This 5th and final installment in Don Albers’ long interview with Martin Gardner clarifies his philosophical theism, tackles pseudoscience, and glimpses what he’s up to now. Remember, he’s still at it. Gardner just released revised editions of his Scientific American columns here at Cambridge, and has other projects in the works too.

Start from the beginning of the interview here >>

My Favorite Book

DA: Which of your books is in some sense a favorite?

Gardner: I think my Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener is my favorite because it is a detailed account of everything I believe.

DA: When you tell people what you believe, unless it’s Pablum-like, there’s likely to be some strong reaction.

Gardner:Well, the book is controversial because almost everybody who believes in a personal god is into an established religion. The idea of believing in God and not being affiliated with any particular religion is a strange kind of a position to take.

DA: Did the reviews really focus on that?

Gardner: It didn’t get many reviews. It got some good reviews mainly by Christians. The best review was by an Anglican priest, who reviewed it for an Anglican journal. It was a ten-page review. That was the best review it ever got. Actually, a lot of liberal Protestants and very liberal Catholics are really philosophical theists, but they won’t use the term. A lot of prominent Protestant preachers who are liberal Protestants don’t buy any of the traditional doctrines. Take Harry Emerson Fosdick and Norman Vincent Peale, for example. You don’t know what they believed about any Christian doctrine. I don’t think Norman Vincent Peale bought the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection, but he had a big following among conservative Protestants.

DA: You’ve talked about the surprise you threw at some readers in your The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, when you said you are a philosophical theist. For those who don’t know what the term means, you began to explain that this is a belief in a god, and you said in your case that prayer was a part of it, and that you believe in a hereafter.

Gardner: That’s true, I do.

DA: What does your hereafter look like?

Gardner: You can’t say anything about it at all. It’s like talking about attributes of God. It’s in a transcendental realm, and you just believe by hope and a leap of faith that there’s that possibility, but you can’t say anything about it in any detail because obviously nobody knows anything about it. I don’t buy the mediums who communicate with the dead. There’s no empirical evidence for it, and no logical proof, but the possibility is open. If there is a personal god, an after existence follows automatically if you think that God is just, because obviously nature doesn’t care anything about human life. A thousand people can be snuffed out of existence by an earthquake. So to me, the belief in a personal god and belief in some kind of immortality is part of the same leap of faith. It’s hard to have one without the other. But I certainly don’t know that there is an afterlife, in the sense of having any kind of knowledge. It’s a peculiar thing in my brain. It may even have a genetic basis. Philosophical theism is entirely emotional. As Kant said, he destroyed pure reason to make room for faith.

DA: How long have you been a philosophical theist? Did it develop over a long period of time?

Gardner: Absolutely yes—it is a remnant I saved out of my Protestant past.

DA: I don’t know if it’s any comfort, but you’re certainly back in Protestant country again, here in North Carolina.

Gardner: Oh yes, there are lots of Seventh Day Adventists around here. I was quite interested in the Adventist movement when I was in high school. George McCready Price, a prominent Adventist, convinced me that evolution was a false theory when I was in high school. I have a collection of his books. He wrote about 15 or 20 books.

DA: Of the sixty books you’ve done, some have sold very well—The Annotated Alice certainly has done well.

Gardner: Yes, it has sold more than a million copies if you include paperbacks and translations. It has never been out of print.

DA: How do you explain your fascination with Alice in Wonderland?

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This continues Don Albers’ long interview of Gardner from last week. Or, start from the beginning.

Adam, Eve, and Navels

DA: In 1979, you talked about retiring from Scientific American that year, because you were going to turn 65. Some of us expressed real sadness at the fact that you weren’t going to be cranking out those monthly columns anymore. You said that there were other things that you really wanted to write about that you were afraid you were never going to get to unless you gave up the columns. You’ve had a lot of time to do that and you’re written quite a lot since then.

Gardner: Well, I do a regular column in The Skeptical Inquirer, and those columns get reprinted in books. There’s one due out in another month. Norton is doing a collection of Skeptical Inquirer columns. My editor there is Bob Weil who earlier was at St. Martin’s. Now he’s a top editor at Norton. He thought of a great title for the book—“Did Adam and Eve have Navels?” That was one of my columns. It’s a very perplexing problem for Biblical fundamentalists. It’s hard to figure out, because if they had navels it indicated an event that never took place. And of course it applies to hundreds of other things too. Did trees in the Garden of Eden have rings? If they were really trees, they had to have rings, but the rings indicate growth over time, alternate winters and summers.

DA: So how did you deal with the navel problem?

Gardner: I just sort of give a history of it, and various opinions that theologians have had toward the problem.

DA: I’d never heard that posed as a problem before, but I can understand why it would drive some people crazy.

Gardner: Oh, it’s a big problem for fundamentalists. Whenever I meet fundamentalists I usually ask them about that, and they’re very puzzled.

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Continuing from last week, we’ll continue with Don Albers‘ 2004 interview with Martin Gardner right where we left off:

Navy Service

DA: In December of 1941, the U.S. entered World War II and you enlisted in the Navy.

Gardner: I ended up serving on DE 134, a destroyer escort, in the Atlantic. I was miserably seasick for about three days, and then I was never seasick again. I couldn’t wait for the war to end, but later I looked back at it as a rather pleasurable time of my life. You’re on a ship, you make friends with your shipmates, you got liberties now and then, and you didn’t have to worry about anything.

I’ve had migraine headaches all my life that were fairly severe when I was in high school. When I enlisted in the Navy, I did not list my migraines because I was afraid they wouldn’t take me. I feared that I might develop migraine headaches during battle situations. We were part of a so-called “killer group” of six destroyers looking for German submarines. During my four years in the Navy, I never had a migraine headache. I’m convinced that they’re associated with periods of anxiety. When you’re in the Navy, you don’t worry about what you’re going to do tomorrow, what tie to put on, etc. You just follow orders. In a way, you have a big sense of freedom. Otherwise, I have no other explanation.

DA: But when the war ended, you were glad to get out.

Gardner: At the time I was glad to get out. I was the yeoman who decommissioned the ship in Green Cove Springs, Florida. It was what they called a ‘Caribou’ for six. We worked together, sweeping and looking for German subs. When they were mothballed in Florida there was one missing; it got torpedoed and sunk.

DA: Over what period of time were the six DE’s together?

Gardner: The whole time I was on the DE.

DA: Which was how many years?

Gardner: About three years. Before going to sea, I spent about a year at Madison, Wisconsin, which had a radio training school there. I handled public relations for the school, and edited a school newspaper.

DA: In 1942, German submarines were devastating allied shipping.

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