Movie Review: Life of Pi

Spoiler alert: Pretty much everything important about the film is given away in this review. If you have any plans to watch the film without knowing the ending, I highly suggest you save this for later; the film largely depends on ignorance about the outcome for its effectiveness.

Perhaps you have heard about the new Ang Lee film Life of Pi. You may have seen advertisements for it, which communicated pretty successfully two things: one, this film is epic and two, it involves a guy being stuck in a boat with a tiger.

Turns out the preview did not mislead you – Life of Pi is a bona fide epic, and it does involve a boy stuck on a boat with a tiger. But from a strange ad on my facebook feed and an emotional post on an academic blog, I went into the film also knowing it had a much grander theme than merely spectacular visuals – I knew it had something to do with God, faith, and the meaning of it all.

Thus, I went into Life of Pi very curious but a little precautious. And at first, my precaution seemed at least slightly justified – early in the film, we are treated to several obnoxious and common mainstream (and typically liberal) truisms about faith – that God communicates himself through all the major religions, and that you cannot have faith without doubt, for lest how do you know you really believe? These are delivered by the adult Pi, living in contemporary Canada, who is visited by a struggling writer who tells him that a shared acquaintance told him that Pi had a story which would make him believe in God – and the film is structured by Pi’s recounting of this tale. This sets up the film to appear, at first, as another vehicle for delivering Hallmark-safe religion; all love, all acceptance, all inner-peace and in the end God or the force of love in the universe or whatever makes everything OK. But then things get a little more complicated.

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Richard Coles Reviews Alain de Botton’s “Religion for Atheists”

Richard Coles has reviewed Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists, de Botton’s book which expands greatly upon his “Atheism 2.0″ TED talk. Coles is not impressed:

I think I share a secular person’s sense of awe and wonder at a starlit sky or a subatomic particle behaving ambiguously; I too find deep consolation in the sublime indifference of nature – the one thing that makes me feel nostalgic for atheism – but Christianity does not offer consolation, it offers salvation. That is why people built cathedrals, and in other dispensations enormous mosques and complexes of temples: they sought, and seek, salvation, and for this God‑givenness seems to me essential.

De Botton’s book does sound like an awfully fascinating read.

Why Carl Sagan is awesome – post script.

One more point about Carl Sagan and Cosmos – in the last episode, Sagan makes explicit the connection he appears to draw throughout the series between the value of critical thinking in the scientific realm and the value of critical thinking in all human endeavors. While standing in a recreated library of Alexandria, he asks why the knowledge of the Ancients failed to bring us swiftly into the Enlightenment and instead disintegrated into the Dark Ages, only to reemerge hundreds of years later.

I cannot give you a simple answer, but I do know this. There is no record in the entire history of the library that any of the illustrious scholars and scientists who worked here, ever seriously challenged a single political, or economic, or religious assumption of the society in which they lived. The permanence of the stars was questioned – the justice of slavery was not.”

I’ve written several times before on the connection between atheism and social justice, the skeptical movement and other political movements. I’ve argued that anyone who cares about the religiosity of a society also needs to care about politics – that the two are intertwined and cannot be untangled, and that perhaps it is even the political and social arrangements of a society that have the greatest impact on the level and destructiveness of its religiosity. I can’t say how pleased I was to see Sagan invoking the same point – science without a social conscience cannot justify itself all on its own, and if we challenge the irrationality of theism but not of oppression, it is quite possible we will, in the long run, accomplish very little indeed.

A quick review of Cosmos

Over the past few weeks I have been watching Carl Sagan’s epic 13 episode series, Cosmos (which is also a book). Of course, I found it to be awesome in multiple ways, and I wouldn’t be adding much to go into detail about how well Sagan invokes scientific wonder or how articulate and inspiring his language is. However, I’ll hazard a few observations based on my perspective as someone who works in the humanities.

My favorite thing about Cosmos is its breadth – while clearly, science and the physical nature of the universe is the focus of the series, Sagan takes long detours to buttress scientific exploration with the history of science. We learn about the library of Alexandria, the Heikegani crabs of Japan and the legend that produced them, the life story and struggles of Johannes Kepler, the decoding of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and much more.

This extensive storytelling has not only the effect of heightening the drama and effectiveness of the series, but of also giving it a feel of being almost as much a historical documentary as a scientific documentary – and therefore, science is not presented as an isolated, bracketed off enterprise that has no relationship to the human spirit or the human story. As a historian, I was surprised and delighted to learn history from this series I never knew before. These days, it seems most science documentaries stick rigidly to the science being explored, although there are a few that put a lot of effort into dramatizing the lives of the scientists they explore. But Sagan’s series has the intellectual creativity and courage to make connections where none are obvious – such as the extended segment on Egypt’s hieroglyphs that feeds into Sagan’s contemplations on communicating with an alien civilization.

As a lover of classical music, I also thoroughly appreciated the extended uses of some of the best classical music ever written. At one point we are treated to a depiction of all of evolutionary biology passing before our eyes in a few minutes, with a beautiful piece by Bach playing in the background. Beethoven and other well known composers also make appearances, always in places where they seem entirely appropriate. It is almost as if Sagan was aiming to make Cosmos not just a reflection on human scientific achievement, but a meditation on the entirety of human culture, accomplishment, and beauty.

One more thing about Cosmos – it’s rather funny, in a loveable way. From the somewhat frightfully bare “spaceship of the imagination” to the frequently awful synthesizer music, its very earnestness makes you a little self-conscious and snarky at first. But before you know it, you’re getting sucked into the spacescapes and the extended keyboard notes wailing in the background – and there you are, feeling all the cheesy wonder and appreciation you were supposed to. It is stealthy, and it gets under your cynical skin. Now that is quite an accomplishment – and I’m very sorry that I’ve finished the series and there are no more Cosmos evenings ahead of me.

Investigating Woo: Spring Forest Qigong “research”

This is a follow-up to my previous post investigating a study from the Mayo Clinic in collaboration with the University of Minnesota claiming that external qigong, a form of ancient Chinese medicine, is an effective treatment for chronic pain.  My critique apparently got on the nerves of at least one person, Drew Hempel, qigong enthusiast and woo extraordinaire, who offered his assurance regarding the validity of the study and its methodology.  Sadly, it’s not assurance that I am after—it’s evidence.  However, maybe I was wrong; maybe the study was academically rigorous and its conclusions actually sound.  After all, I am only an undergraduate (despite the fact that, in a recent blog post, Hempel incorrectly described me as a “university senior biologist”), and I admittedly only read the abstract.

Mr. Hempel has posted on internet blogs and forums statements such as the following:

Last fall there was a new study done by doctors from one of the top rated hospitals in the world — the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. The study proved the existence and the efficacy of external qi (paranormal energy) healing transmission. . .  O.K. I want to emphasize the implications of this study. This is ground-breaking official proof of something that undermines the very foundation of science.

Such extraordinary claims require even more extraordinary evidence, and Hempel believes, along with many, many others, that this evidence exists in a study performed at the Spring Forest Qigong center in Minnesota, published in The American Journal of Chinese Medicine.

After Hempel’s criticisms of my post and his request that I not “give up so easily” in my search for truth (I suggest Hempel do the same), I decided to check whether or not my university subscribed to the specific journal in order to obtain the full text of External Qigong for Chronic Pain (2010), the study that had supposedly demonstrated the efficacy of qigong.  Much to my surprise, they do, and I found it.  While reading the study, my initial criticisms based on the abstract alone became more and more cemented.  I am now–more than ever–convinced that the study is absolutely bunk from the top down.  The flaws are numerous, and I have included them below in point form, followed by a more in-depth criticism regarding the methodology behind each.

1.  Flawed sampling method.

2.  Lack of adequate controls.

3.  Subjectivity in data collection.

4.  Reliance on anecdotal evidence.

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Nietzsche and Atheism

Preface: The below post is inspired by a course on Nietzsche I am currently the teaching assistant for; however, Nietzsche has always been my favorite philosopher. The reasons why, however, are complex – no, I don’t agree with everything he says, far from it – and wonderfully, Nietzsche actually presents a great challenge to us in the atheist and skeptical movements; an opportunity to think in the most critical ways possible about why we care about these issues at all.

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God is dead, Nietzsche famously wrote. Based on these three words, one might assume that Nietzsche would be an atheist’s best friend. Think again.

Nietzsche was, of course, himself an atheist, if we are simply talking about whether or not he believed in God. But he harshly criticized the group of people he labeled “atheists,” along with scientists and rational skeptics. Why? If we are going to understand that, we first have to understand Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity.

Personally, my favorite picture of Friedrich. But I won't try to universalize that preference.

Nietzsche believed that Christianity grew out of the resentment, or ressentiment, of the weak in society – hence his famous phrase, “slave morality.” The genius of Christianity, according to Nietzsche, is its ability to take the will to power – which simply means the universal urge of man to express his spirit and impress himself upon the world – and turn it against itself. The values of Christianity, as captured in the Sermon on the Mount, celebrate humility and weakness – they argue, in other words, that the weak is good and the strong is bad. Moreover, Nietzsche argues, the priests of Christianity took the suffering of the masses and explained to them that they themselves were responsible for this suffering – the doctrine of original sin, obviously, clearly says as much. Moreover, not only does Christianity preach a worthlessness of human beings and consequently, the worthlessness of the earthly world itself, but it posits a self-sacrificing God (in the form of Jesus) that had to suffer and die for all these worthless human beings – thus, the doctrine of the crucifixion, rather than alleviating any guilt believers may suffer from, only increases it by adding to the heavy burden of debt we all owe to God. The consequence has been hundreds of years of scrupulous self-denial and the shaming of all our noble, passionate instincts – the will to power turned in wretched self-loathing against itself.

So this all sounds rather unpleasant, and I think it is in this highly psychological analysis of Christianity that some of the most brilliant (and accurate) insights of Nietzsche can be found. But why, then, would Nietzsche be critical towards atheists, scientists, and skeptics? Wouldn’t he see their focus on the physical, real world, and their rigorous skepticism of Christian theology as freeing, as liberating? Why in the world would he actually posit the opposite – that atheism and science, rather than being a way out of Christianity, are actually the product of Christian values  – indeed, are Christian values in their most refined form?

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