Seeking compatibility

• The latest Paris Review "Art of Fiction" subject is Marilynne Robinson.

Characteristically fascinating interview with Robinson, with some interesting comments on science vs. religion, as well as the work of Richard Dawkins.

INTERVIEWER
Are religion and science simply two systems that don’t merge?

ROBINSON
The debate seems to be between a naive understanding of religion and a naive understanding of science. When people try to debunk religion, it seems to me they are referring to an eighteenth-century notion of what science is. I’m talking about Richard Dawkins here, who has a status that I can’t quite understand. He acts as if the physical world that is manifest to us describes reality exhaustively. On the other side, many of the people who articulate and form religious expression have not acted in good faith. The us-versus-them mentality is a terrible corruption of the whole culture.

INTERVIEWER
You’ve written critically about Dawkins and the other New Atheists. Is it their disdain for religion and championing of pure science that troubles you?

ROBINSON
No, I read as much pure science as I can take in. It’s a fact that their thinking does not feel scientific. The whole excitement of science is that it’s always pushing toward the discovery of something that it cannot account for or did not anticipate. The New Atheist types, like Dawkins, act as if science had revealed the world as a closed system. That simply is not what contemporary science is about. A lot of scientists are atheists, but they don’t talk about reality in the same way that Dawkins does. And they would not assume that there is a simple-as-that kind of response to everything in question. Certainly not on the grounds of anything that science has discovered in the last hundred years.
The science that I prefer tends toward cosmology, theories of quantum reality, things that are finer-textured than classical physics in terms of their powers of description. Science is amazing. On a mote of celestial dust, we have figured out how to look to the edge of our universe. I feel instructed by everything I have read. Science has a lot of the satisfactions for me that good theology has.

More Turkish idiocy

• Members of a Turkish brain trust are considering prosecuting the publisher of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.

I feel sorry for the country that has to put up with asshole stupidity like this...

The publisher, Erol Karaaslan, said today that he expected to be questioned on Thursday by an Istanbul prosecutor as part of an official investigation, and faces prosecution both as its publisher and translator. The book has sold some 6,000 copies in Turkey since it was published by his Kuzey publishing house in June. The inquiry apparently began after one reader complained that passages in the book were an assault on "sacred values".

The investigation comes in the wake of controversy over the issue of freedom of speech in Turkey after Orhan Pamuk's prosecution in 2005. The Nobel prize-winner was tried under Article 301 of the Turkish criminal code for "insulting Turkishness" following comments he made to a Swiss magazine to the effect that a million Armenians had died in Turkey during the first world war - "and nobody but me dares to talk about it". The charges were eventually dropped. The author Elif Shafak, too, was last year acquitted of similar charges brought over remarks made by a character in her latest novel, The Bastard of Istanbul.

Scientist versus comedian

• The Guardian Unlimited reports on the dust-up between Richard Dawkins and Peter Kay.

A celebrity scandal that's kinda-sorta-halfway interesting for a change, if only for the reliably amusing sight of Dawkins turning into an atheist pitbull at the drop of a hat:

The comedian and the scientist are rivals in the Galaxy British Book Awards, in which Dawkins is a frontrunner for his bestselling atheist diatribe The God Delusion, and Kay is nominated for his popular memoirs The Sound of Laughter.

The controversy erupted after Dawkins read an excerpt from Kay's autobiography, in which he wrote: "I believe in a God of some kind, in some sort of higher being. Personally I find it very comforting."

The believer-baiting academic responded with contempt. "How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?" he said.

"If evidence were found for a supreme being I would change my mind instantly -with pride and with great surprise. Would I find it comforting? What matters is what is true, and we discover truth by evidence, not what we would 'like'." Kay, at present appearing in "The Producers" at the Palace theatre in Manchester, was unavailable for comment last night and his publicist declined to respond on his behalf.