Not “vs” but “and” (so get over it).

I still occasionally come across talks entitled (to give but one example) “Religion vs Science: Can the two coexist?”; as of writing, the YouTube snippet of this lecture I stumbled upon had racked up 1.2M views. This title is fairly typical of a way of talking about science (somehow defined) and religion (somehow defined) that sees them as typically and inevitably in conflict. In its strongest form this conflict thesis is ahistorical (and in some cases anti-historical) taking this to be a steady state. It is the way things are now, and essentially the way they have always been, and it is the way they must always be. In its weaker forms there is often some acceptance that while this may not have been the way things were at some time in the past, the relationship inevitably developed into one of conflict and conflict is now the only possible way to describe the interaction of science and religion (or faith) by anyone who is in any sense mature in their thinking. This is so misconceived that it is difficult to know where to begin in refuting it. But let’s begin at an obvious place which will come as no surprise to any regular reader of these posts (you know who you are!).

The idea of an inevitable clash has been constantly undermined by the large numbers of serious people who, both now and in the past, have happily combined both a commitment to science (some at very exalted levels) and religion, specifically Christianity. My suspicion is that if you were familiar with Indian science you would find devout Hindus who were scientists, and in other parts of the world devout Muslims, similarly active in science. But I will stick with what I know best, and that form of religion that arguably played a vital role in the emergence of what we might call the experimental sciences. Because, as it happens, I am one such example.

I confess that during my career I was never particularly publicly prominent, I never chaired august scientific institutions, I influenced not one decision of national or international scientific public policy. But I was clearly a professional scientist, trained the way scientists are trained (a first degree in Physiology, PhD in Neurobiology, various postdoctoral jobs in other people’s labs), did all the things scientists do (as evidenced by the expected publications, many of which can be search for on the web and are open access), progressing as scientists progresses (I won a Welcome Trust Vision Research Fellowship earlyish in my career, set up my own lab, subsequently obtained substantive University posts, was a trainer of other doctoral scientists, etc). Yet I am also a Christian, and of kind some find to be most objectionable, variously labelled fundamentalist, evangelical, Bible-bashing and so on. It is true that occasionally a few other scientists tried to convince me of some basic contradiction between the two designations “scientist” and “Christian”. But a moment’s pause always demonstrated that the problem was with their definitions and modes of thought. Usually either their understanding of what science is and how it works was lacking (a surprisingly frequent occurrence even among scientists), or their familiarity with Biblical Christianity was low or non-existent. Caricatures of both science and Christianity are not hard to find and with them apparent contradictions and conflicts. But on closer inspection these turn out to be more apparent than real.

Note that I am not making the reverse mistake of claiming that it is impossible to find some who say that they personally find that there is a conflict between science and Christianity (like the lecturer mentioned at the outset), or that there are no examples of those who were “keen Christians” who report “losing their faith” because of science. What I am claiming is that there is ample evidence that this is neither necessary nor inevitable, and that I, with others, constitute that evidence. Because I have always worked in universities, I have always lived in University towns, and worshipped in churches found in such places. So it is perhaps not a surprise that there were always others around, who were educated to a similar level in science (although not always working as professional scientists) who like me found no obvious conflict in our personal thinking. There might be parts of the country where such creatures are thin on the ground. But I am neither rare or special. In my current church (which is admittedly large by UK standards, and is in a city with several universities) I can think of several science PhDs, across disciplines. Such is the contemporary scene I survey. But the reality is there have always been those who quite happily combine science and faith, without compromising either.

The historical situation is perhaps even clearer than either my personal case or the more general contemporary picture. This is slightly more contested ground, but those doing most of the contesting are often ignorant (sometimes wilfully so) of the actual history. Professional science as we know it today is a 19^th century development, but it emerged from 17^th century political, religious and philosophical ferments. Of particular interest are some of the key early players, particularly those who championed “experimental”, as opposed to “rational”, science. Experimental science in England (often called natural philosophy at the time) was actively promoted by such figures as Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), leading (at the time of the restoration of the Monarchy) to the establishment of The Royal Society of London in 1662. What is interesting about Bacon, and some of his acolytes like Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600-1662), is not merely their Christian sympathies, but the distinctly Puritan and Calvinistic framework that they operated within. This was even detectable in later characters like Robert Boyle, John Locke and even Isaac Newton (although Newton was famously heterodox in his theology). It was not merely that many of these men were shaped and educated in a world dominated by Protestant Christianity; many were themselves ardent believers (although by no means always Puritans), who saw in science as much as a theological exercise as anything else. Those named are not isolated examples; they could be multiplied. No conflict here then, at this early stage (at least not between science and religious belief).

There is another interesting historical example of peaceful coexistence worth noting: “The Declaration of Students of the Natural and Physical Sciences”, 1864/5. The date is significant. Signed by 717, including 66 Fellows of the Royal Society, this was a response to the furore that had raged following the publication of Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” in 1859. The Declaration made clear that the signatories regretted “..that researches into scientific truth are perverted by some in our own times into … casting doubt upon the truth and authenticity of the Holy Scriptures”. This made no sense, because “physical science is not complete” (nor it might be added is our understanding of God’s revealed truth). Contradictions between science and the Bible should be left “side by side”, and ultimately would be reconcilable because there is only one world, and ultimately one source of truth (ie God). If (or when) we find contradictions between scientific and Biblical views, the problem is likely to be in either the evidence (which is only ever partial) or our interpretation of the evidence (which can be no more perfect than we are). But the wider point to be made here is that at a key juncture in the 19^th century, the notion that there was a necessary conflict between the two, was by no means the only, or perhaps even a majority view among scientists.

So can the two, science and religion (or faith, or belief) coexist? Personal, contemporary and historical considerations suggest that they have, they are, they can and they will. 

Science + theology?

A while ago I took to thinking about the area of study in which I am now engaged (theology), and also the area in which I had previously been professionally occupied (science). I suppose I conceived of these as two largely separable and separate fields. Sitting next to each other in the intellectual landscape, I suppose I would have expected to find a fairly well defined boundary between them. But because I am a realist (technically a critical realist), committed to a single , overarching and knowable reality outside of me, I would expect the boundary to be a fuzzy one, allowing friendly contact and interchange. If both represent valid pursuits, then they both deal with the same reality, although from different perspectives, using different tools. They are neither enemies or rivals. Admittedly, few scientists spend much time in properly theological reflection (except the ones who do), and there are probably more than a few who would deny theology any validity at all. But that has more to do with weaknesses in the education of scientists (at least in the Anglo Saxon world) than with any real problem with theology as a discipline. It has its problems of course, but validity is not one of them. However, it turns out that there may be a bigger overlap between theology and science than I had suspected.

I was alerted to this by having to critique a paper published in the Journal of Empirical Theology. Can there be such a thing I wondered. If theology is the study of an ineffable and inapproachable God, then it seems unlikely that empirical methods will have much traction. I am rather assuming that there are theologians (Barth perhaps?) who argue that when it comes to knowing anything about God, what is required is revelation not scientific experimentation. And while God’s self-revelation can be examined, debated and understood (and misunderstood), this is not a task that the methods of the natural sciences will be much help with. But theology (rather like science) is really not one single institution or discipline, with a single object of study from a single standpoint and a single set of tools. Given that things are believed about God (and indeed gods) by people, there are reasons for studying these beliefs, the people who hold them, and perhaps thereby discover things  about the God in whom they believe. In general, those who study people develop interests in the beliefs people have. So it is no surprise that tools have been developed to study such things, and some of these are thoroughly empirical.

Obvious examples are found in social and cognitive psychology, where many of the classic approaches found in other branches of the natural sciences, are used to study things like beliefs. The general approach can often be couched in classic hypothesis-driven terms (observation-hypothesis-prediction-test), using standard instruments and testing strategies to get at what is going on in people’s minds (or at least inside their heads). Religious ideas and beliefs might simply be seen as a subset of beliefs and ideas, examinable using exactly the same techniques. This is not a new idea; that religious belief was nothing special is a view that Scottish arch-sceptic and empiricist David Hume would have agreed with. Such investigations, undertaken from a standpoint of “methodological naturalism” generate explanations for the phenomena under investigation that do not invoke God, any more that I would have invoked His activity to explain the eye movement phenomena that I used to study. But then this doesn’t really sound like any kind of theology. And indeed it isn’t – it’s psychology.

As an aside, as a Christian believer, while I did not invoke the actions of God to explain the things I was investigating, I was well aware that He was not remote. He was as present in my lab as anywhere else; I am a Christian not a Deist. I was always quite comfortable with the belief that underpinning everything I did, indeed underpinning my very existence as well as that of the universe, was God’s power (revealed by writer of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews; Heb 1:3). But my job was to find immediate and natural explanations for what I was investigating, based on natural rather than supernatural mechanisms. My hypotheses were couched in terms of these natural mechanisms, and these were what my experiments tested, and what my theories invoked. But God and natural explanations are neither contradictory or mutually exclusive. They are different, and pertain to different levels of reality. But this poses a conundrum. I assume that there is an explanation that connects the power and working of the God who is spirit with the existence and maintenance of this universe which is material. I have no idea what it is, and my gut feeling is that even if God had revealed it I would not be capable of understanding it.

But back to empirical theology. There are models of belief and thought that originate within an avowedly theological context and use theological concepts. These are likely to be dependent, at least for the most part, on the revelation of God mentioned above. Empirical methods could, I suppose, be used to study such beliefs. But the methods themselves would have to be theologically informed, otherwise we’re simply back in the realms of psychology. This seems to be what goes on in what is called empirical theology. What I don’t quite understand is what it’s for. Mind you, that applies to a lot of science which is actually at its best when it is just about finding out stuff. It is only subsequently that it turns out that some of the stuff is useful or important or worth lots of money. There’s a lot of serendipity involved in even the hardest of hard sciences. There are contexts where finding how what and how people think is important. An example would be education where if you wanted to know whether a concept or belief was being adequately transmitted, then there are ways of finding this out in a rigorous manner. This is likely to be as useful in theological education as elsewhere. But is this really theology? Who’s to say. Defining disciplines is famously difficult. But I can conceive of investigating theological concepts and beliefs in a thoroughly scientific manner. Whether it ever is, is a different story.

“Blessed wonder and surprising delight…”

Maybe it’s just me, but I assume that there is a time in all our lives when the thought strikes us that we are nearer our death than our birth. Of course none of us can ever know when we reach this point, because that would require knowing when we were going to die. Fortunately, for most of us this is unknown, if not necessarily unknowable. Perhaps such thoughts only come when one reaches a certain stage in life when statistically, the law of averages being what it is, we think we are at, or are beyond that point. This was brought home to me recently when I received a couple of projections from my pension company (there’s a big clue!). Their actuaries had calculated that I (probably) had about twenty years of life left. But then what?

Here we have a problem. It is at this point that the evil twins of materialism and naturalism demand  a high price. Materialism is a creed and therefore it is something to be believed. It is not something that is necessarily true. It proclaims that the universe only consists of stuff that can be seen, touched, tasted, heard or smelled. Only matter exists and there is nothing else, nothing beneath and nothing above. Naturalism is the related belief that everything that is arises from natural causes, and therefore only natural explanations, that rule out a priori supernatural causes, are acceptable. Again, this is a belief. Many would hold that these two are the ruling beliefs of the age. And the problem is that even those of us who reject both of them are influenced by them.

Previous generations would have thought nothing of my "then what" question. Most would simply have spoken of heaven to come. Today we are patronizingly apt to claim that this was because they knew so much less than us, although they believed so much more. Now we know so much more, and consequently believe so much less. How easily their answer to “then what” is dismissed as just a form of superstitious wishful thinking. But this falls into two traps. The first is the chronological snobbery that C.S. Lewis defined as the “uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited”. The modern (or the postmodern, or post-postmodern) is inevitably right, the past is inevitably mistaken. Secondly, it leaves us ensnared in the trap of believing that somehow we no longer  believe. Certainly there are things that we no longer believe. But that is different. Materialism and naturalism are creeds that are believed. It’s not that we don’t believe, rather that we believe something different. We have ruled out all talk of heaven to come, not so much as unbelievable but as irrelevant.

But Christian believers, those who take seriously God’s self-revelation of His purposes in His Word, need to be a lot less coy about what we believe. It’s not that we believe and the naturalist and materialist don’t. We believe something different and need to be less shy about saying so. And perhaps there is no more important issue than our final destination and state. If it’s not up to much, we should be clear about it. If it is only just a little bit better than the alternatives, then that would be worth knowing. An informed choice can then be made about whether it can really supply the hope and comfort actually needed to offset the trouble we’re likely to face for being believers in it in the first place. But if it were to turn out that it is a prospect that is glorious and joyful (not words we’ve heard much in recent days), indeed if it were revealed to be full of “blessed wonder and surprising delight” then this is surely worth knowing too. A clear vision of such a state would surely be an important resource helping us in the here and now, as well as healing us in there and then.

In his book “Rejoice and Tremble”, Michael Reeves highlights some of the writing about heaven from the past, including some from Isaac Watts. Watts is perhaps best known today as a hymn writer; he wrote “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” and the Christmas carol “Joy to the World”. But he was also a non-conformist pastor, tutor, philosopher and logician, and wrote what became a standard textbook on logic (titled “Logic”!), published in 1724 and running to some twenty editions. It was widely used in universities such as Oxford and Yale, well into the nineteenth century. So he is not easily dismissed as an obscurantist medieval mystic. Indeed he was well aware of, and had respect for science. But he knew it had limits:

“What are the heights, and depths, and lengths, of human science, with all the boasted acquisitions of the brightest genius of mankind! Learning and science can measure the globe, can sound the depths of the sea, can compass the heavens, can mete out the distances of the sun and moon, and mark out the path of every twinkling star for many ages past, or ages to come; but they cannot acquaint us with the way of salvation from this long, this endless distress.”

So it is interesting to read what Watts wrote about heaven. He certainly wrote about it in terms rarely encountered today:

“In heaven the blessed inhabitants ‘behold the majesty and greatness of God’ in such a light as fixes their thoughts in glorious wonder and the humblest adoration, and exalts them to the highest pleasure and praise.” (“The World to Come”, Vol I, 1811, p389)

“When … the soul, as it were, beholds God in these heights of transcendent majesty, it is overwhelmed with blessed wonder and surprising delight, even while it adores in most profound lowliness and self-abasement.” (p390)

So there you have it. According to Watts, I can look forward to being “overwhelmed with blessed wonder and surprising delight”. Clearly he could be just plain wrong. But what he wasn’t was stupid, and therefore should not be lightly dismissed. As an answer to “what then”, it’ll do me.

Life in the pandemic XXIV Alice through the twitter glass…….

I am fairly sure that (most) humanists are nice people. Certainly, the current president of Humanists UK, Alice Roberts, has always struck me as quite nice. I haven’t met her personally of course, but she pops up on the telly in the UK fairly frequently, usually presenting broadly scientific documentaries. They are often very interesting and …. nice. Alice recently got involved in an Easter twitter spat, which she kicked off by tweeting the following around teatime on Good Friday: “Just a little reminder today. Dead people - don’t come back to life.” At the time of writing, this tweet had been “liked” almost 12000 times, and commented on just over 3000 times. The responses were the sort of mixed bag that we’ve all come to expect in the twittersphere. Some were delighted, others were derogatory, and some tweets intimated a degree of disappointment. One line of criticism was that while Alice is quite entitled not to share the beliefs of Christians celebrating Easter, it was disrespectful to tweet as she had done on that particular day. To which she responded: “I don’t have to respect unscientific beliefs.”

Fair enough. After all, respect cannot be forced, and to that extent of course she doesn’t “have to” respect anything. Her critics might (and some did) respond that, particularly as a public figure, she also doesn’t have to parade her lack of respect for particular beliefs in so public a manner, at a time calculated to cause offense. Now, while I’m prepared to believe that the intention was not to offend (and as I discussed previously, Christians of all people should be quite difficult to offend), some pointed out that she has a bit of form in this regard, getting into a previous twitter spat in the gender recognition debate. What’s of more interest is Alice’s comment about “unscientific beliefs”.

It’s not that Alice has a problem with unscientific beliefs in general. I can say with some certainty that there are many beliefs she holds which are unscientific, but which she finds perfectly respectable (otherwise she wouldn’t hold them). I can say this because precisely the same is true of us all. She is a professor of the “public understanding of science”. I take it that she believes that a scientifically knowledgeable public is a good thing, something she and I would agree on. This is a belief that is perfectly worthy of respect, but it is not a scientific belief. Few of the many beliefs that all of us have are. It seems that Alice’s problem is with specific unscientific beliefs, that she feels she can take a pop at. At the top of this list appear to be the beliefs held and taught by Christians.

This is of course is no surprise. Alice is, after all, president of Humanists UK. In a recent interview she stated her belief that “Living a good life comes from you, from employing your own human faculties of reason and empathy and love.” Now, what are we to make of such a belief? For my part, I find it perfectly respectable, and feel no need to poke fun at it. However, it is clearly not in any sense scientific. It is both highly debateable and over centuries has been hotly debated. And it is in my view, respectfully, deeply flawed. But it is not flawed because it is unscientific. Science doesn’t deal in such terms as “good” and “love”, and can’t be used to settle whether this belief is better than any other belief for this or that purpose. Science is entirely the wrong tool to use, in the same way a screwdriver isn’t appropriate for hammering nails.

Of course the game Alice is playing is to portray her humanism as non-religious, rational and scientific, and Christian belief (and presumably other religious beliefs) as unscientific, irrational, and therefore not worthy of her respect. The problem is that the distinction being drawn doesn’t work. It turns out that Alice’s brand of humanism, secular humanism, actually has distinctly religious origins, and was at least originally conceived as a competing religion. As Humanists UK make clear on their website, they grew out late 19^th century “Ethical Societies”, many of which originated within the Christian tradition, but gradually rejected key features of Christian belief, until laterally all traces of supernaturalism were thrown off. However, well into the 20^th century “Ethical” churches were meeting, singing “ethical” hymns and listening to sermons. Sounds familiar. And this isn’t just historical baggage that humanists might claim is ancient history that is now irrelevant. The contemporary manifestation of such ideas (besides Humanists UK) is the Sunday Assembly; interestingly the founding London branch meets in Conway Hall which is owned by one of the original Ethical Societies. The Sunday Assembly was founded by two comedians who “wanted to do something that was like church”. While I find all of this perfectly respectable, it does sound a bit (say it quietly) religious. One might be tempted to tweet that it was all a bit “unscientific”.

I am not the only one to detect these religious undertones in secular humanism. A recent reviewer of John Gray’s “Seven Types of Atheism” reported Gray as being of the view that “humanists are in bad faith”. He continued “Most of them are atheists, but all they have done is substitute humanity for God. They thus remain in thrall to the very religious faith they reject.” Thoroughly shaking off the trappings of Christian belief and patterns of thought, it turns out, is really tricky. Alice, who has confirmed on twitter that she is indeed an atheist, has work to do.

Humanists of Alice’s stripe are not even entitled to exclusive use of the title “humanist”, as though they uniquely have the best interests of their fellow human beings at heart. The word has a long and distinctively Christian history. Again back in the 19^th century, it came to be used for an intellectual movement originating in the Renaissance, and later luminaries such as Erasmus of Rotterdam combined Biblical thought with classical philosophical traditions (among other things). This was a distinctly Christian humanism and there continues to be an important strand of it within the Evangelical tradition, exemplified by the likes of Packer and Howard in their book “Christianity: the True Humanism”. There is a simple reason that it makes sense to talk of Christian humanism. If humanism at its heart is about human beings finding true fulfilment (an aim I think Alice would agree is a worthy one), then Biblical Christianity has two important things to say (neither of which Alice would agree with). The first is that secular humanism has historically failed and will continue to fail to address humanity’s deepest needs, because it denies that these exist. The second is that it is in God’s self-revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ that we will find the answers to our deepest needs. And of course this brings us back to Easter.

I can confirm that it is indeed the case that in general (at least at the moment) dead people do not come back to life. I accept that anyone who denies this as a general proposition is in need of sympathy, if not some form of mental health intervention. But I can also confirm that this general principle was violated on at least one occasion in history. This is not a contradiction, nor is it a scientific statement. But neither is it irrational. There is evidence to be evaluated. Have a go Alice.

Life in the Pandemic X: Exacerbating uncertainty

 Many things in life are uncertain (apart from death and taxes obviously). And many things are uncertain in science. Indeed identifying, controlling and quantifying uncertainty is a key aspect of the practice of science. We’re so keenly aware of uncertainty that we try to dissuade students of talking about science “proving” things, as though in any given situation absolutely all uncertainty can be removed. We don’t think that it can be, and we can therefore never be “certain”. What we seek to do is accumulate evidence supporting a particular explanation for a given phenomenon so that it moves from being highly provisional (a hypothesis), to being fairly probably the correct explanation (a supported hypothesis), to being the best and most highly supported explanation we have (at which point it’s  usually elevated to the status of a theory). This takes time and effort. Even so, we also accept that the most accepted theory, with apparently lots of supporting evidence, can always be superseded by a new theory. This might be an extension of the original theory, or indeed a contradiction of it. But this whole approach raises  problems. It is tricky to explain (as you may have noticed), and it’s not the way most people think or speak most of the time. These problems (and why they matter) have been amply exposed by the pandemic.

Let’s start with the language problem. There are situations where certainty is conflated with clarity. In a startling reversal of form for the particular bunch of politicians currently running the UK, the pandemic mantra has been “We’re following the science, therefore….”. This is a reversal because it suited them in a previous situation (ie the Brexit debate), to downplay the view of “experts”. But as I’ve noted before, in the pandemic, this has changed. Experts are in; but uncertainty is not out.

Politicians and the media, are very keen on what they call clarity. But COVID19 is a virus new to  humans, and therefore new to science. Nothing was known, indeed could be known, about it (although things could be inferred). Early in the pandemic, at the time when many key decisions were being taken, the science was more than usually uncertain, and therefore the scientific advice to politicians had to be highly caveated (this is an assumption on my part, I wasn’t privy to it). But this doesn’t make for snappy press conferences. And it almost certainly guaranteed that the advice would change, and therefore the instructions issued by politicians would have to change (example: face masks). The media don’t particularly help in such situations. Their stock in trade is the language of u-turn and climb-down. It might have been wise to clearly communicate from the start that the course of action being embarked upon was based on a consensus of what, given the evidence at the time, was reasonable. Not certain, but reasonable. Problem is, would any of us reacted as we need to if the politicians had spoken this way?

To be fair to them, there have been some sceptics and deniers who have been happy to jump up and down and accuse them of exaggerating the danger of the situation for nefarious political ends. They have pointed out that for all the talk of half a million UK dead and the NHS overwhelmed, this was not the disaster that developed. But this is to miss the point. The one experiment that could not be done was the one that involved doing nothing and essentially letting COVID19 run its course. So on the basis of (suitably caveated) advice, we had our lockdown. And while we can’t be certain (that is, after all, the point I’m making), the difference in case and death curves (eg see here) between most EU countries (including the UK) and others like the US and Brazil, suggests that this was indeed a sensible course of action. As an aside, we have to now hope that we don’t blow it, and revert to the earlier trajectory that could lead to disaster. However, at least some of the critics seem to suggest that with all the uncertainty involved, essentially nothing should have been done. Action should only have been taken once all doubt had been removed. But then that would have meant nothing would have been done. And many thousands more would have died, deaths that we have almost certainly avoided. It will perhaps be possible to demonstrate this statistically, once more  evidence has accumulated. But at the point the big political and economic decisions had to be taken, actual evidence was scarce.

We have heard this sort of call to wait for certainty before, both in another contemporary context and historically. And it’s here that the language problem, and the complexity problem intersect. Climate change, its cause, effects and what we should do about it (if we can do anything about it), is undoubtedly complex. The idea that it is caused by human activity (primarily the burning of fossil fuels from the industrial revolution on, increasing atmospheric CO₂) has been a matter of overwhelming scientific consensus for decades ie we’ve gone beyond hypothesis, supported hypothesis, and theory to consensus. Even still, scientists in this area will probably be unwilling to say they have no doubts, that the relevant theory/theories have been “proved” in some absolute sense. That’s just not the appropriate language of science. But that allows others to come along and say that the science is uncertain, there are alternative explanations or the whole thing is just a hoax. Here, a legal analogy might help.

I served on a murder jury some years ago. We were faced with the weighty decision of whether the prosecution had proved its case beyond reasonable doubt. Notice that you can still convict and have doubt. The question is whether the case is proved beyond reasonable doubt. One can always come up with lots of “could be’s” and “might have beens”. But if they fly in the face of the evidence, or are not supported by evidence, then they are not reasonable. And if they are not reasonable, they is no reason to pronounce the defendant “not guilty”. If the scientific consensus around climate change were a defendant in the dock, although there are doubts and uncertainties, they would be ruled out by the evidence as unreasonable, a guilty verdict handed down, and the jury would go away and sleep soundly, their duty done. And yet the uncertainty, complexity, and the language of science conspire to provide a space for those who say we should do nothing because we are not 100% certain, precisely at the time when action has to be taken.

At least some who operate in this space are following in a fairly inglorious tradition that has been exposed several times. They seek to foment doubt and increase complexity, obfuscate evidence and exacerbate uncertainty. They explicitly seek to sow doubt, of the unreasonable sort. The approach was famously summarised by a cigarette company executive in the 1960’s in a now infamous memo which stated “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.”(1). What followed was essentially a well funded disinformation campaign of epic proportions. Meanwhile, cigarettes continued to be manufactured, sold and consumed and contributed to the early deaths of millions. The story of this and similar campaigns is expertly revealed in its gory detail by David Michaels in his books (2,3). And there’s evidence that there are commercial and other interests playing the same game with climate change. Stir up doubt, exacerbate the uncertainty, and the public will conclude that either the issues are so complicated and unclear that it would be premature to take action (like ban smoking or increase tax on gas guzzlers), or that the inconvenience of action is not worth uncertain benefits.

This kind of thing is happening in the pandemic. Reasonable people are not taking reasonable actions because, particularly in the US, misinformation is being spread and uncertainty is being exacerbated. The scary bit is that when the much hoped-for vaccine becomes available, we all know it’s likely to start over vaccination against COVID19. But, to resort to some unscientific language, you can be sure that wearing a mask and washing your hands frequently at the moment, and getting vaccinated once one or more vaccines have passed through the requisite trials, is a really good idea. I don’t doubt it.

 1. Michaels D (2005) Doubt is their product. Scientific American 292(6):96-101 (available on Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7806937_Doubt_Is_Their_Product)

 2. Michaels D (2008) Doubt is Their Product. Oxford Univ. Press

 3. Michaels D (2020 )The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception Oxford Univ. Press

Easter Reflections II

The trick to setting up a successful enterprise, regardless of whether it’s honest or a con, is believability. The key to sustaining it is believability and consistency. Whatever else it is, Christianity in either its personal or institutional forms has been successfully sustained. How believable is it?

For Jesus it was all going so well until he started making explicit, outrageous claims. His opponents must have secretly rejoiced. The theologically educated among them had known almost from the outset that he had been implying he was unique and not just another in a long line of teachers, scholars and prophets. They had detected early on that he was claiming to be God. They deserve some credit for this, because a number of those closest to Jesus took a while to catch on. But then he began to be more explicit about this claim until he succeeded in driving away many of his own supporters. On some occasions he was so clear about it that his original hearers were outraged; they started picking up stones to throw at him. Somehow he escaped. Every leader makes mistakes. Great leaders learn from them. But apparently not Jesus. Instead of dialling back his claims, he continued to make them and started heading for the place where they would cause him the most trouble – Jerusalem.

There’s little evidence that Jesus was driven to Jerusalem by events; there is considerable evidence that he headed there quite deliberately. This would seem to be a miscalculation of historic proportions. It’s not as though he was naïve about the dangers. Indeed, he seems to have been very aware that the main result of heading to Jerusalem would be his own death. And he provided strong hints about the events that would immediately precede his death, and even the manner of his death. His immediate circle managed to stick with him all the way, until, at the last, it was too much for even them. One of them eventually conspired with the authorities to have Jesus arrested and the rest quietly disappeared and hid. Once he was arrested, they knew what the likely outcome was. They also knew that having stuck with Jesus as long as they had, once the authorities had dealt with him, they’d likely be next. They observed the apparently final events of Jesus’ relatively short life from what they thought was a safe distance. So much, then, for his bold claims. Like so many before and since, their boldness was no protection against the cold realities of political and institutional calculation and power. And that should have been that. The cleverer of his sayings might live on. Some of his more calculating followers might profit from his death by turning it into some kind of noble sacrifice with a cult following. But his real influence had ended, and any cult that grew up around him would be trivial. And of course, if anyone actually thought about what he had said, it would be clear what a charlatan he really was. In the light of his death, none of his claims were  believable, because they were not true. God indeed!

And then what happened next, happened. There’s lots of detail that can be examined at leisure. But the big picture is this – He did exactly what you would expect if every one of His claims were true. It was the surprise that no one expected. Certainly not his friends and former followers. Certainly not his enemies. They did expect trouble of course. In His life, Jesus had caused quite a stir. Aspects of His trial and death had been quite controversial. Some of them predicted that His followers, to substantiate the claims He had made in life, would steal His body and then make yet more bizarre claims on His behalf. As they weren’t idiots, they took sensible precautions to prevent this from happening. They needn’t have bothered. Jesus followers were in no state to perpetrate further fraud. And they needn’t have bothered because in reality they could do nothing to stop what happened next.

The thing about God is that He is God. He is not a big version of us. He’s not a slightly more powerful president or prime minister. He’s God. And even death itself has no hold on him. At this point I have to confess that it’s quite hard for the believer (which is what I am) not to get a bit excited. The events of the Sunday morning following the Friday night have been prodded, poked, stared at, examined, dissected, discussed and debated ever since they occurred. That something happened, no one disputes. What happened is critical and therefore has been a matter of dispute right from the start. I’m not going to go through it all here, for the simple reason that you can read the eye witness testimony for yourself in the Gospel accounts. I think those early accounts are compelling and on reflection persuasive. But here’s the thing. If you were going to make up a story that might be persuasive, it would not be the one that you find in those accounts. It’s just not that believable.

It is an apparent fact of our experience that human beings once dead stay dead. I’ve been at a number of funerals and thanksgiving services. I was at another one last week. The sadness and grieving on such occasions is real and occurs precisely because everything we experience tells us that the dead, once dead, stay dead. That’s why there is that sense of loss and of parting. That’s also why Jesus’ closest friends, when told that He’d been seen alive, responded exactly the way you or I would have responded. They didn’t believe it. It’s why two of his friends could find themselves walking beside Jesus, and not recognise Him. Of course they didn’t. He was dead, this person was alive, therefore the one person it could not be was Jesus. Their logic was impeccable, and their perception followed it completely. But eventually the evidence overcame their previous experience, and they came to see the truth of the matter. He was alive. And all of His claims, all of the things He had done, all of those qualities He had demonstrated, it all made sense. They didn’t take a leap into the dark, they were persuaded.

One of His friends has gone down in history as a sceptic. “Doubting” Thomas was no more than a sensible human being who knew what you and I know. He was a scientist before his time and proposed an experiment that, in the event, he never had to run. He knew what crucifixion involved, and proposed a simple test when told Jesus was alive. But the evidence of his own experience was so clear, so incontrovertible, that rather than prod and poke the living Jesus as he had proposed, all he could do was gasp his worship in amazement when he himself saw Jesus. He along with the others spent the rest of their lives reporting what they had seen, even at the cost of those lives.

If they were going to invent a believable story, a story that would be an easy sell, this was not it. If they were going to construct a case for Jesus being who He claimed to be, then this was a desperately risky strategy. One bone of Jesus body would be enough to torpedo the credibility of it all. If it was a concoction, an elaborate hoax, then if just one of their number cracked, the whole edifice would come tumbling down. As compelling as Jesus had been before His death, if he was still dead this was not a web worth spinning. It was unlikely to stand any test, let alone the test of time.

Yet here we are.

Easter Reflections I

I came across an article recently that opened with the following statement:  Perhaps the most boring question one can ever direct at a religion is to ask whether or not it is ‘true’. The author went on to claim that Easter “commemorates an incident of catastrophic failure”[1]. Well, we’ll see. My view is that deciding whether the events commemorated at Easter are true is far from boring. Not bothering to consider whether they are true is probably a product of the author completely misunderstanding what was going on. But let’s go back to the thorny issue of truth.

We now apparently live in a culture that has a real problem with truth. For some, and for a long time, the idea that there is something “out there” to be known is a non-starter. For others, even if there is an “out there”, it cannot be known in any certain way. This sort of thing has been argued back and forth for centuries. Meanwhile, most of humanity has just got on with life, not really bothering too much whether they could/could not prove in any absolute sense that it was all “real”. Family, food, employment, cushions, art, music, football, Radio 4, Monty Python and model railways might all be illusions, but they are comforting illusions. Interestingly (at least to me), even those who think that truth is an illusion seem to spill a lot of ink trying to persuade other people of the truth that truth is an illusion. It is almost as though it matters.

In fact most of us seem to live with the notion that it’s important to know what is true and what is not. Not all truth is equally important I’ll grant you. For most people, most of the time, knowing that there is a river that flows through Merseyside to the sea, is of only trivial importance. It’s maybe useful in the odd pub quiz, but it hardly counts as one of life’s great truths. Mind you, it becomes considerably more important if you have to make your way from Liverpool city centre to Birkenhead – look at a map (hopefully a true representation of certain geographical features) if you don’t believe me.

Clearly there are some people who claim that certain events that occurred in and around an obscure city in the Middle East called Jerusalem millennia ago have continuing significance. As a matter of observation, these events have been celebrated annually throughout large parts of the world, and by a growing and now large proportion of humanity, ever since. There are reports that provide some level of access to those original precipitating events. Can we reach a judgement on the truth of what those events were, whether they are important and indeed whether some of them were catastrophic? I think we can, and I think we should. I think we owe it to ourselves to investigate for ourselves what the fuss is about. We could just surf the web and explore the blogosphere. We could depend on the opinions of others. I much prefer the notion of doing as much of the work as I can for myself. Of course, I’ll have to take some things on trust. But as I’ve argued here before, some level of trust is always required in any enquiry. How much trust would be too much? Well, if I’m standing at a bridge wondering if it can bear my weight and get me safely across a river, I know some of the signs I need to look for. Does it go all the way across? Is it fairly clear what’s keeping it up? Does it appear steady as I set out, or does it begin to creak alarmingly? Of course I could be fooled. But not to attempt the crossing could be equally foolish, particularly if there’s a pressing reason to cross the river.

As far as Christianity is concerned, the question “is it true?” has to be the key question. Christianity depends on claims about things that happened (or didn’t happen). While some of these things are probably more important than others, if any of them turn out to be demonstrably untrue, then the credibility of the whole will take a hit. If the major claims are untrue, then the whole thing comes crashing down. Certain of the key claims are clearly unusual, and some, on the surface at least, approach the bizarre (at least from a 21^st century standpoint). It’s tempting to dismiss these out of hand, a priori. This is a temptation worth resisting.

The Easter story turns on one of the most famous characters in history called Jesus. Four main accounts compiled from eye witness testimony from his own time have come down to us, along with accounts and interpretations of others who claimed to know him. These various sources have been frequently attacked but have yet to be fatally undermined. They tell us quite a lot about the life of Jesus, including what they claim was a miraculous birth (also still celebrated). They tell us much of what he said. But they seem to spend an inordinate amount of time on his death, implying that it has some significance beyond the ending of a particular life.

Jesus as portrayed in these accounts does not come over as a fanatic, a rabble rouser or a tyrant. He seems to have been attractive to some, and a curiosity to many. He doesn’t seem that interested in gathering a movement around himself. Indeed, in at least one of the accounts (by one of his followers called John) he seems to go out of his way to drive the merely interested away. For all his apparently humility and simplicity, it is his claims about himself that stick out. His original audience were in no doubt that he made one particularly objectionable claim. It’s a claim that many have made for themselves, and today it would be taken as a sign of poor mental health. He claimed to be God. One modern writer about Jesus introduced the subject by confessing that it was “easy to sympathise with scepticism” because the claims made by Jesus and his early followers “are staggering, and indeed offensive”[2]. And C.S. Lewis famously pointed out that these claims paint both Jesus and enquirers about Easter into a corner:

“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”[3]

It was at a place just outside Jerusalem that his claims and his death collided. By all accounts he died a barbaric, if not entirely unique, death. In Jesus day, those in control of where he lived had a standard form of execution. This involved literally nailing the condemned person to a wooden frame, raising them up, and waiting for them to die from suffocation, blood loss, thirst or a combination all three (plus various other encouragements like breaking legs, or sticking with spears). Even in the midst of these excruciating circumstances (which he had some insight into before they happened) he verbalised forgiveness for his torturers, made provision for his mother, comforted someone being executed with him, and made several other statements. None was a statement of regret. One was tantamount to a final claim. It is reported that he shouted “finished” (probably a single word in his original language). Even in dying (an extended process lasting several hours), he was claiming that he had accomplished something.

And there the story should have ended. If this was a man, a good man, a clever man, an exemplary man, ending as all men do, what possible significance could he have for the rest of us? Less than none. This would not be a sad story of what could have been. It might be a story that was instructive, but hardly one that would in any way be transformative. For most of us it would be more of a footnote than a catastrophe. But remember he claimed to be something considerably more than a man. If the story ends with his death, then this claim is clearly bogus. This, and probably all of his other claims are untrue, his credibility fatally flawed. He might have occasionally said something clever, or even something that appears high and moral, but it’s not. He got the one thing he could truly know wrong; he didn’t ultimately even know himself, never mind anything else. So why then twenty centuries later is there still even a question? Why a story to repeat? Why claims to consider?

Because of what happened next.

1.       “Easter for Atheists”, The Philosopher’s Mail 

2.       Donald MacLeod, “The Person of Christ”

3.       C.S. Lewis, “Mere Christianity”

Scientism

If “new atheism” (NA) is, if not dead, perhaps terminally ill, then one of the contributory factors to its demise is the scrutiny that its supporting doctrines have come under. Whether cause or consequence, NA has always been closely linked with “scientism”. Scientism is not science, does not work in the same way as science, and does not (or should not) have the same authority as science. A bit like NA itself, it’s not new; it has probably been around in one form or another as long as science itself. But it really began to emerge in the late 19^th century with the desire of some in science to paint the only possible relationship between science and other disciplines, or between science and religious faith, as a war in which there had to be a winner and a loser. It kicked around in the background for a while, probably pooped up in many undergraduate science courses, and came to public prominence more recently as a supporting pillar of NA.

What is it? Definitions abound, but at its heart it’s an understandable (and now familiar) view. The only truth that counts is scientific truth, and therefore the scientific method is the only means of discovering truth. A series of classic statements can be found in Peter Atkins short essay “Science as truth” published in in 1995. Speaking of science, Atkins claims that “There appear to be no bounds to its competence… This claim of universal competence may seem arrogant, but it appears to be justified.” All religion (grouped with studies of the paranormal) is dismissed as an “obscurantist pursuit”. Science is the “greatest of humanity’s intellectual achievements”; in contrast he thinks it a defensible proposition that “no philosopher has helped to elucidate nature”! I commenced my own scientific journey in 1979 when I began my science degree at the University of Glasgow. There were certainly some lecturers to us first-year biology students who weren’t backward at dropping such sentiments into their lectures. I now suspect that this was because their own historical and philosophical education was sadly lacking. As student, I found such views baffling; as a scientist, more than thirty years Iater I find them embarrassing.

There have been and are lots of responses to scientism. Some have come from those of a theological disposition. I rather like John Polkinghorne’s comment on scientism (in “Theology in the Context of Science, p46), that it is “the rash and implausible claim that science tells us all that is worth knowing, or even that could ever be known. Embracing that belief is to take an arid and dreary view of reality..” . Polkinghorne writes as a theologian and former (distinguished) physicist. For a wide ranging and eloquent critique from a scientist’s standpoint, read Austin Hughes’ “The Folly of Scientism”. Hughes writes for more than just the sake of an argument. He has a real concern that scientism’s overreach will eventually cause science big problems: “Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole.” With contemporary attacks on expertise ringing in our ears, and with science now worrying within about the reproducibility crisis, I think he’s right to be concerned.  

Part of Hughes’ case is that philosophers are far from innocent when it comes to the scientism. Some schools of philosophy provided a major impetus to it (ie the logical positivists), while others colluded in its rise. It always bemused me that 19^th century theology gave up the tussle so easily. But philosophy being philosophy, scientism didn’t have it entirely its own way. At least now there does seem to be something of a fight back going on whether it’s Roger Scruton’s approach from art history, or Peter Hacker’s more analytical analytical critique.  

To my non-philosophical mind, many of those objecting to scientism seem to be united in a common reaction to the ignorance of those who promulgate scientism. This is a version of the disdain for other approaches that has been so much a part of NA. From their different perspectives, scientism’s critics have pointed out that it often derides and dismisses ideas that are never fully defined or fairly discussed. Some have objected to its selective memory when it comes to the history of science itself. Others have pointed out that it has a habit of blundering to other areas of academic endeavour, oblivious to important concepts and developments, constructing weak arguments and reaching fallacious conclusions. Particularly in popular accounts, this leads to a series of illusory battles against straw men, which of course, are convincingly won.  

It’s always struck me that this is something that often marks NA’s attacks on religious belief. Of course if you take the very weakest form of an argument it will be easy to defeat it. Having defeated the weakest form, it’s a short step to the claim that all arguments of that type are also therefore defeated. Showing that diverse beliefs in fairies, Santa Claus and large lizards controlling earth from the moon are irrational is not likely to be that relevant to debunking beliefs in well attested and evidenced ancient events that believers claim to have transformative power today. Such debunking may be possible, but it was always likely to take much more careful work than many in NA were apparently able or inclined to do. And the sheer logical inappropriateness of the natural science to do this work, was clearly lost on them.

As with the reported death of NA, it’s unclear to me what the fate of scientism will be. As Hughes argued, its fate will likely have important effects on science itself. As a scientist, I’m committed to the scientific endeavour, and think that within its area of competence science offers the best way to answer certain types of questions. But it can’t answer every type of question. For that we need the tools of philosophy, history, anthropology and the rest. And for that most important type of question (the why rather than the how)? If I were you I’d turn to Scripture rather than scientism (or even science).  

Can I be a Christian and…? The downfall of Tim Farron

We’ve had to cope with yet more tragedy in recent days. After terror attacks in Manchester and London, now the news of massive loss of life in a tower block fire. But another, seeminly more trivial event, caught my attention on Tuesday evening – the resignation of Tim Farron as the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party. At the outset of the general election campaign, he was persistently and specifically questioned about an issue not in his party’s election manifesto, and not likely to feature in upcoming legislation. The issue of whether he thought “gay sex” was a sin, became sport for the media and a distraction to his party’s campaign. It was partly on the media’s radar because he is known to be a Christian (in the confessional as opposed to the ethnic sense), and while his voting record on LGBTIx issues is fairly consistent, he abstained on a final vote on the Same Sex Marriage Bill in 2013 (having voted consistently for the legislation up to that point), a decision he later said he regretted. The reaction to both his resignation and his resignation speech is instructive.

Some have gloated and some have provided a more nuanced commentary. On one hand it’s claimed we have seen prejudice and medievalism driven from the public sphere, on the other that tolerance and liberalism are now proven to be in decline rather than in the ascendancy. Before throwing in my tuppence worth, I’ll make clear my own perspective and commitments.

I too am a Christian - a term that needs further qualification. I am a follower of Jesus Christ, as He is revealed in the Bible, which I take to be the Word of God. I am convinced the Bible is both an ordinary and an extraordinary book. It’s ordinary in that it is composed of words, and has to be read and interpreted like any other book. It’s extraordinary in that these words are the means by which the God who is real communicates to 21^st century men and women. As with all words, the ones in my English translation of the Bible have to be interpreted, and that entails a degree of work and commitment on my part. Unlike the words in any other book, behind and within the words in my Bible, is the Living God.  He is not the words, and the words are not Him, but He communicates by means of them. Words can be misinterpreted of course. When I do that with the Bible, it is because I am limited and fallible, and sometimes just plain lazy. That is my failure, not God’s. All of this leaves room for disagreement among followers of Jesus and there are some areas of “twilight” in what Scripture says and what Scripture means. But, to quote Dr Johnston, the fact that there is twilight doesn’t mean I can’t tell night from day.

All of this matters because it is words, and partly Bible words, that contributed to Tim Farron’s downfall. I’m clear that God in His word is clear on matters such as human sexual behaviour and marriage. The views that I hold, based on a rational reading of Scripture, used to be the majority view, and were the consensus view on such matters for centuries. But no longer; I am now in a minority. It’s unclear the extent to which Tim and I agree on what the Bible teaches on these issues. I don’t know him personally, and have no inclination to speculate. But, despite many of his public statements, his voting record in parliament and his work on LGBTI issues in the Liberal Democrat party, the commentariat appear to assume that he thinks certain things, and on the basis of this assumed pattern of thought, he has been stalked, outed, criticised and condemned.

David Laws, not a stranger to controversy and the odd political resignation himself, was revealing in his article on the topic: ..”you cannot be a leader of a liberal party while holding fundamentally illiberal and prejudiced views". Never mind Farron’s voting record and tireless party work. Laws continued that the LD election campaign had been “undermined by the outdated opinions and views which Tim clearly holds”. It appears from this article that Mr Laws thinks that even if I accept that the law should treat he and I equally, I am not entitled to even think (let alone argue) that he or anyone else is immoral on the basis of my “outdated” and “irrational” beliefs. Exactly which methods should be used to expose my beliefs (if I should I keep them to myself) or to what extent I should be penalised for believing stuff he finds offensive, or whether I should be coerced to think differently – all this remains unsaid and unclear. Re-education camps perhaps? Sounds a bit illiberal to me.

The open and tolerant society that allowed campaigners to overturn the consensus view on legislation relating to issues like homosexuality and abortion was rooted in and shaped by a Biblically informed world view. It appears as society moves ever further away from this, I’m not even to be allowed to think differently from the new consensus, never mind to debate or campaign for change in a different direction. Liberalism apparently has its limits.

So much about politics, political leadership and illiberalism. But occasionally, I hear the question asked: is it possible to be a Christian and a scientist? After all, to be a Christian one has to be irrational. You have to believe stuff against reason, or at least not think too carefully about it. There are irrational beliefs (ie beliefs held either without evidence or in the teeth of evidence). But I am a Christian because having weighed the evidence and found it compelling, I have responded to it. Or not so much responded to it, but to Him. Because Christianity is at root a relationship with a person, not an information processing exercise. And having become a Christian, everything (including reason) is involved in being a Christian. And being a Christian, one exciting way of understanding the world around me, is to use the methods of science. In doing that, all I am doing is further exploring what ultimately God has done and is doing. Where others assert conflict, I find that these are more apparent than real. No choice between science and scripture is necessary. In happily being a Christian and a scientist, I’m doing nothing new, and I'm not alone. I’m following in a long and distinguished line.   

Faith and aeroplanes

Every year the eye and vision science community (or at least a fairly large proportion of it) decamps to the United States for the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. This year I combined this trip with a quick visit to colleagues in Athens, Georgia. So I had to get on an aeroplane in Manchester and fly to Atlanta, then a few days later get on another one and fly to Seattle via Phoenix, Arizona, and about a week after that fly to New York and then back to Manchester. All of this was booked using the interweb or some such. Indeed, before I arrived at any airport, I parted with a large sum of cash (actually I trusted various electronic systems about which I know nothing to move money from my credit card account, to the account of various commercial organisation) trusting that when I turned up at the airport (or the hotel in Athens, or the apartment in Seattle) they would actually know who I was and let me use their services.

Let’s focus in on that first flight from Manchester to Atlanta. I did no investigation of any of the principles of aeronautical engineering, the mastering of which I was relying to keep the aircraft in the air. I exercised implicit trust (or faith) in the aircraft designers and manufacturers, trusting that they had known what they were doing when they designed and built that particular plane. This despite the fact that I know they have occasionally got things wrong in the past. Neither did I investigate the people who were using the presumably airworthy aircraft once it had been built, to transport me to my destination. I trusted them to use it properly and to get me safely to where I was going. This despite the fact that only a few months ago, one particularly disturbed but clearly qualified individual flew an aircraft into a mountain, killing all on board. And I didn’t think too much about all of those charged with stopping bad people causing problems; all those security people I could see, and all of those I couldn’t see. Apparently there are those who want to do me harm by interfering with things like aircraft. I trust lots of people to stop them. But I myself don’t check the competence or commitment of the airport security staff. I trust others to hire them, screen them, train them, motivate, pay and monitor them. This, despite that fact that I know that occasionally, bad people have slipped through the net and have managed to do bad things to aeroplanes, with catastrophic consequences. No, I exercised faith all the way along the line. And the way I behaved was evidence of my faith. I booked my ticket, checked-in on time, made my way to the gate when called, boarded the aircraft, settled into my seat and (I’m glad to report) safely arrived in Atlanta.

The faith I exercised wasn’t blind faith, or particularly naïve, or irrational. This is a flight I’ve made safely before. And in fact, most such flights, many thousands if not millions of them, have been completed safely before. So I had good reason to believe that my faith was not misplaced. While clearly bad things happen to aircraft, and currently one feels for the families grieving for those lost in troubling circumstances in the Mediterranean, such events are mercifully and relatively rare. So in a few weeks’ time I’ll be getting on another aeroplane. My point is that faith was a key part of what I was doing.  And what I will be doing: exercising faith again.

In fact, when you begin to think about it, faith is a part of everyday life and we barely give it a thought. And while faith can be blind, irrational, or misplaced, it rarely is. It seems pretty basic. So here’s the question: is religious faith different in some fundamental way from the kind of thing I’ve been talking about?

When I think about my Christian faith, I don’t think about it in the abstract. I think about what (or who) it’s in. Have I placed my faith in an unknowable mystery? No. I’ve place my faith primary in a person who lived one of the most scrutinised lives in all of history. How do I know about that life? It is recorded (several times over) in one of the most scrutinised books in all of history.  To be honest, just as I (and I would submit, you) have approached other aspects of life, I personally did not do all of the scrutinising myself. As with anything I’m being asked to entrust myself too (like aeroplanes) I’ve looked in detail at some things, left some things to others who have particular expertise, and never had any reason (note the use of the word “reason”) to scrutinise a whole other bunch of stuff. I suppose if I came to suspect that I’d placed my faith in the wrong object, or found I was being asked to simply trust things that seemed internally contradictory, then I’d resort to more scrutiny myself. But so far, this hasn’t been an issue. My exercise of faith in this context seems to be more an act of will, than a process of discovery and persuasion. I didn’t wait till all the “i’s” were dotted and “t’s” crossed. I took a decision and ran with it, just as I do in life in general. So far I have no reason to review the basic decision.

One other thought. Sometimes faith is placed in opposition to science. People talk about science vs faith, or the science/faith debate. Occasionally I do this myself. But in one way I actually find this a bit odd. Science involves buckets of faith on all sorts of levels. But that’s for another day. Trust me.

On “Moralistic gods” – at least we're taking them seriously now

Usually when the subject of religion crops up in Nature (the top ranking scientific journal), it’s because some perceived great obscurantist evil has to be exposed. The impression given has been that there is definitely nothing good or intellectually wholesome to be found in religion. At best, it’s for the weak minded. However, recently Nature published the report of a very large study by Purzycki and colleagues (“Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality” 2016, Nature 530:327-330). They conducted an experiment investigating how the beliefs of people in eight different, widely separated, communities about their god/s affected how they viewed anonymous, distant, coreligionists.  Long (and interesting) story short, the more you believe your god knows about your thoughts and motives, and wants you to be nice to fellow believers (even if you don’t know them and they live far away), and the more you believe that he/she/it has power to punish you if you don’t do what he/she/it wants, the more you’ll do what they want. So the effect is that you’re kinder to strangers you have no genetic links with. Simple “selfish gene” accounts struggle to explain why humans have come to live in large socially complex cooperative groups rather than small, selfish, genetically related ones. Religious belief, which simple observation shows is rampant, seems to provides at least one explanation.

There’s lots about the experiment that’s really interesting, and some aspects that seem distinctly odd. It’s not clear to me whether the label “Christian” has much of a meaning in the Biblical sense, at least in Western Europe. It seems merely to name a vaguely connected set of cultures that for a long time have been separated by quite some distance from the person one of whose titles provides the label. It would be churlish to claim this, and not accept that there are devout Muslims who feel the same way about the word “muslim” being applied broad-brush to large swathes of the world. After all, if I claim that your average IRA man planting bombs and shooting policemen in Northern Ireland in the 1970’s can’t in any sense be called a Christian without the word being emptied of usefulness, doesn’t the same logic apply to the “muslims” trying set up their Caliphate in Syria/Iraq? Yet this is portrayed as being about Islam and muslims, rather than power and politics. But that aside, there’s something more interesting about the publishing of this paper.

It’s now apparently intellectually respectable to take religion seriously. Strange as it may seem, this is a change. It used to be that religion was an epiphenomenon to be dismissed, or that it was a primitive intellectual parasite that the advance of science would finally put an end to. Or that it belonged to humanity’s violent adolescence, a passing phase we would collectively grow out of. It turns out that as a minimum, the influence of religion, for good or ill, now seems to be accepted as playing some fundamental roll in the development of complex societies. None of this means that what is actually believed by the religious (and that is probably all of us) is true, or even helpful. It’s just that it is observably deeply ingrained in us all. Indeed that it is probably all encompassing.

Now of course I see all this from a particular perspective. Because it’s just what I would expect if in fact we were all the product of (creatures of) a “moralistic” God, who held us accountable for our actions. A God who had designed us to know Him, and enjoy Him. Even if we denied Him, these facts of our design would not disappear; how could they? They’re just brute facts. The way things are. If we tried to observe the state of things from a standpoint of neutrality as to whether He (or “they”) were real, these features of how we are made, and how this worked itself out in our relationships would still be observed.

These observations neither prove that this God (let’s call Him the living God) exists, nor can they explain Him away (although it won’t be long until at least the later of these is being claimed). But at least now it’s respectable to have a sensible discussion. The reality of  Him having “placed eternity in the heart of man” as I might put it (or actually the writer of Ecclesiastes 3:11), and the large scale effects this has had, and still has, is no longer being denied.