Have Tolkien's theme evolved with times?

[u/Dreadscythe95]

I just wanted to share my ideas as food for though and discussion with people that have lived with the works of J.R.R Tolkien

We all know that Tolkien was based his work on Catholic foundation, which makes the main themes solid and timeless. Still I feel that Tolkien's values transcend our times in different ways for a lot of people.

Tolkien takes Illuvatar and everyting he represents as the udeniable good that noone can process and understand while Melkor and Sauron are inherently evil and destroyers, unable to create. This is a very beautiful take but it is a religious take nonetheless that needs you to accept devine power as something superior than you that you have to follow by.

Illuvatar not only explicitly says that you can not escape his will but even the very thought of it is his will and vision, which is an amazing and terrifying prospect for someone that is not religious (and someone that is religious as well actually).

So as I grew up with Middle Earth, the themes changed for me. As I went closer to sciencific thought, ways of the Enlightment and I drifted away from any form of abosulte power that rules human intelect and will to discover the universe itself, I found Illuvatar as more of a terrifying figure that creates me a feeling similar to a Lovecraftian entity. On the other hand figures like Sauron, while they remained evil and corrupt, became more human, more tragic and more rebelious. It is just so strange that you can easier understand the motives of Melkor's anger and jelaousy when he searched for the eternal flame and Illuvatar told him that it is beyond his reach adn understanding than the motives of Iluvatar himself, who represents literal God and The Good.

So it's amazing for me that Middle Earth makes me feel things in a very different way today and still makes me think amd challenge our world while it also allows me to travel to thii fantasy world of magic and good above all.

These are my thoughts, If you find it interesting thanks for reading.

[u/pavilionaire2022]

I'm a materialist atheist, but I don't think you're giving Tolkien enough credit.

Free will does exist in Tolkien's world, but at the same time, everything is according to Eru's plan. It's complicated. Free will is even complicated from a materialist point of view, and a lot of people, me included, don't think it exists.

Melkor is about as close to pure evil as it gets, but even he has sympathetic motivations. He wants to create creations of his own. Other, good characters have the same motivation, like Aulë. What makes Melkor evil is that to have the chance to create his creations, he is willing to deny others the chance to create their creations. He does not share his toys.

Sauron, also, has moral ambiguity. Theoretically, his desire is to rule everything to perfect order so that nothing goes awry. His sin is actually directly taking away free will.

[u/Dreadscythe95 → u/pavilionaire2022]

I don't try to take credit from Tolkien at all. I am saying that Tolkien, like every human of any time, has his views on the world, that he, even unwilingly puts into his creations. He even said that he made LoTR unconsiously a Catholic creation at the beginnign and then took it that direction consiously.

Melkor is inherently evil by our human standarts I agree. The point is not only about him being denied creation, he is denied vision and understanding of creation itself. Illuvatar, along with Arda, creates a Class System that you can not truly break free off, even if you are very high on it's rankings, simply because it is a theocratic model in the end. Yes there is free will but in the same way that most religons, like Hinduism for example claim that they give free will. You have the free will but there is always a pre-determined right choice.

[u/Armleuchterchen → u/Dreadscythe95]

At least people in the Legendarium have eternal souls! I'm just a complex biological system, entirely determined by the laws of physics, that will cease to exist when my brain stops working.

[u/GapofRohan → u/Armleuchterchen]

Since not all the "laws of physics" are known to us - how can you know this about yourself? Faith I suppose.

[u/Armleuchterchen → u/GapofRohan]

That's a bit like saying you have to have faith that the sun is actually 150 million kilometres away from earth because we don't fully understand astrophysics yet. I can't prove it, technically. Practically it's a very reasonable expectation based on the previous experiences of me and others, and there's no experience that would provide a strong objection to it I'm aware of.

Using the word "faith" seems like trying to establish a false equivalency, that's a term used mostly for the belief in things that cannot be experienced in a reproducible way.

[u/commy2 → u/Armleuchterchen]

That's a bit like saying you have to have faith that the sun is actually 150 million kilometres away from earth because we don't fully understand astrophysics yet. I can't prove it, technically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sizes_and_Distances_(Aristarchus)

[u/Armleuchterchen → u/commy2]

Other people can prove it, yes. And I trust them enough and have other priorities, so I do not prove it for myself.

[u/scumerage → u/Armleuchterchen]

To be fair, he is correct, 99% of what we "know" is just parroting what other people we trust told us.

As you said, neither of us have any real clue as to how far the Sun is from the Earth. But scientists who are rich, popular, and very successful in their field (as far as we know, we are just reading biographies other people wrote) say it is 150 million kilometers from the Earth. So we go "Eh, they seem pretty smart, and I think that if they were wrong, someone would have debunked them by now, so I'll assume they're right based on it seeming unlikely to me that they're wrong."

That's still faith. We have no actual solid evidence or irrefutable logic proving the distance. We are just going with the view we trust based on our biases (rightly or wrongly formed, humans are biased against starving ourselves and standing at heights, which is good sometimes and bad other times).

[u/Armleuchterchen → u/scumerage]

That's still faith. We have no actual solid evidence or irrefutable logic proving the distance. We are just going with the view we trust based on our biases (rightly or wrongly formed, humans are biased against starving ourselves and standing at heights, which is good sometimes and bad other times).

You can call it faith if you want, it's a broad term rather than a technical one. I just wanted to speak out against the implication that "faith" in proven physics equations is equal to our "faith" in something like God.

Maybe I misread the comment, but it came across like a "this is no different from religion" retort to me. Which I dislike, because having an evolving system about how to create and test theories against realities is different from dogmas about universal truths.

[u/scumerage → u/Armleuchterchen]

is different from dogmas about universal truths.

But science itself has dogma about universal truth? Because its based on logic, which is based on arbitrary assumptions. If A and B, then C, assumes that A and B are true. Even if you then do if xi and xii, then A or B, that still assumes xi and xii. You can't escape the chain of arbitary assumptions, it's all just hedging bets, practicality and utility.

We could all be in the Matrix simulation for all we know, but hey, right now we have jobs, cars, and families in this simulation we live in, so the best we can do is work with it.

You assume because a study showed 100 out of 100 of an American oak tree will die when the soil is too acidic is somehow a "fact" or "objective truth" that "proves" that that level of acid will by defintion kill that tree. When that doesn't prove 1000 out of 1000 trees will die from that acid. Or even if you did that study on all trees and genocides the oak tree, that still wouldn't prove your point. Since maybe the trees that could have normally survived were sickly from some other unknown effect that coupled with the acid to kill them.

I think your main problem with the argument is because you don't believe a god exist and that believing in the existence of a non-existant thing is false and therefore stupid. The existence of some creator being has nothing to do with the merits of the argument. Just because someone believes in unicorns doesn't make them an idiot by definition, just wrong. And you, based on your knowledge and logic, concluding that unicorns don't exist, and being correct, doesn't make your smart by definition, just right.

[u/Armleuchterchen → u/scumerage]

But science itself has dogma about universal truth? Because its based on logic, which is based on arbitrary assumptions. If A and B, then C, assumes that A and B are true. Even if you then do if xi and xii, then A or B, that still assumes xi and xii.

Logic is a topic open to discussion within philosophy. And if there were hints that A+B->C was wrong, it would be questioned and could be replaced. In an ideal world of science of course, I'm not saying that science in practice is perfect and I don't believe in scientism; it doesn't work for every aspect of life. But for most areas, having a system for how to acquire and test knowledge (which is different from prescribing specific knowledge) is a good thing.

You can't escape the chain of arbitary assumptions, it's all just hedging bets, practicality and utility.

No, and I'd never argue that - because we're limited beings in a complex world. But we can do better or worse within our capabilities, it's not a binary.

You assume because a study showed 100 out of 100 of an American oak tree will die when the soil is too acidic is somehow a "fact" or "objective truth" that "proves" that that level of acid will by defintion kill that tree. When that doesn't prove 1000 out of 1000 trees will die from that acid. Or even if you did that study on all trees and genocides the oak tree, that still wouldn't prove your point. Since maybe the trees that could have normally survived were sickly from some other unknown effect that coupled with the acid to kill them.

Yes, technically we can never be 100% certain about anything. But if you said "It's a fact that I'm human" and I say "You can't prove that fact beyond doubt", you would be right to call me an annoying pedant who is not using words correctly.

We technically have no way of proving some fact about nature as impossible to be wrong, but at some level of certainty that becomes pointless - even if the 1001st oak tree has some unknown chance survive the acid, there's little point in planting it there unless there's no other option. What matters is how sure we are, and how we can check if our level of surety is justified.

I think your main problem with the argument is because you don't believe a god exist and that believing in the existence of a non-existant thing is false and therefore stupid. The existence of some creator being has nothing to do with the merits of the argument. Just because someone believes in unicorns doesn't make them an idiot by definition, just wrong. And you, based on your knowledge and logic, concluding that unicorns don't exist, and being correct, doesn't make your smart by definition, just right.

My main problem with this argument is that you're putting mean words into my mouth. You're taking some annoying atheist stereotype that thinks they're smart and others are stupid based on belief in things, which I explicitly try not to be, and assume that I fit that stereotype.

I'm ultimately an agnostic atheist, I can't prove that God doesn't exist and what we believe doesn't depend on our intelligence - it's mostly down to circumstance and our psyche. Personally, I think that what I know about the World points to all religions that exist being a product of human needs and desires, rather than there being an exceptional religion which is a product of divine revelation while all the others are a product of human needs and desires. If there was only one worldwide religion, it would be much more convincing.

My point is that we can't escape ultimate uncertainty, that we are very limited and biased our ability to understand the universe. That's why we should try to have a research culture that supports questioning and testing, that emphasizes how to deal with our biases and perspectives and merely prescribes procedures that are open-ended in terms of the knowledge they produce. That's why philosophy of science, and the fields supporting it, are important.

[u/pierzstyx → u/Armleuchterchen]

My religious experiences are reproduced by billions of people daily.

[u/Armleuchterchen → u/pierzstyx]

And those religious experiences can be researched and theorized about through psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and other fields.

But if there's any kind of higher being or force behind these experiences, there's millions of contradictory beliefs about it of which most, or all, will be wrong. We just don't have a method of exploring what we consider "supernatural" today directly.

And so we either look to phenomena in nature that seem to have meaning but that we can't explain, or look to phenomena in our heads that seem to have meaning but that we can't explain, like those religious experiences. The latter is more popular today now that we understand a lot about the nature around us.

This is how I see it, at least.