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 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

Faith in aliens….

I am not a famous ex-anything.  I’m not an ex-premier league footballer making even more of my millions. I’m not an ex-MP or ex-minister of Her Majesty, who makes TV documentaries about trains wearing brightly coloured clothes. In particular, I am not an ex-astronaut. I don’t regret not having played professional football (being fairly uninterested in the amateur variety). And, although sometimes it has had its attractions to my argumentative side, I don’t regret not being involved in professional politics (a tricky thing for a Christian – just ask Tim Farron). But who would not want to sit atop one of the most powerful machines ever invented, and then be blasted into orbit at unimaginable speeds, to look down on this blue jewel we all call home, or to look outward with unimpeded clarity at the stars? Too much? Anyway, the point is, I’m not an ex-astronaut. But some people are.

Helen Sharman is. She belongs to a select club that numbers just over 550. And, of course, she also has the additional distinction of being one a very few female ex-astronauts. In May 1991, after 18 months of intensive training, she blasted off in a Russian rocket, to conduct an 8-day mission on the Soviet Mir space station. Most of her time was spent running experiments. I have always assumed that astronauts are quite bright (this is partly about rocket science after all). As well expertise in science or engineering (Sharman’s background is in chemistry), there are all the other things you have to master connected to flying into, and then operating, in space. It’s a complex, difficult and dangerous environment. Since her return, she has busied herself as a science communicator and populariser, has received several honours from the Queen and the Royal Society of Chemistry and a host of honorary degrees from a list of universities. And she does occasional media interviews.

One of these interviews was published in the Guardian earlier this month. It was notable because it generated relatively little comment about one particular aspect of what she was quoted as having said. 

On the subject of aliens:

“Aliens exist, there’s no two ways about it. There are so many billions of stars out there in the universe that there must be all sorts of different forms of life. Will they be like you and me, made up of carbon and nitrogen? Maybe not. It’s possible they’re here right now and we simply can’t see them.”

(published in The Guardian, Jan 5th, 2020)

I have no reason to believe that this was said “tongue-in-cheek”, or was a random, throwaway statement. It is a view, an opinion, and a statement of faith. It is not stated as a hypothesis - a provisional statement of affairs, waiting to be tested and supported (or refuted) by evidence. That would make it a kind of scientific statement, with the weight and authority that such statements have (or at least should have). Helen is clear and emphatic: aliens exist. Indeed they “must” exist. She is basing this on a statistical argument (not evidence), that has been around for a while. But it’s an argument, based on an intuition, not an observation. The intuition is that we are not alone; it is widely shared. Is there any evidence that this intuition will be satisfied by the discovery of alien life? No. This is an exercise in faith. There is no evidence to support either the substantive assertion or the possibility that is alluded to. And it’s not that the evidence is lacking for want of effort.

The “search for extra-terrestrial intelligence” has gone on in one sense probably since the first human looked to the sky. In its modern form it began in earnest with the discovery of radio. Apparently Tesla suggested that his newly invented wireless could be used to contact beings on Mars. New technology brought new suggestions and opportunities. In the 1950’s it was searches in the microwave range. In the 1960’s it was searches in other frequency bands with radio telescopes. Then in the 1970’s NASA took up the reigns, spending large sums on various projects designed to search for signs of life out in the further reaches of space. Eventually NASA’s funding for SETI projects was cut (although efforts come and go to restore it), and the SETI institute carried on projects with private funding. There have been sizeable donations to the effort. Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, notably donated a sum in the region of $25M to support SETI. So a cumulatively large sum, running into tens of, if not hundreds of millions of US$, have been spent on this search. Some of the science along the way may well have been impressive. But (so far) the search has turned up nothing coming close to the evidence being searched for.

But who needs evidence. Aliens are real and probably among us, right? There is a bit of a double standard going on here. There are things that I claim that are clearly statements of faith. I’m apt to claim that the life of Jesus of Nazareth has significance beyond the historical and sociological. But this is based not on faith, but on facts. The faith bit is about the response, not the foundation. There are a number of well-attested and constantly investigated facts that lead me to believe certain things about Jesus (facts about what he said and did). The facts are of course contested, and even the concept of “fact” can be a bit slippery. But there is an evidence base to be engaged with. The facts are of a specific type of course. They are historical facts, and therefore the kind of investigation and validation that is necessary belongs to the discipline of history, not science. Other disciplines also have a role, because these facts are attested to by documents – in the main the Bible. But facts there are, none-the-less.

Evidence, disputed and debated as it is, is available to be disputed and debated, probed and weighted. Potentially, an awful lot hangs on the outcome of such investigations into the claims, work, death and (claimed) resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Much more than is the case for the non-evidenced claim that aliens exist.

Frankly Franklin……

There is a (largely) unspoken rule that insists there are two topics of conversation that are inappropriate for polite after-dinner conversation – politics and religion. This is a rule I struggle with although it is not a big problem for me because I don’t get invited to many polite English dinner parties. The problem with this rule is that politics and religion are two of the more interesting topics worth having a conversation about. They are more interesting than those other staples – the weather and association football (or soccer as it is occasionally called). I suppose the rule developed because discussing religion and politics can be tricky. At the moment in the UK most political discussion begins and ends with Brexit, which shows no signs of being resolved any time soon. Its resolution certainly hasn’t been brought any closer by the election that should never have been. And there are lots of aspects of religion that are not worth discussing around a dinner table or anywhere else. But this weekend politics and religion have intersected in a way that has me bamboozled.

Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, has called a day of prayer for tomorrow (Sunday 2^nd June) in support of that other president, Donald J. Trump (President of the United States). One hand this is perfectly understandable. As he (Franklin that is) fairly points out, praying for those in authority is something that Scripture encourages every Christian to do. So I believe that I should be praying for political leaders, both in the UK (how they need it!), and others including President Trump. What’s got me confused is what Franklin is encouraging us to pray for.

On the BGEA web page with this “call”, the invitation is to pray “that God would protect, strengthen, embolden, and direct” President Trump. Protect I get. The US president is a target regardless of who he is and what his policies are. Strengthen I get – he’s an old guy and it’s a tough job. And he certainly needs direction. But embolden? This suggests that Franklin thinks Trump is doing a fine job and going in the right direction. He needs encouragement to press on with the good work he’s started. This I don’t get. Trump’s campaign back in 2016 was marked from the outset by insults and deception. It was devoid of almost any kind of virtue, let alone Christian virtue. It was fairly clear that here was going to be a President who had, at best, a distant relationship with truth, and no understanding of (or apparent need for) humility. The “Access Holywood” tape and the abuse of John McCain should, along with other things, have made him all but unelectable. And what was hinted at in the campaign has been writ large during his presidency. None of which has anything to do with me. But here’s what I really don’t understand.

US evangelicals (an admittedly elastic term) were among Trump’s staunchest supporters and it is claimed they have largely stuck by him. US evangelical leaders (or at least a prominent proportion of them) have given him public and vocal support. For someone whose lifestyle, ambitions and pronouncements are so starkly different to what Scripture teaches they should be, this support is baffling. I know that elections are about choices and the alternative was unpalatable to many evangelicals. Among other things Hillary was also perceived to have a problem with truth.  There were Congressional hearings and FBI investigations, and accusations flying thick and fast. But just on the narrow ground of telling the truth, did Hillary really have as big a problem as Trump? In any case, if they were both so equally appalling, that’s an argument for spoiling your ballot.

I understand too that a major motivation for US evangelicals was a desire to see someone in the White House who would, in time, deliver a more conservative Supreme Court. This, so the argument goes, would provide a longer term means for preventing the slide away from supposed Biblical values. To an extent this has paid off. Trump has delivered for them, wiping out the “liberal” majority on the Court (although it remains to be seen whether this will really deliver the longer term, longed for “benefits”). My problem with this is that the US Supreme Court and the US culture wars just don’t feature in Scripture. Pride, adultery, lying all do. Being aligned with the latter to achieve the former doesn’t square with any kind of Biblically-based reasoning. Even if you thought Donald was worth taking a punt on back in 2016, how can the chaos, the dissembling, the continuing ad-hominem attacks, the coarsening of debate, the sheer incompetence, not prompt a rethink?

But Franklin does not appear to be concerned by any of this. He is not suggesting that his constituency prays for Donald’s repentance or his humbling. Neither is he asking for prayer that the political process as a whole might function better to deliver real benefits to the people. Instead, he talks about Trump’s enemies trying to destroy him. Now if by destroy we’re talking about violent or disorderly activity to overturn a lawfully elected government, going about its lawful business (although this is being argued about in multiple US courts), then this should be prayed against and resisted. Fair enough.  But presumably the enemies Franklin has in mind are Trumps political opponents. And all they seem to be doing at the moment is trying, by constitutional and lawful means, to get to the bottom of who Trump really is and what he’s been up to. Of course politics can be a dirty business. Ironically Trump was elected in part to “drain the swamp”. How has that turned out? Michael “lock her up” Flynn a convicted felon, 34 indictments or guilty pleas emerging from the now-complete Muller investigation (so much for it being a hoax), multiple administration members caught out in financial and ethics violations. Despite the desire to lock up Hillary, after investigations, reported referrals and Fox News wishful thinking, there’s been little in the way of indictments let alone convictions.

Perhaps the enemies Franklin has in mind are those who lurk in the US media who refuse to give the President a fair shake. This too is difficult to understand given the way Trump and his associates have sought to systematically malign and undermine all but the most supportive media. And the White House media operation, headed a press secretary who should know better, has consistently demonstrated the same problems with truth as their boss, as most recently highlighted in the Muller report. So what about praying for honest reporting (on all sides) and rigorous fact checking so there might be something akin informed debate based on reasonably well established and agreed facts (if such a thing is possible)?

Frankly, Franklin, you’re calling on Christians to do something most us are doing anyway (and more fervently than we have for a while given the state of politics on both sides of the Atlantic). It’s the terms of your “call” that has me confused. You seem to be taking a partisan position. I’m not arguing that Christians should not be involved in politics, although as Tim Farron’s experience recently demonstrated it’s difficult. There are lots of issues where there is plenty of scope for Christians to take different positions, many of which are political. On this side of the pond you’ll find Christians (in the Biblical as opposed to cultural sense) in different political parties arguing for mutually contradictory policies. But there’s something about Trump that is beyond politics. Given the monumental deceit, lies, attacks, misogyny, racism and dangerous incompetence at home (“healthcare – who knew it was so hard?”) and abroad (“I have a great relationship with Chairman Kim”) it’s not Donald Trump enemies that are the problem. We should pray for the man. But frankly, Franklin, you need to rethink what it is exactly we should be praying.

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”

Death of an expert

A few days ago, a remarkable human being left this life. Professor Stephen Hawking, one of Newton’s successors as the Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge (from 1979 to 2009), cosmologist, space tourist and author, died at the age of 76. His scientific output was prodigious and ground breaking, from his 1965 PhD thesis, “Properties of Expanding Universes”, to his 2017 paper “A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?”. His popular output has made him a familiar name to many who knew nothing of physics. His 1988 book “A Brief History of Time”, was a best seller, and in the last week has shot back up Amazon’s best seller table (I’ve just looked and it’s currently #2).  Among other places, he popped up in Star Trek and The Simpsons. He was all the more remarkable because much of what he accomplished, he accomplished from wheelchair. At the age of 21 he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the most common form of motor neurone disease. Originally told he only had a few years to live, it turned out that he was in the small group of ALS sufferers who survive more than 10 years after diagnosis. But latterly he had lost all power of movement in his limbs and lost the ability to speak, so he communicated by means of a computer interface that allowed him to type via a cursor activated by twitching a cheek muscle. It was slow and laborious, but it allowed him to continue to make an impact on the world beyond his wheelchair, and the sound of his electronic voice was widely and instantly recognisable. He did so much more than grudgingly and grimly survive. His passing will be felt most severely by his family and close friends. Then there will be that wider circle of friends and colleagues in Physics, and science more generally, who will miss and mourn him. And beyond that a much wider circle who will feel poorer for his passing. That’s all as it should be.

He was an expert. His specific expertise was in cosmology, working on how the universe came into existence and developed, carrying out basic and elegant work on those most mysterious objects in the universe, black holes. He used the mathematics of the infinitely small, and applied it to the really big. If you get the impression I’m being a bit vague, that’s because the maths involved, as well as many of the concepts, are well beyond me. But I’m not alone. I suppose this applies to the vast bulk of humanity. This got me thinking about expertise.

Many of us can appreciate and value Stephen Hawking’s expertise. Rather than resenting it, we can accept it, respect it. Some have been inspired by it. In part, maybe this is because of his very human story of achievement in the face of the most difficult of life circumstances. Rather than give up when confronted with essentially a death sentence, he persevered. That is impressive. Maybe it’s because his expertise was of a particular non-threatening sort. After all, as important as his work on black holes is, most of us can live quite happily in ignorance of it, with it making no personal demands on us. It has no influence on how we live, or spend, or vote. It’s the sort of thing most us are very clear we have no understanding of. There’s no question of our opinion on anything to do with black holes having any weight at all compared to Stephen Hawking’s. Most of us would accept that his expertise and knowledge were unquestionable, whereas ours is miniscule or non-existent. Perhaps it gets tricky when expertise is more questionable or its implications closer to home.

Expertise that has implications for how we think or how we live seems to be under attack (see Tom Nichol’s essay “The death of expertise”). In the blogosphere, in the media (social and otherwise), even in the street, we no longer defer to experts even when the issues are relatively technical. And of course some seem happy to keep us away from actual knowledge and to glory in ignorance (something discussed here). We have the spread of fake news (or at least the constant claim that a particular piece of news is fake) and fake facts. It emerged this week that a certain prominent politician made up a “fact” stated as a truth.

But this approach strikes me of having at its heart a strange double standard. In cosmology, medicine and aviation (to mention a few) we are happy to recognise, trust and rely on experts. Black holes may be remote objects with little direct impact on us, but knowing your surgeon can tell your tonsils from your toes, or that your pilot can successfully lower the undercarriage before landing, is clearly important. We accept that true facts matter in these domains, and that fake facts (your tonsils are on the end of your foot) have potentially serious consequences. Why then the unwillingness to accept expertise in other matters? Maybe it’s because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; it leads to the kind of hubris that claims that we can all be experts. And of course a little knowledge is only mouse click away. All opinions can then become expert opinions that must be taken equally seriously.

The answer to this is not so much a new deference but old fashioned humility; humility to recognise skill and expertise in others, and therefore give their opinions more weight than my own within their areas of expertise. This doesn’t mean experts should be regarded as infallible, even within their areas of expertise. They are human, and therefore always capable of making mistakes. So transparency and dialogue, critical engagement and debate have a role in providing corrections.  But experts are still much more likely to be right that I am. And maybe experts need a degree of humility too. Perhaps it’s tempting in the current climate to be a little too dogmatic and emphatic, even where uncertainties abound.

True expertise will always be valuable and should be valued. I wouldn’t take my views on the fate of particle pairs at the edge of black holes too seriously if I were you. We had Stephen Hawking for that.

On understanding pencils…..

Consider the humble pencil. For those poor souls born in the internet age who may not be familiar with them, the pencil is a wooden cylinder, usually about 12cm long, with a graphite core. They can be used for things like writing or drawing, making dark marks on paper (a bit like what happens on your laptop screen when you press keys on the keyboard). They don’t require an electrical supply and are pretty hardy objects, continuing to work in both hot and cold weather. They even work outdoors when it’s raining. But when all is said and done, they are fairly simple objects. Now here are some questions. What does it mean to understand a pencil? What range of disciplines are required? Is anything required beyond some fairly straightforward science? Could a pencil be any more than a sum of its parts?

Well talking of parts, I suppose a scientific approach to pencils would begin by understanding what it was actually made from. A simple pencil (let’s not complicate things too much by discussing pencils with erasers on the end or highly engineered propelling pencils) seems to consist of just two kinds of stuff. Its core is clearly different from the material surrounding it. In fact the core is probably a far from simple mixture of graphite, a substance which was originally mined but these days is manufactured. The graphite is mixed with clay or wax. The surround is of course wood. But what kind of wood? It turns out that almost all pencils are made of cedar, which doesn’t warp or crack, and can be repeatedly sharpened.  Actually the pencil I have in front of me is also painted (it’s red), and on the side there’s lettering.

The lettering spells out a brand name, but there are also some code letters. It turns out all pencils are not the same. In some the “filling” is hard and makes a thick black line, while in others it’s relatively soft making fainter, finer marks. So you don’t have to try out a pencil each time you go to buy one to find out what kind it is, the different types are coded. Apparently “medium soft” pencils (#2’s) are best for writing. But hang on. Now we’re not really thinking about the constituent parts of a pencil and their properties, the sort of thing that science can help with. A botanist could perhaps have identified the wood and speculated as to why it had been chosen. A chemist would have quickly identified that the core was a mixture of something that occurs naturally (graphite) mixed with other chemicals that it doesn’t naturally occur with. She could perhaps speculate on the processes used to combine these different substances. But now it turns out that there’s a whole other level of understanding required in order to understand pencils. They are “for something”, they have an intended purpose. And this is beyond the purview of chemistry and botany.

There are lots of uses to which pencils could be put. I assume that they burn, wood usually does. So I suppose you could put them in a fire to keep your house warm. They are relatively long and thin.  So I suppose you could poke them into holes in a bid to winkle out anything that might be hiding there. A quick experiment will show that graphite is an excellent conductor. But if you try to build circuits with pencils you’ll discover that they quickly generate so much heat that they burst into flames. So a line of pencils is never going to perform well as a mains electricity distribution system. Pencils have an intended purpose, for which they are designed, and for which they are really good. They are designed for writing and drawing, and when used in this way they perform admirably. But what kind of thing is an intended purpose? And what discipline has the correct tools for studying intended purposes? Not physics, or chemistry, or even most of biology.

It turns out pencils have a history, so it’s not just about the particular pencil sitting in front of me now. But they did not start out as the finely manufactured objects they are today. Some trace the history of the pencil back to Roman stylus. Others argue that pencils, properly understood, began with the discovery of naturally occurring graphite in Borrowdale in 1564. Leonardo frequently sketched his ideas in pencil. Without the humble pencil who knows what he might have forgotten all about,a what we would never have known he thought about. The pencil no doubt played a role in, and benefitted from, the industrial revolution of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. To understand the pencil clearly the humanities have a role to play.

Understanding pencils is turning out to be a bit tricky. To fully capture their constitution, their use and purposes, and their impact on society is getting complicated. Just imagine how complicated it would be to substantiate the claim that we understand things like table lamps, or cars or houses. Mind you, these are all artefacts. They are all things that people make and use. But what about understanding people? Is a person simpler or more complicated that a pencil? Now I think that the answer to this is fairly simply. But for the absence of doubt I think that people are more complicated than pencils. So if we need multiple methods to understand pencils, it’s fairly certain we’ll need multiple methods to understand people. To be able to claim we understand just one individual will take effort, multiple disciplines and many layers of explanation. Some higher levels of explanation will probably be closely related to lower layers, and it may be able to explain one thing at a higher level with things at a lower level. So in principle the biological processes of digestion, beginning with what goes on in the stomach, might well be reducible to chemical explanations (eg the action of hydrochloric acid on certain foodstuffs). While the detail might be a bit tricky and technical, you can see how this kind of thing might work. But there might be other levels of explanation that can’t be decomposed into lower level types of explanation. So I might well be able to explain chemically the effect of HCl on chocolate, but why do I so enjoy Cadbury’s Dairy Milk?

And this is just about explaining one individual. People tend to clump together. And in that clumping whole new concepts emerge and need different types of explanations. So what do we make of football scores? They are a thing. You know what I mean by “football score” even if in the UK it’s about some you do with a round ball, and in the US it concerns an oval ball. On one level a football score might be just two numbers on a board at one end of a football ground. But then it seems to have strange properties than can induce effects on human beings even over great distances. So there might be a vast crowd of 50 000 people in a football ground, variable distances from the board displaying the score. A score of 1-0 is somehow capable of inducing depression in one group of 25 000 and euphoria in the remaining 25 000 (and this is the simplified version). Suppose the same score is liberated from the football ground itself and transmitted by the wonders of modern communications across the world. Across the world a similar pattern of depression and eupohoria is induced in different individuals. So what kind of thing is a football score, and with what tools should it be studied?

Given all of the above consider the following famous quotation: “The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”  This comes from Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick. If you’re nothing but a pack of neurons, then all we need to understand all the complexity of humanity are the tools furnished by a particular branch of biology called neuroscience, with perhaps a dash of physics and chemistry thrown in. It smacks of a kind of reductionism often encountered in the popular writings of scientists, very often towards the end of otherwise really interesting books. reductionism doesn't work for pencils. It’s unlikely to be a plausible approach to understanding people.  

Of peacock tears, cows and global warming

First of all, a potential fake news alert. A story concerning retiring judge Mahesh Chandra Sharma of the Rajasthan State High Court went viral this week. Some of the reported quotations attributed to said judge follow:

“The peacock is a lifelong celibate. It never has sex with the peahen. The peahen gets pregnant after swallowing the tears of the peacock.”

 “(Mother cow) is the only animal that inhales as well as exhales oxygen.”

 “Cow urine has the miraculous property of destroying any kind of germs. It provides strength to mind and heart. It stops ageing,” he said, adding that its horns “acquire cosmic energy“.

 “Houses plastered with cow dung are safe from radio waves.”

The reporting of these comments provoked a bit of an international media storm, well divorced from the initial context. The judge was hearing a case involving the care of cows in government shelters. Not a big issue you might think. But you would only think that if you were not an Indian Hindu, to whom cows, their status and treatment, matter a whole lot more than to your average Westerner. While as far as I can see the judge exists and said these things, a bit of care still has to be taken in interpreting the comments. After all, the original judgement was handed down in Hindi. That said, and taking them at face value, it’s a reminder that there are people and places that have been bypassed by a couple of centuries of scientific progress.

Ignorance is neither innocent nor harmless. It also has a close cousin – denialism. Particularly within healthcare and medicine, there are a number of denial movements which have either cost, are costing or will cost lives. HIV denialism took root in South Africa for a while, and with political support from former president Thabo Mbeki, delayed the introduction of antiretroviral treatment. According to a study by Chigwedere et al (2008)¹, that delay may have cost 300,000 lives. Currently, lives are being lost because of the activity of the anti-vaccines movement. Parents are being persuaded not to have their children vaccinated, whether against measles in the US and Europe, or polio in Africa and parts of the sub-continent, in the face of scientific evidence and consensus. This all takes on a further worrying complexion when the deniers team up with purveyors of snake oil and sugar water, and seek to provide “alternative” remedies, usually at a profit. Like alternative facts, alternative remedies rarely have any positive effects.

In the West what is interesting is that this decline in the public traction that scientific evidence seems to have, at least in some quarters, parallels the decline in the influence of Biblical Christianity, or more particularly the values that flow from it. Arguments have raged for a while about the influence of these values on the rise of science. For all that the conflict metaphor has come to dominate at least the popular conception of the relationship between science and Christianity, it was in “Christian” Europe that the modern scientific enterprise emerged, having faltered in the Muslim world after a good start. Among others Hooykaas² claimed that this was no accident. Perhaps we’re now in a position to begin observing what happens as nature becomes remythologised (seemingly a problem in Rajasthan) and a personal commitment to truth is devalued.

In addition, this week saw international ructions as result of President Trump announcing that the US would pull out of the Paris climate change agreement. This is further evidence of the success of a denial movement, partly motivated by commercial and industrial interests. Again there’s a weight of scientific evidence to be processed, not all of which is unequivocal. Few of us have either the expertise, the time or the inclination to examine the evidence for ourselves and therefore remain relatively ignorant of it. And there’s a small, but apparently influential group of dissidents, who reject both the scientific and the current political consensus. They cite alternative evidence, or provide alternative interpretations of the evidence. And of course, given our relative ignorance, we can fall prey to their efforts. Sometimes, we’re happy to cooperate in this if it supports our prejudices, or looks like it’s in our local, personal, narrow economic self-interest.

Of course, even if the science were 100% clear on one side of the argument (it’s probably more like 95%), in areas where political action is required, there are other considerations that have to come into play. History, economics, fairness and more besides go into making political decisions. That said, the evidence that humanity is warming the planet in a damaging way, while complicated, is fairly compelling.  If the consensus is wrong, then lots of money will be spent to achieve ends that while probably useful we could equally well live without. But if the consensus is right, but proper action is undermined by the deniers, then the consequences will be catastrophic in some places, grim in many others and expensive everywhere. But of course, because the consequences will unfold over a long period of time, the deniers will be long gone.

Maybe the truth of the matter is that ignorance is never bliss. But the only alternative is hard work educating the next generation and for that matter hard work informing ourselves.

1.       Chigwedere P et al (2008) Estimating the lost benefits of antiretroviral drug use in South Africa. J. Acquir Immune Defic Syndr 49(4):410-5. [Link]

2.       Hooykaas R (1972) Religion and the rise of modern science. Scottish Academic Press.

Alt-facts, fake news and agnotology for beginners

I suppose like many “experts” and not a few scientists, I’ve been troubled by the apparently recent rise of alternative facts, fake news and the like. Of course it’s only apparent (rather than real) and it’s ancient not recent (see Matt 28:11-15). I’ve already discussed why the notion that complex issues are simple and that all that is needed is a dispassionate collection and analysis of facts is problematic. However, on further reflection it turns out that it’s naïve as well. In part, my reflections were stimulated by an excellent article by Tim Harford, the FT’s  Undercover Economist (“The problem with facts”; unfortunately this is behind the FT’s paywall so you won’t be able to read it without a subscription, but see this). He discusses at length how big tobacco combatted a whole slew of facts showing that their product was killing people in their thousands if not millions. They managed to delay by decades any kind of serious reckoning that would east into their profits. Sixty years on from when the evidence that smoking kills began to mount, they are still turning a pretty profit. It turns out that it’s the tobacco playbook that the likes of the Trump and Brexit campaigns have been following either intuitively or explicitly.

So how do you combat inconvenient but true facts? To quote Harford about the indisputable facts from unquestionable sources on smoking: “The indisputable facts were disputed. The unquestionable sources were questioned”. The aim? To manufacture, encourage and maintain ignorance rather than knowledge and truth, an exercise Robert Proctor, a Stanford historian, has called “agnotology”. In fact, last May, during the election campaign, then president Obama spotted this and commented on it in a speech delivered at Rutgers University. He pointed out that ignorance is not a virtue. Clearly, however, as a tactic it’s pretty effective. Look what happened come last November. It turns out that ignorance is in the interest of some people, and that truth is not an unalloyed good. So make an issue sound as complicated as you can, with certainly more than one side and preferably more than two. Question the motives of those whose facts you don’t like and give them motives if they don’t apparently have any. Destroy the notion of the seeker after truth for truth’s sake. 

Of course the problem is, and this is why these tactics are so potentially powerful, that we live in a messy world in which many issues are complicated and motives mixed. Put this together with the observation that genuine facts are tricky things to find and trickier to deal with effectively, and you begin to understand the problem. And then of course (and this is why I was being naïve) clearly there are those (like of big tobacco) whose motives are very decidedly less than pure (profit over lives). The answer can’t just be more facts, although if repeating non-facts (ie lies) gives them a deal of credibility, then repeating facts and finding new and relevant ones must count for something. It has to be a more subtle analysis that sifts the facts, looks at the sources, weighs competing motives and judges the relative importance of different outcomes.

This all takes time and effort. But maybe for democracy to function, that’s what as citizens we have to do. Investigate, collate, triangulate, think, judge. Perhaps this is not something we are prepared to do. Could it be that in complacency most of us would rather stick to narrow sources of information (our favourite web site, like-thinking friends on social media, a single newspaper or tv channel), be told what to think, be credulous about what we’re told, allow ourselves to believe alt-facts we find convenient? If democracy ceases to function, we’re heading towards something less palatable.  In this and other domains it’s time to “be adults in our thinking” (1 Cor 14:20).

A bit of Trumpian perspective

Pundits have been having a bad time. They've been badly beaten up by the people. It’s been a bad time for experts too. Ignored and even mocked. Leading up to the EU referendum in the UK, we were told that Brexit would cost us all money. It would cost jobs. There would be political, educational and cultural costs. A majority ignored the advice. Some didn't believe if. Some didn't want too. Some wilfully listened to different voices that made carefully calibrated and worded, deniable, non-promises. We embarked on an uncertain course to an uncertain destination.

I remember waking with a palpable sense of déjà vu to something else that was scarcely believable right up to the moment it actually happened. One Donald Trump won the US Presidential election. The insurgency that wasn’t really, won again. A rich insider persuaded enough voters in the US (although not a majority) that he was an outsider like them, and that he would be their man if they elected him. Post-inauguration something approaching chaos has ensued, despite claims by the President to the contrary. The “Muslim ban” that wasn’t has been stymied by the courts. He claims that his executive order was good and its implementation smooth, but that the administration had encountered a “bad court”. Courts matter in the US. There will probably, eventually, be a more conservative Supreme Court. But even then, President Trump will have no control over Justices once raised to the Supreme Court. Given that reality has a way of reasserting itself over fantasy, it remains to be seen what the effects of a more conservative court will be. And what happens when the “Mexican” wall doesn’t appear? Or when a combination of tax cuts and infrastructure spending either doesn’t happen or does happen and cripples the economy? An uncertain course is unfolding towards an uncertain destination. And how will we know what’s going on? Bad news is likely to be constantly derided as fake news. And meanwhile it looks like real fake news will be used to distract and confuse.

What has any of this got do with science? Well, it's never nice to see facts trashed and experts ignored. Mind you for the sake of full disclosure I should admit that write from the perspective of an expert (if only in eye movement control). During the US presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton said in her stump speech that she 'believed science'. At the time she was referring to issues around climate change. But this was a risky thing to do politically. It probably contributed in a small way to her democratic demise. It suited quite a lot of voters to discount the science of climate change (complicated and nuanced) in favour of the much simpler idea that their jobs and standard of living, at least over the short term, were much more important. She was also drawing a contrast with someone who claimed to know better experts, whether generals, economists or yes, scientists. And with someone whose connection with anything resembling reality appears, at least on the basis of his public pronouncements, to be tenuous. Given the Trump presidential campaign, and the early weeks of the Administration, given the misinformation on a heroic scale, insults and fantasy we’re hearing and seeing, things are not looking good.

But facts matter, there is a reality that can be usefully contrasted with fantasy. You can get away with voting for comforting fantasy for a while. There are circumstances, after all, in which it is possible to deny the reality of gravity for a little while. But in the end the reality reasserts itself. Get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and the end result is unlikely to be pretty.

As an aside it’s interesting (and humbling) to note that a reality TV star and shady businessman, has had more effect on the world, than most scientists toiling away diligently will ever have. Time will tell whether the effects are good or bad. But it’s a reminder that science the institution is limited in its influence and heavily dependent on other institutions, including cultural and political institutions. Before my science chums get sneery about the 'ordinary' folk and their choices, it's worth remembering that those are the folk science serves. And they are also the folk that, at least in the UK, fund most science via their taxes. Science has its realm, and is spectacularly successful at dealing with certain kinds of questions. But they are not the only questions that bother people, and indeed may not even be the most important ones. Whether I should vote to leave the EU, or vote for a Trump or Clinton, or beyond that how I should live, science is only part, maybe just a small part, of the picture.

When the facts change….

Over time, people change. Over time their ideas change. There are probably few of us who think the same in our 50’s as we did in our 20’s. Those currently in their 20’s will be tempted to dismiss such change as “selling out”. Those currently in their 50’s will probably shrug and call it “growing up”. With some things it doesn’t particularly matter. But changing some ideas is a big deal.

In my 20’s I spent quite a lot of time hanging about with a bunch of sparky characters in the Glasgow University Christian Union. We were, most of us, pretty sure of our ideas. Much of our thinking (and a lot of our arguing) was suffused with the certainty of youth. And this was thinking about the big stuff, like how we should live, what characteristics and attitudes we should manifest, and even our eternal destinies. But we had more than just youthful enthusiasm on our side. We felt that this certainty really sprang from a sure foundation that we had found. That foundation was both personal and objective. It was personal in the sense that it was based on a person, none other than God Himself. It was objective, because God had revealed Himself in a book that was open to all to read and respond to – the Bible. Certainty was a bit unfashionable at that time. Some condemned it as naiveté, some as stupidity. Others saw it as leading to a stifling of adventure and liberty. If anything, certainty today is even more unfashionable. At the time we had our critics who claimed this was all a bit of a phase we were going through. We would grow out of it. We would grow up. We would change our ideas.

Thirty years or so later, these reflections are prompted by the observation that a number of friends from that period have indeed changed their thinking. Some changed quickly, some slowly. Some changed superficially, some fundamentally. And maybe some of us haven’t changed much at all. The change I’m talking about is not the superficial stuff of hair presence or colour, tastes in music, or even taste in politics. I’m sure we all change in lots of ways with age, and should. What I’m talking about are our responses to those more basic issues: life, death and eternity, lifestyle, values, motives and attitudes.

Some have claimed they have indeed moved on and grown up. They weren’t wrong at the time, for that time, but it was indeed just a phase. A sort of youthful hobby that they had time for then, but not as real responsibilities accumulated. So grace, Gospel, Bible, Church, Jesus – all that kind of thing  faded from importance; like an attachment to an old childhood toy. Some have made a much stronger claim. The views they held then, certainties about Heaven and Hell, salvation and sin, Christ and cross, were just wrong. Forgivable in the young perhaps, but they know better now. It’s not that their views then aren’t appropriate now, but that those views are wrong and misconceived now, and in fact were wrong and misconceived then.

My observation is that there is also a group who, in a sense, have not changed their ideas. It’s not that they haven’t changed. For thirty years of life experience not to produce change would be tragic. But the changes are about sensitivity and nuance, not a change to basic ideas and thoughts. Perhaps an increased sense of life’s complexities, bringing a realisation of where the certainties are and where they are not. I belong to this group. And I’ve been trying to figure out why.

It’s a bit unclear who actually said “When the facts change, I change my ideas”. It has been attributed to J.M. Keyes the renowned economist. But there appears to be no record of him actually saying these words. I’ve commented previously about what slippery creatures facts are. Never-the-less, the notion here is clear. I might hold certain views based on certain things I know (or think I know). But if what I have based my thinking on changes, then by implication it’s only right that my thinking changes too. Changed premises should lead to changed conclusions. Suppose I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was not just a man (albeit a great one) but that He was God because he died and rose from the dead. Bit of a bold and contested claim I know. But suppose I find this belief (and all that flows from it) credible because I have weighed the evidence supporting it, primarily concerning an empty tomb, and found it persuasive. Then a startling new piece of evidence comes to light – say for the sake of argument the bones of Jesus of Nazareth! Not that anyone is likely to find a casket of bones conveniently labelled, whose provenance is uncontested – facts are slippery remember. But on weighing the new evidence, I conclude that it is credible, and trumps the evidence on the other side of the argument. I would have to change my thinking fundamentally.

So, now flip this around. Reflecting on the experience of many of my friends who have changed their ideas, I’m curious to know what “facts” have changed. Because to me, most of the facts on which I based my views all those years ago have not changed. I have changed. My circumstances have certainly changed. My responsibilities have changed. But the facts? My conviction that the God who is, and has revealed Himself in His Son and in His Book, remains. At various times it has been tempting to turn my back on what to me are certainties. It would have freed me to perhaps do things that at the time seemed attractive, or behave in ways that would have been pragmatic or expedient. But I would have been fooling myself. I would have been conveniently self-deluded. And although certainty is deeply unfashionable, I don’t see any point in denying that there are some things, some very important things, of which I am convinced. Things I am certain of.

Hopefully as long as the facts do not change, neither will my thinking.

It’s (not just) about the facts, stupid

James Carville, the architect of Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential run, gets the credit (blame?) for coming up with the phrase “It’s the economy stupid”. This was designed to keep the campaign on track by keeping everyone’s attention focussed on what really mattered. Now you might think that an appropriate version of this in science might be “It’s about the facts”. After all science is all about facts – discovering and communicating them. It’s not about stuff like feelings. This is not to argue that facts are easy things to work with. It can be really hard to prise them out of the universe. Just think of the time and expense, trouble and complexity, involved in finding the Higgs Boson, of establishing as a fact that it exists. However, it turns out that even in science it’s not that simple. And beyond science, in the rest of life, if the last week in the UK has demonstrated anything, it’s that a lot of things besides facts are critical.

Definitions of the word “fact” abound. Let’s assume we mean statements about things, situations, objects, processes or people that are true. Just being able to state something (eg “Trump is a chump”) doesn’t make it a fact. Although, as an aside, it’s interesting that in the social media age, it seems that the secret to establishing something as a fact is simply to say it often enough, or to have it said by enough people. But to establish a statement as a statement of fact, there has to be some interaction with evidence, with how things actually are. This moves a statement from being an opinion to being a fact. So if a Trump did or said lots of chump-like things, then we might feel happier concluding that the statement was a statement of fact, not of opinion. Of course we have the practical problem of identifying, gathering and analysing the evidence. And this all turns out to be quite tricky.

What is going to count as relevant evidence, and who is going to decide? We tend to depend on various types of institution to decide what is and what is not relevant. So we have courts and judges and lawyers with rules to decide what’s relevant in the criminal sphere. In science, different disciplines tend to act in a similar institutional way deciding what’s relevant to a given issue. So it was particle physicists who decided the rules in determining what sort of, and what degree of evidence would be required to show that the Higgs existed and had been found. They would claim that they were guided by theories that laid out mathematical criteria for deciding what was what. But it was still a community effort. And even in physics, there’s still scope for a degree of interpretation.

But when it gets really interesting is when you realise that even once you’ve got a stone cold fact, that’s when the fun really begins. Because facts don’t exist in isolation. Every fact comes embedded in a whole bunch of contextual stuff. And it’s when both are taken together (the fact/facts and the context) that we determine whether we’re going to take a fact seriously (believe it, rely on it, act on it). Take the simple fact that “it’s raining”. If you run in to my windowless office (it’s not actually windowless, but bear with me) shouting that it’s raining, just before I leave for home, then you might expect me to pick up a brolly or put on a coat. But if I know you are a regular prankster, and you are known for never quite telling things as they are and for always having your own agenda (and if your name is Boris), even if it really is raining I might actually leave my office unprotected.

There’s also the issue of deciding between facts. It turns out that how we might interpret the same fact differs depending on context. Even in science, deciding which facts to go after, is rarely a matter of the facts themselves. Experiments guided by provisional theories (hypotheses) will prioritise some facts over others. So some are discovered, others remain hidden. And prior views (beliefs and theories) can be so powerful, even in science, that we have to guard constantly against things like confirmation bias – prioritising the facts that suit our views. Our prior commitments to theories, it turns out, can lead us to interpret the same facts in different ways. It can be so bad, that we become incapable of even communicating sensibly with adherents of other views. This has happened in science in the past, even (or perhaps particularly) in physics, the hardest of hard sciences.

This sort of thing is going on now in UK politics. We have just had a referendum that was in part about facts. Facts about the economic impact of Brexit. Facts about the numbers coming into the UK from both the EU and further afield. But how those facts were interpreted, or even whether they were accepted as facts, depended very much on the prior commitments of people. And during the campaign there developed a kind of mutual incomprehension between Remainers and Brexiteers. For many on both sides, the facts were so obvious and powerful, that communication became almost impossible. But it turned out it wasn’t just about facts at all. It was about a lot of other stuff too.

So when we come to other important facts, facts like an empty tomb for example, there’s no warrant for instant dismissal on one side, or a feeling that its implications should just be obvious on the other. There’s investigating to be done, evidence to be engaged with and carefully weighed. And an awareness of background biases and prior commitments. And if you’re tempted to feel that the facts are just so obvious that you cannot conceive of how someone can come to view that differs from yours given those facts, then go sit in a dark cool room and think again.