The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener Quotes

“If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron… my answer is “How should I know?”… I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.”
― Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

“As I will be saying over and over again in this rambling volume, I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries. What is the difference between something and nothing? Why is there something rather than nothing? Should the something of which the universe is fundamentally composed be regarded as like atoms or be regarded as more like a mind? Or is the substratum best thought of as something neutral: material when structured one way, mental when structured another way? I have no desire even to try to answer such questions. I find nothing absurd about the notion that the external world is the mind of God, nor do I find it repulsive to suppose that God can create a world of substance, utterly unlike ideas in God’s mind or anybody’s mind, that can exist whether God thinks about it or not. How can I, a mere mortal slightly above an ape in intelligence, know what it means to say that something is “created” by God, or “thought” by God? One can play endless metaphysical games with such phrases,3 but I can no more grasp what is behind such questions than my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.”
― Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

“My wife and I own a cat we call Eureka, after Dorothy’s cat in the fourth Oz book. In Eureka’s dim mind she must be a kind of polytheist, fed as she is by the two of us, and by neighbors when we take a trip; surrounded on all sides by giant creatures who move about on their hind legs to do things utterly beyond her ken. But we who are her gods have a power of speculation far greater than that of her tiny feline brain.”
― Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

“My anthology would be incomplete without the chapter on “The Ethics of Elfland” from Orthodoxy.26 In the spirit of Hume, though Hume is never mentioned, Chesterton argues that all natural laws should be looked upon as magic because there is no logical connection between any cause and its effect. Fairy tales, said GK, remind us that the laws of nature have an arbitrary quality in that they could, for all we know, be quite other than what they are. Maybe the regularities of nature, its weird repetitions, as Chesterton called them, are not logically necessary but exist because God, like a small child, is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg.”
― Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

“The entire counterculture scene of the sixties, with its weird mixture of kinky sex, pot, rock, zen, astrology, obscene language, and fusty anarchist theory, always struck me as a prime example of how quickly angry rebels turn into other-directed conformists of the most extreme sort. After telling everybody over thirty that each person has a right to do his or her own thing, millions of youngsters proceeded to do identical things. Boys let their hair grow to their shoulders. Little girls learned how to shock their grandmothers with four-letter words. Boys and girls alike bought the same records, worshiped the same rock stars. The radicals among them loudly proclaimed their devotion to “participatory democracy,” simultaneously praising Hanoi and plastering their rooms with photos of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.”
― Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener