The God Delusion (yet again)

The issue of how convincing Richard Dawkins's arguments are came up again in conversation yesterday, so I thought I would quickly summarise my own views on where he goes most astray.

1) The God Delusion although ostensibly an attack on the belief side of religion is also an attack on philosophy by omission, because Dawkins is trying to convince us that the explanatory scope of his own 'scientific' approach is all-encompassing. He doesn't want to address the issue of whether there might after all be limits to what the empirical method can tell us about our cosmological situation.

2) The intergalactic teapot is an improbable material thing. Ditto the spaghetti monster. The reason for everything, whether or not one tends to refer to this as God, isn't.

You could of course plausibly argue that there is no reason for everything, but you would have to do better than Dawkins's stab at it: that science hasn't found one yet and probably won't.

3) Probability in the sense that Dawkins uses the term is a macro phenomenon like you and me. So it's not the ideal conceptual tool for explaining why you and me are here. At the micro/quantum level probability is a different beast altogether and arguably also at the very macro level, given that many physicists today believe that the meta-verse is technically infinite. There may be giant teapots and spaghetti monsters floating around out there in some other universe. Indeed, others may have gardens that have fairies at the bottom of them. So Dawkins's statement that "there is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities," is misleading to say the least.

4) Dawkins has one foot stuck in the old clockwork universe model. He has an oversimplified reductionist perspective on the how and why of everything. His Selfish Gene theory for example is indicative of how he seems incapable of understanding how different organisational principles can be operating at the same time. This week's front page article in the Economist on RNA shows how the world of experimental biology is gradually leaving his model behind.

5) Religious belief is a mind virus but it's OK to read the Bible. So, how do you catch it?

The God Delusion, further thoughts

Unless I have misread the last hundred years of the history of Science, the common sense notions of chance and probability only actually make sense within a limited set of frames of reference.

Any believer could rightfully claim that the God they worship would of course necessarily operate across all the frames of reference relevant to the perceptual sphere of human beings. Exit Dawkins's argument from improbability stage left.

And the common sense notion of evolution requires the common sense notion of sequential chronological time. Seen from the perspective say of Einstein's Spacetime, it isn't quite the same phenomenon, is it?

Dawkins seems to have carefully distanced himself from some of his earlier rhetorical excesses. Nowhere in The God Delusion I suspect, does his irritating totem word random crop up. This permitted him to acerbically mock the Creationist position that evolution is all a matter of chance. No other word reveals the mildly hypocritical tendencies of modern scientists: quantum phenomena are random they freely admit, but everything else is fully determined...er, except genetic mutations.

The Selfish Gene strikes me as a deliciously obstinate exercise in not recognising the duality within all the structures within the network we call Life: for at every single level each structure appears subject to both the logic of selfishness and that 0f collaboration. It is the tension between these dynamics that surely makes life interesting in the first place.

What exactly is a gene? To my mind it is one of those categories that one can refer to as individual with even less certainty than say that of the biological organism. I am an individual, but within me all sorts of collectives fizzle away until the day I...we die.

The Dawkins Delusion?

Richard Dawkins preaches that religious belief is a kind of mind virus. One has to wonder therefore where he thinks people tend to catch the Christian variant of this pathogen, because he also asserts that he'd be perfectly happy for people to carry on reading the Bible − for its literary merits of course − even after science has finally cured believers of their residual faith.

The advantage if my logical quibble there with The God Delusion is that it is belief-neutral. The same cannot be said of Alister McGrath's compact counter-polemic, which has much the same sort of mix of affront and dodgy reasoning as its target.

Ironically, Dawkins has of late managed to evolve his own thinking into a "misfiring of something useful", and on balance might be said to have fully deserved this attemped mugging, however bungled it turns out to have been.

For McGrath, Dawkins's bestselling book is part of the Western cultural response to 9-11: religious extremism, especially the Islamic kind, has driven neo-atheists like Dawkins to start digging their trenches rather more publicly, he suggests.

Actually I think it is Christianity that particularly bugs Dawkins, because Islam, in spite of its contemporary association with rag-head toe-rags, had a long and mutually beneficial association with mathematics and science, and along with Judaism still offers up less intense provocation to the rational mind.

When people that I otherwise consider to be mentally competent start trying to tell me that − spiritual yearnings aside − they genuinely believe that a Palestinian Jew who lived 2000 years ago was the son of a virgin and the creator of the universe, the thought that they might be a bit thick after all inevitably crosses my mind!

Dawkins's own position is clear when he mocks the stated belief of the late Pope John Paul II that it was Our Lady of Fatima that preserved him from assassination in 1981. So why should Dawkins − as his critics strongly suggest − brush up on theology in order to address its sophisticated end, when the former leader of the Catholic church can profess this kind of nonsense?

McGrath himself is a lapsed scientist (and atheist) and as such has been going in the opposite direction to Dawkins along the "intellectual superhighway". It must be a while however since he studied molecular biophysics: "How can Dawkins speak of religion as something accidental," he asks "when his understanding of the evolutionary process precludes any theoretical framework that allows him to suggest that some outcomes are 'intentional' and others 'accidental'. Except of course that scientists use adaptive to contrast with accidental, not intentional.

One of his key arguments does merit more consideration: we human beings are capable of great good and great evil and whenever our ideals become transcendentalised (be they religious or secular) we are likely to realise these potentials most fully:

"The simplistic belief that the elimination of religion would lead to the ending of violence, social tension or discrimination is thus sociologically naive. It fails to take account of the way in which human beings create values and norms, and make sense of their identity and their surroundings. If religion were to cease to exist, other social demarcators would emerge as decisive, some of which would become transcendentalised in due course."

McGrath won't acknowledge though that in spite of his excessive claims for the explanative powers of Science, Richard Dawkins is essentially a spokesman for a non-transcendentalised humanist/atheist worldview, one that cannot be usefully compared to the brutal godlessness of Stalin's Russia.

There's a line in Don DeLillo's new novel that I think is very relevant here: religion elevates consciousness in some, reduces it in others. Those whose consciousness has been elevated by their religious belief possibly do have good reason to be miffed by the general tone of The God Delusion, but Professor Dawkins represents a discipline of knowledge acquisition that can really only serve to open up the mind, and frankly I'm with him all the way when he seethes at the prospect of complacent masses whose minds have been stultified by incuriosity and prejudice.

McGrath can tot up the number of scientist-believers all he likes, but it is this special knack for creating new idiots, that sets religion apart from the natural sciences. Scientists are by definition not naturally inclined to ignorance. Religion in contrast preys on those that are.

In Guatemala in particular I regularly come up against people who have been taught to deny themselves the right to think as individuals. Religious belief may not do this to everybody that it touches, but it does it to enough of them to merit the sense of outrage that pervades Dawkins's book.

Perhaps McGrath is right to imply that Dawkins is deluded in stipulating that science is the only reliable tool we possess for understanding the world. There may well be natural limits to what the empirical method can tell us about our cosmological situation, but the gap thus opened up is in a sense antithetical to reliable statements. (And if anything McGrath has made the case for philosophy's role in addressing transcendent questions, as opposed to theology.)

McGrath's most disingenuous remarks turn up towards the conclusion of his tract when he opines that "the phenomenon of religion is a provisional, human institution." It's absolute truth Jim, but not as we know it.

Cruci-fiction

See here a handy little device carried in the vanguard of the processions in Antigua for ensuring that the Holy COD remains crucifiction and not strangulation or indeed electrocution.

There's possibly nothing quite like Semana Santa in Antigua for prompting the unbeliever to reflect on the sources of his or her unbelief.

V's notion of God is broadly similar to the one that is often referred to as Einsteinian. God is Nature, the big picture, the whole shebang. Occasionally I've witnessed the looks of confusion and dismay she is capable of eliciting on the faces of her fellow Antigueños when she breezily asserts that "we are God."

By this she essentially means that human sentience is a very significant part of that Nature which encompasses her notion of the Divine. For her God is not something that can be referred to as He or She, not something with beliefs and desires, and rather more pertinently, not something that can be nailed to a cross.

It strikes me that the essential piece of misinformation that the faithful receive by way of religious instruction is the notion that categories like Truth, Beauty, Good and Evil can meaningfully exist in perfect, uncontested form. Perfection and wholeness are not in fact synonymous. The most intense good or evil will often shine through the cracks in everyday reality, still in a sense transcendental, but not I suspect as markers for some uniform, non-dimensional aggregate that is permently resident in a wooly beyond.

A valuable lesson that can be learned from reading Plato's Symposium (as opposed to the Koran for instance) is that many different competing explanations can all contribute to our understanding of life. Each can be partly right and partly wrong to greater or lesser extent, but none can ever be perfectly right for the very nature of knowledge − and indeed of all explanation − is surely incompleteness.

People still take sides today as if it were reasonable to assume that Marxism for example is either a flawless descriptive/predictive system or otherwise unadulterated bunk. If only we could all be taught at a young age to properly grasp the partial nature of all rational descriptions of reality. (It would certainly reduce much of the common misunderstandings surrounding the appropriate demarcation of the explanative spheres of Science and Religion.)

Atheism has certainly been given a bad name over the past hundred years or so, first by the communists and more recently by the likes of Richard Dawkins and the self-styled brights; a name which leaves little doubt about their opinion of people that cherish a contrasting, more spiritual view of the cosmos.

For both of these groups, the root of their rejection of faith has been a zealous form of materialism, which as far as I am concerned is an alternative belief system. The blinkered nature of Dawkins' world-view is often quite staggering. He seems to genuinely believe he can shut down the 'God Delusion' once and for all simply by asserting that any divinity would have to be subject to the same laws of probability that apply to large-scale material objects − at the classical level of explanation familiar to everyday human experience, yet apparently meaningless at the scale of particle physics.

For most of the chapines I know atheist is synonymous with immoralist. It's no use pointing out that there is usually a greater proportion of individuals holding religious beliefs in the prison population than there is in the general population outside.

Personally I have a hard time understanding how anyone that has received their understanding of right and wrong by way of religious instruction can ever really be characterised as truly moral. Time and again one sees how un-reflected ethical impulses are inclined to degrade relatively quickly once exposed to extraordinary situations.

The God Delusion

As a practically lifelong unbeliever and sceptic, I undertook this book with trepidation, all too familiar with the damage that Richard Dawkins's blinkered logic tends to inflict on the atheist cause.

Ever since I first read The Selfish Gene over a decade ago I have noted his unnerving ability to leave strewn behind his jauntily self-confident prose, the very logical and metaphorical tools that any reasonably intelligent person can pick up and use to expose the weaknesses of his core arguments. And his newest book is no exception.

Of what possible relevance are fairies at the bottom of the garden and rampant spaghetti monsters to what the writer the book is dedicated to famously characterised as "the answer to life the universe and everything"? Dawkins himself notes that people tend to form models of the world they find themselves in, and it is surely far more probable that your average human being will include some sort of God in their personal model than say, Bertrand Russell's intergalactic teapot. Indeed, the gap in question is rather more obviously God-shaped than teapot shaped.

At one point noting that theologians and philosophers tend to inhabit the supposedly narrowing gap beyond the magisterium of empirical investigation, he goes on to rubbish the claims of theology to be any kind of subject at all. Of philosophy we hear no more. Has he granted it its place in the twilight zone by default?

"There is no reason," he says, "to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities," and then goes on to supply a number of very good reasons in his final chapter covering quantum theory and its counterintuitive assaults on common sense. The ultimate 747 gambit is based on the huge assumption that the probability of supernatural intelligence has to be examined like that of any other chunk of complex matter on the middle-world scale.

The narrowness of Dawkins's own "mental burkha window" is as apparent as ever. He is the epitome of the middle-of-the-road English intellectual, imperiously dismissing the "Franco-phoneyism" of important (if flawed) Gallic thinkers such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. I wonder what Ethiopia's undernourished children would make of his assertion that we have no business complaining about our "time in the sun"; indeed to do so would be a "callous insult" to all those unborn combinations of human DNA.

To the charge that he willfully confuses the issue of the origins of life with the origins of the universe, Dawkins would probably argue in his defence that he is simply responding to the sophistry of his creationist opponents. But the confusion remains, and it muddies his exposition.

But all that said, what would we do without Richard Dawkins? It's clearer than ever that atheism needs a spokesperson in a western society that appears to have lost its connection with the cultural gains of the Enlightenment. And for better or for worse, Dawkins is the man that has stepped up to the podium (or the pulpit!).

Ultimately, I have to say that I have a good deal of sympathy for his conviction that Abrahamic monotheism is the "great unmentionable evil at the centre of our culture, " and I can understand his bitter frustration at "the unparalleled presumption of respect for religion" that seems to be solidifying in the modern West.

The fact that each of the four gospels has a significantly different take on the circumstances of Jesus' birth should, I believe, be something that seriously bothers all believing Christians every time Christmas comes round. The ignorance of scripture amongst most of the self-professed devout Catholics that I have interrogated in Guatemala is also something that regularly astounds me.

But Dawkins never addresses the fact that there is a cultural as well as individual psychological need for the exortations, consolations and inspirations of religion. How would a society that had wholeheartedly accepted both the finality of death and the absence of final justice actually function in practice?

It's clear from looking at the areas of human culture where monotheism itself is absent that it would indeed be possible to eradicate it within the space of several generations. The efforts of the communists to do so in recent history should not be taken to indicate the futility of such a programme, because Marx's own opiate was in many ways a simple substitute. Yet could we really collectively accept that there might be no decisive justice for the downtrodden either in history or the hereafter?

Anyway, the Professor's closed-minded zeal is always stimulating, as is his aforementioned generosity in providing his readers with handy armaments for resisting him as he tries to drag them away from their infantile fantasies. Like his idol Darwin, he aspires to be a burkha-lifter, and does largely succeed, if not always in the ways intended.

One of the book's most impassioned passages concerns our cultural response to the discovery of the frozen corpse of a young Inca princess sacrificed many centuries ago high up in the Andes. It doesn't matter that she herself felt proud to give up her life to the sun god, he pleads, she wasn't in possession of the facts, and the act undoubtedly remains a senseless, cold-hearted murder whatever the local cultural context. Though Dawkins doesn't directly make the connection, the fact that the veil is wholeheartedly supported by many Muslim girls is surely vulnerable to assault from the very same logic.

Preferisco ragionare...

"I prefer to reason rather than believe, that's why I'm an atheist."

That's the motto on the billboard created for by the UAAR (Unione degli Atei e degli Agnostici Razionalistici) in Pisa and subsequently set up behind a tree by a 'charitable' local firm, even though the organisation had specifically paid for it to be on the other side of the highway where there are no trees.

I'm reasonably content to describe myself as an atheist, largely because the term, — though it can feel like having a monkey on your back— presents fewer problems for me than agnostic. Having said that, the 'rational agnosticism' absorbed by the UAAR is not something I could seriously object to.

In the recent Intelligence Squared Debate Stephen Fry joked that the Roman Catholic Church talks much about 'moral relativism', something he himself has always equated with 'thinking'. The trouble is that there really is an insidious form of relativism out there, which I have always equated with not thinking, and I find many agnostics guilty of this abjuration from thought. ("So open-minded your brain falls out..." sayeth Richard Dawkins. More on him shortly.)

In cultures such as this, where the majority still inherit their beliefs from their parents, atheists are typically branded as individuals who have turned their back on morality, purpose and a concern for justice. Nihilists do exist, but I'm not one of them, and I tend to think that people who have thought through their moral positions make better judgments than people who have picked them up from sermons.

Yet any educated person privy to my views might still be inclined to describe me as an agnostic, just as they would probably label the (very undogmatic) intuitions of my wife pantheistic. The idea that the ultimate meaning of the cosmos is somehow immanent within it, is one I am also sympathetic to, as I am to the 'atheistic' tradition within Hinduism and Buddhism.

For a long time atheists were given a very bad name by the likes of Joseph Stalin. Just when that nasty spectre had started to fade, along comes Richard Dawkins. The philosophy of both men should properly be described as materialist — where legitimate enquiry/struggle is supposedly confined to the material world and all other viewpoints are dismissed as spiritual...which to them means hokum.

The 'dialectical materialism' which underlay the communist ideology of the Soviet Union was shown to owe is deeper origins to Plotinus, the Christian Neo-Platonists and John 'the Scot' Eriugena by the late, great Leszek Kolakowski. These early streams of Western thought led to a bias within our culture towards a process-driven view of history, with a beginning and end, and in between a teleology that gives the whole thing meaning (though Marxist thinkers and Christian theologians map this onto an external system of justice rather differently). And as far as I am concerned materialism is faith in another guise.

Listen to Richard Dawkins and you might think that Charles Darwin had come up with the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. Darwin's achievement was to record numerable observations which demonstrated how life-forms — once they had acquired the ability to self-replicate— could make use of the external selection services of Sex and Death to adapt themselves to specific environmental niches, and thereby improve their survival opportunities in what has always been a highly competitive natural world.

This 'theory' has significant explanatory power outside biology — specifically in computer science — but it is not a complete philosophical system. Yet Dawkins's public preaching on the merits of science over all things religious, occasionally gives the impression that that's exactly what he thinks it is.

His position reflects the prejudices of a biologist whose discipline has necessarily remained rooted in the material world and the classical science of Newton, while his colleagues in the department next door have strayed into the altogether more exciting space where Physics and Metaphysics overlap.

Dawkins actually considers himself an agnostic because he claims to be only 99% sure that there isn't a god — and one has to be 100% sure if one wants to call oneself an atheist, he argues. This is of course nonsense. If there is one thing atheism is not about, it is certainty.

He has fallaciously equated the case for God with that of a giant spaghetti monster, which is nothing but a generically-unlikely supernatural thingamajig, as opposed to what my learned colleague refers to as a 'first cause'.

It is of course absurd to speak of probability outside of the behavioural context of matter in the observable universe....and then only matter in macro form, because down at the more fundamental, quantum dimensions, the very notion becomes problematic. So when in The God Delusion Dawkins describes God as "improbable", he's betraying much the same philosophical naivety manifested by many of his chosen adversaries. So in that respect at least, he might have to consider himself "trounced"!

Yet for much the same reasons, the idea of causality at the cosmological level is equally problematic. Hence, I would suggest that a belief in first causes necessarily requires a leap outside the bounds of logic and into assumption...if not indeed faith.

In the course of the past half century cosmology has had to relinquish its commitment to the 'steady state universe' in favour of the Big Bang model, which might initially have seemed more amenable to first cause enthusiasts, except that physicists went on to posit a number of possible explanations for the Big Bang which don't in fact require an intelligent detonator.

I mentioned one of these the other day: the notion that many big bangs have occurred as the more mysterious structure of the outer cosmos inflates, each one embodying the moment of decay when the process of rapid expansion ceases locally, causing energy to transmute into the firey creation of matter.

Which takes me back again to Richard Dawkins. Most people are atheistic when it comes to Thor and Zeus, he quips, "I've just added Yahweh to the list of deities that I'm atheistic about".

Now Zeus was the alpha-godhead of a society which generally thought the universe eternal: it's always been here, and always will be, so not much point in discussing who was responsible for creating it. Thor meanwhile, was the metaphorical embodiment of something scary which the Vikings didn't understand in a scientific sense, but which had the power to make their transatlantic voyages extremely uncomfortable.

Neither of these mythological personages can be a straight swap for the God of the Abrahamic tradition, said to be the Creator of everything.

Yet for a long time after they invented him, the Israelites conceived of Yahweh as a member of the Divine Assembly of 'holy ones' presided over by El, the high god of Canaan with his consort Asherah. Yahweh was essentially the supernatural being one wanted on one's side in battle, but when it came to agriculture, the people of Israel and Judah turned to Baal and his sister-spouse Anat. But being atheistic about Yahweh when he was part of a well-demarcated pagan pantheon, is not the same thing as being atheistic about Him once He has emerged in the eighth century BC as the peerless primal cause. (However, being atheistic about the Virgin Mary, the Archangel Gabriel, Lucifer and St Peter is perhaps more logically consistent with a rejection of other pre-monotheist deities.)

So, another potential trouncing for Dawkins? To a point, but I've yet to be exposed to a convincing logical/factual explanation for why the universe had to have had a beginning and why that beginning had to have been caused by something omnipotent and omniscient. In fact, our current cosmological model suggests that the very idea that our situation here involved the creation of something out of nothing is a category error, one of those sticky misapprehensions which 'common-sense' thinking occasionally serves up.

Digression: Though of course, 'folk' interpretations of phenomena are often found to be accurate by subsequent scientific investigation — I recall Guatemalan presecriptions for harvesting avocados at full moon and the local technique for containing the effervescence of a shaken fizzy drink bottle by placing one's palm along the base.

Anyway, I've asked myself a number of times whether either Darwin or Einstein really succeded in making the world less mysterious. When you are dealing with a mystery that is in a sense infinite, incremental steps in human knowledge are never really going to do philosophers out of a job.

Yet Darwin provided a concrete explanation for something which had no business being ineffable in the first place — the dynamics of the natural world that were going on literally beneath our noses, not outside the scope of the visible universe.

On the other hand, from the time he first came across a compass, Einstein was far more concerned with the world beyond appearances — and so his own contributions to science have that strange dual quality of clarification and re-mystification. (The idea that spacetime is grainy and that the chronological aspect of it doesn't flow as it appears to subjectively, wraps the essentially linear process of evolution in a blanket of inscrutability that Dawkins seems reluctant to touch upon.)

Like many of his contemporaries during the first half of the last century Einstein showed us that the barrier between the effable and the ineffable is a real and unyielding one, and that however many new ways we find to think about it, we are unlikely to be able to think our way around it.

Preferisco ragionare. I prefer to reason about these matters, to find my own path towards ultimate purposes rather than accept a culturally-mediated solution that has inevitably been distorted by historical contexts and human psychology.

I claim no special access to the ineffable, but then nor do I blind myself to the philosophical challenge that it presents, and seeing matter as a side-effect of a more fundamental reality, I find it hard to share Richard Dawkins's apparent faith that Science — at least as he conceives it — is making small but significant steps towards de-fogging everything that religion has traditionally sought to explain.

That's why I'm an atheist.

"Makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann"

The Professor sent me this link to Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books. Apparently another savaging for Dawkins.

Yet Eagleton has some slippery arguments of his own up his sleeve: "It would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing," which reminds me of "to be or not to be, that is the answer, not the question"!

He setting up something of a straw man himself in this review − Richard Dawkins, the provincial philistine who thinks all faith is blind faith. I rather think Dawkins knows that many religious people consider themselves persuaded of the existence of God, but that they are sadly a minority. The reasonableness of some people's spirituality cannot begin to excuse the wider tendency throughout history to often violent unreasonableness.

I think it is also deeply disingenuous of Eagelton to insist that militant Islamism is a purely political phenomenon, and not a religious one at all.

And whilst Darwinian Natural Selection may not be able to explain how we first got on the simple to complex ladder, how nothing became something, it is not fair to say, I think, that Science as a whole has nada to contribute to answering this question, and can therefore leave this little niche for the religious to hold onto.

Torchwood

Russell T. Davies's Doctor Who spin-off got off to a great start on Sunday. It's been scheduled post-watershed, so the content is slightly more mature, while retaining the camp inventiveness of the parent show. This will distinguish it from US precedents like The X Files and Bones which have taken themselves a bit more seriously.

The revived corpse which confirmed in despairing tones that there is nothing after death was one of its more startlingly adult moments.

Jim Holt's review of The God Delusion is being talked about across the blogosphere. I will have get my own perspective on it out later, but with reference to that Torchwood scene, I did enjoy Holt's reflections on the implications of nothingness after death:

"If the after-death options are either a beatific vision (God) or oblivion (no God), then it is poignant to think that believers will never discover that they are wrong, whereas Dawkins and fellow atheists will never discover that they are right."

Doppelgängers

The question of whether there is intelligent life out there in the universe would seem to boil down to whether or not you consider yourself to be intelligent.

Based on a plug from the Professor I picked up Marcus Chown's The Never Ending Days of Being Dead in Foyles and read the first chapter: Elvis Lives.

In it Chown argues that if you accept the premises of quantum theory and inflation (a key part of the standard cosmological model), then you must accept that there is a being identical to you at a fairly predictable distance from your current location. Additionally, there may also be another identical you at an altogether unpredictable distance, the doppelgänger resulting from the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory.

And this is what is interesting to me about the current state of such parallel universe hypotheses, that there can be two absolutely identical individuals doing identical things, differing only in the theoretical reason for their being there in the first place.

I have a couple of issues with Chown's logic, which maybe someone better versed in such matters can help clear up for me:

1) Is "to all intents and purposes infinite" really the same thing as infinite? This seems quite crucial because the relative nature of the first type of infinity might prevent it from driving the rest of Chown's argument.

2) If there is a finite number of ways of arranging matter in an "infinite" bubble-universe, will all possible instances inevitably occur?

I had a similar quibble with Richard Dawkins's assertion in The God Delusion that there must be a version of me with green hair somewhere 'out there'. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the number of possible events that are realised in practice will be constrained by the number of possible histories that follow from the starting conditions.

Quote of the Day

"We know in actuality, there is really no such thing as "Atheism." So in fact, "real Atheists" can also be indistinguishable from "fake Atheists" because there are people and organizations who claim to be Atheist, while we know that is quite impossible, since there is no such thing as a real Atheist. All sane and rational people believe in God, whether they deny it or not. The Bible says that people who say there is "no God" are "'ivveleth (ihv-vel-LETH)" which translates to "mentally insane" (Psalm 14:1) Thus, people who claim to be Atheists are suffering from a mental delusion that can be cured in many cases by steadfast prayer, and/or mild electro-shock therapy coupled with approved medications prescribed by an authorized Christian Psychiatrist or experienced Pastor."
Landover Baptist Church website

Utter disbelief

There's an article in this month's EDGE by Gregory Paul & Phil Zuckerman entitled Why the Gods aren't winning. Contrary to the fears of Dawkins and the brights and our relentlessly scaremongering media, patriarchal monotheism is not, they argue, on the comeback trail.

Instead disbelief now rivals the great churches in terms of numbers and influence, making 8.5m converts worldwide annually. In most secular nations, 4/5 of people accept the premise of evolution by natural selection; in Korea 40% of the population claim not to believe in a supernatural God. Islam is the only religion to have increased its global proportional representation over the past century, and this say Paul and Zuckerman is largely down to "unprotected sex".

It is, the authors proclaim, the first emergence of mass apostasy:

"No major religion is expanding its share of the global population by conversion in any circumstances. Disbelief in the supernatural alone is able to achieve extraordinary rates of growth by voluntary conversion...Not a single advanced democracy that enjoys benign, progressive socio-econmic conditions retains a high-level of popular religiosity."

What of the US you might ask? Well "benign, progressive socio-econmic conditions" kind of excludes them according to these American scientists. Nevertheless they point out that there are now 30m atheists in the US, more than all the Jews, Muslims and Mormons put together and also a more substantial denomination than the Southern Baptists.

The trouble across the pond though is Darwinian economic competition and the concentration of wealth in a narrow elite, conditions that inevitably lead to more persistent bible-bashing, Paul and Zuckerman attest. Everywhere else in the modern world the opportunity to lead a long and stable middle-class life reduces the need to believe in supernatural protection from calamity. But for cultural, economic and historical reasons many Americans remain in a state of existential unease.

This logic has a number of important, if not fatal weaknesses. Firstly, the areas where the most bibles are bashed in the US are not necessarily those where socio-economic competition is at its most Darwinian.

Secondly, studies using identical twins have shown that there is a genetic component to religiosity. Now we know that the descendents of slaves in America are more likely to suffer from hypertension and other conditions because they have inherited the genes that helped their ancestors survive the appalling conditions on the Atlantic crossing. Could it not also be the case that since becoming the promised land for those puritan folk on the Mayflower, America has consistently admitted close-knit populations whose very heredity might just incline them to a bit of theistic delusion? (There will of course be any number of geographical and cultural factors that may over time have reinforced such a tiny bias.)

Thirdly, and more tellingly I'm sure, we now live in an increasingly globalised world. Within our modern secular democracies things might look evenly prosperous and secure, but zoom out a bit and the very dynamics that Paul and Zuckerman claim foster a firmer belief in supernatural interference (vast disparitries of wealth and opportunity, violence and insecurity) are operating with considerable impunity.

The writers of this essay have also brushed over some of the important distinctions within the religious and non-religious groups in their pie-charts. For instance they lump agnostics in with atheists, a tactic that would no doubt have Richard Dawkins repeating his famous jibe about people with minds so open that their brains fall out.

And they have also merged bells n' smells Papists with Pentecostals. This week's Economist has an article about the battle for the faith of Latin America, which the Catholic Church has of late been losing. The Pope is on his way to Brazil where 15% of the population are now 'evangelicals'. Up in Guatemala the proportion is now 30%, achieved not as a result of out-of-control unprotected protestant sex, but through careful courting of predominantly lower-income, indigenous groups (and the odd blatant bribe).

Of V's seven siblings, only one has "changed religion". He explained to me on Good Friday why he chose the "ecstasy over the agony". His children are still being brought up as catholics, though Paul and Zuckerman suggest we are more likely to base our beliefs on those of our fathers than those of our mothers. (Which leads them nicely to the stat that church-going is now more common in the US among women.) As for V herself, she gives consideration to the "weasel God" of pantheist Baruch Spinoza!

Mythological Goggles

 

Had a small chuckle today when I encountered an article in an American journal which referred to the ancient Arabs who had established a settlement in Italy as ‘immigrants’. It didn’t say if they arrived in small boats.

The important thing is that in American academic discourse, they can never be referred to as invaders or colonisers. (Made me wonder if Antigua might be usefully rebranded from ‘La Ciudad Colonial’ to ‘La Ciudad Inmigrante’?!)

Anyway, on a mildly separate note, I recently came across this highlighted passage in my copy of God’s War by Christopher Tyerman.

“Crusading reflected a social mentality grounded in war as a central force of protection, arbitration, social discipline, political expression and material gain. The crusades confirmed a communal identity comprising aggression, paranoia, nostalgia, wishful thinking and invented history.”

 

What is perhaps so remarkable about this observation is how true it is of all the combatants in the perpetual holy wars waged in and around the Levant, both then and now. (And the blathering academics and intellectuals in their baggage train.)

 

And there is a monstrous lack of collective self-awareness. Each imagines that it is the other who is beholden to a toxic delusion.

For 1500 years the Levant has been plagued by ideologies which are essentially non-native yet which insist that their ground zero is a certain spot in the city of Jerusalem. This sense of ownership in largely grounded in fabrications, fairy-tales.

 

This has been true of Norman crusaders —  ultimately Scandinavian, and so non-local in the extreme —  or Arabian Muslims or Turks in the past and now Persians. Each brings an obsession which underpins meddling in a region that they have no real business to meddle in. 

It is also true of a certain group of extreme Zionists, originating in the US but also prevalent here in Guatemala, who are not even Jewish, but instead evangelical Christians.

The absolutist perspectives, which for the crusaders were grounded in the spiritual/apocalyptic —  and in fact geographically transferable —  notion of the Holy City on the hill, still prevent anyone who has signed up to these 'visions' from seeing reason today, because these groups have in effect  constructed their communal identities and the sense of how to live their everyday lives around these stark obsessions.

One of the greater absurdities in the western side of this discourse is that the Radical Left appears to have concluded that Zionism is the only form of formalised false consciousness impacting on the conflicts in the Levant during modern times.

This POV represents almost the most outrageous pair of mythological goggles worn by anyone, arguably comparable with those worn by the Islamic fundamentalists: a prescription which pares down reality to a rigidly thematicised, 'anti-colonial' conceptualisation of history.

And as I wrote here the other day, UN institutions like UNRWA have started to operate like the Society of Jesus in the early modern period, a self-serving order which maintains a bizarre, hypocritical, extra-legal operation in the region, which ultimately works against integration and the establishment of stable, peaceful, collaborative societies which operate within the international order as it now stands.