Recently in Fantasy Category

Wiley/Blackwell finally has a page for The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles, to which I'm one of the contributors. (Why do I want to say "of which" there instead of "to which"? That doesn't seem grammatical, but it sounds better.) Amazon also has a page for it now.

There's still no picture, and I have no idea what this is going to look like. I wasn't all that impressed with the X-Men one's cover, but I guess they couldn't get copyright permission to depict anyone from the X-Men on the cover, and without that what can you do but have a cool way of writing the title and trying to do something interesting with the cover scheme? The Open Court volume on Harry Potter had a picture of a castle with a snow owl, and I'm guessing Wiley/Blackwell will come up with something else generic that doesn't violate copyright.

It says it won't be out until September, but the editor tells me they're actually shooting for July. Either way, it will be out in advance of the seventh movie, which I'm much happier about than I was about their original plan, which was to put it out concurrent with the eighth movie in 2011. This thing has been done for quite a while already and has just been sitting around waiting for the publisher to find it appropriate to release it. It could have been done in time for the sixth movie if they'd wanted to do that.

I'm looking forward to reading the other pieces in this one even more than I was with the X-Men one that also included a piece by me. I read the whole Open Court volume, and there were only a few duds there. I've gotten most of the way through the Narnia one, and the same is true of that one. I was disappointed in a lot more of the X-Men ones, for different reasons in different cases. I haven't read anything in this one but mine (and one that got pulled for legal reasons that I can't say anything else about here), but I've seen the email addresses of the other contributors, and I've been able to deduce who quite a few of them are, several of them very good philosophers who undoubtedly have interesting things to say.

My piece has been retitled "Destiny in the Wizarding World", which I think is superior to my own title, which was "Destiny in Harry Potter". I'm much more satisfied with the final state of this chapter than I was with the X-Men one, which I thought had been worsened by the removal of the most interesting discussions of race and even in one place the weakening of my argument due to crucial bits taken out (it even reads as fallacious to me now). There was a whole section I'd added at the editors' insistence that the series editor removed without discussion. This one, on the other hand, was, I think, noticeably improved at every stage of editing. So I'm looking forward to holding it in my hands and reading all the pieces.

James Sennett's chapter in The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy considers several views on the extent of salvation:

Universalism: Everyone will be saved.
Pluralism: There is no one, true religion. Multiple religions are legitimate paths to God.
Inclusivism: There is one, true religion, but some who are technically in other religions are nonetheless on a legitimate path to God by means of the correct religion, even if they don't know it.
Exclusivism: There is one, true religion, and the only path to God is through explicitly following that religion.

Sennett argues, correctly I think, that Lewis was an inclusivist. He allows for Emeth to be saved without any explicit trust in Aslan, but he insists that Emeth was following Aslan while falsely believing he was following Tash. Aslan clearly states that Aslan and Tash are not the same being, and the followers of Tash are evil and do not make it into Aslan's country. Universalism and pluralism are as easily ruled out as exclusivism. I haven't spent an awful lot of time thinking about inclusivism, because it seems so hard to square with Paul's train of thought in Romans 10. But Sennett has helped me see that Lewis' inclusivism makes sense of one puzzling element of the Narnia stories, and he's also helped me think a little more fully about what an inclusivist view should look like.

Sennett argues that inclusivism best explains something that might otherwise be puzzling in the Narnia stories. See The Mouse Trap Theory of Atonement at Green Baggins for a serious discussion of Lewis' theory of the atonement in the Narnia books. After reading Sennett, I'm now wondering if the discussion makes any sense. It's an attempt to get an entire theory of atonement out of an event that isn't really atonement for anyone but Edmund. Sennett has a much better alternative. He insists that the Narnians' following of Aslan is not Christianity. You don't have anything in Narnia like salvation by means of faith in a work of atonement. The stone table was one event for one person that turned the tables in one war against one opponent. It's much better to think of Narnians who follow Aslan in a way more like how Christians generally see faithful Jews before the time of Christ and how Lewis saw Emeth following Aslan without knowing it when he thought he was serving Tash. I think what Sennett is suggesting is that the real atonement for Narnians is the same one for us, namely the cross in our world. The Narnians don't know this to put explicit faith in it, but it's enough that Aslan does when he initiates the work of faith in their lives to guide them along in their progress toward greater understanding, some of which may only come after their death (as was the case with Emeth). I think this makes much better sense of what Lewis is doing with the stone table and how he might say that Narnians are saved.

Anther intriguing statement Sennett makes is that Aslan is not Jesus. I thought it was obvious that Aslan is Jesus. Isn't the stone table supposed to refer to the cross, even if it isn't really salvation for all the Narnians? Well, yes, literarily. But in the world of the fiction, Aslan is a lion. Jesus is a man. The incarnation of the first person of the Trinity as a man in our world is not the same incarnation as his incarnation as a lion in the Narnian world. The incarnation is hard enough to figure out philosophically, but a double incarnation? Fortunately, Prosblogion has already had two discussions of that issue for those who are curious.

Finally, it occurs to me that inclusivism fits best with a Calvinist model of divine sovereignty. Sennett's way of describing who among other religions is genuinely on the path to salvation is that they're the ones God is working in to move them toward the right attitudes and practices, despite not having the right information to know what the gospel even is. Without that, and without the evidence of explicit faith in Jesus Christ, it's very hard for there to be objective criteria for someone to be saved. The easiest way around that is for the criteria to be simply whoever God is genuinely working in, a work that will always be brought to completion, but that requires Calvinist views of divine sovereignty over human salvation. There may be other ways to do it, but that's certainly the easiest answer to the problem. Ironically, Calvinists are probably more likely to be opposed to inclusivism than other groups, and inclusivists rarely want to be Calvinists.

We've been listening to C.S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicles on CD. I read them when I was about ten years old, and I never got around to re-reading them, so some of it is almost as if I'm experiencing them for the first time. When I got to the following scene from the Silver Chair, it struck me as a strange argument, sort of like Pascal's Wager, but something rubbed me the wrong way about it. The main characters were in the Green Witch's underground domain and had fallen under her influence, which was causing them to lose their belief in the above-ground world. Puddleglum the marsh-wiggle then gives the following speech:

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say.

What rubbed me the wrong way was that it sounded as if he didn't care whether the world was real. He was going to believe in it anyway, because it's more pleasant to believe in it. How can the upper world be so much better than the underground world that its mere finite value of being better would be worth believing in a lie if it's not true?

When I raised this issue with a friend, he said, "But it's Pascal's Wager!" I said, "No, it's not!" He insisted that the upper world is Aslan's world, which I'd been thinking of as the place at the end of the world that they went to in the previous book, and the upper world was just Narnia, which is the analogue of Earth. But we were interrupted and never managed to finish the conversation.

I realized later, when teaching Pascal's Wager, what Lewis must have been up to, and it's actually a neat trick. If he was seeing Narnia as a placeholder for the eternal reward of Pascal's Wager and the underworld as a placeholder for this life, then you have an interesting argument that isn't quite Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager concedes for the sake of argument that life in this world is more pleasant if you don't believe in God but then argues that the chance of eternal reward in heaven compensates for that in terms of rational decision theory. You shouldn't even need 50% likelihood of God's existence for the wager to be worth it given that the reward is infinite and the cost merely finite if you bet wrong. But Lewis' Wager is different in exactly one way: it doesn't make the concession. It takes the finite value of life in this world to be better if you believe in God than if you don't. So life is finitely better if you believe in God, and the afterlife is infinitely better if it turns out there is one. Therefore, it's a no-brainer. You might as well believe in God. If it turns out you lose the bet (i.e. God doesn't exist), you still end up finitely better off, and if you win (i.e. God does exist) then you get an infinitely better result.

One interesting result of Puddleglum's Wager is that it easily avoids the problem Mike Almeida raises against Pascal's Wager. Mike's problem (which I'm not taking a stand on at this point) relies on its being better in this life not to believe.

[cross-posted at Prosblogion]

The District of Columbia was ticketing people for parking in their own driveways, and apparently this was actually legal (at least there was a law that provided for this; I'm not sure whether the courts would find it constitutional). I don't know if this is still going on, but it sounded like a hoax when I first heard of it.

David Boies, Al Gore's lawyer in Bush v. Gore, and Ted Olsen, George Bush's lawyer from the same case (who was also Bush's first Solicitor General) are working together to try to get judicial declaration of same-sex marriage at the federal level. Olson, to be fair, is not advocating the kind of policy-preference right that more liberal lawyers and judges often see in the Constitution and that he has consistently argued against his entire career. His argument doesn't even assume that there is a right to marry. It just relies on the fact that our court system recognizes a right to marry and concludes that it ought to be applied to gay couples as well as straight couples if we're going to be in the business of applying such rights. (However, their argument does seem to assume that couples as couples and not just individuals have rights, or else it assumes what an Equal Rights Amendment would have provided but didn't when it never passed.)

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives to reinstate the draft during the Bush Administration and then voted against the bill (almost no one actually voted for it, which was what he had expected). I thought it was strange when Republicans kept pushing a marriage amendment that they knew they didn't have enough votes to pass, but it's well beyond that to waste government time and money by pushing something you don't even want passing to begin with.

Jeff Bridges and Beau Bridges are brothers, and Lloyd Bridges was their father. Beau I can understand. But Jeff? I wouldn't have expected it.

All the miscreants who linked the phrase "miserable failure" to President Bush's biography had succeeded in making it the top website in Google for that expression. I was sure this was a joke when I first heard about it. It was pretty quick to verify, though. It had less skepticism when I heard that miscreants on the right had done the same with getting John Kerry's senate bio at the top of searches for "waffles".

Jeremiah Wright, whose heterodox, anti-white language makes him sound as if he doesn't think white people can be genuine Christians, actually has white members actively ministering in his congregation, sometimes even occupying leadership roles. (I don't think that excuses his rhetoric, which I think still counts as heterodox divisiveness, but he seems not to mean what he says.)

Philip Pullman wrote an entire scifi/fantasy series (His Dark Materials, whose first novel is The Golden Compass) out of an anti-religion and particularly anti-Christian agenda. When I first heard this, I thought it must be an exaggeration and that it probably just had some anti-religious elements throughout, but it turns out as the series develops that the agenda is far more central to the books than at first it appears. Pullman has even portrayed it as his remedy to the Narnia Chronicles, which he thinks call good evil and evil good. (I happen to think he failed in some crucial ways at what he was seeking to accomplish, but I wanted to post on that at some point separately, and I just haven't gotten around to it. Finishing up this post, which I started weeks ago but didn't have enough items to finish, has reminded me that I had wanted to do this, so maybe I'll get to it soon.)

Two days after his big announcement revoking President Bush's stem-cell policy, President Obama signed into law the big budget bill for the year, including a provision that prevented any funding from being used for embryonic stem cell research. I was especially skeptical about this, and it took me a long time and some hard Googling to find enough information to confirm it, but it does seem to have happened.

The Obama Administration's original discussion suggestions for his speech to school kids on September 8, 2009 really did ask kids to write about how they could help Obama, but they later changed it to ask about how they could be responsible. This was especially surprising given the actual content of the speech, which was mostly politically neutral. Why would they then ask how kids could help Obama when the thrust of the speech was just calling them to work harder in school and to be responsible? The original question therefore puzzles me a little unless he changed the speech too, which we have no evidence of (and the official explanation that the revision was what they had meant all along is completely implausible).

You can't help out your neighbor in Michigan by putting their kids on the bus for them every morning without a license to operate a daycare business.

So I've listed ten myths that I at one point just believed when I first heard them, even if in some cases it was only when I was pretty young. I also wanted to put together a list of myths that never sounded plausible to me, even the ones I heard as a kid, but that somehow get passed around as if true (and in some cases even get trotted out as if any serious scholar must believe such a thing).

1. KFC changed its name from Kentucky Fried Chicken because they don't use chicken anymore. They use clones of chickens grown without heads, and the U.S. government won't allow them to call that chicken.

2. There's such a person as Santa Claus.

3. The Bush Administration orchestrated 9-11.

4. Barack Obama wasn't born in the U.S.

5. The Pentateuch was compiled over several generations by people with different and conflicting ideologies, and we can reconstruct which ideology is behind which verses or even partial verses with pinpoint precision, according to such tell-tale signs as which name is used for God or whether it happens to involve a negative or positive assumption or conclusion about a certain tribe of Israel. It amazes me how confident scholars can be of this even though no sources have ever been found for such texts, no textual statements in the text we have indicate anything about any such sources, and no two scholars can even agree on which parts come from which sources.

6. J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter novels, is a practitioner of Wicca who sought to convert Christians to Wicca by writing novels about magic.

7. Sarah Palin cut funding for teen mothers because of pro-life convictions.

8. George W. Bush attacked Iraq because he believed God told him to.

9. Sarah Palin thinks God directed the U.S. to attack Iraq.

10. Divine foreknowledge and predetermination are incompatible with human freedom and responsbility. Sorry, I suppose I should find something less controversial. How about the commonly-heard line about how Jesus' statement that it's easier for a camel to get through an eye of a needle than for the rich to enter God's kingdom once you know that there's a gate in Jerusalem called the eye of the needle, and camels can get through it, but it's hard. (I once heard someone repeat that false background to Jesus's statement and then say that knowing that changed her life. Somehow. She never explained any further and probably couldn't have done so even at gunpoint.)

Now that I've seen Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, here are my rankings of the movies and books at this point.

Movies rankings:

1. Chamber of Secrets (movie 2)
2. Sorceror's Stone (movie 1)
3. Half-Blood Prince (movie 6)
4. Prisoner of Azkaban (movie 3)
5. Goblet of Fire (movie 4)
6. Order of the Phoenix (movie 5)

Books rankings:

1. Deathly Hallows (book 7)
2. Order of the Phoenix (book 5)
3. Goblet of Fire (book 4)
4. Half-Blood Prince (book 6)
5. Prisoner of Azkaban (book 3)
6. Chamber of Secrets (book 2)
7. Sorceror's Stone (book 1)

Isn't it interesting that how much I liked the movies is roughly inversely proportional to how much I liked the books? Part of what influences it is how faithful the movies are to the books, not that I insist on getting it exactly like the book, but until the latest film they were increasingly leaving out significant parts of the books, even parts that help explain otherwise unexplained phenomena or actions of characters. It left a much less satisfying experience, especially if you knew that there was an explanation in the books. Plus a lot of the scenes and entire plotlines that were left out were fun, interesting, and suspense-building. When you consider that the movies were actually getting shorter as the books got longer, it just drives home the disappointment, because there was so much room for more in Order of the Phoenix, the longest of the books but the shortest of the movies.

I expected Half-Blood Prince to be an improvement over the last few, because the book is much shorter than the two previous books, and they were willing to make it a longer movie. I figured they'd be able to include a higher percentage of plotlines and scenes from the book, and I was right. They were. There were still places where they changed things needlessly (most annoyingly at the end where they made Harry's incapacity to act because of Dumbledore's spell into a moral choice not to act). There wouldn't have been a huge increase in time if they'd explained a few things a little better with explanations from the book. The most unexplainable thing was the scene they completely made up that wasn't in the book at all with the Christmas attack. Harry's actions there made no sense. But it was far superior to the three previous movies, which all had major plots missing. What was missing from this was no more than what was missing from Prisoner of Azkaban, but it affected the plot less, so I place it above that. I didn't understand from the movie alone everything that had happened by the end, and I didn't get it fully until I read the book.

This film should be understandable in the most crucial ways to those who haven't read the book, and it's the first one since the two directed by Chris Columbus that that's true of, at least in the most important aspects. But those stories made complete sense in pretty much every way as films, and they didn't cut major plots the way this one did with the private lessons Dumbledore gave Harry all year about Voldemort's past, which they abbreviated far too much in the movie to be satisfying. I also thought they shouldn't have cut out the Professor Trelawney storyline, which both explains more on her prophecies, which will play a big role in the next one (although maybe they'll find a way to put it in that one instead). They didn't explain the Room of Requirement well, why Harry couldn't get in, why it looked different from it did in Order of the Phoenix when he did, and why it looked like what it looked for for Malfoy. They had Ginny hide the book rather than Harry, and I wonder if that will create problems when they need to return in the final movie for the item that in the book Harry sees while hiding his potions book. Leaving out the new Minister of Magic might make it harder to explain the transition for the Ministry near the beginning of book 7 as well, and the absence of the house elves again might create problems for when they have to reintroduce Dobby and Kreacher in the next one.

I'm hoping that the decision to split Deathly Hallows into two movies will prevent it from being any worse than this outing, since there really is a lot to include, and pretty much all of the necessary parts could easily make two three-hour movies if done well (and they're shooting for two to two-and-a-half hours per movie). They're going to have to trim some things, as they did here. I'm just hoping that they choose a little more judiciously than they did with a few things in this film.

As I was responding to this comment from Neil, I realized that I was getting into a bunch of issues that I don't think I've ever discussed comprehensively on this blog before, and I thought it might as well be its own post. Neil raises some questions about Christians reading (and presumably watching) science fiction and fantasy, questions that are more general (and more legitimate) than the common complaint about magic in fantasy. He wonders whether certain writers or stories (he has in mind a series by Stephen Donaldson that I'm not familiar with) can be dangerous in leaving behind what he calls an amoral residue. There's also the worry that spending time in fictional worlds is escaping from reality and might even be an addiction. It also might be a waste of time when there are more important things to do. He suggests that God might speak through such literature, but hasn't God spoken much more clearly in other ways already, so why should we need this kind of thing?

I think there can be a number of different healthy motivations for a Christian to read or watch science fiction or fantasy, many of them no different from the motivations for any other kind of fiction. One is simply entertainment. The idea that entertainment is just escape from reality seems wrong to me. I know people who think of it that way, but I don't think that's what they're actually doing when they see themselves as escaping. They might be distracting themselves from things they don't want to think about, but the things they're thinking about, while fictional, are based on reality in some way, or they couldn't think about them. It's just a rearrangement of real things, and those are good things that God created. It's also an engagement with the process of creation, an ability that I think God has given to us as part of being made in his image. The use of the imagination develops abilities God wants us to develop. Thinking about fictional worlds is one way to develop intellectual virtue. It's also simply good to enjoy good storytelling and to appreciate people using their God-given abilities to produce something enjoyable.

There are also moral themes in literature, and fiction of any kind helps us evaluate our lives in many ways. If the story in question only motivates moral evaluation of fictional cases, and those cases could never come up in real life, then at least it allows us to practice our ethical thinking in hard and strange cases, which is still a good skill to develop, because we will confront new situations that require such skills, especially as technology develops and social relations become further changed from what we see as the norm. But many ethical issues in fiction, even in fantasy and science fiction, are also going to come up in real life. Sometimes the author wants to make certain moral points, and sometimes we need to develop the ability to think for ourselves about those questions and not just accept what the author wants us to take away from it. But that's not a reason not to read or watch it except in cases where someone has a problem doing that. Maybe in Neil's case the Donaldson series was like that, and for all I know it might have that effect on me too (I know little about the series in question, so I have no idea). It's certainly worth being vigilant about how things affect you, but that's true of any fiction, and it's true of a lot of things besides fiction. It's true of observing how your friends live, and Paul tells us not to isolate ourselves from those who aren't Christians, even if he also says that Christians ought to live differently from the world.

I like fantasy and science fiction in particular because they help illustrate philosophical questions in ways that real life sometimes can't. One way to show that a sophisticated hedonism is wrong is to point out that with Harry Potter's invisibility cloak or Sauron's ring you could get away with almost anything you want, and it would still be wrong to do so. A sophisticated hedonism says it's only wrong to do certain things because it's against your self-interest (given that people will be mad at you for doing it and want to stop you and punish you). But these cases show that the real reason it's wrong isn't because it's against your self-interest, because you can achieve the self-interested goal in such cases, and it's still wrong. Scenarios like the Matrix or science fiction or fantasy worlds with very different social relations raise interesting questions about the moral principles that we assume as fundamental, because they lead us to wonder if they would apply in a very different situation. If I spent ten minutes coming up with a list, I could probably name off at least a dozen examples from science fiction and fantasy that I use regularly in my philosophy classes to illustrate points that are a lot harder to make clear or vivid without the aid of such examples.

So you don't need to think of fiction as revelation in any important sense to think that it provides an occasion for something that can be productive. It's bad if it distracts from more important things, as is true of any kind of enjoyable activity. At the same time, a little rest and relaxation, especially if it engages aspects of our thinking that we don't otherwise use, is part of being productive in the long run. So there has to be a balance, but I think this kind of imaginative fiction can contribute a lot of good toward our moral development and to our lives as well-rounded human beings, even if there are also risks and dangers, as there are with most pursuits in life.

We usually listen to audiobooks while we're driving. We've gone through the whole Harry Potter series (after reading them in hard copy). We've also tried out some new authors. We didn't like Ursula LeGuin's first Earthsea book very much, but we did like Terry Goodkind's first Sword of Truth book (something I can't say about the new TV adaptation Legend of the Seeker, which doesn't have much of anything to do with the book besides the character names and a few very general characteristics taken from the original storyline but modified enough to remove the most interesting aspects). Sam has long been a fan of Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, and we listened to one of those also (after having read a bunch). I'm not as impressed with her writing, but I like the world she's created, which is one of the things I like about fantasy and science fiction in general.

One of the problems we keep running into is that we listen to something and then can't continue on because our library doesn't have an audio version of the next volume in the series. They don't have the second Goodkind book or the next McCaffrey one after Moreta, where we left off. We also are re-reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and the library had book 6, so we've been listening to that, but they only have a few more, and they're much later in the series. We could always listen to books we've read or ones one of us has read. I'm thinking Lloyd Alexander might be good (new to Sam). There is always Tolkien or Lewis if we want to go through those again. Our library system has Stephen Lawhead's first few volumes in the Arthur/Pendragon series. I tried reading the first one when it came out but didn't get very far, and maybe having an audio version would make it easier to get through it.

But I'm wondering if anyone has further recommendations of authors to try who would be similar to what we've liked. I don't like Stephen Donaldson. I thought his white gold series was awful. Besides what I've mentioned, we both really like Terry Brooks. I've thought about Robert Jordan, Tad Williams, Raymond Feist, Fred Saberhagen, Katherine Kerr, and David Eddings, but their respective first volumes aren't in the library system. They do have some of the Dune series, including the first one, but I'm somewhat hesitant about that unless Sam decides to push it. Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber is available, but I don't know much about that other than seeing his name mentioned a lot in scifi/fantasy contexts.

In a bizarrely ironic twist, Richard Dawkins has joined the anti-Harry-Potter bandwagon. I wonder if his allies in this fight will appreciate his help.

It reminds me of when secular feminists decided to recognize the harm pornography contributes toward women. The difference here is that Dawkins' reasons don't seem to be anything like the usual anti-Harry crowd's. Religious opposition to pornography typically involves some reasons the recent feminist opposition hasn't included (such as its being wrong to lust after someone you're not married to), but Focus on the Family and other evangelical groups that have opposed pornography have long accepted many of the same arguments that feminist opponents of pornography have more recently come to. It objectifies women. It sends a message about women that harms them and psychologically influences the men who view it in a way that leads them to do things that further affect women negatively. I've seen one prominent feminist, Catherine MacKinnon, claim that her religious allies against pornography didn't share any of her reasons, but when I read that I couldn't help but conclude that she hadn't actually talked to James Dobson, Josh McDowell, or any others among the most prominent evangelicals opposing pornography. I'd heard almost all of MacKinnon's arguments from evangelicals while growing up.

Dawkins, on the other hand, shares very little in reasoning with other Potter foes. He doesn't fear that kids are going to become Satanists because they read fantasy literature, and he doesn't care a whole lot about whether the series teaches kids bad morals. (By the way, David Baggett's chapter in Harry Potter and Philosophy gives an excellent response to such arguments, especialyl on the latter issue.) Dawkins just worries about whether it's a good thing to stir kids' imaginations about things that aren't possible given the way the physical world works in real life, and his reason for that is that he expects fantastical literature to open kids' minds up to the possibility that naturalism is false, which might make them more likely to become creationists or something.

Warning: for those who have not read the last two books of the Harry Potter series, this post does include spoilers.

Before she wrote Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling answered a question about the Fidelius charm on her website:

When a Secret-Keeper dies, their secret dies with them, or, to put it another way, the status of their secret will remain as it was at the moment of their death. Everybody in whom they confided will continue to know the hidden information, but nobody else.

Just in case you have forgotten exactly how the Fidelius Charm works, it is

"an immensely complex spell involving the magical concealment of a secret inside a single, living soul. The information is hidden inside the chosen person, or Secret-Keeper, and is henceforth impossible to find -- unless, of course, the Secret-Keeper chooses to divulge it" (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban)

In other words, a secret (eg, the location of a family in hiding, like the Potters) is enchanted so that it is protected by a single Keeper (in our example, Peter Pettigrew, a.k.a. Wormtail). Thenceforth nobody else - not even the subjects of the secret themselves - can divulge the secret. Even if one of the Potters had been captured, force fed Veritaserum or placed under the Imperius Curse, they would not have been able to give away the whereabouts of the other two. The only people who ever knew their precise location were those whom Wormtail had told directly, but none of them would have been able to pass on the information.

This seemed fine to me when I read it. But then I read Deathly Hallows. Hermione Granger seems to contradict the above explanation. She acts as if everyone in on the secret becomes a Secret-Keeper once the Secret-Keeper dies. If that's right, then the secret can be spread after the Secret-Keeper is dead, and it can be spread by anyone who was told the secret. This is why she thinks the Death Eaters know about Sirius' house once they apparate into its location with a Death Eater in tow. As Secret-Keepers, they can reveal the site to someone.

There's one problem with this. Severus Snape was also in on the secret, and he could have told them the secret. He didn't, and he would have had to have an excuse. If the secret couldn't be told by those who were merely told it, then he would still have that excuse. So is this a sign that Hermione is wrong and Rowling's original explanation is correct? Not necessarily. Perhaps Snape was lying about who the Secret-Keeper was, and Voldemort didn't know it had been Dumbledore. Then Snape would still have an out, and he could pretend not to be able to say. So this isn't really strong evidence that Rowling's original explanation was correct after all.

[cross-posted at Prosblogion]

I'm working on a chapter for the forthcoming Blackwell Philosophy and Harry Potter on the topic of destiny, and one of the things I'm trying to do in the chapter is distinguish between different metaphysical analyses of prophecy. I've come up with three, and I'm inclined to think that it might be exhaustive enough for the purposes of a popular-level work like this, but I'm curious if anyone here can think of any others.

Here's what I've got (and how I'm presenting it in the draft I'm writing):

1. They involve mere likelihoods. No one has access to the actual future, but someone might have magical access to information that's derived from what's likely. Given what's true about the various people involved, it's very likely that a certain outcome will happen. That means prophecies, even the ones Dumbledore is inclined to call genuine, are not infallible. They can turn out get it wrong.

2. They do not derive their content from the actual future. Rather, they make the future happen. When a genuine prophecy occurs, it influences those who hear it in such a way that they end up doing things that will fulfill the prophecy. This kind of prophecy is self-fulfilling in a very literal sense.

3. The seer has some intuitive connection with the way things will really happen, such that the words of the prophecy are true about a future that really will be that way. If it's a genuine prophecy, it can't be wrong, because its origin lies in the very future events that it tells about. In the same way that a report about the past can bring knowledge about the past only if there's some reliable connection with the actual events in the past, a genuine prophecy in this sense must derive its truth from a reliable method of getting facts about the future.

My understanding of J.K. Rowling's view of prophecy, judging by this interview and my sense that the Albus Dumbledore character represents her views when he discusses this issue with Harry Potter, is that she wants to treat Professor Trelawney's two genuine prophecies as the first kind, a kind of prophecy an open theist could accept.

There are hints in at least two of Dumbledore's conversations with Harry that he thinks something like the second kind is going on, but it's clearly not a reduction of prophecy to what happens in #2, because the characters in question (mostly Lord Voldemort) still make free choices and aren't simply caused by the prophecy to do anything the way some ancients thought Laius was caused by Apollo's prophecy to do what he did that led to Oedipus eventually killing him.

My argument at this point is that there isn't really a way for Dumbledore to distinguish between Trelawney's two genuine prophecies and all her vague predictions that can often be interpreted as coming true unless the genuine ones are of the third kind (because the pseudo-prophecies are of the first kind, and the genuine ones can't be completely explained by the second kind). Rowling doesn't seem to want to accept that, and Dumbledore is clearly with her, so there's a consistency issue here both for the character and the author. But my argument depends on the options I've listed being exhaustive. Is that true?

We recently finished listening to Harlan Ellison's reading of Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. This novel is often thought of as one of the great fantasy novels of our time (well, the time of the people saying it; I wasn't around yet). It was difficult going to such a sparse story, with very little character development and hardly any dialogue (and Ellison, while very expressive in prose narrative, reads dialogue like it's the phone book). My sense is that Le Guin is appreciated for the world she created rather than for her storytelling, which simply didn't impress me, not after coming off of listening to the whole Harry Potter series. Rowling is a much more entertaining writer. Her characters are much more fully developed. The world is much more developed, even in the first book. It's much more imaginative. There's a richer, more complex plot. There's nothing to latch onto in Le Guin's book. It's like a short story extended over a whole novel.

So it surprised me to see Le Guin's derisive comments about J.K. Rowling:

Her credit to JK Rowling for giving the "whole fantasy field a boost" is tinged with regret. "I didn't feel she ripped me off, as some people did," she says quietly, "though she could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn't one of them. That hurt."

She doesn't think Rowling ripped her off. Yet she is hurt that people think Rowling was original. I'm guessing she thinks there's a level of borrowing between ripping her off and being original and that the Harry Potter books are in that area. I don't see it. The way magic works is very different in the two worlds. The general storyline is very different. I don't see much similarity at all, actually. Wikipedia's reference to the above quote offers some explanation, however:

The basic premise of Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), in which a boy with unusual aptitude for magic is recognised, and sent to a special school for wizards, resembles that of Harry Potter. The hero encounters Jasper, a typically unpleasant Draco-like rival, in the Flashman tradition.

The way Harry Potter's unusual aptitude for magic is recognized is nothing like Ged's. It's a completely different kind of magic that gets discovered in a different way, and the way he ends up at the school isn't remotely similar. The school itself is nothing like Hogwarts and occupies only a fairly brief section of the book. The rival Jasper appears for maybe one chapter. If that's the best they can do, then I think they're grasping at straws. If that's what Le Guin really had in mind, then it doesn't reflect well on her to have said this.

This isn't the only time I've seen Le Guin overreacting to something and taking it way out of proportion, to the point of almost ignoring more important things. Her response to the by-all-accounts awful pseudo-adaptation of her novels has an introductory paragraph mentioning that the story of the miniseries doesn't resemble the novels at all, four paragraphs on her role, or lack thereof, in the process of producing the miniseries, nine paragraphs on the issue of race, and one final condemnation those who produced the miniseries. She says the miniseries changes her story almost entirely, using some scenes from her books but putting them together in a very different overall plot and removing the important context. That's a significant claim. Yet she doesn't substantiate it, at all.

The one thing she does complain about in detail really is worth complaining about. I would have been very upset if I'd written something like what she wrote, and they had done this to it. She explicitly made most of her characters something like darker natives of the Americas in look. There's a small minority of brown-skinned characters (with straight hair, so more like Indians than Africans) and a small minority of Viking-like pale, blond, blue-eyed barbarians. Most of Earthsea is dominated by people she describes as reddish. She's deliberately playing with people's sense of race and the assumption of whiteness as a norm. She doesn't make a big deal of it in the books, but it's noticeable just because she mentions it offhand as if it's normal.

So it would have been nice if the miniseries had gotten that aspect of her world. But it's far from being central to the storyline itself, as she says it is, and it's certainly not worth nine significant paragraphs when absolutely nothing in her complaint surfaces about any specific things they changed about the storyline. I have no sense, since I haven't seen it, of what specifically they did to change the plot, and I couldn't evaluate it other than the racial issue, which again is relatively minor to the plot of the book, without actually seeing the thing. The way she deals with race in her books is very important for her world and for one of the points she wanted to get across with her novel. But it's simply not central to the novel itself, which is a story that race hardly enters into in the course of the events that take place in it. She deliberately made it non-central, so it's strange that she sees it as so central that she can spend all her time complaining about it without even a quick mention of what they got wrong on more significant matters.

I have a few requests in case anyone reading this blog can help. If you've been following my recent submissions and approvals for the Blackwell philosophy and pop culture series, you might have some idea of why I want some of the following information if anyone has it readily available. If you have exact quotes or specific scenes from the movies or issue numbers in the comics, that would be wonderful. I have a large number of X-Men comic books (mostly from the mid-late 80s until the early 90s, but I have reprints of older stuff too), but if it's easy for anyone to find some then it will make my work much easier in two weeks once I'm done grading and begin writing, so I can focus on the philosophy.

1. I'm looking for any instances in X-Men movies or comic books where any character or the narrator uses race-language or species-language to refer to mutants as distinct from humans. This includes when it's morally loaded but also when it's not. I'm interested both in Magneto's elevated view of the rights of mutants as superior beings but also in the factual claim that mutants are a separate race, sub-species, or species.

2. I'm also looking for instances where Magneto has given moral justifications for his questionable or immoral actions, again from the movies or the comic books. (I have no cartoon episodes to verify the information.) I'm interested in his attitude toward humans and the moral difference he sees between mutants and humans. I'm also interested in any general moral principles he might state in the process of explaining his reasons for doing things. Any specific descriptions of Magneto's actions as terrorist would also be nice or descriptions of particular actions he's taken that are morally questionable or outright immoral would also help me.

3. For those more wizard-inclined, I'm hoping to compile a list of seemingly-chance occurrences in Harry Potter, where something not under the conscious control of any character, i.e. lucky occurrences, are absolutely crucial for the major plot of the book to move along, particularly if Harry's success or the bad guys' defeat or frustration in their purposes hinges on it. I'm also looking for specific instances where any characters talk about issues related to destiny, the various prophecies, time travel and changing the past, free will, and so on. If you can give page numbers in the American paperback editions (hardcover for Deathly Hallows) or chapter numbers otherwise, that would be great. But even just mention of the events and how important they are could help me if it's something I haven't thought of yet, especially if it's a really big deal.

Whatever help anyone can offer is appreciated.

I wrote before that my proposal for a chapter on mutants and the nature of race was accepted to The X-Men and Philosophy volume and that I'd submitted three other proposals for two other volumes. I haven't heard anything one way or the other about my submission about The Hobbit, but I found out today that one of the two proposals I wrote for Harry Potter and Philosophy was accepted. They liked what I submitted about the limits of authorial intent, but they had a number of good submissions on that topic, and they decided they'd rather go with my proposal on destiny in Rowling's series, so they accepted that one. You can see the blog version of my initial thoughts on the matter here.

Before I even started graduate school, I hoped to be able to write popular-level philosophical discussions about questions that I thought needed serious philosophical reflection that science fiction and fantasy often raise, and I guess now I get to write about two topics I care a lot about in two fictional worlds that I've spent a lot of time in. These will be my first publications besides a book review (although it was a book review that made several substantive points, some of which I thought were genuine contributions to how to think about the issues). That means I need to work hard to submit some parts of my dissertation to journals pretty quickly to avoid giving the impression that I'm a lightweight when it comes to publication. Still, I'm glad to have the chance to contribute to these volumes.

Amazon.com has a page reviewing J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which she wrote out by hand, distributed four copies of to people important to her, and sold the fifth to the highest bidder (with the proceeds donated to charity), and the highest bidder turned out to be Amazon. Unfortunately there's no way to read these stories for yourself, since it's not (at least at this point) being published (and I know of no plans ever to do so. One of them, at least, is already present in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and it plays an important role in the plot of that book, but the others are new (although I believe all the titles were mentioned in that book).

It consists of five short fairy tales told in the wizarding world of Harry Potter. A few elements of magic as Rowling conceives of it do appear, but mainly these can stand alone as simply good fairy tales. I was less impressed by "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot" (although it may be better as a story than the impression I get from the review), but the other four strike me as very well-conceived stories with excellent moral lessons, often with nice twists at the end, excellent ironies, and so on.

Many of the things I appreciate about her books seem to be in these stories as well, especially in "The Fountain of Fair Fortune" and "The Warlock's Hairy Heart", which serve as illustrations of what great virtue and its opposite, respectively. The latter tale strikes me as something Edgar Allen Poe could have written. It's impressive that she managed to turn her title "Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump" into what's not just a plausible story for such a name but a fun romp illustrating a nice moral lesson. "The Tale of the Three Brothers" is, of course, not new to those who have read the seventh Harry Potter novel, but it is a great fairy tale in its own right, and that one we can actually read in its published form (which apparently differs in a few details from the handwritten version in this work).

I really wish these end up being published so we can all read the actual stories. Until then, I do appreciate having the Amazon reviews. I'm glad they ended up with the fifth copy.

A week ago, I posted about J.K. Rowling's views on destiny, taking my starting point from this interview that she gave a few weeks ago. I ended with the thought that Rowling's own interpretation of what was going on wasn't the best interpretation of her actual text. That raises questions, however, about how an author might not interpret her own work correctly. She created it, after all. Does authorial intent have no bearing on these kinds of questions? [As with the previous post and the interview, there may be spoilers in this post, so don't read it if you don't know how the series concludes and want to find out in chronological order as the author intended it.]

So what does authorial intent contribute to the story when the text itself can be interpreted in several ways? Can an author determine that a character is, for example, gay even if the text itself doesn't make that clear? Can an author declare the character's motivations even if the text itself doesn't make them clear? This arises in the interview when it comes to the motivations and moral character of Albus Dumbledore in his various machinations in the war against Lord Voldemort.

I say the author can declare the intent of the character, even if the text doesn't, but I know some people make the text fundamental rather than the author. But even if that's right, it doesn't follow that everything an author says in interviews after the fact are canon. There's a debate over whether Dumbledore is a bit too manipulative. Apparently Rowling herself thinks so, judging by this interview, while many fans don't (or at least think he's less so than she seems to think; I'm one of those fans, by the way).

She can tell us what a character did and what the character's motivations were. She doesn't, however, have the power to determine whether those actions and motivations count as manipulation or whether they are immoral. Whether the word 'manipulation' applies is a matter of linguistic fact, and authors of a fantasy world can't determine by themselves what the word 'manipulation' means in English.

By the same token, whether what Dumbledore does is wrong is a matter of moral truth. Whatever determines morality (and views on that abound), it's certainly not authors of fantasy novels by themselves. I can't just write a novel where killing innocents for fun is morally ok. That can't be part of the stipulation within the novel. I can write a novel in a world where people think that, but I can't as an author make their beliefs true. I can write a novel whose characters speak a language slightly differently from English, where the word 'manipulation' means something different from what it means in English, but that doesn't change what we who speak English mean by the word when we apply it to those characters.

So there's room for debate over whether a character really is manipulative even if the author takes a side on the issue, and the same goes for whether what the character did (whether you call it manipulative or not) was morally wrong.

J.K. Rowling did an interview recently with a Dutch newspaper, and it included (among a lot of other things) her thoughts on destiny and free will. (For those who care about spoilers, you might not want to look at the interview or read the rest of this post.)

I have to confess that I'm a little disappointed in her response. She's very smart and well-informed about intellectual matters. But I have to wonder if she presents a false dilemma on this issue, and I'm not even sure the view she expresses here fits well with the books she wrote.

Your books are about the battle between good and evil. Harry is good. But is Voldemort pure Evil? He is also a victim.

He is a victim, indeed. He is a victim, and he has made choices. He was conceived by force and under the influence of a silly infatuation, While Harry was conceived in love; I think the conditions under which you were born form an important fundament of your existence. But Voldemort chose evil. I've been trying to point that out in the books; I gave him choices.

So far so good. It's important to distinguish between being forced into good or evil because of what happens to be true about your conception and making choices. This still doesn't say anything about the metaphysical status of free will. A libertarian will hold that these choices can't be caused by prior events if they're to be free, and a compatibilist will allow that they might be caused by prior events while still being free, because the distinction here is between being forced into something no matter what your own choices would be (merely because of the circumstances of your conception) and making choices (which doesn't yet say anything about whether those choices have explanations and if so what the explanations are).

But where she goes from here is what I find problematic: 

I've heard of people getting away with serious academic work based on the Harry Potter series, but I think this one takes the cake. Molly Diesing is a linguist who has written on the speech-acts of spell-casting in Harry Potter. I wish I had the time to read her paper, because it sounds fascinating to a language geek like me. I'm not entirely sure I'd understand some of the technical linguistics, but that wouldn't stop me if I didn't have other time constraints that I do have.

In case you haven't heard, J.K. Rowling was asked last week if Albus Dumbledore ever experienced romantic love, and Rowling revealed something that never appeared in the books: she'd always thought of Dumbldore as gay. This revelation makes sense of something in the last book that was a little puzzling otherwise, but I won't get into it in case anyone hasn't read the book and wants to get into it spoiler-free. I wish I had the time to write up my thoughts on this, but I'm glad someone has saved me the trouble. Travis at Sword of Gryffindor has already written up most of what I'd want to say:

See also the two comments linked to at the top of his post, in the update. If you haven't read the final book of the series, beware of spoilers in any of this.

Ben Witherington had a good review a while back of Tolkien's The Children of Hurin. For those who are completely out of the loop, this is an unfinished novel of J.R.R. Tolkien, parts of which appeared in The Silmarillion. Christopher Tolkien, who edited the last volume, turned what existed of the bulk of this novel into a real story. Apparently it's much easier to read than most of the posthumous publications of Tolkien that Christopher Tolkien has edited, but it's not all that much like the more widely-read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Sean at myelectionanalysis makes great use of a Harry Potter reference in his reflection on the Ames, Iowa strall poll, speaking of Sam Brownback's taking third place and Mike Huckabee's coming in second:

I know a lot of people think that his third place showing is enough to keep him in the race. I’m not so sure. He threw everything he had into Ames, and still came up short. I think donors who are considering Brownback are going to look long and hard at him, then turn to Huckabee. One of them needs to exit quickly though, as neither can live while the other survives.

This is such a nice appropriation of pop culture that I had to mention it here, but I think it's accurate too. Huckabee and Brownback are marketing themselves to those who because of some intellectual vice (ignorance, too comfortable accepting lies without checking them, inconsistency in who to trust) see Romney as a pretender to the pro-life label. Huckabee could be a contender, but if Brownback is taking much of his support he's not going to have a chance. Brownback doesn't have much of a chance if Huckabee steps out, but the same is not true in reverse. So on the assumptions of those who wrongly fail to recognize that Romney is the best pro-life candidate (which is all that's driving the Brownback campaign at this point), Brownback ought to get out.

According to Wikipedia's article on the Dragonriders of Pern series, Anne McCaffrey says to read Dragondrums before The White Dragon, even though the publication order (and presumably the order she wrote them) is the reverse. Does anyone know if she really did say this, and can it be substantiated? Wikipedia usually requires citation for such claims, but I see none about this claim.

The final Harry Potter novel is due out tomorrow, and most bookstores are treating that as one minute past midnight tonight. Our copy will be arriving by mail tomorrow, because we did the Amazon preorder deal, which should save us some money over buying it in a bookstore.

I thought I'd record some predictions as to what will happen in the seventh book before my predictions could be tainted by actually seeing the book. Since some may read this who haven't read through book six yet, I'll put the predictions in an extended entry to leave the front page free of spoilers for earlier books. 

A little while ago, Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy wrote a brief but interesting review of the new Tolkien novel The Children of Hurin. One statement stood out to me as especially interesting:

The story also emphasizes Tolkien's view (perhaps influenced by his experiences in World War I) that waging war against evil often requires time and patience, avoiding both premature defeatism and premature large-scale offensives.

I don't know whether this is accurate to Tolkien's intent, but I thought the ensuing discussion in the comments was very helpful in terms of why he takes Tolkien this way. But what's perhaps more interesting to me is that this seems like a perfectly normal use of the word 'evil', one that assumes nothing in particular about the metaphysical or moral content of the term. Speaking of fighting against evil in this sense does not involve any assumption about some force of evil in the world, never mind about whether such a thing is as powerful as any good force.

It amazes me how many philosophers I know think that using 'evil' as a noun in this way somehow reveals a hidden Manicheanism or dualism in one's view of good and evil (i.e. the view that good and evil are equally powerful forces). Sometimes the claim is put that President Bush is "ontologizing evil" by using the word 'evil' as a noun in this way, which is philosophical shorthand for the same point. A friend of mine called me up last week for other reasons, but the conversation degenerated to a series of his gripes against some of the views I've argued for on this blog that he'd been holding in for a couple years and had to get out before he leaves town (at least that's what it seemed to me he was doing), and at one point he just couldn't fathom how I could possibly think President Bush is not a dualist of this sort given how often he uses the word 'evil' as a noun in this way.

This kind of abstract language isn't all that uncommon. Are people ontologizing cancer as if it's some all-powerful force in the universe when they say that we're forming a crusade against breast cancer? Are Mothers Against Drunk Driving treating drunk driving as some evil force on the level of divinity if they speak as if they're waging a war against drunk driving? Are politicians ontologizing corruption as some spiritual force as powerful as God whenever they speak of fighting corruption? I don't see how it's any different when it comes to fighting terrorism, fighting terror, or fighting evil. It's a credit to the Volokh Conspiracy readers that no one repeated that meme in the comments.

J.K. Rowling regularly speaks against this sort of thing. It's one thing to photshop women as a matter of course to increase their bust size and thin their waist. Not that it's not immoral with adult women, but it seems to me to be a completely different matter to do it with someone who is underage (just turned 17, probably 16 when she took the picture) who is portraying someone even more underage (15 at the beginning of the movie, 16 at the end).

Several of the commenters have already made this point, but I'll make it again here. If whoever was responsible for this perverse act doesn't think Emma Watson is attractive enough to teenagagers as she is, then our culture's standards of beauty have become even more warped than I had thought (and I've long thought them to be pretty twisted). We already tell girls in too many ways that they're not good enough unless they look like Emma Watson. Now it turns out even Emma Watson isn't even good enough as she is.

Update: More here. I've also now linked above to Rowling's own rant against this sort of thing.

Update 2: Warner Brothers claims that they didn't authorize this. They've asked IMAX to remove it from their site.