Never Mind The Bedrocks – part 2.

In Never Mind The Bedrocks – part 1 I began to get into the discussion concerning evolution vs. creationism. To summarise the previous post, I made the following points: Intelligent Design is creationism in disguise, and it is not science. There is overwhelming evidence that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old; that life has existed in many and varied forms over hundreds of millions of years; and there is excellent scientific data concerning the origins of the solar system. I have also said that there is a near-phobic Fundamentalist Christian response to evolution and science in general, and that some of the claims made by Christians of this stripe are completely insupportable either by Biblical teaching or social observation.

I’m going to carry on now by looking at the use – the dangerous use – of the concept ‘need’.

This idea cuts to the very heart of the debate. It’s right in the middle of a Dawkins statement with which I agree – “You do not require God to explain the complexity of the natural world” – and implied in a statement with which I do not agree – “Christianity exists to answer the question of our origin”.

Let’s take the latter first, because it impinges on the former. The response in both cases boils down to the same answer: You require God to explain the existence of God.

At first glance this seems tautological. It is not. It is the same philosophical point as is made in the statement “I see a chair before me, therefore chairs exist.” So this is the first hurdle to overcome in a fundamental (not Fundamental!) miscommunication between Science and Christianity. I know no Christian, none at all (and, not to boast or anything, but I know several hundred), who is a Christian because they said “I find the Darwinian theory of speciation abhorrent: I will therefore become a Christian, since it offers an alternative.” Christianity is not in the business of explaining humanity’s origins: Christianity is in the business of explaining humanity’s relationship to God. The committed (as opposed to nominal) Christians I know are almost infinitely more concerned with their relationship to Christ than their relationship to primates. So that is my first objection, my first perception of a category error in the debate: Christianity takes as its symbol a fish not because it spends endless hours worrying about whether or not fish were the ancestors of all land animals but because the letters of the word ‘fish’, in Greek, could be rearranged to form the word ‘Christ’. Evolutionary science and Christianity have completely different focal points.

I should take this opportunity to expand on this point, and to answer the criticism that could be made of my ‘chairs’ analogy: “Yes, but we can all see chairs. We don’t have to have faith in them”. (My comments here, I hope, will also go some way to answering the charge that there is no ‘evidence’ that supports the adoption of a religious position). It is not the case that there is no evidence in favour of the existence of God, or more specifically the Christian God: it is simply the case that all the evidence that does exist is anecdotal. This is an important distinction. It is a question of subjectivity. If someone says to you “I believe in buses because I rode on one once”, that is a rather different statement to “I believe in buses because it comforts me to believe in buses”. In neither instance can you see a bus to prove the assertion that buses exist; but we must surely have to take the former argument for their existence rather more seriously than the latter. This is where Dawkins, in The God Delusion, comes badly unstuck. In it he takes the Bible (in my analogy, a bus timetable) and arguments of the latter, consolatory type and concludes that there is no such thing as a God. He dismisses arguments of the former type as mere delusion. And while I make no claim for the objectivity of the former claim, there is something more compelling than Dawkins is willing to admit in the similarity of millions of shared God-experiences of the type to which Christians routinely refer. In other words, if millions of people say they have ridden on buses, and the descriptions of those rides overwhelmingly agree, it is more persuasive a position to conclude that buses may exist in the manner described by people who believe they have ridden on them than to conclude that these people have, in their millions over two thousand years, invented the same delusional experience.

Note that I am only talking, at this point, about the Christian God. If we broaden the terms of our engagement to incorporate God as a divine figure alluded to in other world religions (in the Middle East there are nearly a billion believers in trains, while in India they have many forms of taxi) then the case for the existence of public transportation becomes almost overwhelming (I fear I may be enjoying this metaphor too much!). But all the evidence is still subjective, i.e. it is not susceptible to wilful replication under laboratory conditions. This is the great disconnect between the scientists and the religious. “If you wish to convince me of the existence of God, then show Him to me,” says the scientist – and despite what certain Fundamentalist groups might say, that is not an unreasonable position. But the scientists do not appear willing to accept the utter reasonableness of the religious person’s response: “God is greater, holier, and far more powerful than I. How on earth do you expect me to instruct Him to do anything?”

Architeuthis Dux, seen live in the wild for the first time

For many years Architeuthis Dux, the Giant Squid, was an animal for which a great deal of subjective evidence existed in the form of anecdotal reports and eyewitness observations – but the animal was not formally known to science until examples washed ashore and they could be scientifically examined, thus demonstrating with unarguable solidity the reality of their existence. It was only in 2005 that the first live Giant Squid were filmed and photographed at a depth of 3,000 feet 600 miles off the coast of Japan. The position of the Giant Squid now is that it is an accepted scientific reality. The Christian is in a similar position, though, to one of the old squid eyewitnesses before the animal was formally identified by science. And he faces the same problem: he knows what he saw and he also knows science will not accept it unless it is presented with an example to dissect and examine. And that is completely fine. That is how science is meant to operate. It is also why Dawkins says he is not an atheist so much as a teapot agnostic. His problem is that someday, like a fisherman walking along a beach in Japan or New Zealand, he might stumble across something that forces him to rethink his whole position on the existence of something he had not hitherto believed in.

Exactly the same problem about evidential presentation reoccurs with miracles. “If such a thing happened,” says the scientist, “then it ought to be replicable.” But the mistake here is that the scientist, while perfectly capable of studying it, sees the process of the miracle itself as the thing to replicate, while the religious person has to try to explain that it is not possible to replicate the deliberate interference of a supernatural entity in the natural order of things. In other words, scientists will never have a miracle to dissect until God steps in and performs one under laboratory conditions. And God is not subject to the whims of the scientists who would wish such a thing. Therefore, it might be truer to say that the problem is one of definition: the scientist sees the purported miracle as an exceptional process working in the natural world, while the believer sees the miracle as an act of Divine Will. And obviously the latter cannot be replicated by man, thus enabling the sceptical scientist to conclude that there are no such thing as miracles. Essentially, the scientist wants to study a by-product while ignoring the actual source of the phenomenon. Given that the source is not replicable, is it any wonder that the by-product remains absent?

However, that is something of a digression. Let us return to something on which Dawkins and I are in agreement. In fact let’s take two things, because they connect: “There ought not to be unchallengeable ideas at the centre of a religion” and “Atheism is a religious position that has no bearing on one’s patriotism or citizenship.” The connection here is in the spirit of inquiry. And let us be quite clear: the Bible does not condemn this. Job is a prime example. Job asked God some awfully big questions and, in what must count as one of the most terrifying conversations in the whole of recorded history, received some awfully big answers in return. Here is the point: Job was not instructed not to ask. Job was perfectly entitled to ask what was going on. Christ’s disciples regularly queried what He was up to. The idea that “why?” or “why not?” are not permissible questions to direct at the doctrines central to the Christian faith is untrue. It is also dangerous. It encourages precisely those abuses of authority in Christian leaders that detractors of religion gleefully highlight, and by which Christian followers are embarrassed and horrified.

Questions are important. Questioning one’s spiritual leaders helps to ensure that heresy in both thought and deed is avoided; questioning God, as Job discovered, is a route to revelation. And I can think of few better pathways to understanding Christianity than to ask “What does the Bible mean when it says this?” It is by interrogating the Bible, God and my fellow Christians that my Christianity grows. This is why I say there are no Great Unchallengeables. Everything is up for discussion. It has to be. Otherwise, wilful ignorance is all that’s left, and I can’t imagine God being impressed at the deliberate atrophying of the critical faculties He intended us to put to good use. Douglas Adams, much though I adore The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, was dead wrong when he said “There are some things you can’t ask about religion. Why not? Because you just can’t!” I can think of no honest question that dishonours God or Christianity by the asking of it – and I speak as someone who, at one stage, was pretty convinced that if God existed then He was a despicable sadist. This is not a position I now hold, as you can probably tell (!), but I am fairly sure God was not offended by my asking Him to demonstrate that He was something other than the cruel and callous manipulator I thought Him to be.

Neither of these positions has had any effect on my patriotism (such as it is) or my ability to function as a citizen of my country. (I’m from Northern Ireland, by the way, where if anything overly-enthusiastic endorsements of a particular religious perspective have caused nothing but trouble – or Troubles). Patriotism is about sensing one belongs, and being willing to defend that sense of belonging both for other people (‘dying for one’s country’) or oneself (‘killing for one’s country’). Citizenship is about participating in a society and abiding by the ethics it endorses – and although my religion informs my ethical position the two things are not coterminous, which was Bush Sr’s mistake. Human beings have an inherent moral sense – what we call the conscience. It unarguably exists, and though I might believe (as I do) that its existence is an argument in favour of a moral God, such a belief makes no difference to the manner of its operation. In other words, you don’t have to be a Christian to know the difference between right and wrong.

This ties in, again, to the American fetish for a single unified society, united in its beliefs – ‘One Nation Under God’. Bizarrely, in a country where one of the most damning political epithets is ‘socialist’, there is a marked intolerance for independent belief. Good Americans, in this regard, are independently wealthy but not independent thinkers.

As a Christian, I believe in heaven and hell, and I believe in the Great Commission whereby Christ instructed His followers to go out into the world and make disciples of all nations. I believe in the need for salvation, because I believe Hell to be a catastrophic reality from which people need to be saved. For those reasons, I believe ‘One Nation Under God’ to be a good thing, because to me it is exactly the same as having written ‘One Nation Saved From Eternal Destruction’. But I also believe that there is a big difference between saying “You ought to believe this” and “You must believe this”. Whatever free will we have in the matter of faith, it is not up to governments to legislate, or majority opinion to enforce, any one position on anyone. As the Bible makes clear repeatedly, God desires to be loved by His creations, and you cannot order someone to ‘love’ anything. (Where love does exist, incidentally, it cannot be proven to exist scientifically!)

However, once again having surpassed 2,000 words on the topic, I think it’s time to take a breather. But this discussion will continue in ‘Never Mind The Bedrocks – part 3′, in which I intend to look at Adam and Eve, what it means to be human, a common misconception concerning Cartesian philosophy, the problem of speciation, the religious imagination, and the concept of wonder. Stay tuned, folks!

 

A V3 pulls a suburban service over the calm waters of Starlingford Lough

Never Mind The Bedrocks – part 1.

One of the wonders – to me at least – of the internet is that it facilitates interesting conversation without being hindered by money (a key concern for those of us on pay-as-you-go tariffs!), distance, or time. And the internet, being open to all, is therefore a perfect forum for precisely those interesting conversations, and I love being part of them. So my thanks go to Cristian, a follower of this blog, who left the following comment, which stimulated the post that you are about to read:

Gavin,

You do not know me, but i have stumbled upon your blog and have followed it for a few months. To me it’s about what you wrote at the top but mostly about: reason, intelligence and religion. A combination that you don’t see that often.

I am writing because I would like to know your opinion about Richard Dawkins and particularly about his arguments in this movie

I do think it would make for quite an interesting post and I hope you will consider it. I am extremely curious about how a person who is simultaneously intelligent and religious views this matter, as I have not found any comments made by such a person until now.

I did hesitate before writing this, wondering if it made any sense at all, I hope in the end it did.

Cristi

I encourage you to watch the video, for a couple of reasons: first of all, it’s very entertaining and informative in its own right; secondly, a lot of the post that follows is going to refer to it, and therefore it’s worth acquainting yourself with the arguments before I get into them.

Richard Dawkins, for the benefit of those few people left who do not know who he is, is a biologist and exponent of evolutionary biology. He coined the word ‘meme’ and was Oxford University’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 – 2008. He has sometimes been referred to as ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler’, and he – as you will know if you watched the above embedded video – is opposed to religion in all its forms (and particularly Christianity, though that is simply the biggest target in front of him in the UK and America).

Let me begin by saying this: Dawkins and I disagree on a number of crucial points – but there is a lot of common ground on which he and I are in agreement. Here are the things on which he and I agree:

#1. Intelligent Design is Creationism in disguise, and it is not science.

#2. In America there is a widespread and wholly insupportable prejudice against atheists.

#3. Science is enthralling and inspirational.

#4. Repeated simplicity gives rise to complexity.

#5. You do not require God to explain the complexity of the natural world (I have phrased this very carefully!)

#6. There ought not to be unchallengeable ideas at the core of a religion. There is always room for debate.

#7. An atheist is a person espousing a particular religious position. It has no bearing on their patriotism or citizenship.

#8. We are all atheists about most gods. I do not believe in Thor, Apollo or Shiva.

Meanwhile, here are the points on which Dawkins and I part company:

#1a. Science is inherently corrosive in its action on religious faith, and vice versa.

#2a. Christianity (as an example of a religious faith) or ‘The God Theory’ exists to answer the question of our origin.

#3a. “Hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought!’”

#4a. The religious imagination is ‘poverty-stricken’.

I think, to begin with, I should look at the points on which Dawkins and I are in agreement, and explain why this is the case. So let’s start with #1: “Intelligent Design is Creationism in disguise, and it is not science”.

This seems to be primarily a factor in American discussions on the origin of life, and it is of special relevance to Americans for two reasons. Firstly, because of the separation of Church and State, it is impossible to teach an overtly religious position in the classroom; secondly, the Fundamentalist movement, though not without its adherents elsewhere, is primarily an American Christian movement, and it is Fundamentalism, more than any other branch of the Christian faith, that preaches Creationism.

Because of the influence of the Christian church on American political life, particularly the best-funded and most vocal aspects of the church (such as the Fundamentalist movement), there is immense pressure on the educational system to incorporate religious beliefs into classroom curricula. Intelligent Design is one example; Abstinence Only is another. However, the American Constitution, because of its clear and unambiguous separation of Church and State, cannot permit such an influence to be realised, and so these religious positions are forced to adopt more legitimate (or legitimate-sounding) rationales for their inclusion. Abstinence Only (even though a meta-study of the scientific data has demonstrated that as an educational policy it doesn’t work) is incorporated as a matter of biological education and public health; Intelligent Design becomes an alternative scientific theory for the origin of the universe and humanity.

However, as this cartoon demonstrates, as a scientific theory, it lacks a certain rigour:

Throwing formulae and pseudo-scientific phraseology (‘irreducible complexity’, etc.) at a concept does not a scientific theory make. And that is before we get into the quagmire of literalism, and taking the Genesis account as entirely (and crucially) literally accurate.

The argument against there being literally six days taken to create the earth is older and more respectable than is often acknowledged. First of all, Christ had nothing to say on the matter. Six literal days avoids that divine endorsement. Secondly, if we reach back into church history, great theologians, such as Augustine, avoided a literal interpretation, explaining that the six days provided a logical framework rather than a description of the passage of time. (These beliefs, incidentally, were never condemned as heretical). It was much later that the idea of the Young Earth took hold, when Archbishop Ussher calculated that 4004 B.C. was the date of creation. He arrived at this conclusion by simply counting backwards through the genealogies mentioned in the Bible.

I don’t want to spend a huge amount of time on this, but I am, as a Christian, completely and utterly convinced that the Earth is older than 6,000 years. Geology tells us it is, Astronomy tells us it is, Cosmology tells us it is, Chemistry tells us it is, Paleontology tells us it is, and (my favourite, this one) Archeology tells us it is. The Sumerians had a flourishing civilisation 6,000 years ago, and we have the artefacts to prove it. Hence this hilarious article in The Onion. So let’s have no more on the young earth hypothesis. It’s nonsense.

I am also convinced that the literal interpretation of the six days is incorrect. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, the scientific evidence against it is too completely overwhelming. We know, from empirical data and research, roughly how and when the solar system was formed. We can date the earth itself because we know the half-lives of the isotopes in the rocks that form it. And we have dateable fossils of living things separated from us and each other by hundreds of millions of years. An argument proposed against this is that God planted the fossils to test our faith. I’m sorry, but that argument smacks of desperation to me. It only works if you ignore other, key Biblical teachings: namely, the (hugely important) idea that God is not capricious.  Numbers 23:19 puts it “God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?”. That God would use the physical structure of the planet on which we live to deceive us therefore contravenes what the Bible says about Him. “God,” said Einstein, neatly encapsulating the argument, “does not play dice with the Universe”.

I am neither a theologian nor a scientist, though I read around a fair amount on both topics. I am a student of English, and a student of stories, and I am particularly a student of how people convey difficult information to one another. As such, when I read the Genesis account of creation, I read it in a manner not dissimilar to the Revelation, as experienced by John on Patmos. It seems to me to be an attempt toward expression of a vision or a revelation monstrously complicated, mind-blowing in its implications and literally inconcievable for a single human being. I imagine the author of Genesis reeling away, clutching his head, crying out “what was that?“

Such a view is not necessarily popular within the Christian church. In fact it was precisely this perspective – the method of Biblical interpretation facilitated by Higher Criticism and then referred to as ‘Modernist’  – that led to the rise of Fundamentalism in the United States in the first place. (This was news to me, but it forms vital backround information in Edward L. Larson’s book on the 1925 Scopes trial, “Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s continuing debate over Science and Religion”). There were Five Fundamentals put forward as a result of the controversy and debate:

(a) The Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit and therefore inerrant

(b) Christ was born of the virgin Mary

(c) Christ’s death is an atonement for sin

(d) Christ was bodily resurrected after His death

(e) Christ’s miracles were real, historical happenings

It is the first of these, concerning the inerrancy of Scripture, that caused the problems. According to the Fundamentalists, if the Bible is inerrant then it follows that everything within it is literally true. I’m sorry, but that argument seems to me fundamentally invalidated by the existence of the Parables. In other words, there are bits of the Bible that we know not to take literally. And with the greatest respect to Vicki Dillen and others of her ilk, if there are bits of the Bible that can be demonstrated not to be literally true, insisting that the Universe is wrong and your particular interpretation is right is not a particularly tenable position…

Allow me to pre-empt the argument that God ‘destroys the wisdom of the wise’ (1 Corinthians 1:19) that is sometimes advanced under these circumstances. It is invalid on two counts. Firstly, wisdom is subjective. It consists of applying a morality to knowledge. Knowledge itself, on the other hand, is objective: things are either known or they are not, and if they are known, they are known because they are demonstrable. If God destroys wisdom He destroys a particular moral position, not an understanding of the physical structure of the universe. Secondly, and not unrelatedly, the verse is taken out of context when it is used under circumstances such as these. The passage in question concerns other soteriological systems (particularly those of the Jews and the Greeks) and explains that Christ’s actions are a refutation of them, a destruction of their apparent wisdom. So let’s not have anyone explaining that despite the overwhelming evidence of a 4.5 billion-year-old earth upon which life appeared over a very long period, that this is ‘merely the wisdom of scientists, and God will destroy it’. No part of that defence, which I have heard before and am keen to finally put to bed, is accurate or valid (This is a particularly good example, which commits among others the sin of cherry-picking the evidence, but there are hundreds if not thousands of similar sites that Google can connect you to). So let’s move on.

Dawkins’s second and third points with which I am in agreement – the idea that in the US there is a war on atheists, and that science is, in and of itself, a beautiful thing – are not unconnected. The weblink above provides a reason why. On that site (which, judging by it’s page on ‘What we believe‘, appears to be a fairly conventional conservative fundamental Christian website, albeit one in South Africa rather than the USA) it asserts that

If evolution is true then there is no right or wrong and no Creator to whom we are accountable. This attitude influences every area of life. For instance, since evolution teaches that man is nothing more than an impressive mammal, sexual behaviour has become increasingly predatory and bestial. It is quite consistent for the humanist (for whom evolution is the foundation of all he believes) to accept that sexual practices among humans can be as varied as they are among animals. Thus, sex outside of marriage and homosexuality must of necessity be accepted as alternative lifestyles; abortion is simply the “survival of the fittest”; there is nothing to prevent paedophilia becoming an accepted lifestyle.

Comments like these really and genuinely make me angry. (They make Richard Dawkins angry too, incidentally). They make me angry because they are based on such false premises. First of all, evolution has nothing to do with the existence of God. One does not invalidate the existence of the other. The Universe (which I do, incidentally, believe God made – this question of origins is for me, ultimately, a question of mechanisms rather than sources) and my understanding of it can accommodate both. But the idea that evolution destroys ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is ludicrous. Right and wrong are not arbitrary. Evolution doesn’t say that they are. Evolution actually supports the existence and social relevence of right and wrong, in that people who do right more often are more attractive potential partners and thus more likely to find a sexual partner and reproduce. For instance, this study (also conducted in South Africa)  found that

Encouraging young people to be protective and caring towards mothers, role models to younger siblings, ‘right’ friends to each other and to nurture values that arise out of close relationships (such as selflessness and a desire to be a better person for their partners) presents an unexplored opportunity for moral education that builds on young people’s understandings of positive influences in their lives.

The comment from CFT also betrays an ignorance of human behaviour. If learning about evolution is responsible for increasingly predatory sexual behaviour, then we would expect to see a corresponding and unprecedented change in sexual behaviour since about 1860 (Darwin having published his On the Origin of the Species in 1859). However, there are no such data. In fact we find that in the 1700s public consumption of pornography and erotica was far more socially acceptable than today, and Sexuality Education: Theory and Practice by Clint E. Bruess and Jerrold S. Greenburg explains that

Reiss (1973) informs us that, in the late 1700s in Massachusetts, one in three women in a particular church confessed fornication to her minister (the actual figure was probably higher still). The western frontier relied heavily on prostitution.

So much for a revolution of sexual behaviours. (I will accept that there was a revolution in the way in which sexual behaviours were discussed, and I will accept there have been sexual revolutions, mostly either to do with the invention of effective contraceptives – the condom in 1876 and the Pill in 1961 – or modes of transport that enabled a widening of the gene pool – the introduction of the bicycle probably saved East Anglia from a population implosion. But neither of these seems to have anything to do with evolution). Actually, the unchanging nature of ‘man’s baser attitudes and desires’, to quote a particularly apposite phrase, is not so much an argument against evolution as it is an argument for the existence of original sin.

Other aspects of CFT’s comment make equally little sense. Abortion has nothing to do with the ‘survival of the fittest’. And paedophilia cannot be encouraged by evolutionary thinking – quite apart from the moral outrage it (quite rightly) provokes, it is not an effective reproductive strategy. Homosexuality is an even less effective reproductive strategy again. The comment, which serves as a useful example of ‘the war on atheism’, seems fundamentally misguided, in that the offence taken by the religious requires a huge number of unwarranted and phobic assumptions. I have several theories on why this might be the case, but they shall have to wait until a later part of this discussion. I think 2,700 words on the subject are more than enough for one post!

So let’s conclude – temporarily – with a moment of Zen for today: