The blogging year…

So, here we are. The last day of 2023. It’s been a year of 21 blog posts not counting this one. And although I confess it is a bit indulgent, this seems like a good time to review them. They cover an eclectic bunch of topics, as you might expect from the summary that follows this blog’s title: “Not quite a science blog, not quite a Bible blog, not quite a politics or family blog. Just a box into which almost anything might be thrown.” If you’ve read much of it, you can decide for yourself whether it’s been “worth a rummage in”.

Back in February (was it really only ten months ago?) I was sitting on a train from Glasgow to Edinburgh when I heard that Nicola Sturgeon had resigned. If you’re not a Scot, or don’t live in Scotland (or if you hail from almost anywhere in the US) you probably won’t understand why for many us this was a “Kennedy” moment. Of course, not only my train has moved on. Since then Nicola has been investigated and arrested (although not charged) over financial irregularities in her party, leading to undisguised glee in unionist circles, and a bit of hand-wringing amongst the nationalists in my homeland (although probably not as much as there should have been). She was of course replaced by Scotland's first Muslim “First Minister”, after an interesting SNP leadership campaign. It was interesting because it revealed once again that it is acceptable to be almost anything in politics other than a Christian who takes their faith seriously, and that for the modern UK media Christianity is rather poorly understood (see "Tolerance and the public square"). Despite religion in general playing an ever more important role in most of the world, in the UK media we still don’t “do God” very well.

We do of course do politics. We had a lot of it in 2022, but we’ve only had one Prime Minister for the whole of 2023! By and large there’s been less turmoil, which is just as well given the scale of the problems that the politicians have had to grapple with. The war in Ukraine compounded the economic shocks of the pandemic (remember that?) leading to real hardship for many families. Government did a bit (not enough for many, not the right things for others), but at the end of 2023 finds itself facing a crushing defeat in the polls in 2024. The only question appears to be how crushing? I do have the occasional twinge of sympathy for our current PM (Rishi Sunak), but then he goes and trails some potty policy to see off a threat (real or imagined) from the right wing of his party or even the right wing of the right wing. Meanwhile the Labour Party has become at least worthy of consideration as an alternative government because it has dealt with its crazy left wing. For some in Labour this about betrayal and backstabbing and the claim is that if their current leader Keir Starmer stands for anything, nobody knows what it is. But this is always the accusation laid at the door of the opposition (even by some on the same side). The time to judge will come perhaps as early as Spring 2024 when the two main parties set out their stalls. But what will perhaps be more interesting will the tone as much as the substance of the next UK general election. We like a good argument, and there are always accusations of lies and media bias. But these are usually peripheral rather than central. Argument had, election over, we get on with life. Whoever wins the election, we probably won’t have any nonsense about it being stolen, with everyone running to the courts. We are likely to be spared at least that fate.

On this side of the Atlantic our constitution, unwritten as it is, has always been about more than politics (just as well you might mutter under your breath). We officially obtained a new head of state in 2023, thanks to the coronation of King Charles III. Despite various fictitious versions of both royal history (courtesy of Netflix) and more recent royal shenanigans (courtesy of Charles’ youngest son), the reality has been steady and, as far as one can tell from the far distance, fairly sure. The coronation certainly got things off to an impressive start. And unlike our media, and most of our politicians, Charles is a profoundly religiously literate man. Given the recent apparent surge in both antisemitic and anti-Islamic crimes (the out-working on British streets of events in Israel and Gaza), having a head of state who is broadly respected by different communities can be no bad thing. Of course, even if Charles possessed the wisdom of Solomon, he would be taxed to breaking point by developments in the church of which he is the “Supreme Governor” – the Church of England. Its leadership has decided to make a fairly startling break with what it is signed up to protect and teach, changing their basic doctrine while denying that they are doing any such thing. While usually what happens is that the very heterogenous theological views that comprise the C of E find some way of remaining in a more-or-less working relationship, perhaps not this time. More will be revealed in the year ahead.

At the heart of that particular tussle is theology (for once), which is of course now “my thing”. I attended my first theological conference at the start of 2023, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Not that theology, at least in its academic form, is uniformly impressive (as I discussed back in July). But I’ve really enjoyed two years of study with Union School of Theology, completing my Masters dissertation (which you can read here if you're so inclined) back in September. Graduation next summer will, I hope, be a highlight of 2024. But the study doesn’t stop. One of my Christmas presents was the Greek New Testament. So 2024 will be full of declensions and tenses as I work to get the point where I can begin to read the New Testament’s human authors in their original language. Of course, God’s word is not bound by language, and you can hear what the Divine Author has to say just as well in English translation.

And what of my former “thing” science? Well, as an institution it’s been struggling a bit as I blogged in September and November. Some of this is the cumulative impact of a culture that has long maintained that there is no such thing as truth, perhaps combined with the impact of the post-modern view that the claim that there is a truth with demands everyone's assent is an illegitimate power game. So we now live surrounded by a morass of relativism and conspiracy, when even something as basic as the sexual dimorphism of humanity is flatly denied. In this atmosphere, when scientists make mistakes, or perpetrate outright fraud (which still happens relatively rarely), this is jumped on to show that, like every other human activity, science is flawed. The difficulty is that this is of course true, to the extent that science is a human activity with all that this implies. And yet it remains the best way, bar none, for answering certain kinds of questions – questions about what “is”. For questions about what “ought to be”, well for that we have theology (other humanities disciplines are available).

So there you have it. That’s the 22^nd and final blog post of 2023. Now, what will take my fancy next year?

My new car has a dent in it….

Tis the season of stuff. Much of it will be welcome stuff - presents we’ve been looking forward to, perhaps that we requested or hinted at. Anticipation was increased by seeing them (or what we hoped was them), wrapped in fancy paper, sitting, waiting under a Christmas tree (maybe for weeks in the more organized households). And then it arrived - Christmas day. We got to tear away the wrapping paper to reveal… whatever. How long will or has the satisfaction of finally getting our hands on a much-anticipated present last? Did it live up to its billing? Perhaps. However, as I learned recently (or perhaps re-learned) we should be careful how we regard stuff.

A few months ago, we decided to replace our ageing car. It had been reliable for a long time (about thirteen years in fact) but was at that stage where it was starting to cost more to maintain and keep roadworthy than it was actually worth. We were in the fortunate position of being able to go to a dealership and pick a new (smaller) car. Eventually we plumped for a dark blue, sporty hatchback. It had some of the latest gizmos and gadgets. So now it bleeps when I reverse too close towards the much more expensive SUV parked behind us in the street outside our house. When on long journeys it nags us about the need to take breaks and drink coffee. Because it has sporty seats and natty red trim in various prominent places internally, one of our friends has taken our purchase as evidence of a mid-life crisis on my part. Whatever it is, this it cannot be as I am no longer in mid-life.

However, like everything else, our shiny new car is not immune to damage and degradation, whether accidental or malicious. We’ve already had a flat tyre that needed replacing. Interestingly, the combination of an actual flat and large alloy wheel rims had us constantly looking at our wheels and asking if we’d got another flat. It turned out that it is disconcertingly difficult to tell. But for the most part the car has sat outside our house, all shiny and new (complete with that “new car” smell). A delight to behold (and smell). And then it wasn’t. In a church car park of all places, what we presume was another car door was flung open with sufficient force to put a small but deep dent in one of our doors. One would hardly notice the dent on casual, uninterested inspection. The problem is that my observation of my shiny new car is neither casual nor uninterested. Because I know where the blemish is, my eye is attracted to it automatically, almost magnetically. Mechanically the car is fine, and still drives like a dream. It still has the natty red trim inside, and the gizmos all still work. And there’s even still a faint whiff of “new car” inside (although that may by now just be my imagination). But it is now blemished and therefore somehow less. What is disconcerting is that I care quite so much. And thereby hangs a tale and a moral.

Stuff, it turns out, is not neutral; it is sticky. We get overly attached to it. Admittedly cars are quite large and expensive items (even small ones). But much smaller bits of stuff can be quite as sticky as large objects, and exert a remarkable pull. And, as with my mechanically sound although marked car, this is about much more than the utility of the object in question. It seems to be some property of the stuff itself and how we relate to it. After all there are plenty of cars driving around with dents in them about which I care not a jot. It is this particular car that, it turns out, has an amazing ability to discombobulate me, presumably because it’s mine. Yet cars (phones, rings, boats, pens, computers etc) are not people. We might have a relationship of sorts with stuff (some people name their cars, never mind their pets), but it falls some way short of the relationships that should matter to us; those with spouses, children, parents and friends, even colleagues, bosses, employees. People should matter more than stuff.

Of course sometimes we use stuff to symbolize our relationships. I suppose this is what Christmas gifts (ie the stuff we give each other at Christmas) are really about. But in a way the stuff itself should be relatively unimportant. This explains why even stuff that has little monetary value can still be of great worth, if it serves as a sign and symbol of an important relationship. All well and good. But what a tragedy when the stuff, even gifted stuff, comes to matter more than it should. Even worse, when it is mistaken for the relationship that it is supposed to signify, or valued more than those relationships that should matter to us. When the stuff receives the attention that the giver of the gift should receive. This is to confuse signs and things signified. Because stuff inevitably becomes notably less shiny with time, not to mention when it gets dented, to be obsessed with it is also to miss so much of what really matters. And yet stuff, the obtaining of it, the possession of it, can do this to us. Warping our perception of what, or rather who, should be valued.

Consider one more intriguing observation. The greatest gift that was ever given was not stuff at all, but a person; a someone to be known not a something to be had. That is, when all is said and done, what (or rather who) lies at the heart of Christmas. Enjoy your presents.

I’ve decided to try and be constructive rather than just rant, even although the temptation to rant has been with me since mid-September. That’s when, once again, “X-mas Movies” started to appear on various TV channels, closely followed by adverts for assorted types of turkey roast, artificial fir trees, celebratory confectionery etc, etc, etc. And to cap it all, the contrast between Western commercialized end-of-year bonhomie and what is actually going on the world is perhaps starker this year than it has been for a while. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has bogged-down into a meat-grinding bloody stalemate. And more tragically still (if that were possible) in the part of the world where the events supposedly commemorated at “Christmas” actually occurred, bloodshed on an appalling scale is a daily occurrence. This is accompanies the reignition of an inter-ethnic war-for-land that had been reduced to a smoulder (or at least largely forgotten about by the Western media) and a widening of the conflict by Iranian proxies in Yemen and Lebanon (two failed states that promise more conflict for the future). None of this is to forget the tangling of Philippino and Chinese boats in the South China Sea (something of a misnomer - the tangle in question was much closer to the Philippine than Chinese coast), civil war in Myanmar (and several more in the horn of Africa), and political chaos in the Anglo-Saxon world. Oh, and then there’s the prospect of another Trump presidency. But no, I am not going carry on listing reasons to be (un)cheerful, rant, or even just sink into deep despair, tempting though all of those may be. Precisely because this is a cursed world, there is an amazing contrast to be drawn between what’s actually going on and an event actually worth focussing on, although often either missed or mythologized.

It is an event with even greater resonance because of what is going on in Israel and Gaza. Arguably today, as in the time detailed in the Gospels, Bethlehem is occupied territory. Precisely who is doing the occupying is at the centre of the current dispute. But the absence this year of anything worth celebrating is not. So there will be no Christmas tree or Christmas lights in Manger Square; the Church of the Nativity will be all but silent. And yet this is all similar to the circumstances that God Himself decided to enter in the person of His eternal son, Jesus. The Bethlehem in which Jesus was born was just as gritty as today, although a lot less famous. It was far from the centre of the world’s attention, but was an obscure location, within an obscure, conquered and occupied region of the world empire of the day. There was no Manger Square of course. And there was arguably no stable either; only a manger is mentioned in Luke’s account – the stable is inferred. There may well have been no inn, in which there was no room. Only Luke mentions what is usually translated as  “inn”, and it may have been a guestroom in the house of a relative. At no point in this story do we find all the other things that stand in the foreground of the contemporary Christmas – trees, presents and old men with white beards. All of this stuff was invented (and became “traditional”) relatively recently; the Santa with white beard and red coat is essentially the product of 1930’s advertising designed to sell a particular US soft-drink. I would suggest this stuff is the bit that’s worth forgetting. The earlier stuff, of much older provenance, is it turns out, much more relevant to our current hard-pressed circumstances.

At some point after the baby was born in Bethlehem (essentially to two homeless people who were about to become refugees in a country not their own), ugly politics intervened in the form of the local power-broker. Alerted by some unexpected visiting dignitaries to the fact that a potential rival for the peoples’ affections had been born, King Herod decided that power was more important to him than basic humanity. So he instigated the slaughter of who knows how many male children under the age of two in and around Bethlehem. Given this further sickening resonance with what is currently occurring in Gaza, it will be a brave pastor or minister that will include this little nugget in their nativity stories this Christmas. But these were the circumstances surrounding Jesus birth, and they contrast with the sanitized version that decorates the front of many a Christmas card. It was a world of poverty and suffering, of scandal, of refugees, political violence and curse. In other words, this world, our world, not a made up one.

And yet beneath the surface something important, joyful even, was happening. Jesus birth is not the whole story, but it was the beginning of something with staggering implications. Angels in the Gospel accounts are not always perceived to be good news, even if it’s good news they bring. The angel that came to Mary initially terrified her. And the news that was communicated to her was scary too. While no gynaecologist, Mary knew fine and well where babies came from, and so did her betrothed, Joseph. So it took another angel appearing in a dream, who also had to pacify Joseph and calm his fears, before telling him to continue with his plan to take Mary as his wife, notwithstanding the fact that she was pregnant, and not by him. All credit to him to reverting from Plan B (quietly divorcing Mary) to Plan A. The angel that encountered a bunch of Bethlehem shepherds initially terrified them too. Yet what they are told is “..good news of great joy..”: a long-promised rescuer had been born. Some rescuer, lying helpless in a feeding trough! Others also identified the baby as a deliverer of peace with significance way beyond the borders of Israel (Simeon in the temple at Jerusalem). Something was stirring in this world. It would be missed by the vast majority of those who lived at time, just as the Jesus’ significance continues to missed today.

So you could do a lot worse for yourself than forget about the made up man with the red coat and white beard, and focus on the real baby born in weakness, frailty and vulnerability in Bethlehem of all places. I wonder what became of Him?

Science’s problems – getting bigger?

In my last post ("Science's big problem(s)") I pointed out that science was a human activity, and therefore prone to being less than pristine and perfect. Precisely because it is carried on by scientists who, whatever else they may be, are certainly human, there are bound to be mistakes made. This needn’t derail the whole exercise (as is clear from the history of such mistakes), but it does mean that a degree of humility and realism are appropriate. Such humility and realism notably departed in the 19^th century, almost deliberately driven out by the likes of Huxley, his X-club and the like. Warfare (they claimed) was the inevitable state of things between science and religion/theology (in the West usually Christianity and Christian theology), and was ably stoked by the likes of John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. Science reigned supreme, was the only source of real knowledge (about everything), and other approaches to reality (which everyone agreed existed and mattered) were only of historical and therefore limited interest. Christian belief, at least in its orthodox, supernaturalist form, was not useful for anything, could be dangerous and misleading, and should essentially be dispensed with, at least for practical purposes. Humanity had to move on from its intellectual adolescence to something closer to maturity. If tricky issues arose, they could be settled by sensible, scientific men (and they were mainly men), without resorting to other modes of thought.

One of intellectual history’s tragedies is that theology played a role in its own demise, retreating from its position as the “queen of sciences” and almost cravenly capitulating to the attack of its critics. Prior to the activity of Huxley et al, and increasing the success of their attack when it came, theology developed what looks to the outsider (or at least this outsider) cold feet. Assailed by external attack from the likes of Spinoza and Voltaire, and weakened by those who might claim to be its friends like Kant, theology didn’t appear to be in a mood to put up much of a fight. It, along with the Christianity it had sought to illuminate, appeared to accept that it had to move on from “naive supernaturalism” in order to be fit for the age of enlightenment (and later romanticism or whatever was flavour of the day). This was partly because science, so impressive in its achievements, was claimed to make supernaturalism untenable. No point being sentimental about it. Besides which, all the supernatural stuff (God creating and sustaining a universe from nothing, talking donkeys, healed lepers and paralytics, resurrections and the like) was not core and key and could be lost without losing anything important. Rather than scrutinising the underlying presuppositions and claims of the likes of Kant and Hegel, theology had to capitulate if it was to be intellectually respectable. In particular, the Bible and its claims had to be radically reappraised on the basis of what the reason of the day found palatable.

It is worth pointing out that in parallel with this capitulation in the theological academy, in the real world outside, different stories were unfolding. So, from the late 1730’s in the Anglo-Saxon world, the likes of Whitefield and Wesley went about the business of preaching essentially the same Gospel as that of the Apostles leading to the “great awakening” which, in turn, arguably led to wider social reforms in 19^th century, and to influences still detectable today in North America. In the 19^th century there also remained those who prominently preached that same Gospel seeing it affecting the thinking and lives of ordinary men and women (the likes of McCheyne and Chalmers in Scotland, and Spurgeon and Ryle in England). And in the latter part of the 19^th century the apparent need of some to press the narrative of an inevitable conflict between science and Christianity is itself evidence that progress in eradicating “superstition” had not been as extensive or successful as the likes of Huxley hoped. To this day there are echoes of this in some of the rantings of the “new” atheists of recent memory (whose demise was discussed here). But these are stories for another day. I need to get back to science and its contemporary challenges.

It is a feature of the conflict narrative that it singularly failed to explain why quite to many of those involved in science continued quite happily to be believers of all sorts, including orthodox Christian believers, apparently having no difficulty reconciling one profession with another. The accusation was occasionally made that this could only be accomplished by them keeping two contradictory worlds apart. But, for what it’s worth, this was neither my personal approach, nor my observation of the approach of others. Rather the opposite appeared to be the case. I benefited from the influence of those who reckoned that hard thinking did indeed have to be done, but that Christians had no need to fear truth. Neither was there a need to fear caricatures, half-truths and castles built on sand. As Christians in science were were following a valid and important vocation, not risking either our faith or our intellectual integrity. But it turns out that even outwith the evangelical camp (to which I belong), something was astir in theology.

There have always been alternative models, besides that of conflict, for the interaction between theology and science. Some see no necessary interaction between the two at all, claiming that they address very different issues with very different tools; they can be compartmentalised and should be kept separate. Others, while arguing in a similar vein, think that they are complementary and compatible, rather than separate. Now it appears that the worm has began to turn. Perhaps anticipated by philosophers like Mary Midgely and her critique of scientism in both its crude and subtle forms (e.g. see her “Science as Salvation”), there are those from a theological perspective prepared to claim once again not just an important place for theology, but an indispensable, or even a superior place in providing explanations that matter. This sometimes emerges from expected sources (e.g. see this article from Michael Hanby, Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy of Science at the John Paul II Institute at the Catholic University of America), but it may be gaining a degree of intellectual respectability propelled by those from a range of backgrounds prepared to do hard yards (e.g. see Paul Tyson’s recent “A Christian Theology of Science”).

It could be that in a postmodern world where meaning is what anyone and everyone takes it to be, this sort of “theology in charge” movement is just part of the inevitable mix (not to say mess). It may amount to nothing new or interesting. But the intellectual hegemony claimed for a certain view of science may be coming to an end, opening up a respectable space for theology once again. There are particular types of questions that science provides a means of answering. It would be to no one’s advantage to deny this. But there have always been really big questions that science never could really answer. The trick remains, as ever, to distinguish baby and bath water.

Science’s big problem(s)

Anyone who follows this blog (you know who you are) will have noticed the concentration of late on non-science topics. So I thought it was worth returning to my former stomping ground. This was, in part, because I came across something specific in the press that caught my attention. But it also relates to a much bigger, and therefore more troubling, theme. Science matters because it is clear that it is the best, perhaps the only way, to effectively answer certain types of important questions. It has an impressive (though not unblemished) track record. Some of the problems we face today pose questions of exactly the type science in the past has helped to answer. So if science is in trouble, we’re all in trouble. It is therefore wise to reflect on the position “it” finds itself in.

Let’s start with some specifics. Patrick Brown is a climate scientist. He obtained his PhD (Title: “Magnitude and Mechanisms of Unforced Variability in Global Surface Temperature”) from Duke University in 2016 and has since been fairly productive. As far as I can see, has had three papers published in Nature as “first author” to date; not bad for someone relatively early in his career. It is the third and most recent of these (“Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California”; Nature 621:760-766, published 30/06/2023) that has excited most comment. However, the comment has not primarily been around the science in his paper. Judging from his citation statistics (a far from perfect metric), Patrick is competent but he hasn’t exactly set the heather alight. It was what he did after his latest Nature paper was published that led to things getting tasty. On September 5^th he published an article in “The Free Press” entitled “I left out the full truth to get my climate change paper published”; this article was later also published in the The Times under the title “Groupthink in science is no good for the planet” (The Times, September 9^th, p28) generating much more attention (at least on this side of the Atlantic).

Basically he claimed in his articles that he (and his co-authors) had narrowed the focus of their approach in the Nature paper to that of the effect of climate change on wildfires, all the time knowing that much more complex issues were in play. But they knew that if they “overcomplicated” the picture, so that it did not so clearly support the story that important journals like Nature “want to tell”, their paper would have likely been bounced. If they had broadened the focus (in the process presenting a more accurate and useful picture) they would have been seen not to support “certain preapproved narratives” that some journals, including Nature, are pushing. He fairly makes the point that getting published in prestigious journals has a big influence on someone’s academic career, and that these days it is hard to stick out from the crowd of other PhD’s. So this non-scientific factor, as much as the importance of the science they had done, determined important things like what metrics they had used to assess what was going on with Californian wildfires, and how the data that had resulted from their analysis was interpreted and presented. He was just innocently playing the game of building an academic career. But, having moved out of academia, he now felt moved to act the whistleblower and tell all. Not that he is in favour of retracting the paper as he still thinks “it advances our understanding of climate change’s role in day-to-day wildfire behavior”. It’s just that “the process of customizing the research for an eminent journal caused it to be less useful than it could have been”. The fact that there is a competing narrative in this space (i.e. that man-made climate change is a hoax), and that his “exposé” was jumped on as evidence of scientific skulduggery, didn't seem to bother him (at least initially).

I don’t have the expertise to comment on his Nature article. But of course, before it was published, those with appropriate expertise did. Nature published the peer review reports along with the final paper, and interestingly while the paper itself is behind Nature’s paywall, the reports aren’t (you can access them using the Nature link above). What these make clear is that some of the reviewers made the point that some of the wider issues should have been covered in the paper and hadn’t been. Given the tale that Brown subsequently told, this is a bit surprising. But what is even more surprising is that Brown and his fellow authors then robustly defended their approach. This shows that there was no particular “preapproved narrative”, or at least not one of the kind alleged. The reviewers (and the Editor) dealt with the paper on its merits as we all might expect. So his charge that some agenda that is not supported by the science is being prosecuted, looks a lot weaker than at first it appears.

But what Dr Brown seems to miss entirely is that he has told us that on at least one particular occasion he deliberately shaped his approach so that the resulting paper became potentially misleading or at least less useful (something the Nature reviewers in effect picked up on and challenged). In fact in his Free Press article he claims he left academia because “the pressures put on academic scientists caused too much of the research to be distorted”. Presumably he means his own research as well as that of others – a serious charge. Yet, despite confessing to distortion, we are supposed to take his commentary (unchallenged by reviewers and perhaps serving an agenda) at face value. And it’s not as though he is some kind of innocent when it comes to the media. He knows well how the media works specifically when it comes to his area of expertise (climate change). He published a paper about precisely this back in 2016 (“Reporting on global warming: A study in headlines”). Now he is in the private sector, free from that insidious pressure to “distort” (his word, not mine). But presumably he is also now being paid for his words by individual and corporate donors. We can hardly be sure that it is data and careful analysis that are the centre of his considerations. After all, he has form. It all begins to look a bit murky.

And that’s a big problem. All over, science is beginning to look murky. Much of Brown’s commentary is recognisable. There is pressure to publish, and particularly to publish in “top” journals like Nature. I’ve submitted to Nature myself (more in hope than expectation). And decisions do have to be made about both data selection and analysis, even in much simpler situations that those being investigated by Brown and his co-authors. Can this lead to bias and misrepresentation? Yes it can. But that is where the challenge of reviewers and editors, the peer review system, becomes so important. The system seems to have worked in the case of Brown’s Nature paper. Although the reviewers expressed concerns, these were answered by the authors, and the paper was deemed to make a sufficient contribution (something Brown continues to agree with) to be published. Does it present only part of the picture? Of course it does. It’s now up to others to criticise, challenge, refine or refute what’s in that one paper. If it is actually misleading, that will become clear. That’s science.

But the bigger theme here is a problem about journals; they are a key part of science and collectively comprise the “literature”. Brown’s point was that they may not be as neutral and dispassionate as one would like to think (whether justified or not in the case of his Nature paper). There are other problems too, particularly the issue of “predatory” journals which has been discussed for a while in scientific publishing circles (see this article and others on the the Scholarly Kitchen site). Predatory journals are those whose primary concern is to make money not publish good science. They tend to have lax acceptance and reviewing standards because the more they publish the more money they make. This has been encouraged by a change in who pays for published science. It used to be almost entirely the case that the user (i.e. the reader) paid. But this began to change, partly because of technology and partly because of claims that his was discriminatory. Lots of scientists in low and middle income countries were excluded because neither they nor their institutional libraries could afford the subscriptions that were charged for access to journals. So there was a change to a “producer pays” model. Some journals charge a fee simply to consider a manuscript for publication, and all of them charge a fee to publish papers once the peer review process has determined that a paper is of sufficient merit. Publication fees range from a few hundred £s/$s, to several thousand. Some charge flat fees, others charge by the published page. However, once published the research is open to all, and aided by the interweb, accessible to all. But it is clear that what was meant to assist openness and accessibility is being abused, and that the “literature” is being undermined as a result.

It was always the case that nonsense could be published in scientific journals, including the prestigious ones. I used to have to tell students that just because something was published didn’t make it true. There is never any substitute for careful reading and equally careful thinking. But as the number of predatory journals has increased (one 2021 estimate put the number at 15,059), so has the level of murkiness, and gradually we risk the whole scientific enterprise losing the trust of public and politicians alike. What is the root cause of these problems? Well, unfortunately it is something that cannot be fixed (although it can be improved). Science is a human activity, and is therefore as flawed as humans are. Most scientists are competent and conscientious, some are lazy, a very small number are fraudulent, but all are human. Even although as an institution science is to some extent self-correcting, it remains at its core the activity of flawed women and men. Science’s big problem is scientists. And just when we need them too.

Mourning Christianity (or at least its decline)

Reports of the death of Christianity, like those of Mark Twain’s death, have been greatly exaggerated. Reports of the death of “Christian Britain” are not so much exaggerated as misconceived, given that the adjective “Christian” is usually so emptied of its meaning that it provides no useful description of the noun “Britain”. But you would be forgiven for thinking that something seismic is going on if you had been reading the Times of late. Last year it went to town when the UK Office of National Statistics published its analysis of the latest census figures for England and Wales, reporting that less that 50% of the population (actually 46.2%) self identified as Christian. This prompted headlines such as “End of an era for Christian Britain” (The Times, Nov 30^th, 2022). At the time I commented on similar reports in the Guardian, which has the great virtue of not being behind a paywall.

As an aside, it is worth pointing out that between then and now we have had the SNP leadership election. That is relevant because one of the candidates had made clear publicly that she was a Christian (in the Biblical as opposed to popular sense) and that this motivated and affected her politics, resulting in Christianity and politics grabbing the headlines for a time. This led to quite a furore in Scottish politics which revealed, among other things, the complete inability of the media, as well as a fair proportion of the political class, to report such matters and discuss the issues raised with any great accuracy (let alone consistency). I discussed this at the time. There were honourable exceptions of course including, in the Times, Matthew Parris (see his column “In politics, there’s no such thing as private faith”, March 4^th, 2023). Mind you I was surprised to read in that particular column that “Most of our Prime Ministers have been practising Christians”. Church goers, probably. Intelligent, educated people from a time and of a class who obtained a bit of Bible knowledge and could conjure up the odd quote when necessary; some of them, certainly. Decent human beings trying to do an almost impossible and complex job in always tricky circumstances, fair enough. But using “Christian” in this context would again require some definitional work to be undertaken (although not now – this is an aside).

For it is necessary to return to the Times, and some of its output this last week. It has been reporting on the results of a survey that it conducted into the views of Church of England clergy (starting with “Britain is no longer a Christian country, say frontline clergy”, published Tuesday, 29^th August). Such an exercise is not without merit. After all, the Church of England is a large, wealthy and culturally important English institution. It is in the midst of debating and seeking to come to a mind on important and divisive issues. The particular issues, let it be noted, are of wide, political and cultural significance. From the data returned in the survey various conclusion were drawn and boldly asserted. “Two thirds of Anglican clergy think that..”, “A majority of priests want…” (apparently what the culture wants). Others have commented on the survey and its reporting, and a highly readable critique of it can be found on Ian Paul’s “Psephizo” blog. Unlike me, he was actually sent the survey, and has interesting things to say about some of the questions asked.

As is common in our newspapers today (and the media more widely), the conclusions come well before the methodology and the raw numbers, although to be fair both are eventually provided. This is the opposite of how things are presented in (most) scientific papers. If you are going to draw sound conclusions from such an exercise, then how you go about obtaining the data is critical. But newspapers (and even Times) appear to think that such information is a tiresome detail. It has to be included for form’s sake, but who is going to read that far into the article? In this instance (as ever) how they obtained their numbers is revealing, as is the fuller picture of their numbers that the methodology provides.

According to last Tuesday’s article: “The Times selected 5,000 priests at random from among those with English addresses in Crockford’s Clerical Directory of Anglican Clergy and received 1,436 responses, analysing data from the 1,185 respondents still serving.” According to the Church of England there are about 20 000 active clergy (although exactly what “active clergy” means is complicated). So the Times started with a potential sample of 25% of the population it was interested in. Not entirely unreasonable. But while it sounds sensible to pick addresses at random, this doesn’t mean that the resulting sample will be able to provide anything like a snapshot of the clergy as a whole. In fact, as a population the Church of England clergy is highly structured, breaking into clearly defined sub-populations, often along lines related to some of the issues the Times was interested in, and there’s no way to control for this, although it might have been possible to account for it in the analysis. It doesn’t appear that a weighted analysis was done, even if they had the numbers to do it. In any case, 28.7% of their initial sample responded (actually not bad for a survey of this kind); of which 82.5% provided analysable data (we’re not told the problem with the other 17.5%). So the reporting is based on the views of 5.9% (approximately; 1185/20000) of the Church of England's active clergy.

One can understand why this number is, if not obscured, not particularly prominent. On the basis of this rather thin sliver of opinion, we are told there has been an “historic shift on gay marriage and questions of sex” – suspiciously in exactly the direction favoured by the culture at large. One proponent of such views, now no longer himself ministering within within the C of E, was happy to proclaim that “This is absolutely huge”. But it really isn’t. I assume the gentleman concerned was unaware of the methodology that had been used, only of the conclusions that had been reached. Do the results of this survey indicate any real change of view within the Church of England? We have no way of knowing. But clearly there is a constituency who would dearly love the Times’ reporting to contribute momentum to a drift in a particular direction.

To jump from either the results of the last census, or the results of the Times’ survey of clergy in one particular Christian grouping, to conclusions about those who make up the body of Christ (i.e. the Church in England), is to jump to unwarranted conclusions. And it is a tad parochial (no pun intended). It is to confuse the visible church in one part of the world, always a mixed and often an apparently weak body, with the invisible church, a graced and glorious body of saints worldwide known certainly only to Jesus Himself. The latter group is in rude good health, although I wouldn’t expect this to be reported any time soon in a newspaper any of us have heard of.

To sightly misquote an anonymous funeral poem “Do not weep for [us] for [we] have not gone. Not yet that is. But one day, perhaps soon.