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atheism, Calculating God, evolutionary science, geology, paleontology, religion, Robert J Sawyer, science fiction
Robert J. Sawyer (2000)
My introduction to Robert J. Sawyer came when WWW:Wake was serialized in Analog magazine back in 2008. I remember reading a couple pieces of the novel and thinking it was pretty interesting stuff, but I didn’t get around to rereading and finishing the novel back in 2011. It held up through my changing tastes, and I’m looking forward to digging into WWW:Watch soon.
A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of his 2000 novel, Calculating God. I’d never heard of it, but the concept was pretty interesting: aliens land on Earth, part of an investigation into the existence of a God. Their first stop is a Toronto museum, where a paleontologist named Tom Jericho works. Their theory: God has been steering the evolution of life through the history of the universe. Their proof: two other planets in the galaxy have suffered a series of mass extinctions at precisely the same times, among other things. Their intent: to see if Earth is part of the same grand plan.
The novel is told from Tom Jericho’s point of view. He is visited by Hollus, an alien paleontologist. Hollus is on Earth to examine the fossil record to learn about mass extinction events. Jericho is asked for his help in explaining Earth’s geological and fossil history. Although stunned, Jericho readily agrees to help. However, he is shocked upon hearing Hollus’s premise: a God exists, and has been influencing evolution for an unknown purpose.
Jericho, an atheist, is dumbfounded that a clearly more advanced race believes in a God. Hollus argues that God’s existence is indisputable. A number of physical and cosmological constants are such that life could not exist otherwise. Further, advanced cosmology has discovered that the number of universes to ever exist only numbers eight or nine, meaning that this can’t be one of an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of physical and cosmological configurations. Finally, there is the fact that three planets have suffered a number of mass exinctions independently of each other at the exact same times.
These ideas come at a critical time for Jericho – he has just learned that he is suffering from incurable lung cancer. Facing mortality, Jericho struggles to reconcile the idea that there is a God with his lifelong atheism. Much of the novel centers around Jericho slowly coming to accept the idea, shifting from rejecting Hollus’s idea out of hand to trying to understand God’s motives. I should say here, this isn’t the God of Judeo-Christian tradition, but something much more elusive. This difference does lead to an interesting ending sequence comparable to Childhood’s End.
Calculating God is an interesting character study on one hand – an atheist learning that he has been wrong about the existence of God, but not necessarily wrong in his ideas of faith. On the other hand, it’s kind of sloppily carried out. Sure, it may be easy to doubt the existence of God (as religion currently frames it) with existing scientific evidence, but Jericho refuses to accept the idea at first despite the overwhelming evidence in favor of a God (not exactly as religion frames it) within the novel. For the first half of the novel, I think this is excusable, as it serves as a set-up to discuss the foundations of modern atheism, and explaining why they aren’t true within the novel’s setting. Fair enough. After that set of discussions is done, there’s a good chunk of time spent further detailing Jericho’s doubt, but the payoff here is a couple of paragraphs about how other atheists handled a crisis of non-faith and a few pages about why modern scientists are hesitant to accept the existence of God.
As uneven and slightly ham-handed as that discussion is, it doesn’t even begin to compare to one of the subplots that seems like Sawyer wrote to make the book a broader statement on modern religious trends. On the very first page, the story’s made clear to be a memoir of sorts from Jericho. It remains being told from Jericho’s point of view right up until chapter 14, when suddenly, we’re in a hotel room with two guys that just bombed an abortion clinic. There’s a short conversation, then suddenly, we’re back to Jericho telling the story. As it turns out, it’s part of a setup to make a statement about fundamentalist Christians, which will eventually culminate with the two destroying of a number of priceless fossils at the museum where Jericho works. As jarring as this sudden swerve is, it serves no real purpose to progressing the story. Later on, the two destroy a number of priceless fossils as a group of people helplessly look on, but their actions don’t bring the characters any new insight.
At times, I wanted to just throw this book at the wall. Jericho’s stubbornness, along with the shoehorned statement on fundamentalist religion made me almost put the book down and never look back a couple of times. What drove me to finish the book, though, was that Sawyer has several flashes of interesting ideas. One example in particular that springs to mind are a few pages devoted to Hollus theorizing about how physiology plays a role in evolutionary psychological development, both as applied to humans and to the other alien species that make an appearance in the book.
That’s pretty much the story of the book: flashes of sci-fi brilliance not particularly well-balanced with a number of other plot threads. It’s quite uneven at times, and at its worst, there were a few 10 or 15 page stretches where I just wanted to put it down and be done with it. I can’t say that I hated the book, but I didn’t particularly like it, either. Had I not already read and liked another Sawyer novel, this probably would have turned me off of him completely, but fortunately I know that he’s capable of better than this. The things I like about Sawyer are there – he’s clearly done his research, but a lot of that ends up being stuck spinning its wheels. If you’re interested in getting a better look at Sawyer’s output, I’d direct you to something like the WWW series. Don’t start here.
talkfiction 
I have not read the book. But what exactly is Sawyer’s viewpoint? Is he trying to say that, due to the limitations of the applicability of the scientific method, science is unable to disprove God’s existence? That there is nothing that science can prove which would tend to contradict the possibility of the existence of God? That as we discover more about the complexity and harmony of the universe, that the concept of the universe as a created artifact becomes more likely?
Concept-wise, the book sounds a little like Stapledon’s Star Maker, which was also a source for Childhood’s End.
Did he state why he thinks some scientists might be hesitant to accept God’s existence? This reminds me of an article I read in the magazine Science about 10 years ago. It appears that a study was done to find out how many members of the National Academy of Sciences believed in God. The interesting thing was the headline, which stated that most of the elite members did not believe in God. You had to read three-quarters of the way through the article before they admitted that of the entire membership about 60% believed in God; a clear majority.
What would you define as the issues of the book?
As far as I know, Sawyer is an atheist.
Atheism is reliant on the idea that forces commonly attributed to God are the result of natural forces and principles. For example, there is the weak anthropic principle, which is a natural explanation for the fact that a universe capable of creating life exists. Consider multiple universes (we can’t prove that those exist, but we have at least one example of one existing, so we can say that there could be more). These universes have different physical and cosmological settings – not all of which are capable of supporting life. The fact we exist in a universe capable of supporting life is because those physical and cosmological settings are just right to allow our particular flavor of life to exist. So the idea that the universe is fine-tuned for ourselves is a form of selection bias. There are a couple of other lines of thought that would suggest that we don’t *need* a God to explain the universe.
However, in Calculating God, aliens show up with evidence that God indeed does exist. This is sort of handwaved at – advanced science can *show* us what happened before our particular universe existed, and has disproven the existence of more than eight or nine universes, none of which are capable of supporting life. The main thread in the book is that the universe undergoes a series of Big Bangs and Big Crunches (an idea that has been proven false since the book was published), and with each cycle the universe became more tuned for life than the one before it.
So Calculating God completely undermines the foundations of atheism in its premise: a supernatural force has been discovered to be working with the universe, and proof of this supernatural force has been provided, so there’s no reason to not to believe in a God. The reason the protagonist gets hung up on the concept is that he confuses this particular God with the Judeo-Christian one, and given the past history of church/science relations, is unwilling to concede the point. However, he eventually realizes what the aliens are saying, that this isn’t an intercessionary God as most religions formulate it. It’s more like the God in Childhood’s End.
Calculating God does not have much to say about God in the real world – the God that exists in the fictional universe is based on evidence that has never been observed in the real world. The most he does is explains the modern rationale of atheism and undermines them with fiction.
I read Barrow and Tippler’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, so I am familiar with the ideas to which you are referring. It sounds like Sawyer is simply stacking the deck so that he does not have to take the anthropic principle into account. (Not that I buy it either. Until you can experimentally demonstrate the existence of other universes, anything one has to say about them is mere speculation and not science.) A series of Big Bangs and Crunches certainly does not sound likely when dark energy and the accelerating expansion of the universe is taken into account.
From your description, it does not sound like Sawyer has much to say about the nature of God or how He relates to the world. In other words, the book sounds like it is a superficial treatment of important ideas. I take it that that is what you are saying.
If Sawyer is borrowing from Clarke’s Overmind, then Clarke was borrowing from Stapledon’s Star Maker. Star Maker is one of the most interesting books I have read in my life, in no small part because I believed in virtually nothing Stapledon had to say. It took me ten years to figure out why I did not agree with him, however. If you are looking for a real treatment of these issues, I would recommend Star Maker, which is nothing less than a full scale history of the universe and examination of the nature of God. It is a tough read but very much worth your while and it is easy to get a copy.
To begin, I think Sawyer was trying to undermine the Anthropic Principle by suggesting that there’s not the infinite number of universes that would make the Anthropic Principle more likely. I think Sawyer actually did a pretty nice piece of handwaving, alas, one that has not withstood the test of time. The idea of a cyclical universe made sense at the time this book was published in 2000 since the first inklings that the universe’s expansion rate was increasing were only observed in 1998-1999. It’s not until the mid-2000s that an increasing expansion rate was confirmed beyond a doubt, so I’ll let Sawyer get by with that one. Some science fiction ideas don’t stand the test of time, and I think Calculating God was published unfortunately close to a major paradigm shift. At one point I came close to throwing the book down when I was reading through it (“how could a science fiction author be so WRONG when using science”) before I realized that this book predated the widespread acceptance that expansion was speeding up.
As for the idea that the book is a superficial treatment of important ideas – I agree/disagree on that. My last comment was mainly directed at answering some of your questions, but I think it came across as implying that the nature of God was the central premise of the book. It’s *a* premise, but it’s not the main focus. The real focus is on an atheist facing mortality, and all the second guesses about your life choices that come with it. I wouldn’t say the treatment of this topic is superficial, but Sawyer’s writing on this topic is kind of sketchy. It’s as if he started writing about the mortality premise, and decided it was a good excuse to throw as many things he could about faith and religion into the blender. Some of those threads are well-executed, others are not. As a result, some ideas get a superficial treatment, while others get a more detailed write-up. It’s the unevenness in execution that made me dislike this book.
Based on your review, it does not sound like it is a book that would be worth my while to read.