Thursday, February 16, 2012

Brief Research Note: HPL

One of the papers I am currently working on features H.P. Lovecraft. Yesterday, while watching a presentation by Richard Dawkins and Laurence Krauss on youtube I came across an interesting thought. Dawkins had pointed out (as he done in the past) that the human brain is evolved to cope with certain time frames which are far smaller than the geological scale across which evolution happens and the universe was formed. Reflecting on several comments that HPL makes in his letters and fiction writing which display acute awareness of geological time scales, I wondered if it was not this aspects of his thinking which caused him to be dismiss religious and supernatural explanations in favour of science and unbelief. It is a matter of his philosophical thinking that I will likely follow up on in a specific paper of its own.

Here is one of my favourite quotes from HPL:

"It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive short cut of supernaturalism."

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