Ben Mines

I'd rather burn in hell than be preached at by an author. I'll give it a miss, I think.

Well, I re-read several favourites this year—Borges, Joyce, Melville, Nabokov, etc. Excluding those, the best books I read for the first time were: Time Arrow, Martin Amis The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton Don Quixote, Cervantes Mary, Vladimir Nabokov Islands in the Stream, Hemingway

G. K., The Complete Father Brown. That blinking, sleuthing priest with his shabby umbrella quickly became one of my favourite characters.

I read Chesterton, Calvino, Cervantes, Colonna and Camus for the first time. 2008 was a good year for the letter C.

Do you mean of the books you read, or of the book you read that came out this year?

I'm down to 16.

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or The Strife of Love in a Dream, is a Renaissance incunabulum famous for its elegant typography and engravings. It tells the story of a young man's quest for his beloved in a dream, and is believed to be the work of the Italian monk Colonna on the evidence of the acrostic, "Brother Francesco Colonna dearly loved Polia," formed by the first letter of each chapter. Colonna writes in a kind of dream language, a complex compound of Italian and Latin, inaccessible to all but a few tenacious scholars. Only now, five hundred years after the book was first printed, has the entire text been translated into English by Joscelyn Godwin. Godwin recreates the text in modern English for, as he explains, to approximate the style of the original language it would have been necessary to do in English what Colonna did in Italian: invent new words based on Latin and Greek ones. And he gives an example: "In this horrid and cuspidinous littoral site of the algent and fetorific lake stood saevious Tisiphone, efferal with her viperine capillament...". Clearly, the reader owes Godwin his eternal gratitude, but we are not out of the woods yet. Before I come to the beautiful dream that amply justifies the effort of reading this strange book, it is necessary to say something of Poliphili's obsession with architecture. One of H. G. Wells' characters observes, correctly, I think, that what you never seem to be able to do in dreams is focus on little, irrelevant details

That's true, Andy. I guess the real problem is that I am being pedantic. If only these words would behave according to my interpretation of them! Then an atheist would refer exclusively to that rare bird who claims to know there's no God. Everyone who allows for either possibility—however they apportion the probability—would be an agnostic. And that would leave a tidy remainder of religious zealots sitting under the umbrella of theism. But never mind. Dawkins calls himself an atheist despite allowing for the possibility, however miniscule, that there is actually a God, and I will just have to accept it and get on with my life.

You both make a valid point. The words are used imprecisely; and if they are used precisely, it looks like almost everyone is agnostic. And technically, most people are. But not everyone. If you base a definition of each word on what someone claims to know, then a theist is someone who claims to be certain God exists, through faith, despite a lack of concrete evidence. An atheist is someone who claims to be certain God does not exist, despite the lack of concrete evidence. And there are people who take both positions; who claim to be certain that God does or does not exist. But Dawkins is not one of them. I also think that terms like, "hard atheist" and "soft atheist" are misleading because there are no degrees of certainty, but only of uncertainty. I am certain that my name is Ben. If I were "less certain", it would not be certainty. There are no degrees. On the other hand, I am more uncertain of what will happen in ten years than I am of what will happen tomorrow. But that does not mean I am not uncertain of what will happen tomorrow. Whether you claim to be a little uncertain, or very uncertain, you're an agnostic. Scientific training may have greatly diminished Dawkins' uncertainty about God's non-existence, but until he comes out and says: "God does not exist" he is an agnostic. Agnosticism, as Dawkins should realize, is the only position a scientist can take without evidence. As Carl Sagan once said when asked what his "gut feeling" was about extraterrestrial life: "I try not to think with my gut. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in." Atheism and theism is thinking with your gut. Dawkins is too much of a scientist to do that. He does not claim to know. His only error is that of misusing words; billing himself as an atheist when his hypothesis is obviously that of an agnostic (or, "hard agnostic", if you prefer). Like I said, he wants to have his cake and eat it too.

We risk splitting hairs and turning this into a dispute about semantics (after all, what's a "soft atheist", as you call it, but a "hard agnostic"?) but I think agnostic is a better word for Dawkins' view than atheist—at least, etymologically speaking. I don't know where you got this definition of agnosticism as the position that both hypotheses are "equal". Agnosticism is simply the position that it is not possible to know (from a- "not", gnosis, "knowledge"). Dawkins says the God hypothesis is "undisprovable"—which amounts to the same thing: we can't prove or disprove it; ultimately, we can't know for a certainty whether He exists or not. Dawkins admits this several times in The God Delusion. Atheism, on the other hand, is the view that God does not exist (a- "not", theos "God"). Unless you are prepared to assert that the terms, "almost certainly does not exist" and "does not exist" are the same (it should be clear they are not) then Dawkins is an agnostic: he admits that ultimately he does not know. And you yourself said it: Dawkins assumes there's no god, and to assume is to suppose to be the case, without proof. Agnosticism with a hunch is still agnosticism.

It is, and herein lies the problem with Dawkins. Science cannot prove that God does not exist. For this reason Dawkins (as a scientist) is constrained to stating that God, "almost certainly does not exist." It just can't be proved or disproved. God (to use Dawkins' word) is an "undisprovable" hypothesis. Clearly, that boils down to agnosticism, but Dawkins persists in billing himself as an atheist. The problem with Dawkins, in a word, is that he wants to have his cake and eat it too. But none of this alters the fact that Mr Wilson is disproving an argument that Dawkins did not assert.

But in The God Delusion, Dawkins nowhere claims to prove that God does not exist. The technical term for Wilson's argument (using, "theologians and the Bible", if you please) is therefore ignoratio elenchi.

EUTHYPHRO: What on earth can have happened, Socrates, to make you leave your usual haunts in the Lyceum, and come and spend time here in the king's colonnade? Euthyphro, Plato (translation by Tom Griffith).

I get depressed after finishing books I didn't enjoy reading. Not only have I wasted my time, but even after the curtain drops, I still have to suffer the unwanted guests: the shabby or implausible or ham-fisted characters hanging around in my head, popping up in my dreams, etc.

Ursula K Le Guin, writing a review of Blindness for the Guardian, had this experience with Saramago:

"To the Reader—I here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable period in my life; according to my application of it, I trust that it will prove, not merely an interesting record, but, in a considerable degree, useful and instructive." —Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey

I was quite affected by this book. Possibly the bleakest novel I have ever read. But personally, I have never worried about Big Brother. I just do not believe I am sufficiently interesting or important to justify constant surveillance.

Thanks!

Not that eclectic, I guess, since 99.9 percent of my books were written by men; around 80 percent of them before 1950 and all of them are big guns—I have few books by little-known authors. But that's because I'm trying to read all the important pre-modern and modern novels before moving on to the contemporary stuff—a semi-chronological approach.

Both books are worth the effort.

I just noticed pontalba's signature:

Which translation are you reading? I have Constance Garnett's, which has been enthusiastically panned by several distinguished Russian novelists

No, but I am aware of his premise. Using a cryptological analysis, Boyd tries to prove that the novel is not written by Charles Kinbote nor even by John Shade under the pseudonym of Kinbote but Shade's dead daughter from beyond the grave. Having read Pale Fire, this seems a little strained to me, though I suppose there is a precedent for something of the kind in the short story The Vane Sisters.

And Gulliver's Travels.