The stories we tell….

My reading project for 2025 is N. T. Wright’s “Christian Origins and the Question of God”. But because I managed to finish my 2024 project (Calvin’s “Institutes”) early, I decided to get started on Vol 1 of “Origins”: “The New Testament and the People of God”. Now admittedly there’s a lot of ground clearing goes on in the early chapters, but it’s useful for getting one’s bearings. And central to a lot of it is the issue of “story”. Of course the Anglo-Saxon scientist in me began to bridle at this point. But I managed not to get to the stage of chanting “just give me the facts” under my breath. Of course, had I been better educated (which is my aim in reading Wright in the first place) I would have realised that such a chant would simply be evidence of my capture by a particular story, the “modern” story. This is a story on an epic scale that still has quite a lot of us in its grip. It’s a tale about facts being true statements concerning things that exist absolutely, and phenomena that can be established in their totality using data (observations, measurement etc; for further discussion of facts, see here). We need to busy ourselves collecting such facts and once we have enough (although the threshold for “enough” is rarely explicitly stated) we can know some things for a certainty (because we’ve established the facts). Anything that doesn’t fit with this scheme (ie anything that can’t be measured and weighed, prodded and poked) probably isn’t meaningful, possibly doesn’t even exist and certainly isn’t worth bothering about. Therefore, basically only science can be trusted (because this is the sort of thing that science “does”), anything else is junk. This general view is a holdover from a particular philosophy that no longer impresses philosophers (and their fellow travellers in the humanities in general). But it holds sway in the minds of more than a few scientists I have encountered. And you’ll find it in the popular books they write (usually at or towards the end of their professional scientific careers). So more than a few non-scientists, otherwise normal and intelligent people, have made this their story. The problem is that as a story it is self-refuting. It itself is not a fact or collection of facts, it’s not science (even although it usually involves science) it cannot be measured, and therefore if true it must be false. 

Having calmed myself down, I returned to thinking about stories more widely. Wright’s contention is that “stories are important as an index of the world-view of any culture”. Which got me to thinking about the stories that are current today, those stories that might reveal the world-view of the contemporary culture. This is not a task I am capable of carrying out in any great detail. Others have spent more time and expended much more effort on projects like this. Carl Trueman and his “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self” comes to mind (well worth a read, published in 2020, but by now probably obtainable second hand). What is the defining story of contemporary culture? It clearly cannot be the 18th/19th century story of humanity’s inevitable progress. The bloody 20^th century, with its world wars and atrocities, surely provided ample evidence that inevitable progress was a cruel fiction and could not be a story worth investing in. Its bankruptcy has been amply confirmed by the early disasters of the 21^st century. The story that elevates science and assumes that anything not approachable scientifically (ie most of life as we live it), while widespread, is now only held tentatively. Science itself is in a spot of bother, assailed by crises of reproducibility (what should have been one of its hallmarks turns out to be surprisingly rare) and integrity (a proportion of scientists turn out to be thoroughly untrustworthy). The results range from climate crisis denialism to falling vaccination rates with the consequential return of once banished diseases. Or maybe the more recent story that denies that there is any overarching story, and the nihilism to which this inevitably leads, is in fact the current prevailing story.

How this came to be is precisely what Trueman and others have tried to track. By his account, the efforts of a number of “story tellers” have brought us to where we are, of whom the most familiar are perhaps Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. The particular stories they originally told have themselves largely been discredited and discarded. It’s the residual, cumulative influence of their stories and their cumulative effects that are still with us. For each of these three, part of the objective was the destruction of one particular competing story. Nietzsche was perhaps the most obvious and knowing of the three as far as this aspect of the project was concerned. God might have been killed, but Christianity still had to be dealt with; it would in time “perish”. He was happy to initiate, or at least be in at the beginning of its demise. He knew (or suspected) that this would be a long-term project. In his preface to “The Dawn of the Day”, written in 1881, he writes of “a ‘subterrestrial' at work, digging, mining, undermining.” He probably didn’t realise how long it would take, in part because he was thoroughly dismissive of Christianity’s intellectual merits. After all, key Christian truths originated “in nothing but errors of reason”. He had a substitute story, and yet this story, along with those of Marx and Freud, have faired and aged arguably much worse than Christianity (and indeed other religious “stories”). The churches that these thinkers had so little time for, the centres from which the Christian story was and is (in theory at least) proclaimed, while apparently struggling in Europe and North America, appear to be doing rather well in Africa, South America and Asia. And at an estimated 100 million (estimates vary, this is by no means the highest; see here), there are more Christians in China today than in Europe. It appears that the story that Christians tell has yet to fall into the pit that Nietzsche sought to dig for it. If numbers matter, this might suggest that the story that Christians tell, of all stories, appears to be worth investigating.

But I’m not sure that these numbers do matter. What matters is the truth of the stories we tell and their ability to explain things for us; things like the past, the present and even the future. You may have noticed that we’ve been retelling part of the Christian story this week, acting it out, watching our children acting it out. Mind you, some of the versions on display may have been considerably tweaked from the original. Fortunately the original is available and can be checked, along with the larger Gospel story to which it belongs (not to mention the overall Bible story to which both belong). One can go right to the sources, rather than be suckered by caricatures. What will you find there and what world-view will it reveal? Will it be better than other stories that have been and still are told? Well, that’s a whole other story – which is rather the point.

Life in the pandemic XXV The touching faith of atheists…….

Atheism, in its various forms, has a very old and in some quarters a cherished history. It’s a history that many modern-day atheists seem to be ignorant of, something I discussed a while ago. As you may have gathered, I am not an atheist. But I’m interested in the views of folk who are. I admit that this is partly out of curiosity. As the views and ideas of most atheists (at least the ones who have thought about it) are different to my way of thinking, it’s hardly surprising that they evoke curiosity. There’s also the possibility that there is something fundamental they’ve noticed that I’ve missed. And I suppose the writer of Ecclesiastes could have been wrong; something “new under the sun” could crop up that finally demonstrates, once and for all, that there can be no God. This seems unlikely (although I would say that), but for the sake of friendly interaction I’m prepared to accept this as a logical possibility.

It was in this spirit that I was interested to read an atheist writing about atheism. John Gray’s “Seven Types of Atheism” is readable, entertaining and short (only 150-odd pages in my 2019 Penguin paperback). I don’t suppose all atheists will agree with either his classification or his analysis, but neither do I think anyone will accuse him of rampant misrepresentation. In particular, he in no way writes as a theist critic. He remains quite content with his own atheist position, which he identifies as being closest to a couple of the categories he describes. It is worth noting a the outset that there is a close resemblance between what Grey writes and the thrust of Tom Holland’s “Dominion” (discussed  briefly here). It is terrifically hard to drive out the intellectual and cultural effects of 2000 years of Christian monotheism (and before that Jewish monotheism) and start thinking from (or to) a genuinely different position. It is a big task to find new concepts not dependant on the same foundations as the repudiated system, even if such a thing is possible. This was something that Nietzsche cottoned on to, but apparently not so many others before or since. In his early chapters Grey insists that this leads to a sort of lazy atheism that essentially maintains categories that actually need God, but simply swapping Him for someone or something else. Gray accuses secular humanists of doing this, swapping God for humanity, and then not noticing that the resulting system doesn’t work. Apart from anything else, Gray thinks that this is doomed to fail because humanity doesn’t exist as a single, functional entity; it is a myth inherited from monotheism: “’Humanity’ is not going to turn itself into God, because ‘humanity’ does not exist”. His point is that all we really see is lots of individual human beings with “intractable enmities and divisions”, not a single organism capable of fulfilling God’s role.

But time and again Gray also throws up interesting little insights into the sayings and doings of important atheist thinkers. Many of them seem to be stark examples of what is alluded to in a quotation often attributed to G.K. Chesterton: “ When men chose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.” For example, Grey calls Henry Sidgwick “one of the greatest 19^th century minds”. But having lost his faith, he hoped science would supply him with the meaning he now felt he lacked. Bizarrely, he eventually turned to psychical research, and Grey quotes him as telling a friend later in life  “As I look back …. I see little but wasted hours”. Nietzsche was prepared to put his faith in a few exception human beings, “supermen” who could “will into being the meaning God had once secured”. Grey’s main point is that even arguing that the redemption of humanity by such “supermen” was required or could be accomplished, demonstrated that Nietzsche continued to be held captive by Christian concepts he so deeply despised and had declared dead. But it’s been a while now since Nietzsche’s scheme. No sign of his “supermen”.

Grey is also fairly severe on the idea of the inevitable human progress so beloved of many scientifically minded atheists over the last couple of centuries. This appears to be one of their supreme acts of faith. But as he points out, no-one can really agree what constitutes progress or what it might mean in the future. And there is precious little evidence of overall net progress for the mass of humanity. You might think that this surely goes too far. After all, in technology hasn’t the invention and growth of the internet brought tremendous benefits? I can sit on my sofa and book my next holiday or order my dinner. I can find the answer (or at least an answer) to almost any question using my smartphone. But then this same technology has brought new problems and crises not conceived of previously, like the rise of  social media persecution (which has already cost lives) and the cyber world as a new venue for crime and warfare. But in medicine, haven’t we eradicated some of humanity’s most serious disease? The obvious retort is yes, but oh the irony. Here was are in a global pandemic in which the old scourges have been replaced by a new one, with more around the corner aided and abetted by modern human behaviour. Faith in the progress of humanity (even if you think “it” exists) is touching, but hardly evidenced based!

Grey assembles a bewildering cast of characters with no interest in the God of the Bible, and often resolutely dedicated to denigrating and disproving Christianity as anything more than a fable, and quite possibly a dangerous fable at that. Some were aggressive in their denunciations, some more muted and less evangelical. Many I suspect would be bemused by Christianity’s continuing ability to attract adherents, and its continuing ability to play any a role in thought and intellectual discourse.

Grey quotes Schopenhauer as writing in 1851: “A religion which has at its foundation a single event …. has so feeble a foundation that it cannot possibly survive.” Such faith. Touching. But sorry Arthur, misplaced.

Life in the Pandemic XVIII: Truth in trouble…?

Truth is having a hard time. This statement of the obvious is worth stating for two reasons. Firstly, it implies that there is something called truth, and that, in my view, is something worth implying and indeed asserting. Given that you probably have a fairly instant and rough idea of what I mean (whether you agree with me or not), suggests that such a statement is neither incoherent or meaningless. The second reason that it’s worth stating is that while obvious, it alludes to the observation that something interesting is going on. On one level truth has always had a hard time. Defining and debating what “it” is, has kept busy both amateur and professional philosophers for thousands of years. And yet, as I’ve noted before, at least as far as public and political life in the West is concerned, we seem to have moved into a new phase of hardship.

In the US, the “big lie” is not yet dead. Nor has it yet been driven from the field by the “big truth”. According to CNN (not an entirely unbiased source of information I grant you), former president Trump has just had his impeachment legal team quit/fired because of a disagreement over strategy. This disagreement, it is claimed, comes about because Trump wants to maintain the fiction that the election was stolen from him. His lawyers apparently thought that this was not a viable strategy for the trial in the Senate that he now faces. It is unclear (at least to me) whether this is just about the narrow strategic issue, or because the lawyers understand that they cannot assert what they know to be manifestly untrue. However, at a minimum this shows a certain level of dedication to the lie on Trump’s part. Again, this could all be a strategy. But it could also be because he actually believes it. We shall probably never know the truth (as it were). Strength of belief, while often admirable, can’t turn a lie into the truth. Trump does still have his supporters, and they number in the tens of millions. This again is not sufficient to make the lie true. It just means that it’s a widely believed lie. Who knows which way this story is going to end. Is a complete partisan detachment from facts and truth simply going to become one more viable path to power with no accountability? Or will the political culture in the US revert to the more normal pattern of a commitment to at least the semblance of prizing and speaking the truth, with suitable wiggle room provided by the careful use of words?  So to this extent, in this particular context, the truth is still in trouble. It remains to be see whether this approach to life, this particular and brazen abuse of truth, will successfully spread to this side of the Atlantic.

Of course, some would maintain that either it already had, or in fact crossed from here to there – the “all politicians are liars” school of thought. But it appears that here there still is an interest in at least seeming to tell the truth. In Scotland, the First Minister, may be in big trouble for misleading the Scottish Parliament. The story is complicated and not particularly edifying. But if it turns out she has said x when in fact y is true, she will be greatly diminished, even if not completely finished. And the x’s and y’s in this case are themselves matters of detail. It’s the misleading, if it is proved, that will do the damage, not the content of the misleading itself. On the pandemic front, there is still liberal quoting of science and evidence, because accurate, truthful information matters, and science is still seen as a way of procuring it. So truth may be fighting back. Of course if it turns out that it’s all just carefully crafted propaganda, then things might turn again. The idea that it somehow doesn't matter has yet to gain much traction.

All of this comes against a background of “truth” not really having had any clear moorings for a while. Plato et al argued for truth that was universal, ideal and unchanging, belonging to a different realm from the one which we inhabit. These ideas were adopted and rejigged by Augustine and others, so that truth found its foundation in God. And indeed the Bible reveals that the basis of all truth is personal, not primarily rational. It is found in the God Who is both true and truth and intimately linked to His truthful, faithful and true person. The clear answer to Pilate’s question (“what is truth?”) was the person standing in front of him; a person who both claimed to be truth (Jn 14:6), and whose enemies recognised as “true” (Matt 22:16).

Things worked fairly well until this foundation was “abolished”. Nietzsche succinctly captured it with his “death of God” ramblings. He called it the most important of recent events “that ‘god is dead’, that the belief in the Christian God has become unworthy of belief..”. The retreat from truth, truth that is true everywhere for all time, gathered pace and in more recent times culminated in some of the more radical proposals of first existentialism and now postmodernism. And how is that all working out? Well apparently it's not just that we won't ever know, but we can't ever know!

Fortunately, Nietzsche’s (probably syphilitic) ramblings were just that. As the apocryphal graffiti on the walls of countless University Philosophy department walls attests, it is in fact Nietzsche who is dead (“signed God”). Dostoyevsky has Ivan Karamazov say that “Without God, everything is permitted” (although for some reason this is disputed in some quarters as false news; but see here). But as He is not dead, truth is still with is, and everything is not permitted. Hence the general idea (although again under assault) that truth is good and lies are bad. Even although such notions are inevitably inconvenient for all of us at some point, for most of us this should actually be a comfort. It is not necessary to walk in confusion, knowing nothing for sure and being able to communicate even less. Even in trouble, we can find and know truth. It’s to be found where it all has been, and always will be.