After two frustrating days of visiting local gaming stores, I’ve given up on trying to find a copy of Spore for the moment. For those of you who’ve been living under a rock, Spore is the new epic evolutionary based strategy game by Sim City and The Sim’s designer Will Wright. You get to take a living cell all the way through the chain of evolution- where you actually build your character to adapt to the environment- from a single-celled organism to a galaxy-faring explorer.
As frustrated as I was, I cooked some breakfast and sat down to watch one of my favourite shows here in Canada, Daily Planet on The Discovery Channel. To my hasty amazement, they were doing a week-long feature on the science behind the Burning Man festival in Nevada. What was Daily Planet, a show that focuses on science, doing at the world’s biggest hippy festival? They were doing exactly what is often overlooked in science…art.
Art, Science, Art, Science…. The word’s from an article I read about Spore came to mind “Spore is a work of art.” A quote from Will Wright crawled up from the deep reaches of my mind.
““There were deep motivations in the early phase from the work of a lot of evolutionary biologists, like Richard Dawkins and Edward Wilson.” And “We wanted to convey the sense that evolution can bring up a surprising diversity of weird, interesting, strange things.”
Spore, a game based on science, is art. The artistic installations at Burning Man can only be built with a deep knowledge of science.
In a way, science is an art in itself, but I want to look at the more common definition of art.
the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. It often elicits a specific human emotion or response desired by the artist. In this respect, an artist is always trying to convey something through their art.
I want to take this idea of Art is Science, Science is Art, and apply it to atheism. People often complain about the lack of atheist inspired art, but when you ask them what they would consider atheist art, a few muddled words are the only sounds that follow a long mournful pause. Since atheism is simply the non-belief in God, I want to focus on art that represents the new-atheism. That is, atheism as an end result of the methods of scientific naturalism, inquiry, and skepticism. Here – with examples – are what I consider to be the different ways that art can be classified as new-atheist art:
1. Art that is made for the purpose of expanding knowledge and/or visually experimenting with representations of science.This section rejects art based on appeals to faith or tradition. Rather, it focuses on the future. Often, the art is the end-result of a specific tool, developed by science.
2. Art that is made for the purpose of representing a passion for science and its promotion.Most often, the science is biology.
3. Art that is made for the purpose of representing non-belief and the philosophy behind it.A subsection of the first two sections can be the art on the covers of science-fiction novels. Why? Because they often represent scientific ideas, and they are meloreolistic.
Often, religious art doesn’t even need to be changed – Poe’s law personified in art.
8. Art that glorifies the exploration and understanding of the cosmos
(could be classified as a subsection of the 2nd category, but I figured it was so widespread that it merited its own number).
This post has only shown visual examples. I understand that I left out music, sculpting, architecture, literature, comics, and anything else you would consider art.
I have seen atheist poems and poetic atheist quotes that could be classified as art, but what about books promoting atheism and science? There is much merit in disseminating the ideas of atheism and science in a way that influences people. Carl Sagan’s work often borders on poetic. He uses writing skills and a creative imagination to create metaphors of science that are appealing to a wide audience. I think this constitutes art. And Christopher Hitchens is an exemplar of fine literary talent, while Richard Dawkins holds his own with his metaphors and literary talent. What do you think?
But then, what about more rigorous scientific works like peer reviewed journals? Surely they are not art. They have no appeal to human emotion, no poetic literature, and no aesthetically appealing visual representations that convey anything more than the intent of the paper. Peer reviewed journals are cold, rigorous, and precise. Within the scientific community this is ideal, but a general populace wants an appeal to emotion. It is the job of the science journalist to promote science with a human edge. It is the job of the science journalist to be an artist.
…I look forward to hearing your ideas on this.
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Science Advocacy
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008So you are an atheist. So what!?
Atheism, as I understand it means not believing in God or gods, so if you believe that the whole world is held up by fairies and that your body is made up of candy canes, but you don’t believe in God or gods you are an atheist. Golly-gee, big accomplishment!
I will point out that the Stalinist Progressive Labor Party here in the U.S. is a 100% atheistic organization. From my understanding, the Neo-Nazi organization The Church of the Creator is also a 100% atheistic organization. Don’t let the name confuse you, the Creator is the white male. I would dare suggest that most of the readers of this blog have little in common with Stalinists and Neo-Nazis.
For me, atheism is a side effect of a much more important assertion, which is that the natural world is all that exists, and science is how we understand that world. Science is an application of what philosopher’s call methodological naturalism.
For those who study science and value science as a way to discover things about reality there is a bit of an existential conundrum. You basically have two choices, you can put your head in the sand and rant and rave about the limits of science (which are ever decreasing), or you can carry methodological naturalism to what seems to me to be the obvious conclusion which is philosophical naturalism.
The people who call themselves “atheists” that I count as my comrades are at the very least philosophical naturalists. Philosophical naturalists essentially treat reality as what science calls reality. Pretty fraking simple.
This carries with it a burden, and that burden is to try to advocate for action which is consistent with what we know to be real as a result of science. Only one of these things is the unlikelihood of the Abrahamic god (not to mention other gods).
I think of equal importance is that we advocate for other pertinent things which the scientific evidence is beginning to weigh in clearly on.
For example human affected climate change has reached as much of a scientific consensus as anything can in science. Yet, I see very little from the mouths of philosophical naturalists on this issue, I guess its just more fun to complain about young-earth creationists.
For me investing a lot of time and energy on young-earth creationists is a little like trying to prevent a violent take-over by the Amish. As far as affecting the ability of science to inform policy and science to cause real world action to improve the world, these whak-a-doos are not much of a threat. You just don’t hear too many senators argue their policies on the idea that cave men rode dinosaurs like horses. But the fact that human affected climate change has been framed as a scientific mystery with two sides to the issue, and the “atheists” have remained largely silent about it is a real threat to the ability of science to help us make wise decisions. Human affected climate change has two sides to the same extent that intelligent design and evolution do. Which hopefully you realize that means it doesn’t have two sides. The data is conclusive and a consensus has been reached, in science thats as good as it gets.
“Atheists” have also remained largely silent about stem-cell research and “abstinence only” sex education. Sam Harris will occasionally mention these two things as evidence of the fact that the religious exercise far too strong a foothold on policy, but I argue that this is not enough.
We know a great deal about human sexuality and the psychological factors at play due to a half century of psychological research. We also know a great deal about human development in utero and how the brain develops. We know what the brain needs, generally, to be self-aware, to suffer, to experience life in any meaningful way. We also know with great certainty that a blastocyst, which is the what the organism we use for embryonic stem-cell research is called, does not cut the mustard for consciousness, not even close. Fighting for better sex-education and funding embryonic stem-cell research should be on the forefront of a secularist agenda.
In essence what I am arguing is that those of us who have found ourselves energized in the secular movement, and inspired to fight superstition, need to ask ourselves what are we trying to do. Are we just searching for catharsis about how annoyed we are at the antics of the religious are we trying to make the world a better place?
If you are with me in trying to make the world a better place, I think that what we must do is make it a top priority to find out how science is weighing on issues of political consequence and speak on behalf of science.
Tags: atheism, atheists, evolution, naturalism, science advocacy
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