Life in the pandemic XXVIII More atheist wobbling…..

I’ve got a lot of respect for honest atheists. They have a long and interesting heritage. Many are thoughtful about why they think as they do, and the problems it creates for them. They have concluded that there is no God, some because they find the evidence wanting, others because they reject the implications of there being a God. Some are of course thoroughly religious; many Buddhists are, as a matter of definition, atheists. Others have a problem as much with religion as with the idea of God. I don’t think atheism has gone away, nor do I think it will. But it I do think it is having a bit of a hard time.

I’m not going to discuss here the particular brand of atheism called “new atheism”, because I’ve touched on it before. It is/was fairly ignorant of its antecedents and forebears, and equally ignorant of many of the things it sought to criticise. As I’ve noted its death has been announced. Even other atheists have pointed out that “it contains little that is novel or interesting”¹. It would be tasteless to pick on it in its weakened state. Indeed it would be to indulge in what some of its adherents were prone to do: pick on the worst and most ludicrous examples of theism, claim that they were representative or typical, illustrate their folly, ridicule them thoroughly with a mixture of argument and brilliant wordplay, and then claim to have destroyed the intellectual respectability of all theism. Straw manism at it glorious worst.

But on this occasion something different caught my eye. An article by Jonathon Van Maren recently appeared entitled “Grave MenFacing a Grave Faith”, and was picked up by a number publications and blogs. It deserves a wide reading. It begins with interview excerpts from historian Niall Ferguson, but goes on to discuss the views of other atheists and agnostics such as Douglas Murray and Tom Holland (he of the recently published Dominion, discussed here). Among other things, Ferguson is quoted as having concluded that “atheism, particularly in its militant forms, is really a very dangerous metaphysical framework for a society.” He thinks that in the church (although not necessarily in faith it would seem) we have a good framework for an ethical system that can support those values he holds most dear, essentially those that he was brought up with. Certainly what theism, particularly Christian theism provides, is something more than what has so far emerged from a Godless and purposeless evolutionary process.

For Murray a major worry is how to support key ideas such as human equality and the sanctity of life. These and other Judeo-Christian concepts find their foundations in the Bible. But the Bible is only of passing literary interest if it is not, or does not contain, the word of God. If God, and His Bible, are repudiated (as of course they both widely are) can these values (and along with them the “liberal, democratic West”) survive? According to Murray, Ferguson and others, atheism and secularism seem to be having a hard time providing secure foundations for ideas which they claim are foundational to the kind of society they want to live in. I’ve no doubt that this is something that might very well be disputed by others. They might point out that on one hand human misery and suffering continued apparently unabated all through a period when “Christian” values had been in the ascendant. And on the other hand there are lots of non-Biblical, non-God (or god) dependant ethical systems to choose from. Both of these contentions are true. But many of these alternatives seem to allow things that Ferguson et al are uncomfortable with, and don’t provide sufficient support for the sort of society they have been living in, and want to live in. Then there are some systems which are clearly based on non-Christian and even atheistic ethics that do appear to making progress in the world today. Returning to Ferguson, he sees totalitarianism as “gaining ground not only in China but in subtle ways in our own society”. He sees totalitarianism as a danger and as a source of disasters; this he says is one of the major lessons of the 20^th century. It is a lesson that we appear to be forgetting in the 21^st. And with the demise of Christianity, he is making the case that we are losing an important bulwark against such systems and the unacceptable ethics that flow from them.

All well and good. But it’s not clear to me that what Ferguson, Murray and the rest miss is really Christianity. They seem to hark back to aspects of a bygone culture in which they felt comfortable (if only in retrospect). Ferguson’s parents left the Church of Scotland to bring him up “in a Calvinist ethical framework but with no God”; Murray doesn’t like the Church of England giving up “the King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer”. What they really appear to miss is good old-fashioned 18^th century Deism, not Christianity. Deism was precisely an attempt to remove supernaturalism in general and the revealed God in particular from Christianity, in the hope of leaving a philosophical and ethical edifice that would still have some coherence and benefit. No cross, no blood, no God – but no good. The last three hundred years have shown that this is unsustainable. Deism degenerated into atheism, and what we appear to be hearing from at least some atheists are stirrings of discontent as chickens come home to roost and pennies drop.

Christianity is much more than an ethical code. At its centre is a transforming and sustaining personal relationship with Jesus, crucified, risen, ascended and returning. Take Him out of the equation and you might have an ethical system that is coherent (and many would argue that you do not), but you do not have one that is convincing, satisfying or sustainable in the long term, for individuals or for societies.

1. John Gray “Seven types of atheism”, p7

Life in the pandemic XXVII Explaining stuff is hard…..

You might think that there are oh so many things that need explaining. We still don’t really know where the virus came from. There are lots of folk who think they can explain this, or at least want us to think they can. It’s all down to the malevolence of the Chinese Communist Party we are told. Even if the CCP did not release the virus deliberately, they were up to no good in a lab in Wuhan, got sloppy, and it escaped. The rest is history. Now this might be the correct explanation for what transpired. But it is fair to say that outside of the CCP no-one really knows, and of course it would naïve to expect the CCP to be particularly forthcoming. For their part they’ve been keen to push a counter-explanation suggesting that it is all a CIA plot to tarnish China. Closer to home with over 50% of the UK fully vaccinated (ie over 30M people have now had two doses of vaccine), there are still those who pop up on the news saying they will not be vaccinated because no one has explained to their satisfaction how the vaccines work, and how they can be sure that they are safe. And notwithstanding the success of the vaccination campaign in the UK, no one has yet explained to Dominic Cummings satisfaction how Matt Hancock managed to keep his job for so long. So many people, in search of so many explanations, for so many different things. Someone is going to be disappointed. And all of this is before you get to explaining really tricky stuff like why are we here? Why is there a “here” in the first place? Did God really do it or was there nothing to “do”? I’ve been giving some thought to explanations.

The first odd thing about them is that they are not always required. In fact, in contrast to where I began, they are only really required on the odd occasion. There are lots of things that all of us don’t need, and don’t expect, explanations for. Despite the heroic mathematical efforts of Newton and his successors, I don’t really need someone to explain gravity to me. The basics I get. If I step off of a tall building, nothing good will come of it. It’s not so much that I would be happy with absolutely any explanation for why I would plummet to the ground (what philosophers call “folk” explanations), it’s more that I don’t feel in need of any explanation at all. In fact, I’m so not interested in gravity, it’s only when it is somehow thwarted that my interest is peaked and I’m likely to go in search of an explanation. This is particularly the case when on the basis of that explanation I might consider taking some risk or other. So while I’m not particularly interested in gravity, I am interested in what keeps aeroplanes in the sky.

However, it is worth pointing out that even in this case my interest only goes so far. I suppose if I was really that bothered I would have done a degree in aeronautical engineering (I actually did a degree in Physiology and then a PhD in Neurobiology). So as I’ve pointed out before, what I actually do is put my trust (or to use another word my faith) in the people who did do their degrees in aeronautical engineering, and have designed safe aeroplanes. Of course I do this in the full knowledge that because designing and building aeroplanes is a human activity it will be flawed, along with other activities like fuelling, operating and maintaining aircraft. But in the absence of evidence that aeroplanes fall out of the sky every day (which they don’t), I’m prepared to fly and so defy gravity, if only in a well explained and therefore well understood way (at least in principle if not actually in personal fact).

It seems that I am prepared to accept as a good explanation one that provides either me, or people I trust, with some suitable level of understanding. And the level of understanding required is likely to vary depending on the extent to which I might be risking something if the explanation turns out to be wrong. Any explanation that is likely to satisfy me is likely to satisfy you provided that we are prepared to run the same risks, have the same priorities and are prepared to trust the same people. But this is where the trouble starts. The levels of risk we are prepared to take may be different for perfectly understandable reasons. The levels of trust we are prepared to place in different individuals, groups, bodies or authorities is also likely to vary. So while I might be prepared to accept a given explanation, you might not. And in all of this, I haven’t yet mentioned what we would both likely think is the most important criterion that should be applied to any explanation – the extent to which it actually is the true explanation for whatever it is we want to explain. That of course is assuming that true explanations are ever possible at all.

Given this it should come as no surprise that intelligent people disagree even about when something needs and explanation. In a famous BBC radio debate in 1948 on the existence of God between Frederick Copleston and Bertrand Russell, they couldn’t agree on whether an explanation was required for the existence of the universe. Copleston thought that the existence of the universe, that there is something rather than nothing, just cried out for an explanation. But Russell replied "The Universe is just there, and that's all there is". All other things being equal, there probably is no objective way to choose between these alternatives. But in this case all other things are not exactly equal. For most of human history, and in most of the world today, most human beings appear to have felt and appear to feel that there needs to be an explanation for the existence of something rather than nothing, and that the explanation is to be found in outside the material and the natural. Now even although this observation is data of a sort, it doesn’t mean that this feeling is an accurate guide as to how things really are. It all may be an illusion, perhaps a psychological by-product of our so-called “big brains”.

However, there is a Biblical explanation for this intuition that there is something more going on than the stuff we can see, hear, touch, smell and feel.  According to Ecclesiastes 3:11, “He has put eternity into man’s heart” – it’s designed in, by a God who is there. Add to that inner intuition the external self-revelation of God through the created order of things (the “sort” of universe we find ourselves in), the specific revelation of God in the Bible, and the (admittedly fallible) experience of many thousand if not millions of believers over centuries. This points me to not just the existence of an explanation for who we are, why we’re here, and where we’re headed, but to what that explanation is. It seems to me that while explaining even hard stuff is hard, it is not impossible.

Life in the pandemic XXVI Words and the “death” of postmodernism

I have led a fairly sheltered intellectual and academic existence, just one of many advantages working on the science side of a modern University campus. Modern universities don’t really operate as universities of course. Ideally a university should be a community of scholars with cross-fertilization of ideas across a wide range of disciplines and outlooks. The idea is that even very different disciplines can enlighten and stimulate each other. I can’t be the only scientist to whom good ideas have come while sitting in a seminar whose topic is light years away from some current piece of gristle I’ve been chewing on. However, someone once quipped that academia is the business of getting to know more and more about less and less. On this logic, professors know everything about nothing. Would it be remiss of me to point out that I’m a mere Reader? But it is a fact that we tend to hunker down in ever tighter intellectual cliques and tribes as time and careers progress. Eventually the cell and molecular biologists rarely see those who work on the behaviour of whole organisms, never encounter those (still within the scientific family) who reside in the departments of the physical (as opposed to biological) sciences, and are barely aware of those mythical creatures across the road (actually usually across several roads) who deal in words or thought, sound or pictures. That said, such isolation does have its advantages.

Most of us in the scientific world are probably best described as “modern” in the way we go about our task. This doesn’t sound too bad until you understand that since the 1960s or thereabouts, “modernism” has been seen as dangerous tomfoolery by many of our more arty colleagues who generally consider themselves post-modernists. Modernism is that post-enlightenment mode of thinking that elevates human reason as the key tool for obtaining objective knowledge about the world around us, providing a sure way for humanity to progress. It has been both powered and validated by the apparent success of science and technology. However, it has always had its critics. Romanticism in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries was an early harbinger of trouble ahead. While the power and success of science seemed hard to deny, the materialism that usually accompanied modernity (and it was sometimes a radical materialism) seemed to leave something important out of the account. And the kind of progress science and technology generated wasn’t always perceived as an unalloyed good. The same industrialisation that provided economic progress for many, spawned dark satanic mills for some. Diseases may have been conquered, but poverty killed thousands. And even scientific endeavour had some ugly pseudoscientific offspring in the form of movements like social Darwinism and eugenics.

Bubbling away under the surface were the intellectual forces that eventually led to the “postmodernism” that emerged in the 1960s, sweeping all before it. Or at least it appeared to. Defining postmodernism is a bit like trying to eat soup with a fork; it’s an enterprise doomed to failure. But definitions abound. Britannica defines it as “a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad scepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.” Postmodernism came to be seen as a broad attack on the kind of reason and reasoning that we thought we depended upon in science, and even on the idea that words carry meaning and allow sensible discourse about a world “out there”. There was a specifically scientific manifestation of postmodernism in the form of Kuhn’s famous book “The structure of scientific revolutions” (discussed briefly here). This sought to reduce progress in science, in which a new theory or approach displaces and old one, to a type of “conversion” experience; scientific “progress” (so Kuhn’s critics claimed) was being reduced to a series of almost irrational leaps. Not that most of us scientists were that bothered you understand. Much of this “revolution” passed us by in our isolation from such intellectual fashions.

Perhaps it was because in principle we have to deal with reality as it is (or at least as we perceive it to be). All scientist are in some sense “realists” – there is a real external world, independent of my ideas and feelings about it, that can be prodded and poked. The methods that had stood us in good stead for a couple of centuries, seemed still, indeed seem still, to serve us well. So we left our colleagues in the humanities and social sciences to argue the toss over who was oppressing whom by this or that word or sentence, continued to prod and poke, wrote up and published our results, refined and refuted, and generally just got on with things. Admittedly, neither we nor our students thought as hard as we should have done about the thinking we were actually doing (something I lamented here). But, as the pandemic has demonstrated, it’s probably just as well that we did "just get on with it". Some of the most powerful tools that have led to effective vaccines being delivered in record time stem from just quietly beavering away. And perhaps that’s why, particularly in the pandemic, postmodernism appears to be in big trouble. At least in its more extreme forms it has been unmasked as is a diversion, an entertainment and an indulgence that can’t cope with hard realities. The science that is now saving lives has turned out to be more important than academic word games.

Personally, while not a complete fan of modernism (reason has always had its limits), some of postmodernism’s contentions always seemed ridiculous to me. There is a whole strand that prizes obscure language and then seeks to claim that reason must always be subverted by slippery communication with mixed motives. Words cannot be trusted to accurately convey meaning, they are inevitably ambiguous. The problem is that the proponents of these views apparently thought this only applied to other people’s words; their words were to be taken at face value. But this has to be a sort of self-refuting proposition. But it gets worse. It was the postmoderns’ deliberately obscure and convoluted language that turned out to be easily subverted and exploited by parody.

Famously, the physicist Alan Sokal composed a nonsense paper and submitted it to a prominent academic journal (Social Text). The paper went through the normal (rigorous?) review processes of the journal, and was accepted for publication in a revised form. It was, in Sokal’s words “brimming with absurdities and blatant non sequiturs” but was actually published in a special edition of the journal. The aftermath of the hoax, and the debate which followed, are detailed by Sokal and Bricmont in their book “Intellectual Impostures”. This was not a one off. In 2018 essentially the same thing was done on a much larger scale. Twenty fake papers were submitted to a number of prominent academic journals, bastions of postmodern thought in various forms. Of the 20 papers, seven were accepted for publication, and most of the others might well have been had not the perpetrators called time on their hoax. Only six of the twenty were thrown out. This was a field in trouble.

It turns out the trouble may be have been terminal. Having almost missed the “death”of new atheism, I may actually have missed the death of postmodernism. Before some of us had even begun to grapple with it at our end of the campus, Alan Kirby was writing in “Philosophy Now” that we all really should be post-postmodernists. That was back in 2006. It seems that words do convey meaning, and reason is reasonable again.  Some of us never thought anything different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life in the pandemic XXIII: Easter Reflections – No offense, but……

I recently mentioned my liking for reading history (at the time I was reading McGrath on reformation thought). I am happy to report that I progressed from reading about the Reformation specifically, to reading about just about everything else. Well, not quite. I’ve been reading Tom Holland’s “Dominion” (reviewed here in "The Critic") which covers from about 500BC to the modern day. His mission is to answer a question:

 “How was it that a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world?” 

Interesting as it is, this is Holland’s question and I don’t want to answer here. You can, after all, read his book (which I recommend). But particularly given that Easter has come round again, it is worth contemplating the particular execution that Holland mentions - the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth by the Roman administration in Jerusalem, around 30AD. As Holland goes to some lengths to explain, there is no doubt that this was viewed in a particular way by those who witnessed and heard about it originally. But today it is viewed completely differently (even by many followers of Jesus). And in that change we’ve lost something. Because, to many in the first century and for some time thereafter, the mere idea of crucifixion was utterly offensive. Today we’ve somehow reduced the cross to a silver trinket.

Crucifixion wasn’t invented by the Romans, but it was developed and honed by them, and then employed particularly for the execution of slaves and rebels. While it was occasionally used on an industrial scale, its use in peacetime was more targeted. Besides being a particularly painful and unpleasant way of dying (hence “excruciating”), it was associated with humiliation, and was specifically designed to be so. So if you had wanted to invent a religion that would be attractive in a world dominated by Rome, having crucifixion at the heart of it would not be a very bright move. As Holland says, it “….could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.” That anyone would follow a leader who had been crucified was preposterous. To claim that the leader in question was a god was beyond preposterous. The mere idea was an insult to the Roman intelligence and offensive in itself.

There was one other group that was likely to be even more outraged at the idea of a crucified God than the Romans. Apparently plotting and then successfully driving Jesus towards crucifixion was the Jewish religious leadership of the day. Their apparent enthusiasm for the crucifixion of Jesus (as opposed to His stoning or some other form of death) was perhaps because it would provide the most obvious evidence that Jesus claim to be God was a complete and odious fiction. The idea that the eternal God could die was a contradiction in the first place. But crucifixion would provide the most brutal demonstration of Jesus’ folly. How, after that, would anyone be able to claim that Jesus was anything other than an attention-seeking fake of the worst kind, with no sense of religious, cultural or civic decency.   

However, as it transpired, the followers of this Jesus had the temerity not just to claim that Jesus was God, but that this most horrifying of deaths had some central role to play in God’s dealings with men and women. They preached not just Christ, but Christ crucified. You could not come up with any proposition more likely to offend the ancient mind, whether Jew and Gentile. And the offense was somehow made worse by the idea that there was some necessity to Jesus dying in this way, and that salvation was to be found by valuing what He was claimed to be accomplishing on a cross of all things. This was to pile offense on offense. And the early Christians knew it (see 1 Cor 1:23).

And yet, time changes things. Holland plots how it took about 400 years before the cross began to appear in art. And over the centuries, rather than something to be appalled at, it became something to be contemplated, even admired. Emotions of revulsion, moved through compassion to even attraction. I well remember visiting Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow, where Dali’s “Christ of Saint John of the Cross” hangs; according The Guardian’s art critic “probably the most enduring vision of the crucifixion painted in the 20^th century”. No blood, no gore, no pain and definitely no offense.

But we lose something important when we lose that original sense of offense. It alerts us to something. It alerts us to an offended God, whose justice and holiness demand a response, a reckoning, for the outrage of creaturely rebellion. How is the scale of such offense to be communicated? How is its magnitude to be answered? God’s answer to both is the cross. But there is a sort of counter-offense in the idea that I need the cross. What has it got to do with me? How dare I be accused of rebellion, and have some demand placed upon me. And for that demand to involve my personal response to, or dependence upon, a man dying on a cross? Again, offense upon offense. It all sounds as crazy now, as it did in the first century. And it should strike us as offensive.

But my natural protestations spring from the great lie that Paul talks about it in Romans (1:25). The real offense is God’s not mine, and the answer to it has to be His too. Such great offense required a response greater than any that humanity individually or collectively was capable of. So the answer is found within the Godhead, and the Father requires a price of the Son, who is glad to return it to the Father. And it is returned by way of His death on a cross. There is a compelling logic to all of this that some continue to find offensive. Nietzsche, of all people, summed it up as “the horrific paradox of the ‘crucified God’”. But Spurgeon was clear that “..true ministry should be, and must be — a holding forth of the Cross of Christ to the multitude as the only trust of sinners. Jesus Christ must be set forth evidently crucified among them.”

Religious offense of one sort or another is often in the news. But if there’s one religious group that really has no place to protest about offense it’s Christians. Because right at the heart of Easter is the most offensive event to occur in history. That is rather the point.

Life in the pandemic XXII: Easter Reflections - Singing in the darkness..

Last year at Easter we were just getting used to lockdown – working from home, one hour’s exercise a day and the rest. It made for an interesting Good Friday reflection on self-isolation. It’s sobering to think that was “Life in the pandemic III” – this is XXII!. There was lot’s we didn’t know then, that we do know now. And yet big questions remain unanswered. Perhaps they are not the same big questions for everyone, although there is likely to be an overlap. We would all like to know things like where the virus came from, how it crossed into the human population, and whether the right things were done at the appropriate time to prevent its spread (although the answer to the last of these seems clear enough). In the meantime, we’ve done what we had to do. Lockdowns, shielding, masks and of course vaccines. We’ve been right to do all we can to protect ourselves, our families and our communities. But at least for me there is that deeper, somewhat nagging question as to what the pandemic “means”. One year on from arguing that such a question is legitimate, I confess that I still have no definitive answer.

Some would argue that this is because such a question is misconceived. That was essentially N.T. Wright’s take on the situation from an avowedly Christian (if probably provocative) perspective. Others might argue that because there’s no one to address such a question of meaning or purpose to, there’s no point posing it at all. If there can be no answer, then there can be no question. And yet it still lurks. And it has struck me throughout the pandemic that even among Christians there has been relatively little discussion of the pandemic’s meaning. Perhaps no one wants to be seen to exploiting a catastrophe and tragedy for polemical purposes. Certainly, I accept that the tone of any such discussion is important. So much suffering should not be met with flip or glib statements that gloss over complexities. Even if legitimate answers can be given, it’s important they’re not given in a hubristic, superior, “told you so” tone. My view, for what it’s worth, remains that there is meaning to be found in these dark months. As answers go, it may not be particularly comforting, and it will still leave lots of subsidiary answers to be ferreted out. But answer, and meaning, there is.

Before coming to what it is, it should be noted that Wright had a wider point to make in his article that is worth pondering. For while he thought looking for the “big” answer to the “big” question, looking for an explanation, was folly, there was a distinctive Christian response to the pandemic. Particularly in the midst of global disaster, surrounded by uncertainty and fear, there is a key response and resource available to the believer. It is found in the concept and practice of lament. Lament is in part an articulation of the confusion and pain we are suffering individually and collectively. Even if at the moment we feel that things are improving with the vaccine roll-out and easing of restrictions, many continue to struggle with long-COVID, and grieving continues for the 120 000 plus who have lost their lives. So there’s lots to lament about. And lament may have undertones of complaint and anger. But it’s more than that. All of us cry, and all of us can complain. But for the Christian who relies on the Living God who is sovereign and loving, there is something else that is the a feature of lament – an active choosing to trust.

By some accounts about a third of the Psalms in the Old Testament are laments. And there is a whole OT book that is a lament, called (not surprisingly) Lamentations. It is no accident that many of the Psalms of lament, almost regardless of where they begin, end with an affirmation of hope in, or praise for, the God to whom they are directed. It is also no accident that right in the middle of Lamentations, in the middle of the third chapter of a five chapter book, the writer tells us that he has hope, and why he has hope (Lam 3:22-27). What he says is neither glib nor vague. His hope is grounded, precise and active. “The Lord is my portion…therefore I will hope in Him” (Lam 3:24). It's not that his questions have been answered now. But he also tells us that even in the midst of confusion, and questions, and pain “It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord” (Lam 3: 26).

Jesus was no stranger to the laments. And of course, we remember that in the midst of the darkness (figurative and literal) of the cross, he took on His lips those words of lament from Psalm 22 “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”. There’s a question. It must have hung heavily in the air, apparently unanswered. But Peter tells us that Jesus “..continued entrusting Himself to Him who judges justly” (1 Pet 2:23). Trusting, even in the absence of an answer.

I take Wright’s point. Part of our response to the pandemic is not to forget the suffering of the last year, but to lament, to sing even in the darkness. That said I think, as with the cross, so with the pandemic. There is meaning and there is an answer to the big question. Both involve a curse. The pandemic is a reminder that this is a cursed world, despite our best efforts to insulate ourselves from said curse. Because it is cursed, although there are flashes of beauty, grace, happiness and peace to be found, these tend to be fleeting. But it will not always be so. There will be a reckoning and there needs to be rescue. And that’s why we sing in the darkness of “Good” Friday. Jesus, by taking that very curse on Himself, provides the basis for our rescue. And He laments, so that one day we won’t have to. We will hear an echo, a hint, of the new song that one day will replace all of our laments, when the darkness is displaced by the sunrise. We sing in the darkness of Friday. But Sunday’s coming.