Sunday or a Holy Day of Obligation was a mortal sin. Was it true back then? Is it still true now? Have the rules changed? No one is going to tell you. I read an online essay about hell where the author opined that failure to follow the Church’s rules on contraception was a grave sin, possibly meriting hell. True? Who knows? This is like Calvinball, except if you lose at Calvinball, you don’t suffer eternal torment.

Speaking of eternal torment, the real reason for this post is that I wanted to quote from Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which rivals Joyce’s sermon for a great vision of who you are messing with if your are considering missing Mass on a Holy Day of Obligation:

The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood. Thus all you that never passed under a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls; all you that were never born again, and made new creatures, and raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new, and before altogether unexperienced light and life, are in the hands of an angry God. However you may have reformed your life in many things, and may have had religious affections, and may keep up a form of religion in your families and closets, and in the house of God, it is nothing but his mere pleasure that keeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction. However unconvinced you may now be of the truth of what you hear, by and by you will be fully convinced of it. Those that are gone from being in the like circumstances with you, see that it was so with them; for destruction came suddenly upon most of them; when they expected nothing of it, and while they were saying, Peace and safety: now they see, that those things on which they depended for peace and safety, were nothing but thin air and empty shadows.

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

Awesome stuff.

Portal, an online novel: Chapter 4

Posted on October 28, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Here’s the latest installment of my online novel. For more excitement, check out:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

*********************

Chapter 4

I was stuck sitting in front of Stinky again on the bus. He still seemed puzzled about what happened in the woods. “Hey,” he said to me. “I wanna know how you did that.”

I didn’t answer.

“Come on,” he said. “You were there, and then you weren’t. How’d you do that?”

“Your eyes weren’t fast enough to keep up with me,” I answered without turning around. “Leave me alone.”

And you know what? He did.

At school, Kevin came up to me in homeroom. “So what do you think, huh? Are we gonna do it?”

I was feeling a little less sure than I’d been yesterday. “I don’t know, Kevin.”

“Look,” he said. “You don’t have to go, if you’re scared. Just show me where it is, and I’ll go by myself.”

“I’m not scared,” I protested. “I’m–prudent.” That’s the word my mother always uses. A prudent person doesn’t ride roller coasters, or pet strange dogs, or enter portals to parallel universes.

“Okay, fine, you’ve already been there–you can afford to be prudent,” Kevin argued. “But I haven’t had my chance yet. And if you don’t show me the thing, I’ll never have a chance.”

I gave up. “All right all right,” I said. “Come on over. But you gotta promise to be careful.”

Kevin grinned and gave me a high-five. “Of course I’ll be careful,” he said. “And prudent.”

School took forever. In English class, Nora just sat there next to me, and I started thinking: Wouldn’t it be great to see that smile of hers again? And there was lots of other stuff to check out. Who was president in that world? Did The Gross exist?

Did I exist? Thinking back on what happened yesterday, I wasn’t really sure if Nora or Stinky had recognized me. Maybe Nora smiled at me because she knew me from school, and I looked so strange in my clothes.

What would happen if I met myself? Would we both explode or something? I should ask Kevin; he was bound to have a theory.

Anyway, the more I thought about going back there with Kevin, the more excited I got. Just be cool and don’t get into any trouble, and everything would be fine.

Stinky stayed away from me on the bus ride home. I was beginning to think I had really spooked him. Anyway, when I got home, Mom was on the computer. She has a part-time job writing grant proposals for Glanbury College, and she does a lot of her work in the downstairs study. “Don’t forget your piano lesson this afternoon,” she said as I walked past.

I had in fact forgotten about the stupid lesson. “But Kevin is coming over,” I said.

“Tell him to come tomorrow,” she said. “He’ll live.”

Kevin would go nuts if he had to wait another day, I thought.

“What if he goes home when we have to leave?” I asked.

Mom sighed. “I suppose. But don’t go disappearing in the woods.”

“Huh?”

“You heard me. I want you back in the house, ready to go, at quarter to four.”

“Oh. Sure thing.” I headed upstairs.

“And Larry–how was school?” Mom called out.

“Oh, you know. The usual.”

In my room, I switched out of my cargo shorts into some regular khakis. I should have told Kevin not to wear anything weird, but it was too late now. He was probably already on his way to my house. His mother lets him ride his bike across town–without a helmet–which is something I wouldn’t even bother asking my mom to let me do.

I went downstairs to the kitchen to have some cookies and milk while I waited for him. As I ate my Oreos I started to get nervous. I didn’t really like lying to my mother. And this was my last chance to back out.

I didn’t have long to think about it. Kevin showed up a few minutes later, breathless and excited. “Ready?” he said.

“Want some Oreos?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Who can think about Oreos at a time like this?” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Okay, but we have to be back by quarter to four. I’ve got a piano lesson.”

“Sure, fine. I’ve got my watch. So let’s go.”

Obviously Kevin didn’t want to chat.

I put the milk away and we left the house. It was another beautiful day–the kind you hate to spend inside. Kevin had parked his bike by the garage. We went through the yard and into the woods. Kevin kept running on ahead of me, then waiting impatiently for me to catch up.

Kevin is shorter than I am, and he has this weird combination of freckles and black hair, which is always flopping onto his forehead. He looks younger than most seventh-graders, I think, but actually he’s a couple of months older than I am. He was wearing jeans, an Old Navy t-shirt, and a Red Sox cap. I sure hoped those kids wouldn’t be hanging out at the Burger Queen. “How much further?” he asked. “Are we almost there?”

“Calm down. It’s near the army buildings. We’re getting there.”

“Okay, c’mon.”

“I’m coming.” In a few minutes we reached the army buildings. They looked empty–no Stinky this time. Now I had to figure out exactly where the portal was. I’d been running from Stinky–which way? It took me a couple more minutes to find the clearing and the oak tree, with Kevin making impatient noises behind me. “Over there,” I said. “That’s where it was.” I looked around. We were alone.

Kevin took a step forward and held his hand out. He looked like he was searching for a light switch in the dark. Nothing happened at first. What if the thing had gone away? Should I be relieved or disappointed? Then he took another step, and suddenly his hand disappeared. “Awesome,” he whispered.

He took his hand out, then put it back in again, just the way I had done. Then he did something I hadn’t thought of–he walked around the portal with his hand outstretched, seeing how big it was. “I think the two of us can just barely fit in it at the same time,” he said. “I wonder what happens if, like, half your heart is in this world and the other half is in the other.”

That just made me more nervous. “Kevin, give it a rest,” I said.

“All right,” he said. “Just thinking out loud. It can’t be man-made, right? I mean–there’s no structure to it. It’s not like somebody built this.”

“If you say so.”

“Maybe they built it in the other universe–but you said they didn’t look all that advanced–they had big cell phones and everything.”

“That’s right. And if they built it, why would they put it, you know, behind a strip mall?”

Kevin nodded. “Could’ve been aliens, like you said. Or maybe it comes from some other universe altogether. What if we ended up there?”

Hard to believe, but that was the first time it occurred to me that the portal might not take us back to the world I’d visited the day before. That didn’t help calm my nerves.

“This is just so great,” Kevin went on, as he continued to stare at the thing–or, really, at the thin air where the thing was. “It’s totally strange, but totally real.” He looked at me. “You ready, Larry?”

“Well,” I said, “I’m really not sure if I–”

Kevin looked at his watch. “C’mon, Larry. We don’t have that long before we have to get back.”

“All right, all right,” I said. “I’ll come.”

Kevin grinned. “Attaboy.”

I don’t know why I agreed, really. Now that the moment had arrived, stepping back into the thing didn’t seem like that great an idea. On the other hand, I pictured myself being prudent, hanging around in the woods like Stinky, waiting for Kevin to reappear, and the image just seemed sort of . . . pitiful. If Kevin was going, I had to go, too.

“So what do we do,” Kevin asked. “Just walk into it?”

“Yeah. It’ll be all kind of foggy, but just keep going. Just a couple of steps, and you’re out the other side.”

“Cool. Want me to go first?”

“Okay. I’ll be right behind you.”

Kevin grinned. “All right,” he said. “Here goes.” He stepped inside. I watched him disappear, and it really was weird, seeing him vanish right in front of me. No wonder Stinky had been so freaked. I took a deep breath, and then I followed.

I was inside the thing. Same clouds, same vague shapes off to the sides. Everything seemed kind of out of focus. I blinked a few times, but nothing changed. “You there, Larry?” Kevin said.

The sound of his voice was reassuring. “Right behind you. Keep on going.”

I kept my eye on Kevin’s back as he moved forward.

But it was more than a couple of steps this time, and still the clouds didn’t go away. Instead it started feeling cold and damp–like real fog. And then I heard shouts and what sounded like footsteps.

Uh-oh, I thought. “Um, Kevin?”

As my eyes adjusted, I could make out trees through the fog. I looked around for the dumpster, but it wasn’t where it had been yesterday. Nothing was where it had been yesterday.

I saw two men coming towards us. One of them shouted at us. It sounded like Spanish, but I couldn’t understand it.

“Let’s go back, Kevin,” I said.

But where was the portal? I had lost my bearings in the fog. The men were wearing blue uniforms and carrying rifles. They were soldiers, I realized. They raised the rifles and pointed them at us.

Kevin took off through the trees, and I followed.

I heard rifle shots and tensed, expecting a bullet in the back. But the shots missed; one of them screamed as it ricocheted off a rock or something. I was having a hard time keeping up with Kevin. A branch whacked me in the face. There was more shouting. “C’mon!” Kevin shouted back at me.

The trees petered out suddenly and we found ourselves on a road. And now we heard hoofbeats and saw a wagon bearing down on us through the fog.

“Samuel, stop!” a woman’s voice called out.

The wagon slowed. We stepped back.

There were more rifle shots.

The man driving the wagon peered down at us suspiciously.

“Get in! Quickly!” the woman sitting beside him said.

We hesitated. Kevin looked at me, his eyes wide with fright.

“Now!” the man ordered. “Before the blasted Portuguese send all of us to our Maker!”

Portuguese?

More shouts, from close behind us now. We scrambled into the wagon and the man drove off. Behind us in the fog we saw the Portuguese soldiers come out of the trees and aim at us again. But the fog closed in around them before they could shoot.

I looked at Kevin again. He was shaking. I felt as if I was ready to cry.

The wagon picked up speed. And every second that passed, it took us further away from the portal, and from home.

In which I contemplate my eternal damnation

Posted on October 27, 2012 by Richard Bowker

During my early morning run the other day I was thinking about this post, where I suggested that, according to standard Catholic doctrine, a pretty large percentage of Americans over the past forty years were prime candidates for eternal damnation. And it occurred to me that, according to the standard doctrine I learned growing up, I’m going to hell too, along with a large chunk of the people I know. Not because of anything to do with abortion, but because I was given the gift of faith and rejected it, turning my back on God’s love.

Hell doesn’t come up much nowadays–I’m sure parts of the Church find the fire-and-brimstone stuff embarrassing. This Times article (“Hell Is Getting a Makeover”) points out that the latest Catholic catechism contains only five paragraphs about hell in a 700-page book. And the pain of hell, we now believe, is not physical but mental:

Hell is best understood as the condition of total alienation from all that is good, hopeful and loving in the world. What’s more, this condition is chosen by the damned themselves, the ultimate exercise of free will, not a punishment engineered by God.

Of course, to get to this spot, the theologians have to go the “Jesus’ words shouldn’t be taken literally” route, since Jesus had lots to say about unquenchable fire and the weeping and gnashing of teeth and so on. But that’s theology for you.

In any case, hell is still real, and apparently I’m going there. Maybe I’ll contemplate Pascal’s wager on my deathbed–but I doubt it.

And I can’t help thinking that the sermon in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a far more interesting vision of hell than the etiolated modern view. Here is just a taste.

The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.

That should’ve kept those Irish lads on the straight and narrow!

Americans like their candidates religious, but not really religious

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Richard Bowker

So the Republican senate candidate from Indiana has gotten himself in hot water for saying that pregnancy resulting from rape is the will of God:

“I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God,” Mourdock said. “And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

On the one hand, God intended the baby to happen. On the other hand, God didn’t intend the rape that resulted in that gift from God, which is sort of confusing. This is somewhat different from the “legitimate rape” comment that got another Republican senate candidate into trouble. The latter was just bad science; the former is theology. As I say, I find the theology somewhat confusing, but not absurd, from a Christian perspective. Bad things (like rape) happen as a result of free will; God permits them even if He doesn’t approve of them. But God is in favor of life, and He is certainly opposed to the unjustified ending of life. And presumably that is the case Mourdock was trying to make.

Kevin Drum makes the point that this is a pretty conventional religious belief. It’s just not the sort of thing a politician (in particular) is supposed to say out loud:

What I find occasionally odd is that so many conventional bits of theology like this are so controversial if someone actually mentions them in public. God permits evil. My faith is the only true one. People of other faiths are doomed to spend eternity in Hell. Etc. There’s a lot of stuff like this which is either explicit or implied in sects of all kinds, and at an abstract level we all know it. Somehow, though, when someone actually says it, it’s like they farted in church. Weird.

I don’t find it particularly odd, though. Americans like religion, but most of us are not especially religious when it comes to actual dogma. So people like Mourdock or Rick Santorum who are really religious make us uncomfortable. And they make the mainstream media, who are even less religious, even more uncomfortable. So good politicians always skate around the implications of their (supposed) religious beliefs, because they don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.

I see all of this from the perspective of a lapsed Catholic. For example, Catholic theology is about as clear about abortion as it is about anything. Abortion is murder. Murder is a mortal sin. People who commit mortal sins will go to hell. So, to a true believer, the fifty million or so American women who have had abortions since 1973 are going to hell (except for those who subsequently repented). So are the doctors and nurses involved in the abortions. Maybe all the politicians who vote in favor of abortion rights are going to hell too. It would have been great if someone at one of those primary debates had asked Santorum about all those people going to hell. (Santorum, by the way, thinks the Mourdock controversy is “gotcha politics.”) I wonder if Santorum would have been a good enough politician to skate around it?

Miracles and sainthood: Kateri Tekakwitha

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Kenneth Miller’s book Finding Darwin’s God got me thinking about miracles, because Miller believes in them and believes he understands how they can occur. And now we have the Catholic Church canonizing a bunch of new saints, including Kateri Tekakwitha, the “Lily of the Mohawks.” She becomes the first Native American saint.

Kateri was noted for her chastity and her “mortification of the flesh”:

Tekakwitha’s dedication to ritual mortification became more intense and consuming over the remainder of her life; she included prolonged fasting, flogging, cutting, sleeping on a bed of thorns, and burning herself with hot coals

Good job, seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries!

I can recall her name from my parochial-school history book long ago–she probably showed up in a sidebar as an example of how even American Indians could become good Catholics. (I recall the name, I think, because it has a nice rhythm to it, like an Indian chant.) There’s a Church of the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha down the road from me in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the parishioners are of course excited.

The Church, like Miller, also believes in miracles, and it requires them before making someone a saint. Nowadays you need one to be beatified, and another to be canonized. The miracle that brought Kateri over the finish line happened to a kid from Washington state, who recovered from an infection of flesh-eating bacteria after his family prayed to her.

I read a good book once called Making Saints about the careful process the Vatican undertakes to investigate the miracles needed for canonization. It is one example, among many, of very smart, very dedicated, very religious people spending their lives doing something entirely worthless. The miracles, as I recall, were pretty much all inexplicable medical cures, like the one attributed to Kateri. The problem, of course, is that inexplicable medical cures happen all the time. Why? Because we have only an imperfect understanding of medicine. For the stuff we do understand–like, you don’t grow a new leg when one gets cut off–well, there aren’t any miracles in that neck of the woods.

I read a few news accounts of the canonization and the related miracle, and none of them questioned the miraculousness of the miracle. The family was convinced, the Vatican was convinced, so what more do you want? People, in fact, want miracles. They make life more interesting; they give us hope. I will note that my novel Pontiff is suffused with miracles — they make novels more interesting, too! So I guess I’m not one to complain. But it does seem like some reporter should quote a medical authority expressing some skepticism about the whole thing. I suppose an editor would just lose the quote, though.

(A person I work with has been to one Mass in her life — the canonization of one of her relatives at the Vatican. That’s pretty cool, although her relative’s death was anything but cool. Saints don’t generally lead happy lives, or have happy deaths.)

Finding Kenneth Miller’s God

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Richard Bowker

As I have in the past, I’m teaching Sunday School for the combined Unitarian churches in my little town. (Unitarians are presumably the only folks who would let me teach Sunday School, and I know they are the only ones I’d teach Sunday School for.) We’re doing a “Coming of Age” curriculum for eighth and ninth graders, and the other day we had a little discussion of evolution with the kids. I was a bit taken aback when I discovered that two of my fellow teachers had a lot of sympathy for intelligent design.

These folks are religious in the way Unitarians are religious–they are comfortable recognizing a spiritual dimension to life, but they aren’t comfortable with religious dogma. They seemed to have an instinctive dislike for evolution because it didn’t have a spiritual dimension; they liked the idea that evolution couldn’t explain everything, and that some parts of life required God (or a spiritual force, or something beyond blind chance).

I thought of them as I read Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God. Miller is a biology professor at Brown and a committed supporter of evolution who has testified in trials against ID and creationism. He’s also a devout Catholic. In Finding Darwin’s God, he makes the case that a belief in evolution can be completely reconciled with belief in a personal God who actively intervenes in His creation.

Miller is an appealing writer, and he certainly seems like an appealing person. On the other hand, I don’t think I was the target audience for his book. He begins by making the case for evolution, which I didn’t have to have made for me. Then he made the case against creationism and intelligent design. Don’t need to be convinced about that, either. So I skimmed quite a bit through those chapters. Finally at around page 200 he gets to the part where he reconciles God with evolution. His case is that atheist scientists oversell materialism and determinism, and that in fact, quantum-induced uncertainty means that there is no determinism:

The natural history of evolution is unrepeatable because the nature of matter is unpredictable in the first place. Wind that tape back, and it will surely come out differently next time around, not just for the Burgess shale, but for every important event in the evolutionary history of life.

And it’s in this unpredictability that God can work his wonders, choosing one probability over another to guide the world in the direction of creatures like us.

Well, for me what’s frustrating about the book is that Miller summarizes all this in about five pages. He doesn’t engage with anyone who might disagree with his interpretation of quantum theory, determinism, and free will. He just asserts the truth of his interpretation, and then he’s off to the theological races. Indeterminacy gives you free will, gives you the possibility of miracles, gives you everything you need for a personal God like the one described in Western monotheism. So Miller can do the usual theological thing of making unprovable (or disprovable) arguments in favor of what he already believes:

Of course a loving God would create a Universe in just this way, so that it would contain creatures who have the ability to know, love, and serve Him (as the Baltimore catechism puts it), and if they fail to do so, He will consign them to eternal torment.

Of course a loving God would create the possibility of evil in such a Universe, to give these free creatures a choice, and if as a result some children happen to get tortured, raped, and killed by their stepfathers, it’s certainly not His fault.

I’m being snarky here, but only to make the point that, if you don’t buy into Miller’s beliefs, your surely not going to be convinced by his theological arguments. So I skimmed through that section as well.

Would my co-teachers get something from the book? Maybe, but I can’t imagine they’d find Miller’s view of God as satisfying as intelligent design. With intelligent design and, of course, creationism, God (or a higher power) is a necessity. Miller’s book only makes the case that God is a possibility — that His existence can’t be disproved by the fact of evolution. He certainly doesn’t propose any way of proving that his God exists in the way that science proves hypotheses. So we’re back to faith, which either works for you or it doesn’t. Miller is sure of the truth of his God, and maybe his book will make it easier for others like him to reconcile their God with the scientific truth of evolution. If so, I suppose that’s a good thing. But I imagine that the vast majority of the faithful would still prefer it if evolution would just go away.