My attention was drawn to this interview with Phillip Pulman, the author of the “His Dark Materials” trilogy, of which “The Golden Compass” is, as of this writing, still raking in enormous amounts of money despite sharply mixed reviews. Unsurprisingly due to the widespread vilification of the movie by US religious leaders, the movie is the most popular movie in the world right now, but a distant second in the US.
In this interview, Pullman elucidates his positions a bit more clearly, and surprisingly… he’s a fairly regular guy, writing the story his conscience told him to write. In my opinion, the right-wing religious whackos are way off-base on the trilogy, akin to assertions that JK Rowling was promoting witchcraft with the Harry Potter series or that Dungeons and Dragons was responsible for a rash of murder-suicides in the 1980s.
Can I elucidate my own position as far as atheism is concerned? I don’t know whether I’m an atheist or an agnostic. I’m both, depending on where the standpoint is.
The totality of what I know is no more than the tiniest pinprick of light in an enormous encircling darkness of all the things I don’t know – which includes the number of atoms in the Atlantic Ocean, the thoughts going through the mind of my next-door neighbour at this moment and what is happening two miles above the surface of the planet Mars. In this illimitable darkness there may be God and I don’t know, because I don’t know.
But if we look at this pinprick of light and come closer to it, like a camera zooming in, so that it gradually expands until here we are, sitting in this room, surrounded by all the things we do know – such as what the time is and how to drive to London and all the other things that we know, what we’ve read about history and what we can find out about science – nowhere in this knowledge that’s available to me do I see the slightest evidence for God.
So, within this tiny circle of light I’m a convinced atheist; but when I step back I can see that the totality of what I know is very small compared to the totality of what I don’t know. So, that’s my position.
Well said. I wish there was a shorter way to say it.
Golden Compass
It was a great book. The trilogy unfortunately went sharply downhill from me from there for two reasons.
First, he fell into the trap that many writers do: he introduced multiple dimensions, which made the world of his story infinitely larger than he was prepared to handle. The scope became so big that he lost his grasp on the thruline.
Second, he decided to spend half of the third book doing a little anthropology lesson with a character that we’d never met in the previous two.
Third, I have no problem with him being an atheist, or an agnostic, any more than I have a problem with C.S. Lewis being a christian or Orson Scott Card being mormon. But the problem was, he wasn’t able to hide his message within the story very well. By which I mean, there were a number of points in the story in which it was very clear that the *writer*, not any characters, had an axe to grind.
To be fair, C.S. Lewis, my favorite author, falls prey to this mistake as well. In fact, there are no writers more guilty of writing a sermon and then calling it a story than many Christian bookwriters, and *especially* Christian playwrights (There has only been ONE Christian play I’ve ever seen that didn’t have a gag-me-with-a-rosary-everyone-should-love-Christ ending… and ironically it was the York Cycle Passion play written 500 years ago).
There have been some writers who have been able to put their beliefs in their literature, but done it in a way that works *with* the story. Tolkien is a big example. He was a strong Catholic, and the Lord of the Rings reflects it. But the message never takes you out of the world of the story. J.K. Rowling has also accomplished this with good effect.
So my problem with Phillip Pullman isn’t that he injected an agnostic/atheist message into fantasy. In my opinion, Fantasy is one of the best genres for exploring religion, and Atheism was due its turn for exploration. My problem is that he did it clumsily, and his views got in the way of what was otherwise a good story.