Free Will by Sam Harris No2

Anyone who comes out of reading Sam Harris's brain event-provoking book fully convinced that they did not freely choose to do so, obviously need not bother procrastinating for long about whether to follow it up with Kenneth Weisbrode's On Ambivalence.

As for Hamlet, what a complete bloody waste of time! For it may appear that we are having trouble making up our minds, but we aren't...at least according to Mr Harris.

Free Will by Sam Harris No1

Being atheistic with regards to the existence of a creator, but agnostic with regard to the possibility of transcendentals, my not-strictly materialist cosmogony is one that finds itself intermittently beleaguered by the strident philosophical naivety of certain men of science and other commentators who march under the banner of Neo-Atheism.

This does not mean however, that I wish to count myself amongst the present wave of more accommodating cuddly atheists, in whose ranks the former Mistress of my college, Baroness Mary Warnock was recently listed — largely on the grounds that she has a partiality for a bit of religious sing-song — though on that basis even Richard Dawkins is a bit of a soft toy.

Sam Harris, American author of The End of Faith and now this little volume, which could be subtitled The End of Human Agency, clearly has no intention of being either snuggly or caressible. The book is written in the tone of the man setting out the sort of hard facts most of us simply won't face up to. And he sets them out with just the sort of obstinate determination not to admit the possibility of a bigger picture that the Neo-Atheists have made themselves notorious for, even managing to present his colleague Dan Dennet as callow and limp wristed on the matter of our apparently non-existent free will. (More on that later...)

In essence Harris's argument is based on the following observation: thanks to modern neuroimaging techniques, we can see that the human mind operates in two separate streams, one objective, one subjective. In the first of these brain events occur, in the second the feeling that the owner of the brain has authorial control over these events. Given the detectable delay between the two streams, our sense of having free will is an illusion, Harris therefore concludes.

There's nothing wrong with the facts in Harris's polemic. Yet its a wonder that he believes them to be so compelling a proof against our ability to shape our own actions. Scanning a human brain from the outside can indeed tell us many new and interesting things about its function, but we are still a long way from a comprehensive scientific understanding of the mind.

But the real weakness of the case Harris is making lies in its assumption that the two streams of activity in the brain are stuck in real time mode (or at least one is in real time and the other thinks it is, but isn't) and entirely disconnected from each other. In other words, there is no kind of feedback loop in place between the personal and the impersonal mind. It doesn't take a great deal of subjective brain scanning to realise that this is unlikely to be the true state of affairs...

TBC

An interesting correlation?

"If we take the term ‘morally worse’ as purely descriptive, denoting people whose characters generally appear to be morally worse than average, and if we restrict our attention to those who have had some non-negligible degree of education, we find that people who have religious convictions are on the whole morally worse than people who lack them. Are the religious worse because they’re religious, or are they religious because they’re worse?

"The first direction of causation is well known, but it’s the second that is more prominent in everyday life. The religious (sociologically speaking) tend to be religious because religious belief provides them with a framework in which they can handle certain unattractive elements in themselves. In converts – those who take up religion without having been brought up in it, or without having previously taken it seriously – the correlation between religious belief and relative moral badness in the strictly descriptive sense (which is not incompatible with charm) is particularly striking."

Galen Strawson

No exceptions...

"It's impossible — no exceptions — for the genuine spiritual or religious impulse to achieve full expression in religions that mandate belief in a supernatural, personal God. There have been genuinely religious Abrahamists, but only because they have somehow maintained the forms of personal God religions, while in fact having abandoned any such belief.

"Some people think that men like St Paul and St Augustine are exemplary instances of what it is to possess the religious temperament. It's easy to see why they have this reputation as long as we stick to the sociological understanding of religion: both were brilliant monsters of egotism, and almost all religious belief, considered as a sociological phenomenon, is about self."

Galen Strawson, British philosopher

Divine chaos

"When at last I had disabused my mind of the enormous imposture of a design, an object, and an end, a purpose or a system, I began to see dimly how much more grandeur, beauty and hope there is in a divine chaos - not chaos in the sense of order or confusion, but simply the absence of order - than there is in a universe made by pattern...Logically, that which has a design or a purpose has a limit. The very idea of a design or purpose has grown repulsive to me on account of its littleness. I do not venture, for a moment, even to attempt to supply a reason to take the place of the exploded plan...I look at the sunshine, and feel that there is no contracted order: there is divine chaos, and, in it, limitless hope and possibilities."

Richard Jeffries

'Third World' Airports

For the first time a serving Pontiff is making a state visit to the UK, and Papa Razzi has kicked off his attempt to woo the locals by declaring that the UK is a 'force for good', if a little too secular and multicultural for his taste. He also praised us Brits for standing up to Hitler and his 'atheist extremism'. He did not however say what we are supposed to do about Richard Dawkins.

Not at his side was Father Walter Kasper, a close aide who spared himself the aggro of the arrivals process at London's busiest airport by earlier stating in an interview that "When you land at Heathrow you think at times you have landed in a Third World country." (Though officially at least, health reasons, prevented him from accompanying the Pope on this occasion.)

It's not clear whether his drift was that the place is full of insalubrious wogs, or whether it's just the dumpiest major hub on the planet. Or indeed whether he was speaking synechdochially about the parlous state of our nation as a whole.

Anyway, I suppose he's right about Heathrow and we wish him a speedy recovery from Vatican mouth. I live in a proper Third World country but the airport here thankfully makes Terminal 3 look like a dirt strip in Kandahar.

Still, my recent round-the-world journey did incorporate one major international aiport that provides a marginally worse passenger experience: JFK.

As for the rest, here's my personal league table:


1. Hong Kong International: in a city which often feels like one big duty free lounge they were going to have to come up with something special and who can argue when this mini-metropolis claims to be the world's greatest airport?

2. Suvarnabhumi, Bangkok: could not be further from the shithole that appeared in all those movies where naive young western girls are detained by sweaty, mosca-encircled immigration officials for carrying dope that some low-life had planted in their suitcase. Filled with seemingly pointless rolling electric walkways and an entire floor full of top notch Asian eateries.

3. Narita, Tokyo: much like Hong Kong, but somehow not quite as swanky.

4. YVR, Vancouver International: smartened up and 'greened' in advance of the Winter Olympics, the gate areas feature massive glass windows and high ceilings and pleasingly soft-toned upholstery.

5. Changi, Singapore: the trouble here is that while T3 is as smart and shiny as Asia's other leading terminals, T1 rivals its equivalent at Heathrow for all-round outmoded skankiness. The food on offer in the departure lounge is more along the lines of generic international soggy croissant than what you would expect from a foodie's paradise like Singapore.

6. La Guardia, New York: some might quibble about the runway sticking out into the Hudson, but the terminal facilities are nicely compact and the staff remarkably friendly and helpful for denizens of this city.

7. Aurora International, Guatemala City: the old set-up had its charms, but I suppose this new glass and metal make-over with its American-style dirty blue departure lounge seats is a better advertisement for Guatemala's desire to be modern. The old ways are most visibly preserved in the form of unnecessarily long queues for check-in and the payment of a departure tax that only bank employees can be trusted to handle.

8. Miami International (MIA): my unlucky aiport, scene of two emergency landings and other major inconveniences, which this time included being told by an automatic check-in machine that my flight was cancelled and by the nearest AA employee that customer service was in Dallas. Father Kasper should give it a whirl some time.

9. Heathrow, London: They're doing their best by attempting to tart up the original sixties terminals. The brand new T5 looks like a failed British attempt to recreate the experience of those Asian glass palaces, which went wrong the moment they decided to pack it with the same tat that clutters up the other four terminals.

10. JFK, New York: Rather than create a proper airport, the designers of JFK sought to build an airport of parts, where all the facilities you might need are strung out in a circle of wide circumference and linked by slow-moving driverless trains which circulate in only one direction. Authentic blue-collar New Yorkers of the stereotypically coarse and dismissive kind operate in force here.

Lord Sacks v Stephen Hawking

In his latest book The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking, who had been wont to use the term 'God' in much the same way that Einstein did, has apparently taken a more public stance against first causes, asserting that it is now unnecessary to "invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going".

There's a small irony in this, because Hawking was instrumental in undermining the 'steady-state universe' paradigm of his early Cambridge years and in easing into mainstream secular consciousness the notion that the cosmos had a moment of conception.*

Taking issue with Hawking, last week the Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (pictured above) referred to this more radical stance as "an elementary fallacy of logic", adding that whereas science is about explanation, religion is about interpretation. (Thus echoing the views of our local Sunday morning casuist Jorge Loring. )

Sacks went on to say that the mutual hostility of science and religion is one of the "curses of our age". Science, he notes "cannot tell us why we are here or how we should live. Science masquerading as religion is as unseemly as religion masquerading as science."

This is not an unreasonable position, but one can still sympathise with scientists for wanting a degree of payback for all those centuries where religion did consider itself a system of explanation. And one of the reasons that scientists like Richard Dawkins have ended up so insufferably dogmatic is surely their fear that the achievements of the Enlightenment might somehow be undone in years to come by the West's most powerful nation, where anti-intellectual horrors like the Creation Museum have recently taken root.

Less militant atheists and agnostics could also be forgiven for thinking that all this talk of separate 'domains' for science and religion smacks of a last ditch attempt by religion to define a cultural space for itself from which scientific intrusions are excluded per se. After such a long retreat, it's time to stand and fight to defend the Fatherland!

However, what bothers me about this cosy bilaterality is that it would appear to suit both sides to avoid assigning a role to philosophy. To get an idea what gets lost when this is set up as a two-horse race, ask yourself one of the questions that consistently split believers and unbelievers: i.e. how could something have come of nothing?

Scientists have recently come up with an answer for this one. Down at the quantum scale the difference between something and nothing blurs and there is an underlying potentiality that means energy can flicker into existence out of the 'pregnant void'. (I haven't read Hawking's exposition of this process, but the insight is already common in cosmology.)

There you have it, a solution which will satisfy scientists but leave the religious rigidly unassuaged. Voices from out of the two domains may sound as if they are asking the same question, but they aren't — and this is where philosophy has a role to play, because it helps us to understand the assumptions that underly the big questions that we are bound to ask of existence.

People rightly want to know why there is something and not nothing. Yet this is a philosophical question and thus a more open one than the Book of Genesis and other creation myths allow for. If you insist that there must have been absolutely nothing (except for the Creator himself who must have always existed) followed by something, you are making two assumptions more than most true philosophers will permit themselves. Scientists meanwhile assume the 'ah, but who created the creator?' retort is enough to see this one off. But it isn't.

Anyway, the issue in the current Hawking v Lord Sacks controversy is actually a little more complicated than a straightforward explanation v interpretation dichotomy: it is really about the limits of knowledge.

In one of his more militant moments Professor Dawkins might insist that it would be wrong to set any artificial limits to what humanity can discover about its situation using the scientific method. But even if we agree with this, we also know that science is highly unlikely to come up with all the answers in our own lifetimes. There thus remains a profound mystery, and there are aspects of it which we may have to admit will never be solveable by reason alone.

The Selfish Gene has been widely misunderstood as a treatise justifying human selfishness. Not so, Dawkins contends. We might have all these calculating little robots inside of us, but the wonder of humanity is its ability to transcend them with genuine altruism. Nevertheless, while science can explain why we are kitted up for making moral choices, purely practical explanations for why it is best to be good seem inherently inadequate.

Across the globe and throughout history religious teachings have stepped into this breach, instructing people how they ought to behave, and one can examine each of the main traditions and quickly comprehend how successful they have been as guardians of moral rectitude. It's not hard to find numerous examples of how simultaneously oppressive and hypocritical they have tended to be, and yet within each, one can also trace individuals who have somehow escaped the worst excesses and distortions of the movement as a whole.

Anyway, on a personal level, I find that I am capable of living with an explanatory gap in my life — 'the mystery' — and can proceed with the rest of my life (and death) without needing to know how much of this gap will ultimately be filled by science or indeed by 'spirituality', while finding a good deal of solace in asking reasoned philosophical questions of this lacuna.

It is unquestionably the most startling fact of our existence, a truly significant something which exists, and which conceivably might not have. Just imagine that you had been born into a world where none of the fundamentals were open to question. Believers don't need to of course...which is one of my greatest objections to religion. If you deny yourself the urge to confront the greatest provocation for any conscious mind, you are in a real sense not really living. (Or at least attempting to live like the beasts, when you really don't have to!)

The assumption that out of nothing something cannot come is one I let go of some time ago. Philosophy teaches me to probe beyond such sticking points. And my academic background as a historian also taught me that denial is never the best response to new factual information which poses logical challenges to my pre-existing beliefs.

*The notion that the Big Bang was the absolute beginning of everything has become widespread in mainstream culture, but it is not something that can be backed up with any empirical evidence and is thus not something you will find eminent scientists asserting in print.

'Evolutionism'

This morning on Canal 3 we watched a Spanish Catholic priest by the name of Jorge Loring, author of a fat tome titled Para Salvarte, ably demonstrating the tortuous and somewhat tortured reconciliation the Universal church has made with Darwin.

Only men have tools and honour their dead, Loring preaches, so their spiritual status is completely distinct from animals. (He doesn't mention what we are to make of the spiritual status of Neanderthals who lived in his own native land some 30,000 years ago. They certainly made tools, and evidence exists that they also honoured their dead. They also had bigger brains than modern humans, with whom they briefly coexisted in Europe. Were they just walking matter like 'los monos'? Where did they fit in God's plan?)

The Bible, he also informs us, does not have to 'make history'. It is a collection of messages not of facts. So when it tells us that God made Adam from clay, what it might mean is that God made Adam from the body of a monkey, which like mud, is just a lump of matter. In this sense the Catholic church has 'no problem' with what Loring calls Evolutionism. What really matters then is the 'jump' made from the animal to the spiritual plane.

Ironically, this reasoning itself derives from an an interesting historical fact, for we know that the originators of scripture had in mind an ontologically-distinct kind of textual experiences for its readers, something altogether more complex than a simple distinction between facts and messages can encompass.

And while the Bible may not itself make history it is in fact made of history, something churchmen usually seem less ready to discuss with the faithful. We know for example when, where (and in some crucial instances like Genesis, why) its various components were put together. The minimum insight we can glean from this is that the Bible was not 'composed' in the order in which it is usually presented, and that the myth of creation it contains was not the earliest formative myth of the middle eastern peoples within whose culture and history it emerged. But context it seems, is best left to trained theologians, for when it comes to the ordinary faithful, it might rightly be considered a substrate for doubt.

Anyway, in spite of all this, Loring then advises us in altogether more stentorian tones that evolution remains 'discutible' and opens the pages of his own book in order to quote from the 'numerous' scientists who consider Darwin to be in error. One of these has been cited before in this blog, but Loring fails to distinguish between a reasoned scientific opposition to natural selection as the sole mechanism of evolution and a principled but ill-reasoned objection to evolution in toto.

Don't worry then, Loring concludes, Catholics have no reason to feel obliged to reject Evolutionism, but they also have no reason to feel obliged to accept it. And in this he's right of course. It's not obligatory to believe that the Earth revolves around the sun, that men landed on the moon, that Princess Diana's death was an accident etc. Reason, unlike religion, doesn't function through obligation. And scientific knowledge (as well as historical knowledge) is acquired though the piecemeal synthesis of facts and hypotheses, where truth is always provisional rather than absolute...but never so relative that it's OK to believe anything you want if the empirical evidence starts to line up against it.

Under eastern eyes

One of the highlights of Sunday mornings in Guatemala are the sermons given at 7:30am on local TV by Dr Jorge H. López, lead pastor of the Fraternidad Cristiana de Guatemala.

López sports a worldly, good-humoured outlook on life, and the Prostestantism he peddles is a long way indeed from the dourness of Calvinism. ("Nobody ever went to Hell for drinking a glass of wine," was a memorable soundbite from this morning's sermon.) In some ways it's akin to a self-help system, with López positioning himself someway between star motivator and stand-up comedian.

For the past couple of weeks he's been banging on about "DI-SCI-PLINA".

Now I have a hunch that Pastor López is actually rather close to sharing the view of many of us atheist-agnostics, that it is important to behave well even if NOBODY (not even up there) is watching, but today he drew the most applause from his audience when, whilst berrating those who might act like complete haraganes the moment their bosses go on holiday, he reminded them that 'Dios' is always watching. For me this rather undermined everything he'd previously said about the mice not taking proper advantage of the cat's absence.

This has always been one of the great ironies of organised religion for me: that it disproportionately appeals to those individuals who are incapable of conceiving of an ethical code not underpinned by a supernatural surveillance system.

The idea of spirit eyes (and ears) taking in our every action is of course part of the most ancient strand within human religiosity: ancestor worship. I've been swotting up on the Shinto tradition prior to my Japan trip, and it has caught my attention how the imagined presence of household spirits informed the evolution of almost all Japanese notions of duty, loyalty and self-sacrifice, and how a cult which was perhaps rooted in fear, over time became the basis of rituals where the emotions of gratitude and affection prevail. (...and yet where the 'higher ones' also participate in the joys and sorrows, and perhaps also the bad vibes, of family, commune and state.)

The coexistence of the Buddhist and Shinto traditions within Japan has allowed for a separation of the faith and the hope elements within eastern spirituality: a state of affairs that I find intriguing and will comment on in due course once I've hit the road.

Head cases

It's has been fascinating to follow the Spanish version of the European debate surrounding the outward signs of non-assimilation.

This week teachers in a Madrid school voted 17-2 to bar a Muslim pupil called Najwa Mahla from wearing her veil in class. School rules prohibit all forms of headgear, and any compromise on the part of the centro's authorities was made that much less likely when almost all the other students started appearing with headscarves in sympathy with their modest sixteen-year-old schoolmate.

Spain is not a secular society: annually the Cathlic church takes a chunk of taxpayers' money and there's nothing that other traditions or indeed non-believers can do about it. The problem of women wandering around in silly outfits as a mark of their faith in supernatural nonsense is also not a problem limited to Muslims, as testified to by the quantity of nuns one spots on the streets over there.

Spain has not had quite the full-on experience of mass immigration that both Britain and France have had, and the very nature of Spanish imperialism has meant that many of those seeking a new life in the Iberian peninsula already speak the local lingo and are, culturally at least, quite a long way down the road to Spanishness. Islamic immigration (to a large extent from North Africa) on the other hand, is perhaps an even thornier matter in Spain than elsewhere in Europe.

This Christian nation has a particular history of confrontation with the old enemy, something to which OBL himself has made repeated allusions to in his nutty video spots, and less tolerant Spanish commentators have made much of the remarks of one 'community leader' who has observed that "This is the territory of our enemy, we are here to recover it for Islam."

The country's extended early contact with oriental ways was noted for periods of mutual tolerance and exchange, and there's no question that the Islamic civilisation left a lasting mark on the local culture, not least on the Spanish variety of Catholicism. All this might help explain the particular unease that unassimilated Muslims generate in the nation which invented the Inquisition as one of the strictest enforcers of assimilation the world has ever seen.

The symbolism of the veil is complex, at once religious, cultural, nationalistic. Whilst I am uncomfortable with the very notion of imposing religious symbols (and observance) on the very young, I don't believe that the cause of secular values is much aided by confrontations such as these, where the right of the child to an education becomes compromised, and which tend to be counter-productive anyway on the political level.

In this instance it strikes me that the Catholic children who adopted the veil in solidarity have demonstrated a far more commendable attitude than the majority of adult contributors to the debate.

My own school was a privileged environment with a stringent set of rules regarding uniform. Yet there were boys there from around the world who were permitted small but significant exceptions, such as the Sikhs. Somehow their turbans never seemed to say to me "I'm your enemy within," but it has been my experience that in Britain at least, members of the elite are often (and perhaps surprsingly) more cosmopolitan and tolerant of otherness than certain small-minded factions of the middling sort.

This year's vampires

There are approximately 260 references to angels in the Bible, but only 6 of them mention wings.

This, and other fascinating factlets, cropped up on a recent radio interview given by Professor Peter Marshall of Warwick University, co-author of Angels In The Early Modern World.

Marshall was on mini-panel discussing the durability of these messengers of the divine, who seem set for a pop-culture resurgence in twenty ten.

Now, you might have expected them to have been first against the wall when the Reformation came, but it appears that there are just so many textual accounts of their activities in the scriptures that they proved rather difficult to expunge from the theological record.

Part of the explanation for this resilience may be the fact that angels pre-date the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and as representatives of a more ancient lineage of near-eastern superstition, which has been co-opted yet not contained by the church hierarchies, they appear to have genuine populist appeal.

In early Christian times the standard iconography presented angels as bearded males. But then came the Middle Ages and a whole load of hang-ups about sex. Pope Gregory VII and his fellow reformers insisted on a celibate lay clergy in order to ensure that church property held firm against the nascent nation state's inheritance laws; and so the de-carnalisation of angels ensued as a natural consequence of spurious retro-fitted ideas about purity.

I tend to equate angels with Tolkein's elves. Immortal yet somehow, not bored, they are a far more easy-to-comprehend embodiment of humanity's better self than God could ever be.

As Jeremy Rifkin puts it in The Empathic Civilisation, there's paradoxically no place for the more exalted human emotional responses such as empathy in Heaven or the Marxist utopia, because in such perfect environments there can be no suffering — which means there's nothing to get all empathic about. That an utterly perfect, omniscient being could take a real interest in the trivia of our miniscule existences is something only the vainest of believers can hold to be certain. Angels however, are just like us, without all those sinful tendencies.

Indeed, medieval thinkers started to relate angels to the formally chaste condition of human souls reawakening on the Day of Judgement, and pictorially angels duly shed their whiskers and assumed a decidedly androgynous look in medieval art.

An abiding characteristic of unregulated popular belief in the Middle Ages was the notion that animals and children were somehow closer to the supernatural than everyone else and could perceive beings on the edge of crossing over, so to speak. It's therefore hardly surprising that angels have developed a special bond with the immature and that one of the most attested loci for the summoning one of God's messengers has been the fingernail of a child. One doesn't have to be a qualified psychologist to detect a deep-seated fear of adulthood in western culture (And is it all that surprising given what priests — if not angels — have been getting up to with the children that they've taken a special interest in?)

Angeology, the hot new thriller by Danielle Trussoni (pictured above) — a recent addition to my Kindle 'pile' — is clearly pitched at a readership somewhere between those of Dan Brown and Umberto Eco. I'll probably get round to finishing it during my May odyssey.

The title is suggestive of another contributing factor to the unlikely durability of angels since science started to suppress superstition: they lend themselves to the empiricist's soft underbelly: pseudoscientific, occultic, taxonomic obessesiveness.

Anyway, so long bloodsuckers and hidehi super-seraphs. If Legion is anything to go by, this year's crop come with added testosterone. (No beards so far though.)

Suffer little children to come unto me

Pope Benedict XVI has been getting the full Bill Clinton treatment this week, following the Vatican's failure to ring-fence (as my former colleagues in the PR industry like to say) the sordid revelations emanating from the Irish branch of the universal church. 

Actually, one could say that the former Archbishop Ratzinger's level of personal guilt here amounts to even less of a clear-cut sackable offence than Ronald's Reagan's definitive deniability in the Iran-Contra scandal. God knows I never read every memo I was CC'd in on! 

But this hasn't stopped regular cassock-baiter Christopher Hitchens from going on the Bill Maher show in order to call for the Pontiff's arrest under US law. (26 States currently include members of the clergy among those professionals specifically mandated by law to report known or suspected instances of child abuse or neglect.)

Perhaps the only man in the whole world who would dare to indict the Pope, has himself been suffering some serious reputation damage this week, with a real possibility of career-threatening legal consequences.

Spain's super-juez Baltasar Garzón has been accused of wantonly acting outside his jurisdiction. When I heard this my first thought was, why has it taken the Spanish authorities so long to react to something that us anglophones cottoned onto the moment Garzón started issuing arrest warrants for the likes of Osama Bin Laden and a large part of Latin America's class of retired dictators.? (Starting most notoriously of course, with Pinochet.)
 

The irony here is that the judge has been pulled over now for abusing his authority in the one area you'd think could actually be said to fall within his remit: a probe into atrocities carried out during Spain's own civil war. 

In other news, the government of El Salvador officially apologised to the rest of the world this week for murdering their own Archbishop back in 1980, and I spotted a big poster for Gerardi, La Película on the way into the capital. Does any one know which version of the events surrounding the bishop's bludgeoning (if any) this new film alludes to? (i.e. Goldman's or  Vargas Llosa's.) 

Tell us what we don't know...

One abiding characteristic of the modern digital media is the way it seemingly encourages people to spend a lot of time and money on 'studies' that end up telling us stuff we basically already knew.

And so today news reaches us of the work of Professor Satoshi Kanazawa, Economics Management Professor at the London School of Economics, who has 'discovered' that liberals and atheists tend to be more intelligent.

Kanazawa argues that humans are designed by evolution to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends. Being liberal — caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers one may never meet or interact with — is, in contrast, evolutionarily novel and therefore more likely to be the position of clever offspring. Kanazawa doesn't exactly say why, but appears to assume that kids with smarts will reach out beyond innate behaviours and attitudes.

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) nevertheless supports this hypothesis: Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as "very liberal" have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence, while those identifying themselves as "very conservative" have an average IQ of 95 during the spotty phase.

In case we didn't already know that members of the God Squad are constitutionally paranoid, Kanazawa spells it out for us: "Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid."

This served the species well enough when self-preservation and protection of the clan depended upon vigilance to the point of excess, but these days "more intelligent children are likely to...go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists."

Do these facts get right up your conservative nose? Well, there's a study for that too.

The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School has published research which shows that people react in a closed-minded way to information that threatens their core values, and are much more likely to believe information delivered by a messenger who looks as if he might believe the same things as they do.

They conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to describe their cultural beliefs. Those claiming to embrace new technology, authority and free enterprise were labeled the 'individualistic' group. Those suspicious of authority or of commerce were referred to as 'communitarians.' When queried about nanotechnology, the groups began to polarise sharply around the potential benefits and harms. With the same information to hand, the individualists thought nanotechnology was exciting while the communitarians dismissed it as dangerous."It doesn't matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe, and they glom onto the positive information," reports social scientist Don Braman of the CCP.

TV Viewing Diary: The History of Christianity (2)

Diarmaid MacCulloch turned his back on the rising sun for part two, following the history of the 'Imperial' Christianity through the great schism of 1054 with Constantinople and then on up to the Reformation, his pet subject.

"I don't believe Peter was ever Bishop in Rome," he deliberated, quite early on.

Scholars are apparently still uncertain why Paul, who seemed to make the bigger effort to extend the Word to gentiles, was downgraded relative to Simon Peter once Christianity became the state religion in Rome. Perhaps it was simply that Greek pun — "upon this rock" — put into Jesus' mouth that earned Peter a basilica downtown, while Paul's church and final resting place was stuck outside the city walls.

The Abbot of said church was admirably frank in expressing a hope that the legacy of 'his' saint should achieve greater influence in modern Catholicism, and observing that if Paul not Peter had become the gatekeeper, the church would have had a much less centralised look about it today.

MacCulloch himself betrays a slight Anglican bias on these matters. For he categorically blames St Augustine of Hippo for all of western Christianity's sexual complexes (and specifically of course the doctrine of original sin) whilst failing to note that it was Paul who was the monster misogynist.

In the Dark Ages old controversies still complicated the religious scene — such as the Arianism espoused by the Goths. So the papacy made the decision to outflank this encroaching heresy by converting the Anglo-Saxons in the late sixth century and establishing a particularly loyal bond between these gauche northerners and the Bishop of Rome.

For his services Augustine , the leading Benedictine missionary in England and special papal envoy, was presented with the See of Canterbury and a pallium, which still features in the Anglican Archbishop's coat of arms a half a millennium after the English Reformation.

With no Emperor in Rome at this time, the Italian aristocracy entered the priesthood in droves (The Catholic Bishop's get-up today reflects the secular garb of Rome's fufurufos at this time.) and local secular power was increasingly concentrated in the person of the Pope.

The Papacy was helped first by the eradication of three out of four rival patriarchs (Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem) by Jihad and by the forged Imperial decree known as The Donation of Constantine (not in fact mentioned on the programme) which supposedly transfered control of the western half of the empire to the Pope in the absence of any other capo in the region.

On Christmas Day 800 Pope Leo III felt secure enough to share some of this ascendency by crowning the biggest barbarian then knocking around — Charlemagne — as the first 'Holy Roman Emperor.'

But a Papacy controlled by wealthy Roman toffs was hardly a model Christian institution. A zeal for change soon arrived in the person of the brutish reformer Gregory VII, whose main achievements might be said to have been:

1) Getting himself embroiled in a war with the very institution that Leo III had created, which destablised Europe (and Germany in particular) for centuries and perhaps could be said to have ultimately resulted in two World Wars thanks to Rome's continued efforts to stifle German nationalism and centralised leadership from this point onwards. (MacCulloch didn't actually say this though!)

2) Getting rid of married priests, largely in order to counteract the laws of inheritance that prevailed amongst the aristocracy and thereby establish the Pope's unchallenged authority in the selection process for the key ecclesiastical posts. (Up until this point only 'regular clergy' i.e. monks and nuns were expected to be celibate.)

3) Getting the ideological wheels moving which would lead to exciting new doctrines on the remission of sin, which would pave the way for the Crusades and the sale of indulgences which would in turn eventually culminate in the Reformation and part four (?) of this very interesting programme.

Part 3 meanwhile will cover the 'Orthodox' church. Gregory had been helped by the actions of his predecessor Leo IX who had got shot of Constantinople and both its Emperor and its Patriarch, the last serious rivals to the Pope's claim to head up "all Christendom". This was achieved by sending Rome's least tactful legate Humbert for a crucial meeting with Patriarch Michael in 1054 which concluded with a frenzy of mutual excommunications.

Genesis

The first chapter of Genesis wasn't, as some of the Good Book's more credulous and literalist readers appear to believe, the first part of that work committed to parchment. It is commonly supposed to have been composed by a priest (or a set of priests) known to scholars as P, some time after after the destruction of the Temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 and the commencement of the Israelites' enforced sojourn in Babylon.

People at that time were much less likely to assume an unrealistic certainty on matters ineffable, but found that story-telling was a most effective way of extracting meaning from the mysteries around them. In her fascinating biography of the Bible, Karen Armstrong writes that:

"In the ancient world cosmogony was a therapeutic rather than a factual genre. People recited creation myths at a sickbed, at the start of a new project or at the beginning of a new year - whenever they felt the need for an infusion of divine potency that had, somehow, brought all things into being."

P belonged to a Jewish culture which had flirted with the notion of an eternal cosmos similar to that espoused by the Greeks (and crucially, had not been fully monotheistic before the calamity of exile), but in these particular historical circumstances Yahweh had an obvious competitor in the form of the Babylonian deity Marduk who was said to re-create the world every year. In P's alternative version of creation, there was no great battle, no need for renewal, just an effective, non-violent little project carried out in the space of six days. It gave the Jews a clearly differentiated primordial myth in this period of lost political autonomy.

Armstrong goes on to say that 'few' people before the nineteenth century would have imagined that the first chapter of Genesis was a factual account of creation that could compete with knowledge acquired empirically....but really, how are we to quantify 'few' here?

Asking if people believed this tale literally at any stage in its history is a bit like asking if medieval people believed the world to be flat. Most learned people probably didn't, but then they were part of an educated elite, a group which will always have a more sophisticated (or sophistic) position on where to draw the line between the effable and the ineffable.

My own line is that scholars at the time of P would most probably not have even understood what we mean by literal interpretation, given that scripture was not read in the same way that we moderns are taught to read, but instead used as a means to the real end, a state of religious understanding or ekstasis, achieved through formal recitation of the text.

Of course today we have to put up with hooey like the Creation Museum in Kentucky. But science and creationism are not two sides of a Yin Yang opposition, they are instead part of the same modern drive for factual certainty which has rather overshadowed its true alternative, the more abstract, intuited understandings that come from our exposure to metaphor.

But the apparent challenge of squaring Genesis with Darwin diverts some religious people into a pig-headed rejection of fact and others into an equally inane discourse on the wonderfulness of a God who came up with the idea of creating a process of self-creation.

The authors of the Old Testament — Jews — have generally maintained an approach to this problem that sounds more practical than your typical Christian bluff, and the Muslims — with their Abrahamic Tradition V3.0 — cleverly covered themselves early on by qualifying the creation story in the Koran with the statement that one day in Genesis is equivalent to “a thousand years of your reckoning.” Tellingly though, Muslim creationism has started to take hold in the most secular of Islamic societies: Turkey.

At the Intelligence Squared Debate Anne Widdecombe's managed to be duplicitous as well as abusive to the questioner when she tossed aside the issue of why women are barred from the priesthood: a woman can no more stand in persona cristi at the point of consecration than a man can represent the Virgin Mary, she snorted.

Only an utter dupe would see that as anything other than a casuistic post-rationalisation emerging from an organisation which developed within a culture where women were not even allowed to own property, one of the main perks of the priesthood back in the Middle Ages.

What this debate revealed is that religion does itself few favours by engaging in a fact-slinging contest,. Yet in the modern world, a return to a more mystic tradition (a la Kabbalah) could only really be viewed by the rest of a largely secular society as a conscious act of isolationism. A dilemma indeed.

Trounced

Roman Catholic cultural commentator Andrew M. Brown laments the performance of Archbishop Onaiyekan and Anne Widdecombe in defence of the motion 'The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world' at the recent Intelligence Squared debate. Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens ran circles around them....but then you'd kind of expect them to on just about any topic, especially against such mediocre opposition.

When Anne Widdecombe is at the podium you don't know whether to turn down the volume or dramatically lower the brightness of your screen....or both.

I've never found this kind of adversorial discussion particularly enlightening, but in this instance perspectives were indeed altered:

"The voting gives a good idea of how it went. Before the debate, for the motion: 678. Against: 1102. Don’t know: 346. This is how it changed after the debate. For: 268. Against: 1876. Don’t know: 34. In other words, after hearing the speakers, the number of people in the audience who opposed the motion increased by 774. My friend Simon, who’s a season ticket holder, said it was the most decisive swing against a motion that he could remember."

It's usually difficult for one team or the other to make converts in such encounters because both manage to find the other's weak points, but in this instance Stephen Fry led the RC pair into a number of significant intellectual traps which proved crucial in shifting the waverers:

— When you are a purveyor of absolute truth, you can hardly plead to be judged by the relative standards of different ages

— There's no point in responding aggressively to certain charges if on others you appear afraid to come out in public with your known doctrinal position

— Asking the audience not to focus on your misdeeds is indeed a bit like a paedophile in court asking the jury to forget about his track record of child abuse and consider instead the nice presents he buys for his grandmother

— An organisation which assumes responsibility for the moral lives of so many people at such a young age realy ought to have more to show for it.

Bloody Mary

This morning I read Hilary Mantel's review of Eammon Duffy's Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor.

Whilst generations of English historians have concurred that Mary and her bishops were deluded reactionaries fighting inevitable intellectual change, Duffy insists that traditional faith was resilient at this time and that the Queen and Archbishop Pole demonstrated that a conserted campaign of state terrorism really can set back an idea that could otherwise consider that its time has come.

There were 284 executions, a very public "theatre of cruelty, with both sides performing for each other and for any uncommitted onlooker." The number of protestants prepared to bear witness and burn might ultimately have been small, Mantel agrees, but the genie of free thought was certainly out of the bottle:

"An Essex servant girl, Elizabeth Folkes, aged 20, was asked what she understood about the nature of the Eucharist. Did she believe in a ‘substantial and real presence’ in the host? She answered: ‘It was a substantial lye, and a reall lye.’ She had been questioned once and let go, she had been given her chance, and so although the judge wept when he sentenced her, she was burned with five other humble people outside the town walls of Colchester. Rawlins White was burned; he was an illiterate Cardiff fisherman. William Hunter was 19 years old, a silk-weaver’s apprentice; a priest sneered at him: ‘It is a merye worlde when such as thou arte shall teache us what is the truth.’ Thomas Tomkins, a weaver, was burned after Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, had forcibly shaved off his long evangelist’s beard ‘so he wold loke like a catholike’ even if he wasn’t one, and had held his hand in a candle flame to give him a foretaste of what was in store for him if he failed to recant."

If you recanted, you still burned, but only up to the point of your earthly death, or so the Bishops believed. Clergymen wandered amongst the crowd gathered for the executions, ready to provide ad hoc spiritual commentary, while informants noted down the names of anyone showing undue compassion for the heretics on the barbecue.

It appears to work anyway...

In an apocryphal story about supersition, an eminent man of science is found to have a horseshoe hanging outside his door. When confronted with this anomaly, he cheerfully admits that he doesn't really believe in that kind of thing...but it appears to work anyway.

In Sophie's World the tale is assigned to Isaac Newton, who did indeed dabble in alchemy and organised religion, but I do believe it properly belongs to Nils Bohr.

This week we discovered that enough Americans don't believe in Darwin's theory of evolution to prevent the new biopic starring Paul Bettany from getting a US distributor.

Pathetic...but fear not. It appears to work anyway. This winter a good number of these idiots will go down with Tamiflu-resistant swine flu and end up a bit 'half-baked' themselves.

In the meantime here's Part 1 of last Friday's Newsnight Review special on the legacy of On the Origins of Species with guests Professor Richard Dawkins, novelist Margaret Atwood, the Reverend Richard Coles and Charles Darwin's descendent Ruth Padel. (The subsequent parts can be accessed via the YouTube menu.)

Great atheists go where the money is

As for that shirt...Just because something makes you feel good it doesn't make it cool. (Maybe Ridley Scott needs someone to play a jaded CIA agent in the tropics in some future movie?)

TV Viewing Diary: Did Darwin Kill God?

As a sop to those viewers who apparently thought that Sir David Attenborough's documentary about Charles Darwin was "one-sided", the BBC has permitted handsome and trendy Nottingham University theologian Conor Cunningham to make a programme which answers this particular question in the negative.

Cunningham began by stating his deep admiration for Darwin and his contribution to science. He then stated his apparently non-contradictory belief in God and in the nature of Jesus Christ as the living incarnation of that God. "Mainstream Christianity" — by which he seemed to mean Catholicism but didn't say so— has never had a problem with Darwin's ideas: for instance, St Augustine would have positively dug them, he wished us to believe. The problem however has been the aberration within Christian thought we now know as Creationism and the even less helpful response to it, Ultra-Darwinism. ("The conflict was contrived by an unorthodox strand within my faith..." That would be the Reformation then!)

In as much that ancient and medieval Christians were comfortable with a non-literal reading of the Book of Genesis and so should modern ones be, Cunningham insisted. Meanwhile, the 'idea of God' is fundamentally un-threatened by On The Origins of Species and indeed, the very question "Is there a God?" is not a scientific one.

I've heard all these arguments before and they are all dodges. The 'idea of God' is simply a way of anthropomorphising that part of the mystery of existence which remains inaccessible to the rational mind. The same idea underpins most of the world's great religions, but once you get down to the specifics of scripture and dogma, there is in fact plenty for science to get its teeth into. For while Genesis may simply be an allegorical rather than a factual account of the origins of the universe, this allegory has a meaning which is open to scientific scrutiny: that a supernatural being created something — everything in fact — out of nothing.

A contemporary cosmologist might respond thus: the one thing that appears not to exist, to not even be possible within the cosmos as we currently understand it, is nothing. Nowhere does a perfect void manifest itself, for even within the coldest, darkest, emptiest environment quantum particles can spontaneously flicker into existence. The probabilistic plane out of which they pop is certainly one of the deeper scientific mysteries available for us to contemplate, but it's not one that is much clarified by the insertion of a supreme being.

I'd agree with Cunningham that the Ultra-Darwinists have probably exaggerated the philosophical explanatory power of Darwin's theory. Richard Dawkins in particular acts as if the material universe is all there is to explain. (Compared to Dawkins the timbre of Cunningham's voice is beguilingly calm and convincing.)

Of the two believing scientists that Cunningham interviewed, the one with the most fascinating ideas is Cambridge University's Simon Conway Morris. For his beliefs have led him to explore the almost platonistic notion that the 'mindless' algorithm of natural selection, operating within the contingent cosmos of time and space, may perhaps be subject to the influence of non-contingent 'universals'. Do similarities between bird music and human music portend to a universal tune that evolution is somehow listening to as it goes about its daily job? Why do dolphins and an extict non-mammalian fossil fish have such a similar body form? Can aesthetics be entirely explained away by the wiring within our heads, etc.

The "eerie predictability" uncovered by Conway Morris is hard to dismiss out of hand. That there is "more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophies" is I think a given, even for the most ardent rationalist.

However, there's no doubt that Darwin's theory will pose specific challenges to any 'universal theory of mind', because - as noted here recently - he made it possible for the first time to sensibly assert that matter comes before mind. And once you allow that sentience can be an after-effect of matter in motion, Divine sentience becomes more of a scientific curiosity.

While I conisder myelf an unbeliever — an infidel — I do sometimes find a remote place for this 'idea of God' in the fact that the mystery of existence isn't just any old mystery, it appears to me at least to be very nearly a perfect one. Cunningham himself concluded that "indeed, the theory of evolution even helps to stop my understanding of God becoming too domestic...too cosy...too small". Funny that — declining to accept unquestioningly an explanatory system grounded in Bronze Age literature has a similar effect for me.