I just read it because of this comment. I was pretty impressed by the few Chiang stories I’ve read before (Nancy mentions “Seventy-Two Letters” which I was amazed by). He has a very smooth prose style that reminds me of one of my favorite SF authors, Gene Wolfe, and seems to have an intellectual depth comparable to another favorite of mine, Jorge Luis Borges.
I have no idea what to make of this one. I’m baffled. I’m horrified, I think. The final lines twist the dagger. Do I take it as a reductio of divine command theories of morality? Of an investigation of true love? Or what?
Do I take it as a reductio of divine command theories of morality? Of an investigation of true love? Or what?
There are small notes attached to each story in my book. The note to this one contains:
(…) For me one of the unsatisfying things about the Book of Job is that, int he end, God rewards Job. (…) One of the basic messages of the book is that virtue isn’t always rewarded; bad things happen to good people. Job ultimately accepts this, demonstrating virtue, and is subsequently rewarded. Doesn’t this undercut the message? It seems to me that the Book of Job lacks the courage of its convictions: if the author were really committed to the idea that virtue isn’t always rewarded, shouldn’t the book have ended with Job still bereft of everything?
The story reminded me immediately of the Book of Job and thus subsequently I was confirmed in my suspicion.
A primary role of the Book of Job in the Bible is the reconciliation of reality with a belief in God. It is a crucial point because the empirically experienced reality is that good and bad things happen to people without the apparent influence of some higher being. People may take (or historically have taken) the grandiose and fantastic biblical stories of God’s exploits at face value, but one’s conviction can endure only so much stress that arises from faith’s incongruity with everyday reality. This makes the Book of Job exceedingly self-conscious as of the Old Testament’s standards; it has to be precisely aware of how faith and reality works and the differences between the two, which makes the book sound like it was written by an atheistic marketing expert. But because there is no God the tension cannot be fully neutralized no matter how clever the moralizing is. Thus, the purpose of Job’s ultimate reward is to „bribe” the readership into accepting the moral of the story even though the bribe itself contradicts that moral. The bribe cannot be left out from the Book of Job because then faith would either turn into nothing – because there is no morally meaningful influence from any agent—or believers would have to believe in an explicitly malevolent deity. The illusory promise of divine reward can’t be fully disposed of. There actually is a limit to how morally repugnant your religion can be.
Back to Chiang’s story. Nancy Lebovitz thought that it expresses the idea that God is evil but wants worship. I think this is not the case; rather it is an actually quite faithful reiteration of the Book of Job, with the difference that it tries to realize Job’s message to its full and horrific extent.
Now, the workings of Chiang’s mortal world are essentially the same as our world; the miracles and punishments seem to be just genuinely random, much like most real world accidents and flukes of probability. The angels are just another type of accident. The note also says:
Thinking about natural disasters led to thinking about the problem of innocent suffering. An enormous range of advice has been offered from a religious perspective to those who suffer, and it seems clear that no single response can satisfy everyone; what comforts one person inevitably strikes someone else as outrageous.
However, the epistemic situation of the inhabitants of Chiang’s world differs because they have strong evidence of God, Heaven and Hell. This, I think, is to illustrate the general situation of religious people: they live in a real world and believe in a world of God, Heaven and Hell. The blatant and almost parodic depiction of divine evidences in Chiang’s story serves the purpose to draw attention away from the boring usual atheism vs. theism debate; here a theistic epistemic situation is the premise. In a way, Chiang’s mortal world depicts the world of real-life theists, with Heaven and Hell representing the two ways they can go. Heaven is blind faith, Hell is atheism and the middle world is the unstable world of doubts, rationalizations and constant inner conflicts. It is quite a masterful spin on the Christian universe, where the middle world is also an unstable stage, but with the conflicting forces of moral good and bad.
In the story Heaven is associated with the heavenly light that actually makes one blind. The blind faith scenario of heaven is a total rejection of all individual sense of morality. The Hell scenario is the „decide for yourselves” one. Because the mentioned parallel between Chiang’s mortals and religious people, the main point of the story, I believe, is that if you believe in a God that doesn’t exist, you are going to be pushed around by a neutral universe anyway, and trying to reconcile faith with reality would only cause more mental anguish. If you want to permanently keep your faith, you have to make yourself completely and irreversibly blind, and be ready to accept an arbitrary amount of potential suffering. Just like Job did.
Aside from this above stuff there is also the subject of Sarah, the protagonist’s deceased wife but I haven’t yet thought about that in detail. Plus there are the marvelous depictions of lots of religion vs. innocent victims coping mechanisms etc.
I just read it because of this comment. I was pretty impressed by the few Chiang stories I’ve read before (Nancy mentions “Seventy-Two Letters” which I was amazed by). He has a very smooth prose style that reminds me of one of my favorite SF authors, Gene Wolfe, and seems to have an intellectual depth comparable to another favorite of mine, Jorge Luis Borges.
I have no idea what to make of this one. I’m baffled. I’m horrified, I think. The final lines twist the dagger. Do I take it as a reductio of divine command theories of morality? Of an investigation of true love? Or what?
There are small notes attached to each story in my book. The note to this one contains:
(…) For me one of the unsatisfying things about the Book of Job is that, int he end, God rewards Job. (…) One of the basic messages of the book is that virtue isn’t always rewarded; bad things happen to good people. Job ultimately accepts this, demonstrating virtue, and is subsequently rewarded. Doesn’t this undercut the message? It seems to me that the Book of Job lacks the courage of its convictions: if the author were really committed to the idea that virtue isn’t always rewarded, shouldn’t the book have ended with Job still bereft of everything?
The story reminded me immediately of the Book of Job and thus subsequently I was confirmed in my suspicion.
A primary role of the Book of Job in the Bible is the reconciliation of reality with a belief in God. It is a crucial point because the empirically experienced reality is that good and bad things happen to people without the apparent influence of some higher being. People may take (or historically have taken) the grandiose and fantastic biblical stories of God’s exploits at face value, but one’s conviction can endure only so much stress that arises from faith’s incongruity with everyday reality. This makes the Book of Job exceedingly self-conscious as of the Old Testament’s standards; it has to be precisely aware of how faith and reality works and the differences between the two, which makes the book sound like it was written by an atheistic marketing expert. But because there is no God the tension cannot be fully neutralized no matter how clever the moralizing is. Thus, the purpose of Job’s ultimate reward is to „bribe” the readership into accepting the moral of the story even though the bribe itself contradicts that moral. The bribe cannot be left out from the Book of Job because then faith would either turn into nothing – because there is no morally meaningful influence from any agent—or believers would have to believe in an explicitly malevolent deity. The illusory promise of divine reward can’t be fully disposed of. There actually is a limit to how morally repugnant your religion can be.
Back to Chiang’s story. Nancy Lebovitz thought that it expresses the idea that God is evil but wants worship. I think this is not the case; rather it is an actually quite faithful reiteration of the Book of Job, with the difference that it tries to realize Job’s message to its full and horrific extent.
Now, the workings of Chiang’s mortal world are essentially the same as our world; the miracles and punishments seem to be just genuinely random, much like most real world accidents and flukes of probability. The angels are just another type of accident. The note also says:
Thinking about natural disasters led to thinking about the problem of innocent suffering. An enormous range of advice has been offered from a religious perspective to those who suffer, and it seems clear that no single response can satisfy everyone; what comforts one person inevitably strikes someone else as outrageous.
However, the epistemic situation of the inhabitants of Chiang’s world differs because they have strong evidence of God, Heaven and Hell. This, I think, is to illustrate the general situation of religious people: they live in a real world and believe in a world of God, Heaven and Hell. The blatant and almost parodic depiction of divine evidences in Chiang’s story serves the purpose to draw attention away from the boring usual atheism vs. theism debate; here a theistic epistemic situation is the premise. In a way, Chiang’s mortal world depicts the world of real-life theists, with Heaven and Hell representing the two ways they can go. Heaven is blind faith, Hell is atheism and the middle world is the unstable world of doubts, rationalizations and constant inner conflicts. It is quite a masterful spin on the Christian universe, where the middle world is also an unstable stage, but with the conflicting forces of moral good and bad.
In the story Heaven is associated with the heavenly light that actually makes one blind. The blind faith scenario of heaven is a total rejection of all individual sense of morality. The Hell scenario is the „decide for yourselves” one. Because the mentioned parallel between Chiang’s mortals and religious people, the main point of the story, I believe, is that if you believe in a God that doesn’t exist, you are going to be pushed around by a neutral universe anyway, and trying to reconcile faith with reality would only cause more mental anguish. If you want to permanently keep your faith, you have to make yourself completely and irreversibly blind, and be ready to accept an arbitrary amount of potential suffering. Just like Job did.
Aside from this above stuff there is also the subject of Sarah, the protagonist’s deceased wife but I haven’t yet thought about that in detail. Plus there are the marvelous depictions of lots of religion vs. innocent victims coping mechanisms etc.