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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October 1, 2008

For this week’s contest, click here!

Hello, Leiter Reports! I’m very glad that I have a couple philosophy degrees, because the conditional logic that you guys threw my way … well, wasn’t too complicated per se, I just don’t see much of it during a regular work day! That wasn’t supposed to rhyme.

Anywho, I’m gonna pick THREE winners this week rather than one; because the response was so overwhelming, and I want to raise the chances for everyone. So I’ll announce the winners of Hexaflexagons, Probability Paradoxes, and the Tower of Hanoi.

If you don’t win, don’t fret! Along with the winners, I’ll post the next contest. Two more weeks to go.

There are three simple ways to do it, and you guys nailed them all.

Ask about the other guy: “If I were to ask a member of the other tribe the if this (pointing) road leads to the village, what would he say?”

The soul-searching method: “If I were to ask you if the road over there leads to the village, what would you say?”

The Biconditional (hey, I remember these): Warren C. Haggstrom of Ann Arbor suggested the following phrasing to Gardner (it’s in the book) to take the ambiguity out of questions within questions: “Of the two statements - ‘You are a liar’ and ‘This road leads to a village,’ is one, and only one of them true?”

I like Haggstrom’s language; it’s simpler than the “if and only if” conditional.

Check this out. In a 1957 letter to Scientific American, a couple of writers (one a Cambridge cosmologist) pointed out that you could know that two words, say, ‘pish’ and ‘tush’ mean yes and no, but not know which means which. Even so, given the liar/truth-tellers a crafty logician could ask:

“If I asked you whether the road I am pointing to is the road to the village, would you say pish?” If the response is “Pish,” then that’s the road to take. If “Tush,” take the other road.

Though not categorically correct, I also would have accepted: “Did you know that they are serving free beer in the village?”

This week’s winners:

M. M. Smith with a nice little poem, Gathering for Gardner-style. He changed the logician to a young girl for clarity.

The lass questioned the teen on her plight
But feared he might lie by birthright
So she quizzed the youth’s ken:
“Would the other tribe’s men
Say to the left, or the right?”

The lass then took the other road.

Oh, man! A. Andrews managed to tie this one to our economic crisis:

There once was man from a U(niversity),
got stuck at a fork, what to do!?!
A truth-teller he sought, but discern he could not,
whether what he was saying was true.

He said to his new friend “Dear sir,
If an opponent you were (that is, a member of the other tribe),
Would you tell me to stay on branch B, or A?
Oh, and please do try not to slur.” (For the man from the University was old, and his hearing had declined).

“My friend,” said the native, “I know
that my opponent will tell you to go,
down this road right here, letter B, but I fear,
that with you this way I must go. (For the man’s sight had also declined, and this was apparent to the native).

Now the university man was quite bright,
and he knew well that the native might
be telling the truth, but with out any proof,
he could not be sure he was right, (at least, he could not be sure whether the native were a truth-teller).

But this quandary could not overcome
the mind of the man who was from
the University, for the answer, you see,
was clearer for him than for some.

He started down branch letter A
But why, you ask, did he stray,
from the path advised by the native disguised?
Since the native’s true tribe was still vague.

The answer will now be secured:
The question the prof asked ensured
that the native’s report, or his opponent’s retort
would certainly be a false word.

So along down branch A he went
Till every last dime he had spent
It was gone very fast, for no bill was passed,
that would, an economic crisis, prevent.

Winner #3, picked at random, was B. Bix. with an “Ask the other guy” method. There were some other memorable answers, some insightful, others, well, wrong, but good for a laugh. I’ll post them in the Hall of Fame page up top later today.

Thanks, Leiter readers, I knew I could count on you. Enter again!

And the next contest, after the jump.

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Continuing from last Thursday - Don Albers’ long interview with math puzzle legend Martin Gardner.

Yes, he once edited a magazine for girls.

Newcomers: start from the beginning here >>

Humpty Dumpty’s

Gardner: That’s right, it’s not until I started selling stories to Esquire that I thought I could make a decent living as a freelance writer, but Esquire changed editors after I had sold them many stories. The new editor had a different policy, and he didn’t care for the kind of stories I was writing. So I moved to New York City because that’s where all the action is for writers. And that’s when I got a job at Humpty Dumpty’s Magazine.

DA: Now that’s a curious move.

Gardner: I had a friend who worked for Parents’ Institute, and who was in charge of their periodicals for children. They were starting a new magazine called Humpty Dumpty’s, and were looking for activity features, where you fold the page or stick something through the page, or cut; where you destroy the page. So he hired me to do the activity features for Humpty Dumpty’s.

DA: Had you ever done anything like that?

Gardner: No, but I grew up on a magazine called John Martin’s Book. Everybody’s forgotten about it. It flourished in the twenties, and the art editor, George Carlson, did activity features for John Martin, where you cut things out of the page and fold them intothings, pictures that turned upside down, or you held them up to the light and saw through. I’d always been intrigued by George Carlson’s activity features, and so I started out just sort of imitating George Carlson, taking up where he left off, and inventing new ideas of my own. I did that for eight years. I did the activity features, and I did a short story in every issue about the adventures of Humpty Dumpty, Jr. The magazine is supposed to be edited by Humpty Dumpty, who’s an egg. The wife of the publisher thought of the idea of having Humpty edit the new magazine. She suggested a series of tales about a little egg, who was Humpty Dumpty’s son. I started with the first issue of the magazine, and continued as a “contributing editor” for eight years. The magazine came out ten times a year, so I had eighty short stories about Humpty Dumpty, Jr. that I’ve never had reprinted. I haven’t found a publisher for them yet. Most of the books that come out for children now are done by artists, and they’re mainly art books with small amounts of text underneath the pictures. Not being an artist may be one reason I can’t sell any of these stories. I worked hard on these stories. I have the rights to the stories but not to their illustrations.
I also did a poem in every issue —“Advice from Humpty Sr. to His Son.” —Poems of moral advice. They’re just jingles, and I did get a book out of them. It was published by Simon and Schuster, titled Never Make Fun of a Turtle, My Son. The title refers to a poem about how you shouldn’t make fun of people who are different from you.

DA: This must have taken a lot of time to do.

Gardner: Yes, it was my only job. I’d gotten married and we had a son to support, and I couldn’t make a living in New York freelancing. I made maybe a sale or two of something trivial, but not enough to live on. So I jumped at the chance to work for Parents. I worked at home. There was a short period where I went to the office and edited a magazine for girls called Polly Pigtails. I was Polly Pigtails. I wrote a letter for each issue from Polly Pigtails to her readers. It later changed its name to Calling All Girls.

DA: So you actually edited a magazine aimed at girls.

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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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Contest #1

Update: This is week #1’s puzzle. Click here for the current one!

We’re giving away copies of the first two editions of Martin Gardner’s New Mathematical Library for the next 6 weeks. How to win? Simply solve the puzzle! I’ll pick a winner at random and announce the winner the following Wednesday.

The rules:

These are courtesy rules. On the internets, they’re hard to enforce, of course.

• Only one entry per person. If you win once, please refrain from entering in the following weeks.
  
• These books represent new editions of Gardner’s massive Scientific American corpus. Many people know these puzzles by heart. If you do, please encourage a Gardner neophyte to take a crack at it. Tell your local high school math club. [UPDATE]: If you know the puzzle, but pull off an awesome answer for it (see the next rule), by all means, enter.
  
• Creative entries are encouraged, and could override the random selection process. In the spirit of a true puzzle-master, answer with a limerick, or rebus; record a short song if you’re so inclined! It’ll be posted, of course.
• The first three puzzles will come from Origami, Eleusis, and the Soma Cube. The following three will come from Hexaflexagons, Probability Paradoxes, and the Tower of Hanoi. The corresponding book is the prize.
• Entry selection is at the sole discretion of Jonathan. Solving the puzzle is the real joy here.
• Please get me your answers by 5:00EST on Tuesday.
  

All right. Now for the fun part. These rules will be linked in subsequent contests.

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