I recently read Agatha Christie’s novel, The Hollow.

It was, by my count, the twenty second Hercule Poirot novel, though there is a sense in which it is only sort-of a Poirot novel. In her autobiography, Agatha Christie claimed that she ruined the novel by bringing Poirot into it but I think that she was mistaken. The problem wasn’t that Poirot was out of place, but that she didn’t commit and really bring him into it. (spoilers follow.)

The main character of The Hollow is John Christow. In many ways this remains the case even after he is dead. He is one of those larger-than-life characters who is tremendously charismatic, but that was not the reason he was described as being so alive, by all of the characters he met. He was driven. He wanted things very deeply and, in spite of having decent manners, he let everyone else know what he wanted, too.

This is, weirdly, the sort of man that young women tend to deeply misread. When a man like this is good looking, young women tend to read him as strong, courageous, and principled. (There is, btw, a mirror condition where young men read a certain kind of young woman as far better than she is if she is beautiful.) John Christow was not all that strong, and he wasn’t particularly courageous, and he didn’t have much in the way of principles. In fact, John Christow was a very selfish man. He happened to also be intelligent and have talents which made him a good doctor.

Or at least he was a popular doctor. There was no real evidence in the book that was actually a good doctor. There are people who testify to it, but they never cite any successes that he had. In the beginning of the book we see a few patients who visit him and he’s sympathetic and says all of the right things and writes them expensive prescriptions that he knows won’t do anything except reassure them that no expense has been spared to try to help them. That might be useful, but there’s nothing noble or great about that.

He was also putting a lot of time into researching “Ridgeway’s Disease,” which Agatha Christie made up for the book. It is a progressive disease that is invariably fatal, and Christow is trying to find a cure, for which people regard him as great. The thing is, there’s no evidence that he’s made any meaningful progress. He’s tried a lot of things, but so do people who buy a lottery ticket every day. Oddly, many of the young women in the book give him credit for the success which he has not had. The only assurance that they have that he will have this success is his good looks and powerful personality.

This is where Poirot could have been used to very powerful effect. Poirot is not beautiful and Poirot is not young. But Poirot has an equally powerful personality to John Christow and also something which John Christow lacked: success. The contrast between the two would have been great. All John Christow’s powerful personality would have come to nothing against the equally powerful personality of Poirot and his automatic complete lack of being impressed would have shown Christow’s pretentiousness up for what it was.

Gerda Christow and Henrietta Savernake and even old Mrs. Crabtree, John’s favorite patient, all wanted John Christow to be a great doctor, so in their minds, he was. This is, ultimately, the problem with idolatry. The greatness of the object is always only in the mind of the worshiper. But there is a real potential for interesting reactions when the object of such worship is brought into contrast with something undeniably greater.

Though it was by no means the final Holmes story that Conan Doyle wrote, I think that it is reasonable to take His Last Bow to be the final story of Sherlock Holmes. Set on the second of August in 1914, just two days before England would enter World War 1, it was  published in September of 1917. This would turn out to be towards the end of the war, though with a year left to go, not so close as for the end of the war to be in sight.

As has been said, it’s more a spy thriller than a detective story, and it threads a very difficult needle by being a fictional story about an important real event. On the one hand, it is a contribution to the war effort to boost morale. On the other hand, it runs the double-risk of hurting morale by this benefit being fake (i.e. fictional), and it also runs the risk of seeming to steal the glory of the people who did real work. That’s nothing particular to this story; it’s true of all fictional stories tied to current events. Comic books were in an especially difficult place in this way regarding the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers—all the moreso because many of them should have been able to easily stop the attacks or else rescue far more people than were rescued in real life.

The ending particularly intrigues me, for reasons I shall get to shortly.

The two friends chatted in intimate converse for a few minutes, recalling once again the days of the past… As they turned to the car Holmes pointed back to the moonlit sea and shook a thoughtful head.

“There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”

“I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”

“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared. Start her up, Watson, for it’s time that we were on our way.

Holmes’ sense of tremendous change coming was not misplaced, and it extended even into detective fiction. I do not pretend that the changes to detective fiction were the biggest or most important changes, of course; they are merely the ones that interest me here.

The first world war was not, technically, the end of the Holmes stories. Conan Doyle would write another collection’s worth of short stories by 1927, but for all that it would not be many and a new crop of detectives was on its way. Hercule Poirot would emerge into the world during the Great War, though his first story would not find a publisher until 1920. Five years later, Lord Peter Wimsey would investigate his first murder in Whose Body? Poirot had something of a timeless element to him, but Lord Peter did not, and that’s what’s really brought to mind by His Last Bow.

Though Conan Doyle wrote Holmes stories until 1927, with the one exception of His Last Bow they were all set in the late Victorian period, and for good reason. Holmes was a creature of the Victorian period. It is unthinkable to have Holmes without his Victorian politeness—as exact as his deductions—but Holmes’ encyclopedic knowledge of bicycle tires and cigar ash could not really be sustained over more decades, too.

By contrast, Lord Peter was a creature of the inter-war period. His personality was defined by the trauma of the Great War followed by the emptiness of the Great War being over. He took up detection because he had nothing else to do and after his experiences in the war he could not do nothing.

Each detective was a creature of his time period in a more profound way, though. Holmes was a religious man in the style of English religion which would soon perish in World War 1; he was religious but far more preoccupied with the details of life. The Christianity of England in the Victorian period was salt that lost its flavor, and the question of with what will it be seasoned was soon to be asked. But it was not asked in that time. Lord Peter, by contrast, was a non-religious man. He was in some ways the embodiment of the answer that salt which has lost its flavor is good for nothing but to be trampled under foot. He did not even consider religion; as Dorothy L. Sayers put it, he’d have thought it an impertinence to believe that he had a soul.

But Lord Peter was a creature of the inter-war period not merely in his start, but also in his end. Everything in this world is temporary but Lord Peter was more temporary than most because he was an aristocrat and the aristocracy was, in his time, not long for the world. I don’t mean that it would literally end, but the social importance of dukes and the other minor nobility was drawing to a close. England never, itself, had a revolution, but the revolutions that happened elsewhere sufficed for it. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that England a peaceful revolution instead of a violent one. That peaceful revolution was on its way during the interwar period, and it did not take a crystal ball to see it coming.

That said, even in Lord Peter’s time it was not really enough that he was a lord. He needed to be rich, too. The title helped him make useful friends, though.

All of this is one of the very interesting things about reading old books. It’s not merely that we can select from the best of what’s gone before us profiting from the work of a great many people in reading through the dreck to find that best, though that is of course quite helpful. It’s also not merely that we can benefit from the difference of perspective, taking for granted things we don’t and noticing what we take for granted, though that is enormously valuable too. It’s also that it’s interesting to see where people thought that things were going and what trends were important when we know what the correct answers turned out to be.

It can be amusing and interesting when they turn out to be wrong, but I think it’s even more interesting when they turned out to be right.

Streaming television is better in every way than linear TV (by which I mean broadcast and cable TV, i.e. where a show is on when it is on and you can only choose the channel) and it seems possible that one of those improvements will hurts TV’s cultural prestige.

The improvement I have in mind is that streaming TV shows allow you to watch them whenever you want to. I remarked before (in Watching On-Demand TV) how being able to watch a show whenever you want decreases the urgency of watching it and also gets rid of the weekly rhythm that broadcast TV gave. It recently occurred to me that TV also accidentally gained cultural prestige as an accident of that delivery mechanism.

In the days of linear TV, if you wanted to watch a show you needed to organize your life so that you would be available at the time that the show aired. In the 1980s VCRs made it possible to tape a show when it was on to watch it later, but at first this required one to be around, so you were still organizing your life around the show’s schedule. Later on there were programmable VCRs which could tape a show while one wasn’t home, but it was often easier to be present than to figure out how to program the VCR.

Organizing one’s life around something signals that the thing is important. Here’s the critical part: it doesn’t just signal this to others. It signals this to oneself. Thus television shows gained a double-benefit from people organizing their lives around them. First, we knew that these were the sort of things that millions of people organized their life around, so they had to be important. Second, we organized our own lives around them, so we had to feel them important or we’d be fools for organizing our lives around them. When you and everyone around you acts as if something is important, that gives it prestige.

This was not the only source of prestige, of course. Back in the broadcast days when there were only three television channels, the fact that many millions of people were watching the same thing gave it prestige. The fact that it was common but one of few made it seem select. The fact that it was transmitted over public airwaves gave it the imprimatur of the government, which was more respected back then than it is now. Those things faded with the era of cable TV, when dozens of channels got rid of the exclusivity and the cable itself got rid of the government imprimatur. But the fact of organizing one’s life around the airing of one’s favorite shows persisted.

Even if streaming hadn’t come about, the advent of the Tivo and other digital video recorders which were aware of show schedules and were easy to program and never missed an episode would have mostly ended this aspect of the prestige of TV shows. Streaming has killed it more completely, though.

It will take some time for this to fully play out, of course, and a loss of prestige is usually not the sort of thing one notices, because things without prestige are intrinsically less noticeable. It’s also been going on for a while, so I think we’re already seeing the effects of it. It’s likely that the bigger effects are going to be generational; people (like my children) who grew up with TV not having this prestige will just naturally think of it differently.

A lot of people are confused about whether money is real or imaginary because they don’t realize that it is a spiritual, rather than material, thing. Before I go on, I need to make clear that a thing is neither good nor bad for being spiritual rather than material. Food is material and revenge is spiritual; both angels and demons are pure spirit. I am only talking about what the thing is, in so doing I’m not saying that it’s either good or bad (except in the trivial Thomistic sense that being is good considered differently).

Another misconception I need to get out of the way before I can actually say what I mean is that “spirit” is not merely “a different kind of matter.” For various reasons, a lot of people seem to think that spirit is basically glowing matter that has the ability to move through ordinary matter. That’s not spirit, that’s a TV ghost. When I say that something is spiritual rather than physical, I’m saying that it is not any kind of matter.

OK, with those common misconceptions cleared out of the way, we can finally get down to business.

It is fairly straight-forward to see that money is spiritual instead of material; the easiest way is to consider what happens when you get rid of the matter.

Suppose I lend you ten dollars, in the form of a ten-dollar bill. Then when you repay me, you repay me in the form of ten one-dollar bills. You have given me back exactly what I lent you, but the matter is completely different. This is not possible with material things, it is only possible with spiritual things. The bills are merely physical signs which point to the spiritual thing.

This is true of any money, by the way, not merely of fiat currencies. Suppose I lend you a pound of (pure) gold. Suppose you return to me some other pound of (pure) gold. Despite the matter being completely different matter, you have perfectly repaid the debt. The thing lent was not specific gold, but merely a quantity of gold. The thing returned was the same quantity of gold. Yet the matter is completely different.

You can observe the difference if I lent you a gold statue. If you merely returned to me the same quantity of gold but in the form of coins you would not have repaid what you owed me, because what you owed me was the specific statue.

That money is spiritual rather than material is why so many disagreements arise about it. Because we are a hybrid of spirit and matter, we recognize the spiritual, but in general we do it through the intermediation of matter. That is, we see the effects of spirit on matter and infer the spirit. You can see this even with where spirit got its name from—breath. Aside from on very cold days when we can perceive condensation, we do not see people breathe. We see their chest move, we hear their voice—we perceive various things from which we infer the breath. Or again consider the wind in the trees. We see the tree move and infer the wind, we don’t see the wind itself. These things are analogous to how we perceive spirit by its effects.

Because of this, we create physical signs to point to the spiritual thing we call money, though if you want to get extremely accurate the thing we call money is the same concept as debt (in the moral sense). These physical signs can be anything, since they are not the thing but merely a thing which points to the thing. At one time they might be records on a clay tablet or a stick, at another quantities of metal, at another pieces of paper, and at another records in a computer.

Like all signs, it is possible to lie with signs. You can see this in forgery and also when governments inflate fiat currencies in order to pretend that they have more money than they really have. None of these things make money unreal, they only make the signs pointing to the money unreal.

Recognizing this solves a great many problems around money, such as in this tweet:

Quite frequently the quarrelsome atheists one runs into online are very poorly educated; in many cases they’re basically fundamentalist Christians who swapped the bible out for a biology textbook as the holy book that they don’t read. This seeming lack of knowing anything that would normally be learned by reading books lends itself to them coming up with some really weird creation myths for the existence of religion. Consider this recent one left in a comment to my post You Can’t “Believe In Science”:

Regarding experimentation, science requires observation, not experimentation as such. Paleontology is observational science, like astronomy. Simples. But anyway, the difference between science and religion is that scientific ideas are tested against observation while religious ones are not. Science rejects hypotheses which don’t agree with observation; religion keeps them and adds excuses. The Problem of Evil should have done away with the “everything was created by a perfectly good God” hypthesis, but religion has kept it and added excuses: Free will/God is impossible for puny humans understand/Best of all worlds/Etc. The flaw here is that adding excuses to a failed hypothesis doesn’t make it more likely, it makes it less likely.

While I’ve seen similar creation myths for religion from atheists, I’ve never seen this exact one. According to this myth, people first came to believe that God exists and created all that is, and reasoned out that He is perfectly good, then later discovered evil and invented the idea of free will and the concept of the world being too complicated for us to understand in detail in order to explain away this new discovery.

I doubt that the fellow who wrote this actually believes it; based on previous experience with him I doubt that he really believes anything at all; he seems to be a rhetorical thinker who just types stuff that happens to sound good at the moment. That’s pretty typical of the type, which is why I’m using it here for illustration. (Btw, rhetoric, on a technical level, is generally a micro-narrative or series of micro-narratives. Understanding this will make it easier for me to talk about it.)

You can see the basic flow of the rhetoric in the quoted paragraph. He started off with a story of how science is about observation. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was largely based off of pictures he’s seen of people looking through telescopes and microscopes. (It’s too much to go into here, but in many ways the “scientific revolution” was really the avalanche of knowledge gained when lens-making technology got good enough to make telescopes and microscopes, rather than any change in methodology.) From that mental image, now called Observation, he proceeds to try to distinguish Religion from Science using this. That is, he goes on to tell the story of how Science uses Observation. Since Science uses Observation, Religion must not use Observation. What story to tell?

Well, here he runs into a problem, since obviously in any normal sense of the word “observation” which isn’t code for “looking through a telescope or microscope” looking at a man heal a cripple or walk on water or feed 5000 people when there was only a few loaves of bread and a few fishes would be “observation.” So merely observing things can’t be the story of Observation he wants. However, with falsificationism being a popular idea among atheists, he brings it in as the backbone of the story he’s going to tell. So in Science, Observation allows you to falsify theories, which Scientists heroically do. This is in contrast to Religion, where Observation is not used to falsify theories. He doesn’t bother coming up with an example of scientists rejecting a theory based on observation, probably because this would be far more difficult than he consciously realizes. (It would be far easier to come up with examples of scientific theories being retained in the face of contrary observation. E.g. Newtonian mechanics, the inability of quantum mechanics and relativity to be reconciled, the Standard Model being kept despite observations indicating dark matter, etc. etc. etc.)

He then needs to tell a story of Religion ignoring observation. It would not work for his rhetorical purpose, however, to simply appeal to the fact that Religion (he really means Christianity; this is less true of non-Abramic religions) rests on testimony rather than observation. And this is not because virtually no one actually conducts scientific experiments for himself and relies on testimony. It’s because the narrative flow must be the ignoring of observation. So he comes up with the astonishing idea that there were people who were ignorant of evil that came to believe in God for unspecified reasons, then discovered the existence of evil and rather than rejecting their idea came up with a rationalization for it. It’s dumb as the proverbial solid waste from a dog, but it does have the correct narrative flow.

Now, while these micro-narratives have nothing to do with reality to an impressive degree, they do feature a common theme I’ve seen frequently from this kind of atheist: they get really offended when people don’t take their judgment to be the final word on a matter. They will identify something that they perceive to be a problem and get mad when people don’t instantly change their minds, but instead offer an explanation. This would be nonsensical unless the atheist were infallible, which I think gives some insight into the psychology behind it. Somehow or other (and I suspect there are many possible causes) they have come to be their own authority.

It is unpleasant for anyone to see an authority which they respect being disrespected.

Within the Sherlock Holmes stories, Watson has the invaluable role of being the chronicler of Holmes’ adventures. This does introduce a minor problem, though, which is that it’s utterly at odds with Holmes’ assurances of discretion to his clients.

This is not every case, of course; there are cases where Holmes has no duty of secrecy to anyone. A Study in Scarlet does not bring about this problem, and I doubt that The Sign of Four does either (the only person to whom Holmes might owe discretion, there, became Watson’s wife and was thus available to wave her rights to confidentiality). But as soon as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes begin we run into a problem with A Scandal in Bohemia.

I know that the King said that in two years it wouldn’t matter who knew that he had had an affair with Irene Adler but it is none the less hard to imagine that he would take it kindly to his affair with Adler being made public for no reason other than the publicity of Sherlock Holmes. Mr. Jabez Wilson was, perhaps, not owed any great duty of discretion, so we can pass on the Red Headed League.

The Case of Identity was, I think, a bit cruel for Watson to have published, since it would have created much embarrassment for the woman who came to Holmes. This, however, could be dealt with by Watson changing the names. Few people would be over-likely to recognize the original in the story if her name, as well as the name of her stepfather, and also of the places and businesses were changed.

None of this will work for The Boscombe Valley Mystery. Here, Holmes promised a dying man that for the sake of his daughter he would not reveal the dying man’s former life as a highway robber and murderer. The whole point was to keep from his daughter what her father was. Even if the names had been changed there could be no mistaking who the story was about, especially since she was the one who had called Holmes into the case. There can be no excuse that the case happened many years before, as she was a young woman during the story and would still have been a young woman at the time of publication. (Further, since The Sign of Four took place before The Boscombe Valley Mystery (since it refers to Watson as a married man, and he married in The Sign of Four) the earliest the latter could have taken place would have been about 1887, and The Boscombe Valley Mystery was published in 1891.)

This was by no means the only such case. The Adventure of the Naval Treaty seems equally harmful to ever publish, even with names altered, as does The Adventure of the Second Stain. In both cases the preservation of someone’s reputation requires that no one ever find out what really happened, and the details are utterly unmistakable.

These are just the cases where Holmes either implicitly or explicitly promised to never reveal the damaging secrets to anyone, and Watson’s chronicling them is an inarguable breaking of that promise. Probably the majority of cases Watson chronicles would constitute a violation of privacy and trust to the people concerned.

Stranger still, more than a few people who come to Holmes have heard about his adventures as published by Watson and nevertheless come with a hope of discretion on the part of Holmes.

Ultimately, I don’t think that there’s any solution to this. Just pick up any book trying to reconcile the chronology of the Holmes stories and you’ll discover that Conan Doyle clearly didn’t worry about the details. When Watson’s wife—Mary Morstan—became inconvenient, Conan Doyle basically just forgot about her. (It’s more complicated than that, but not tremendously more complicated).

So, what are we to make of Watson’s chronicling of Holmes’ cases being a contradiction of Holmes’ duty to his clients?

I think that one clue to why this was the case can be found in the titles of most of the Holmes stories. The majority of the stories began with “The Adventure of.” These were not really detective stories in the sense of how the genre would evolve in the 1920s. Conan Doyle obviously thought that the science of deduction was interesting but he equally obviously didn’t think of it as something that the reader would be doing.

(I’m still not sure when the idea of the mystery story being a game between the reader and the author began or, more importantly, when it became commonplace. It was certainly well established by the time of Fr. Knox’s Decalogue, but that was published in 1929. You can see some of this in G.K. Chesterton’s advice on how to write a detective story, which was published in G.K.’s Weekly in October of 1925.)

Since these are adventure stories where the science of deduction is meant only to be interesting but not something where the reader is trying to solve the mystery before the author, I suspect that Conan Doyle did not expect the reader to pay attention to details in the same way that later mystery authors would expect that. I suspect that this is why he was not bothered by the conclusion of a story making it impossible for Watson to have published it.

(Incidentally, I think that the contradictory chronology is more an effect of the stories being written many years apart and Conan Doyle simply having forgotten what he wrote early. I’ve faced this problem in writing my own detective stories. The result is I started keeping a file for all of the miscellaneous facts such as birthday, height, weight, age, siblings, siblings’ age, etc. Annoyingly, I had to re-read my own books in many cases to find out whether I wrote down such details before, though now I mostly can write them into the file whenever I invent a new one. Conan Doyle wrote Holmes stories over the course of nearly forty years; if he was not making a conscious effort to be rigorous about details it would have been shocking for him to not mis-remember things he had written decades before.)

If you go to the right places you will see colorful signs that proclaim a creed which contains among its dogmas, “science is real.” Online, you will see many people arguing over “science” and “what science says.” It’s interesting that people proclaim their faith in, and debate about, something which they cannot define and which cannot be coherently defined.

The idea of “what is science” was debated throughout history, but very hotly in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was called the “demarcation problem,” and it proved to be a failed endeavor. It is simply not possible to define “science” in a way that includes things that clearly are sciences and excludes things that clearly are not. (I will only give a brief sketch of why not, since it’s a big topic that justifies more than a little reading of books on the subject.)

First, we can dispense with the “scientific method” frequently taught in schools because (depending on how you interpret it) it either is generally not what scientists do or else describes what everyone does in all attempts to study the natural world. (See There Is No Scientific Method.) People who want to figure out how to read bird entrails¹ make observations, form a hypothesis, and conduct experiments to test the hypothesis. Paleontologists who study bones don’t conduct experiments².

As Lee Smolin put it in The Trouble With Physics, it can’t be that Science uses a method. Witch Doctors use a method. It can’t be that Science uses math, astrologers use math.

There have been many attempts at the demarcation problem, but I think that the two greatest efforts are Verificationism and Falsificationism. There have been various forms of these, but since this is a sketch I’m going to treat each as just one thing, since all of their forms have the same problem.

Verificationism defines science as those studies of the natural world whose theories can be verified. Falsificationism defines science as those studies of the natural world whose theories can be falsified.

The problem with both is that outside of some very simple investigations into the natural world which have already been done, you run into an infinite recursion problem in trying to decide what is a verification or what is a falsification of a theory. I’ll use another example from Lee Smolin’s book The Trouble With Physics, since it was so well chosen.

Suppose I have a block of marble and present the theory that there is a marble head trapped within it. I propose to test this theory by using a hammer and chisel to clear away the marble of the block from around the marble head. I do so, and lo and behold, there is a marble head. I made a prediction and then what I predicted came to pass. Did I verify my theory?

But suppose that I struck too hard with the hammer and the marble crumbled to dust. There is no marble head to be seen, only a pile of marble rubble on the floor. Has my theory been falsified?

(Another example of how falsificationism doesn’t work is the error in the orbit of Uranus. In theory, when Uranus wasn’t where it was supposed to be, Newtonian mechanics should have been falsified and the theory discarded. Except it wasn’t; if there was a Neptune-sized planet in Neptune’s orbit, that would also explain why predictions of Uranus orbit weren’t correct… and there turned out to be Neptune. So the falsification turned into an even better verification. The same thing with Neptune led to the discovery of Pluto, except that was by accident because the problem was actually with the estimates of Neptune’s mass, not the influence of another planet.)

Both verificationism and falsificationism fail, ultimately, because there is no way to instantly and certainly know that the verification or falsification means what one takes it to mean. There is always the possibility of experimental error, interpretational error, or some unknown factor which is influencing the experiments in unknown ways. Of the three, the unknown factor is the biggest theoretical problem, but I think that the issue of interpretation is the biggest problem in practice.

To see what I mean, consider things that used to be considered prestigious science which are now in disrepute. IQ studies that prove that white people are superior to everyone else, for example, or skull-measuring in order to classify races, or identifying criminals by the shape of their face. All of these considered themselves to be sciences. They all methodically measured things. They tested their theories and found their theories stood up to those tests. The problem, of course, is that they were grading their own tests.

But this is a problem everywhere. Physicists don’t call biologists in to decide whether their experiments legitimately give support to the theory they’re testing. Chemists don’t call in phrenologists to decide whether their experiments really show what they think they show. Biologists don’t ask electricians to judge their interpretation of fMRI data in brain activation. Physicists ask physicists, and phrenologists ask phrenologists, just as astrologers ask to be judged by other astrologers. This is what peer review means; it means that people who do not question the assumptions of a field judge particular ideas, experiments, observations, etc. under the lens of these shared assumptions. All peer review tells you is whether the work is, roughly, on par with the rest of the work in the field. It intrinsically can’t tell you whether the field is any good.

There are a great many people who are willing to grade their own tests and give themselves high marks; which of these people can we trust?

Well, that’s the problem. There’s no way to tell. All you can do is to look at their observations, experiments, interpretive framework, and judge for yourself. (Or you can find people you trust who will do this looking and judging, and have them tell you their conclusions. The number of people who do this out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than out of the desire for money or attention, which will bias their evaluations, is annoyingly small.)

So to come back to where this post started, it is simply not possible to hold that “science is real.” No one can say what the science is that might be real or fake. The word “science,” in that sentence, simply has no referent.

It would have been much better if the sign had simply said what it actually meant, which, IIRC, would have been, “anthropogenic climate change is real and is bad no matter what that change is because the climate is currently perfect.” That may be true or false, but at least it’s meaningful for those words to be put in that order.

1 I mean from scratch. Most bird-entrail readers, like most people who can administer a pH test to determine acidity, do so according to how they were taught by others with no attempts at observation or experimentation, but only following instructions that most couldn’t explain. But if someone wanted to resurrect the lost art of bird entrail reading, they’d begin by making observations—looking at bird entrails and also at what happened. Then they’d make guesses about what the bird entrails mean, then slaughter some more birds and see if these guesses were confirmed by fresh events. If they were, they’d gain confidence in their theories about what the bird entrails mean.

2 People will occasionally try to shoe-horn paleontology into this shoe by claiming that the “experiments” they do are predicting intermediate forms of animals then looking for them. The thing is, they don’t. They dig wherever there are bones and find what they find. Also, since the preservation of any given animal is overwhelmingly unlikely, the absence of anything in the fossil record is never taken to mean anything other than “we haven’t found it yet, if it’s there to be found.”

I was recently asked on Twitter:

As a Christian and and a writer, what are your thoughts on depicting characters using the Lord’s name in vain? I’m curious because in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday someone exclaims “God blast it!”

Here was my reply:

The first thing is to get straight the meanings of taking the Lord’s name in vain. One major division:

1. Invoking God’s name to support a lie in court^†
2. Invoking God’s name to support a lie elsewhere
3. Invoking God’s name irreverently
4. Invoking God’s name trivially

In court is generally the worst because of the effect that it has; it is using God’s name in order to support a lie to wreak injustice. This is not to say similar things can’t be achieved out of court, but usually court has the greater effect and thus is worst.

Invoking God’s name irreverantly, I’m hesitant to give an example of, but to sketch it out, attributing some sort of vice to God, such as, say, lust, would qualify. Bad, but not so bad as is using God’s name to convince people of a lie.

The example you gave is of the forth kind. The thing is, properly speaking, a prayer, but one that is not, in fact, meant. It’s invoking God trivially, since it’s done without thought. (The idea behind it, which is only being invoked by repetition and without intent, is that the “it” is some injustice, and so God is being petitioned to right this injustice.)

The morality of portraying this in fiction will depend very greatly on exactly how it’s done. If it’s portrayed in such a way as to portray it as good, that is, as something for the reader to aspire to, this would be to tempt people into sin and is bad.

If it is portrayed neutrally, it is likely to be harmless or so close to harmless that there are almost certainly bigger pieces of wood to worry about removing from one’s eye before the delicate operation of getting this mote out.

If it is portrayed in a negative way, e.g. as a habit of the villain or a moment of weakness in a hero, then it could even be positive, since there is benefit to be gained from error being shown to be wrong in fiction.

(The same basic analysis will apply to recognizable modifications, such as “gol-durn” or “dagnabbit,” skewing more toward harmless than in the originals.)

† This would consist of things like “I swear to God that I saw this man stab the victim,” or, “as God is my witness, I saw this man stab the victim” or “I saw this man stab the victim and may God strike me down if I’m lying,” where the man invoking God to support the truth of what he was saying was lying. In so doing he is making God a party to his lie, or at least trying to.