Enjoy your sofa Dan…..

There was a little flurry of disquiet in certain quarters this week that almost certainly will have escaped the notice of most. The only reason that I noticed was that it concerned two things close to my heart – science and Christianity. The BBC announced that a mild-mannered, clear speaking and equally clean shaven young man called Dan Walker, was to take over one end of their breakfast show sofa from a mild-mannered older chap called Bill. So far, so dull. However, young Dan is a Christian from the theologically conservative end of the spectrum. It’s widely reported that he has negotiated with his bosses so that it is not necessary for him to work on Sundays. And this week the Times reported that he is “a creationist” and quoted a “senior BBC figure” labelling this a “nutty” belief. A columnist in the Telegraph (who himself claimed to be a Christian), concluded a piece headed “Dan Walker’s creationism is an affront to reason, science and logic” in the following terms:

“Creationists cannot be trusted to report objectively or to interact reasonably with their interviewees and with the public” (Myers,Telegraph 11/2/16)

While hoping for continued tolerance for Christian belief in general, he argued that “creationism” in particular was so intellectually deficient and offensive (on a level with holocaust denial), that it is not to be tolerated in the public sphere (or at least on the BBC’s breakfast sofa).

Many of the comments on the Telegraph’s website pointed out that this is a bit much. And many who hold views very different to those reported to be Dan Walker’s, sprang to his defence (including the National Secular Society). After all, essentially Dan is being employed by the BBC to read an autocue while most of us are still asleep. His views on how the Universe came into being have no bearing to his ability to carry out this task.  And the notion that he is somehow so shifty that he won’t be able to “report objectively or interact reasonably”, is the nutty one. I’m left to conclude that the point of the piece was primarily about stirring up interest in the freelance commentator who produced it, rather than deal with substantive issues.

But there are interesting issues here. There’s a narrowness in the way in which the debate between science and religious, specifically Christian, views is framed in the origins debate. The terms “Creationism” and “creationist” without qualification, are almost meaningless. I’m a creationist. I believe in God the creator of the heavens and the earth. I believe that ever since He created them, He has sustained them at each instant in time, and at each point in space. I don’t believe this because I can observe His power at work through a microscope or telescope, but because this is what He reveals about Himself in the Bible. And for a whole complex set of reasons, I believe these various statements. So I’m a creationist. Although not the particular kind of creationist being objected to.

The thrust of the complaint is “young earth” creationism. I have another set of complex reason why personally I do not feel compelled to interpret the Bible as teaching that God created everything in 6 x 24 hour periods. But this is one legitimate way to interpret the relevant bits of the Bible, and indeed was probably the majority view among most Christians throughout most of Christianity’s history (although even from the earliest centuries it was not the only view). So I’m not going to criticise Dan for having this view. Nor do I see the connection between this and his new job. It is a view that is held to be “nutty” on the basis of science. Thus it is claimed that there is a necessary conflict between a particular interpretation of the Bible, and science.

So what is being claimed about science? Usually, science is treated in these debates as a single, certain and sure method for establishing the absolute truth of explanations, including explanations for remote past events that were unique. Great claims are made for the intellectual rigour involved, frequently (as in the case in point) by those without either relevant expertise or appropriate qualifications. Mathematicians, engineers, medics all get stuck in, and indeed even lawyers (the culprit in this case). Now I admit the first three could be seen as sort of applied scientists. But they often appear to be unfamiliar with the fickle, halting, subjective and conflicted experience of most practicing scientists.  

Here I find myself in a tricky situation. I am as it happens, a practicing, professional scientist. So I don’t particularly want to knock science. I do science in a bid to understand certain types of processes. I’m committed to this way of finding out about certain kinds of stuff. I think that the scientific method, broadly construed, is a really good way to getting a grip on what’s going on. But science is not practiced by super beings, who hand down immutable and absolute truth. Its practitioners are ordinary men and women (and the occasional intellectual giant). Sometimes they/we/I make mistakes. Sometimes we are conflicted in our motives. Sometimes, as a whole string of recent articles in Nature has reported, we cheat. A bit of humility is required about what we can and cannot achieve through science, and about the status of the information generated by the scientific exercise.

And science is successful because it carves off particular types of stuff to study, and produces a particular kind of explanation, that is then tested. By and large an explanation is only scientific if it is both in principle testable with tests that it might fail, and that it is in practice tested. And even as evidence accumulates from past and passed tests that a particular explanation is a good one, scientific explanations should not be treated as dogma. We never reach a position of certainty. Again, a degree of humility is required.

So to find Dan Walker somehow critically deficient because he, a non-scientist, may hold a view of how the Universe came into being that might be at odds with current scientific hypotheses and theories is just confused. There’s no reason here to deny him his place on the sofa. Incidentally, we don’t actually know what his views are. He has never used his position in the media to press them on any of us – unlike the chap writing in the Telegraph.

Mellowing with age….?

I was struck by an article in yesterday’s Times (“It’s time feeble feminists started to condemn the misogyny in Islam” p32, 30/1/16) in which Richard Dawkins opined about the decency he detects in the Church of England, the cultural value of Biblical language, feminism, Islam and the Koran, and even about his own death. As an aside, over the years he has been an expert and interesting evolutionary biologist; he’s worth listening to and reading on these topics. He talks with deep knowledge, based on years of skillful practice. He is an authority on such things, although I suppose it’s possible that now (in his 74^th year) he’s a bit out of touch with his specialist field. It’s not my field, so I wouldn’t be able to give an authoritative view. On that other long list of topics, he clearly has opinions that people want to hear (otherwise they wouldn’t send journalists to interview him). I have no doubt that his opinions are sincerely held. He may even have thought about them deeply. But the authority he has in the one realm should not carry over into the others. His views carry the weight of an interesting, articulate, generally well educated amateur, nothing more.

Back to the article. A couple of things in it struck me as particularly interesting. First is the almost wistful way in which he thinks about the Church of England and the Bible (or at least some of its language). These things seem to have some useful role to play in our culture. Is this a mellowing with age? Well, maybe. As he makes equally clear, he still has no time for the God whom the Bible reveals. Presumably he still thinks that both this God, and the morality He would have us follow is pernicious and despicable. Or at least that his reading and interpretation of these are. But can you really recommend the one thing without the other? And if the basic premise of even beautiful language is wrong, can the language really be said to be beautiful? I suppose it might have a beautiful sound. But this of course was the trick of the Sirens, the sound of whose beautiful voices lured innocent sailors to their doom. Given all that Dawkins has said and written about not just the irrationality of religion (particularly that based on the Bible), but its dangers, it’s clearly highly illogical, perhaps even dangerous, to now say that some of it is worth having because it’s “nice”. One can imagine the fulminations of the younger Dawkins against such talk.

The other thing is that is striking is the reason for some of this wistfulness. The problem is that Dawkins fears cuddly Christianity being replaced by fundamentalist Islam. To be fair he probably objects any sort of religious view that is fundamentalist in his terms. Sadly, these days he appears to encounter few Bible-believers who are prepared to stick to their guns – “Christians have grown out of that. They don’t believe every word of the Bible.” He thinks that this is a blip. But as so often happens when one strays outwith their area of expertise, he’s probably missing the point. 

Religion is not an unfortunate accident or diversion from the true path of intellectual progress, it is basic to it. Indeed, all that happens when you deny this, is that you set up another religion in the place of those which you seek to deny. So we have the idol of scientism, or its close cousins rationalism and naturalism. These have all the hallmarks of the religion that they condemn, including creeds, rituals and priesthood. They don’t stand outside the game, they are part of the game. They are not the referees and umpires of the competition between other strange, barbaric, teams, they are on the field of play themselves competing hard. Except that these “isms” (note the distinction here between science and scientism) haven’t actually produced much of worth. No, that’s harsh. They’ve occasionally produced nice words, I’ll grant them that.

The problem is that it was and is the truth of the Bible that produced a society in which science developed and flourished and in which questioning, challenging skepticism (“virtues” in Dawkins’ view) were not just tolerated but encouraged. It was centuries of Christianity which conditioned minds and developed intellectual life to the point where advance was possible beyond a certain point. While one cannot rule out the possibility that a different network of beliefs and truth might have led to the same end, it’s a brute fact of history that we came from where we were, not some other starting point.

So, maybe the eponymous Professor is mellowing. Although I suspect that even old mellow Dawkins bridled when he read the first sentence of the article, in which he was introduced as “the high priest of atheism”.