{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1917",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1917,
    "subject": "Scientific and mystical explanations in _New Sun_",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-11-03T21:49:17+00:00",
    "last": "1999-11-03T21:49:17+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0028-0374@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Dan Rabin",
        "address": "danrabin at a.crl.com"
      },
      "date": "1999-11-03T21:49:17+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Scientific and mystical explanations in _New Sun_",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "A couple of points:\n\n1.  Wolfe clearly enjoys having simultaneous scientific and mystical\nexplanations for phenomena (viz. Dr. Crane's explanation of Silk's\nenlightenment).  I think the early story \"Trip, trap\" gives a good example\nof this, where each of three beings has a satisfactory (to itself) way of\nlooking at their three-way encounter, one of which is decidedly\nfairy-tale-like.\n\n2.  I think Wolfe has summed up his attitude on the roles of the respective\npoints of view in the remarks of the tea-vending woman at the Saltus fair:\n\n\"Oh, it [the cathedral of the Claw, which Severian and Dorcas had seen\nsuspended in midair] rose all right.  When my grandson-in-law heard about\nit, he was fairly struck flat for half a day.  Then he pasted up a kind of\nhat out of paper and held it over my stove, and it went up, and then he\nthought it was nothing that the cathedral rose, no miracle at all.  That\nshows what it is to be a fool--it never came to him that the reason things\nwere made so was so the cathedral would rise just like it did.  He can't\nsee the Hand in nature.\"\n\nExcuse me, I have to take a little rest every time I read that...\n\nOK, I'm better now.  On the surface it's a sly jab at deism, but we might\nextrapolate: Mercury being a barren planet that looks like the Moon doesn't\nmake it any less the Messenger of the Gods; the stars being\ngravitationally-bound fusion reactors doesn't make them any less jewels\nplaced in the firmament by the Creator, and so on.  Explanations don't\nexplain; reductionism doesn't reduce.  A miracle remains a wonder even when\nexplained and reduced.\n\n[I don't happen to agree with this point of view, but I can't dismiss it.]\n\n  -- Dan Rabin"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}