Martin Gardner

From Philosopedia

Gardner, Martin (21 October 1914 - 22 May 2010 )

Gardner, who was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago in 1936. After Navy service during World War II, he worked as a reporter for the Tulsa Tribune. His mathematical column for Scientific American, originally called "Soma Cube," ran from 1956-1986. Among the more than 100 books and booklets Gardner has authored are: Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, On the Wild Side, his collected Skeptical Inquirer columns, The New Age, and Notes of a Fringe Watcher (1991).

The Healing Revelation of Mary Baker Eddy (1993) exposes the religious leader's plagiarism - he shows how Eddy "copies shamelessly, often word for word,"� not only from John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and others, but also from Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. Gardner maintains Quimby was the one from whom Eddy took the central idea of Christian Science.

Gardner, who was raised as a Protestant fundamentalist, called himself a "philosophical theist," rejecting all supernaturalism and admitting he only believes in a god to "console" himself. According to his New York Times obituary,

• He wrestled with religion in essays and in a novel that described his personal journey from fundamentalism, The Flight of Peter Fromm (1973). He ultimately found no reason to believe in anything religious except a human desire to avoid "deep-seated despair." So, he said, he believed in God.

Naturalists in philosophy noted that "believed in God" was the view of a fictional Peter Fromm. The Flight of Peter Fromm is a novel about a young Pentecostal who loses his faith while a student at the University of Chicago Divinity School. It details the mental journey many in the freethought movement have to make as a minority group.

In a March/April 1998 interview in Skeptical Inquirer, he said,

• . . . bad science contributes to the steady dumbing down of our nation. Crude beliefs get transmitted to political leaders and the result is considerable damage to society. We see this happening now in the rapid rise of the religious right and how it has taken over large segments of the Republican Party. I think fundamentalist and Pentecostalist Pat Robertson is a far greater menace to America than, say, Jesse Helms who will soon be gone and forgotten.

In 1996, he wrote Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic, More Notes of a Fringe Watcher, in which he stated his findings about modern cosmology, the superstring theory, the theology of astronomers, and archeological nonsense.

Gardner has been called a "deist" in Free Inquiry, for in The Night Is Large: Collected Essays, 1938 -1995 (1996) he states that he believes in God while simultaneously admitting that atheists have the better arguments.

In The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, he explains in an entire chapter why he is not an atheist. In short, he states that he is a philosophical theist,� adding, I believe because it consoles me.�

Gardner has been co-chair of the Council for Secular Humanism's Center for Inquiry Capital Fund Drive, but his general views about secular humanism are found to be confusing by large numbers of individuals who label their outlook as being secular humanist. Some have questioned his calling Steve Allen a secular humanist, although both raised funds for Paul Kurtz's secular humanist dues-paying organization.

Wikipedia describes Gardner's views

While critical of organized religions, Gardner believes in God, claiming that this belief cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed by reason. At the same time, he is skeptical of claims that God has communicated with human beings through spoken or telepathic revelation or through miracles in the natural world.

Gardner's philosophy may be summarised as follows: There is nothing supernatural, and nothing in human reason or visible in the world to compel people to believe in God. The mystery of existence is enchanting, but a belief in The Old One comes from faith without evidence. However, with faith and prayer people can find greater happiness than without. If there is an afterlife, the loving Old One is real. "[To an atheist] the universe is the most exquisite masterpiece ever constructed by nobody", from G. K. Chesterton, is one of Martin's favorite quotes.

Aha! Moments

Gardner, 95, was written about by John Tierney in The New York Times (20 October 2009) concerning his having left a children's magazine in 1956 to do a monthly column on "recreational mathematics" in Scientific American.

(See entry for Urantia.)

The New York Times Obituary

Read the obituary.

{Free Inquiry, Fall 1992}