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:

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.

• Spore
• Van Gogh in Second Life
• Conway’s game of life
• Evarium
• Mobius Strip

Most often, the science is biology.

• Science Tattoos
• Flying Trilobite
• Teach the Controversy T-shirts

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.

(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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