On the parking lot of the Pentecostal church in Wageningen, where chess teams from Amsterdam, Hilversum and Wageningen gathered for the Dutch club competition, there was a car that stood out because of what was written on the back:
John 14:6
I am the way and the truth and the life.
#Jesus #Forgiveness #Eternal life
My club is called Caissa, after the chess goddess invented in England in the 18th century, but that was a fantasy. What was written on that car was serious. I wrote the text on a piece of paper. The Dutch magazine to which I contribute a weekly chess column had decided to produce an issue with the theme “God” and I was willing to join.
The owner of the car came to load something. I asked him if he was a chess player and he asked me if I was religious, and the answer was no in both cases. But he had seen me writing and asked if I was interested in these matters. I used to be for a while, but now less so, I said. That was true, although the religions I was interested in were probably far removed from his.
He invited me to a meeting at the church if I didn’t have much to do at Christmas: “God loves you, and it’s never too late to experience His love.” I said I lived in Amsterdam, which may have put a damper on the conversation. He had to deliver his load somewhere, and I had to go inside to my board.
It may have been obvious that he was not a chess player. The chess master and renowned psychologist A. D. de Groot (1914-2006) wrote in 1946 in his study Het Denken van den Schaakmeester (internationally known as Thought and Choice in Chess):
The typical “player” is traditionally a nonbeliever, without fixed standards of thought and life; and for the true “fighter” – for his own cause, that is – only one goal counts: victory. Indeed, the chess player’s relativism is not limited to his chess thinking: it is a fundamental characteristic of his being. From no other type is he so far removed as from the dogmatist; he is a skeptic and relativist through and through. It is characteristic, for example, that I have not been able to find a single example of a truly devout adherent of a particular religion, neither in the biographies of the great figures nor among the living masters. (My translation from the Dutch)
The chess player as the typical unbeliever. It was and is not always true, but very often it is, and I certainly recognized myself in the portrait that De Groot painted. But if one is such a skeptic and relativist, shouldn’t one also be skeptical of one’s own rationalism and unbelief, which often thinks it has a monopoly on the truth?
Someone I considered a guide at the time when my interest in religions was at its peak was the American philosopher Raymond Smullyan (1919-2017). He was a mathematician, logician, philosopher, Taoist, music teacher, magician under the names 5 Ace Merrill (for card tricks) and Chief Mishugi, and he was the author of some thirty books, ranging from academic research in the field of mathematical logic to ingenious collections of puzzles and paradoxes for the general reader.
He wrote extensively about God, and his God took many forms. The form he seemed to like most was the imperfect God who must be helped to develop by humans, who are part of that God.
Somewhere Smullyan wrote that the prophet Mohammed compared someone who reasons about God without having experienced him directly, to a donkey carrying a chest of books on its back. Perhaps Smullyan saw many scholars as such donkeys.
But how did he see himself? He often compared religious experiences to concrete skills: being able to see colors, having a sense of humor, or hearing a melody where a tone-deaf person hears only random sounds. He liked to call himself a mystic, and in his philosophical dialogues, the mystic always wins out.
My copy of his book The Tao Is Silent has fallen apart into loose pages from frequent use. He summarizes his form of Taoism in a four-line verse in the spirit of Lao Tzu: “The Wise Man does not fall asleep because he must, not even because he wants to, but because he is sleepy.” The Wise Man is like Smullyan’s dogs Peekaboo, Peekatoo, and Trixie.
Later in The Tao Is Silent, Smullyan talks about crazy and sensible philosophies. He loved the crazy philosophies, which he believed had the virtues of madness, spontaneity, humor, unconventionality, amoralism, beauty, divinity, naturalness, poetry, uninhibitedness, stubbornness, paradoxicality, lack of discipline, and general yummyness. And most importantly, according to Smullyan, the crazy philosophies are much closer to the truth than the sensible ones.
He claimed that psychologists, psychiatrists, economists, sociologists and political scientists tend toward the “sensible” while artists, theoretical physicists and mathematicians tend toward the “crazy.”
One of his last books, from 2003, was titled Who Knows? A Study of Religious Consciousness. It starts with two mottoes that taken together may sum up his attitude towards religion: “I believe all religions are true” – Walt Whitman; and “I believe no religions are true” – Anonymous.
I was a fan of Smullyan long before I knew he had also created chess problems. These are collected in two volumes, The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes and The Chess Mysteries of the Arabian Knights. Almost all of them are retrograde problems.
In a normal problem, you are given a position with a task that boils down to: what needs to be done now? In a retrograde, the task boils down to: what must have happened before this?
The image in the game viewer is on the cover of Smullyan’s Arabian Knights collection. The task is seemingly simple, but still rather difficult for those who like me are not well-versed in retrogrades : the white king is on the board, but it is invisible. Where is it?
Click here to see the Smullyan retrograde problem and the link to the solution.
The solution may also be found on many internet sites, for instance here: https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/23538/how-does-one-know-if-a-position-is-not-reachable-from-a-series-of-legal-moves-fr/23544#23544