Life goes on - or doesn’t

Strange times. One of the features of the pandemic has been the truly heroic efforts of healthcare workers to reach those in need, and provide them with the care necessary to see them through their crisis to recovery. At the height of the first lockdown, many of us stood on our doorsteps and clapped each week for a number of weeks to recognize and support these efforts. We locked down and stayed at home to prevent sickness and avoid deaths. We put the education of the young into deep-freeze to protect mainly the elderly and those vulnerable for reasons other than their age. But that was then, and this is now. Time has moved on and it’s interesting that it is in this context a very different attitude has been asserting itself.

There is now, and has been for some time, a vocal lobby in the UK advocating for a change in the law to allow the taking of life. The name of what is being advocated changes. It has been called all of euthanasia, assisted suicide, mercy killing, assisted dying, and other things beside. Somewhere I have no doubt PR specialists have been working to establish which term causes the least public anxiety and is likely to garner most public support. But the campaign is definitely up and running. Robert Shrimley’s column in the FT caught my eye back in August (“The time is ripe for citizens’ voices on assisted dying”, FT, 25/8/21; it’s behind the FT’s paywall unfortunately). A number of medical professional organisations have been changing their stance on “assisted dying” from opposition to “neutrality”. Then there was the proposal of Orkney MSP Liam McArthur for a bill to go through the Scottish parliament, which is currently out to public consultation. Most recently we had the debate on Baroness Meacher’s “assisted suicide” bill in the House of Lords.

This is not the first time there have been such debates of course, and the arguments made in the Lords were familiar enough. It is not likely to be the last time they are heard. The proponents are quick to claim they are promoting human dignity and autonomy – individual dignity and autonomy that is. It should be a matter of choice. We have choice in every other area of life, on what basis should it be denied in this one area? In this area though, talking about individual choice is misleading, One person’s right to choose to die, at least on the basis of most current proposals, is the imposition of an obligation to kill (or to assist in a killing) on someone else (usually a medical practitioner). And death, any death, like birth, does not just affect a single individual even in our particularly individualised culture. If someone wishes to die, there are a number of courses of action individuals can, and tragically do, take. That is not what this debate appears to be about. It is about state-sponsored, legislated and organized killing. This is why (as Lord Winston pointed out in the Lords debate), terminology matters; an "assisted" death, inevitably draws others in.  

Opponents of the current proposals rehearsed their (equally familiar) arguments too. Practicalities were prominent, as was the “slippery slope” argument. This raises an interesting question. If, in a modern, liberal, democracy, assisted suicide/euthanasia is legalized, what happens? This, at least in theory, is now an answerable question as there are a number of such jurisdictions – the state of Oregon in the US, Quebec in Canada and Belgium and the Netherlands in Europe are examples. However, it turns out that how you interpret the data depends on which side of the argument you start. Proponents argue that in none of these places have things progressed to mass killing. Opponents point out that numbers have risen inexorably  (Belgium: 2002, 24 cases – 2016/17, 4337; Netherlands: 2006, 1923 – 2017, 6585), and laws have been extended (eg in both Belgium and the Netherlands from only adults to children). Practice in terms of adhering to laws is variable and difficult to monitor and there could be even more slippage “under the radar”. The riposte is that these are practical matters that will have practical solutions. But such solutions are going to fall on an already overworked and overstretched healthcare system. Are resources and safeguards really going to be allocated to deathcare as opposed to other aspects of healthcare? Currently in the UK even our hospices, where high standards of palliative and end-of-life care are available, are not within the state healthcare system. They are largely supported by public donations and sponsorship. Surely the provision of proper end-of-life care should have priority over ending life “care”?

We live in culture where the beginning of life is just as contested. Individual rights and autonomy have been exalted, and the individual and societal cost has been high. In England and Wales 210,860 abortions were reported in 2020, the highest so far recorded (that averages out at over 20 per hour, every hour, over the year). The 1967 Act was introduced with all sorts of safeguards, but sent a signal that had a range of unintended consequences. I am not, as it happens, an absolutist on the abortion issue; an absolute ban would be unworkable and undesirable. And things like aggressive protesting outside centres providing abortions (let alone the violence that has occasionally erupted) cannot be condoned. But perhaps it can be agreed that the situation we currently have is not the sign of a healthy society. And, critically for the current debate, promises made during the original debate, and safeguards introduced to prevent "mission creep", both turned out to be rather hollow. 

Legislating in such complex areas is tragically difficult and should never be undertaken with the breezy confidence exhibited by some of the supporters of Baroness Meacher’s bill. The law has to define, and by definition, it codifies. But some areas of life (and death) defy easy definition and codification. Leaving it to judgement and conscience may be messy, but it is a lot better than the alternatives.

Life in the pandemic XXXI Gamekeeper turned poacher…..

Did I mention I was once a student? In case you missed it, the answer is “yes” and I wrote about it recently! It was a long time ago, and the world was different in a number of ways. And of course I was different. Apart from anything else I was a callow youth, just turned seventeen, when I started. And it would be fair to say that I had led a fairly sheltered existence to that point. Sheltered that is from lots of things that might have done me harm. Life is experience, but avoiding certain experiences does not inevitably lead to an impoverished life. There are definitely some things it is better to read about in books than experience in reality. We all lead sheltered lives in one form or another. First time around as a student I had a lot of growing up to do, as well as a lot of stuff to learn. And I did my growing and learning as part of a particular community.

In the days when only a relatively small proportion of UK teenagers enjoyed the privilege of a University education (about 10% in the late 70’s), University could be a bit of hothouse affair because the population was small and fairly homogeneous. And to some extent while it was possible to branch out and embrace new things, the range of novelty was in some ways quite restricted. While it could be a hothouse, University was not the hotbed of radicalism that it was sometimes portrayed as being. Clubs and societies were a big part of student life, and for me that meant a lot of time spent with fellow students in the Christian Union. Numerically, the Labour Club at Glasgow University probably claimed the largest membership on campus. But every week there were 100 or more of us at the main CU meeting, and there were lots of faculty and other groups meeting weekly too. For some radicals on the left, the Labour Club was a bit on the tame side; they joined the Socialist Workers Student Society (known to all as “Swiz”). Swiz once organised a meeting on “Jesus: the first socialist” to which a number of us CU types decided to go. Our 7 or 8 (it may have been more) somewhat outnumbered the 3 or 4 Swiz members who turned up. They didn’t appear to know too much about either Jesus or socialism in its various forms; and we, it turned out, were probably suggesting more radical answers than they were. But they weren’t that impressed.

It was in the CU as much as in the University where many life-long friendships (and not a few marriages) were formed. Because we were all growing up together, it did make for a fairly intense atmosphere. Sometimes the business of getting a degree seemed like a secondary activity. Even if universities hadn’t changed in the intervening forty-something years (and they have), this could only be a once in a lifetime experience. Time marches on, experience is accumulated, and accompanied by change. Certainly a change in perspective. As a member of staff in a number of universities over the years, it was my turn to experience the frustration of students not paying attention when I thought they should and not bringing the focus to their studies that I thought they demanded. After all, University is only a few short years; why can’t they forswear the “distractions” and just concentrate on studying. We put all that effort into crafting the pearls to be laid out before them. Some would say my experience was justice; the universe is getting me back for my lack of respect for my lecturers and lab demonstrators. In general though, students seem to be a much more serious bunch these days than I think we were. I’ve met more than a few labouring under various pressures that seemed to take a lot of the enjoyment out of their time at University. Such pressures were probably always there, but in recent times they have intensified. Certainly the financial pressures on many students today are more intense – we were paid to go to University.

Now I’m reverting and after several decades I have decided to throw off the privileges and responsibilities of being an academic and member of staff, and returning to being a student. I will shortly begin studying in the Master of Theology (MTh) programme at Union School of Theology. For some of the reasons alluded to above of course it will not be the same as first time round. I’m older, and while there’s always room for personal development, I’m also “all growed up”. I approach the task in a different way as a different person compared to my approach when I was seventeen. Hopefully I have learned a thing or two about learning since then.

The subject of study will be different – not Physiology and Neurobiology but Theology. A new and different discipline; new tools to master as well as different subject matter. Some aspects of study are the same across disciplines, but I expect differences too. It would hubris of the highest order to think that a training in science has provided all I need to embark on studies in theology. This time there is also more of a vocational motivation rather than it being just an “academic” exercise. Calvin wrote in the Institutes “...however fitting it may be for a man seriously to turn his eyes to contemplate God's works .... it is fitting that he prick up his ears to the Word, the better to profit." There will be an aspect of personal challenge and change because of the ultimate subject matter that was absent previously.

In some corners of the Church, theological study is viewed with suspicion, occasionally being seen as inimical to a lively faith. But the  greatest commandment includes that aspect of loving God with all of the mind. While this doesn’t mean everyone needs to embark on a theology degree, it certainly means that this is a wholly legitimate exercise for some of us (provided it is undertaken in the right spirit). The setting will be different too from my first time around.  Union is a relatively small college/seminary as opposed large city university. I’m sure there will be friendships and interaction, maybe even the occasional bit of creative intellectual tension. But for all the reasons above (and more) it won’t be the same, nor should it be.

The poacher/gamekeeper analogy probably isn’t that helpful. But there is a grain of truth in it. I confess that there will be part of me viewing the process with a professional academic eye and wondering if the programme specification is being followed to the letter. But another part of me will be glad that such things are really no longer my concern. I can just get back to learning, “the better to profit”.  

Life in the pandemic XXX Life in transition…

Life is change, so it is said. Change is certainly a big part of life. Over a period of seven to ten years, every cell in our bodies is changed. So the “me” of today, is probably completely biologically different to the “me” of ten years ago, never mind the “me” that was born 59 years ago. If I thought about this for long enough, I might find it quite disturbing! But this kind of change is just a given, so of course I don’t normally think about it at all. Other change is expected, like progressing through life, from school to University, to a job (or jobs) to retirement. Ah yes, retirement. Which brings me to the subject of this post.

I’ve been very fortunate to enjoy a long(ish) career in science. I started as a student in 1979, arriving in October that year at the University of Glasgow, to begin a degree in biological sciences. In those day you were given “faculty” entry which meant that over the four years of an honours degree you gradually specialised. So your final degree subject might not be clear until well through the four years. I arrived with no grand plan, and gradually wandered my way to a degree in Physiology. It was a very different time. There were nine students in final honours Physiology class of 1982/83, and we had some excellent teachers at the top of their game, including a Regius Professor no less.

I still had no grand plan when considering what to do next. But I enjoyed being around the University, and had plenty of biological curiosity. Doing a PhD seemed to be an easier option than actually looking for a job, and there were a number of studentships on offer around the Faculty. I eventually plumped for one that held out the promise of spending some time at a marine biological lab in France. It was France that was the main attraction though, not the lab. So I embarked on my PhD which involved investigating the nervous system and behaviour of the Norway lobster, better known as scampi (as in scampi and chips). Somewhere in cyberspace you can probably find a copy of my thesis which duly appeared just over three years later: Statocyst, input, multimodal interactions, and their effects on motor outputs in the Norway lobster, Nephrops norvegicus (L.). It was never likely to be a blockbuster. Along the way I had the privilege of attending the 1986 Gifford Lectures given by Donald McKay. I had encountered his apologetics and heard him speak previously. But as the resident Zoology Department “religious nut”, I was invited to go to lunch with him, along with one of the Zoology staff. I think this was because it was thought I would be able to engage in “God talk” with him. I can’t remember what we actually discussed. But I do remember clearly the grace with which he would deal with some of the questions after his lectures, even the bizarre ones from a particular befurred and hatted lady from Hyndland who was at every one of the lectures in the series.

There was still no grand plan when I managed to land my first post-doc job in the University of Hull, nor when I moved back to Scotland when the lab I had joined moved. We formed part of the fledgling Laboratory for Neuroscience in the University of Edinburgh. By then my interests had moved from lobsters to vertebrates, although still to do with the balance system. Edinburgh is a beautiful city (I write this through gritted fingers as a Glaswegian), and its University was and is a stimulating intellectual environment. I had dining rights in the Pharmacology staff common room where almost everything and anything might be debated. A highlight of these discussions was almost any interjection by Bernard Ginsborg, former head of Department, and polymath. Bernard started out in Physics, swapped to Physiology and then made seminal contributions in Pharmacology. He had a breadth of knowledge and interests that these days is all too rare. If he had any influence on me it was to encourage resistance to the tiresome hyper specialisation that is a feature of modern academic life. This might enable faster and further ascent up the academic greasy pole, but it makes for really boring conversation. The other thing that was noteworthy, is that you never had the feeling that you were being talked down to by Bernard. And it must have been a bit of a temptation with some of us relative youngsters. It was also at Edinburgh, that I was able to attend another series of Gifford Lectures, Mary Midgley’s 1990 series, later published as “Science and Salvation”.

It was in this stimulating environment that I was encouraged to apply for, and managed to obtain, a Wellcome Trust Vision Research Fellowship. This allowed me to develop my own little niche (while trying to avoid tiresome specialisation!). My project involved investigating the interactions between visual signals from the retina and feedback proprioceptive signals from the muscles which move the eyes (a development of the work we had been doing on the vestibular system). This was at the time, and remains, pretty obscure stuff. And the details needn’t detain us (in any case they can be found in the papers we published). But it was at this time I really began to focus on eye movements, an interest that I developed and transferred from various animal species to humans. By this stage it was becoming clear that I had to shift from doing animal experiments. Measuring eye movement turned out to be quite a good way of probing what was going on inside heads without opening them up and sticking an electrode in. This precipitated a move from Edinburgh to the Optometry department in Glasgow Caledonian University. GCU is one of Scotland’s “new” universities (some of my Edinburgh colleagues were quite sniffy about it), but its Optometrists knew lots about human eyes, and they had their own clinic which provided the interface with people that I needed.

By now I was interested almost exclusively in human eye movement, doing behavioural experiments in which we made careful measurements of the timing of eye  movements. This included work on both healthy people and patients. There was even a series of experiments we did on patients with Schizophrenia. This involved moving the lab to a psychiatric facility which had been newly opened in the east end of the city of Glasgow, near Glasgow Celtic’s famous Parkhead football ground. Whisper it ever so gently, but this is probably an excellent location for such a facility. In the event I was only at GCU for two years or so. A job advert appeared which specifically mentioned the study of eye movements as being something the Division of Orthoptics in the University of Liverpool was interested in. Not knowing what Orthoptics even was (I confess to my shame) I didn’t understand why they were interested in eye movements. Although the post was advertised at Senior Lectureship level, I decided to apply. To my surprise I was invited for interview, and to my greater surprise I was offered the job. And so for the last twenty-two years, Liverpool is where I have ploughed my furrow.

For a number of reasons, my time in the University of Liverpool has now drawn to a close. There have been some scientific highlights. Again, the details needn’t detain us; they’re documented in the papers we’ve published over the years (many of which can be accessed here). I’m taking early retirement because the time has come to do something else. That something else (and this might come as a surprise) is theology, in which I will be undertaking a Masters. Given the old trope about the necessary incompatibility between science and faith, it’s worth saying why. Throughout my scientific career, I have practiced science as a Christian. I have neither ceased being a Christian at my lab door, nor have ceased being a thinking person at the church door.  I am using Christian in its Biblical sense of course – I am a follower of Jesus Christ. And of the worst sort too! I am firmly convinced of necessity, reality and transforming power of His death on a cross approximately two thousand years ago, and of the historical  reality and evidential value of his bodily resurrection. I know about these things because I also believe that the Bible, including the relevant New Testament documents, provide not just a reliable record of certain key events, but are God’s Word – that is, God is their source and preserver, so that today the Bible remains authoritative in everything therein taught. I think this is ample reason why the Bible’s contents and their implications are worthy of rigorous academic study. The type of study that I’m now itching to embark on.

Now it is clearly logically possible that I either was always potty, insanely gullible or both, or that I have recently developed such traits. But I don’t think so. It must be also logically possible that I am correct in my conclusions, perspective and beliefs. But the Bible I read, doesn’t just make claims on me. It makes them on us all. If it’s true, then it’s not just “true for me” – it’s true for us all. 

In any case, here comes an interesting retirement. I’m sure I’ll post more about it here.

Life in the pandemic XXIX Keswick in the transition…

Once again, for the second time in the pandemic, we have made our way to England’s beautiful Lake District, to the market town of Keswick. The scenery is undoubtedly spectacular, the weather tropical (this year at least), and the town itself charming. These would all be good reasons to spend a week’s holiday here. But that is not primarily why we’ve come. As regular readers (and you know who you are) of this blog will know, we are here for the Keswick Convention. For the last few years this has become part of our summer routine. I noted before that it might strike some as an odd way to spend a summer week in the 21^st Century. It is “old fashioned” in the sense that it has been running for over one hundred years, and some of the first attendees would be able to recognise what is going on. It would also strike some as old fashioned in that the subject matter has remained constant over that period. Yes, there have been changes in style, and some in format. But at its core, the key activity is the straightforward explanation of chunks of a very “old fashioned” book – the Bible. And there remains that same conviction – that the reason this is worth doing is that we are listening to God, whose Word this is (again, a very “old fashioned” notion).

There is of course one big difference this year. We are still in the midst of a global pandemic. Not that this is Keswick’s first pandemic, having survived the 1918 Spanish Flu. Last year, while we still came to Keswick (to walk and read), there were no meetings, although there was an online offering. But this year, once again, several thousand gather twice a day, for the morning “Bible Reading” and the evening “Celebration”. There are the now familiar markers of the pandemic – testing and masking. But transition, as well as virus, is in the air. On the first Monday of the first week, the legal restrictions introduced in England (mandatory mask wearing and restrictions on the numbers able to meet either indoors or outdoors) were removed. One of the most onerous restrictions on Christians meeting together was also removed. For fifteen months or more, we haven’t been able to sing together. So last night we sang for all we were worth. But this is transition, so we sang behind our masks. It was still worth it.

We’ve only reached the transition of course, and the pandemic is still with us. But it is perhaps time to reflect on what it might have taught us about ourselves. There have been, and will continue to be, dark days. Lives have been lost, families have been bereaved. Many others have been scarred by the experience of days or weeks (or in some cases months) of hospital treatment, gasping for breath. And not just scarred in their memories. We’ve yet to see the full impact of long Covid, a condition that will afflict hundreds of thousands in the UK alone. But we go on, because we have to. However, for the Christian this is (or should be) about much more than biology, medicine and politics. When the media talks about lessons to be learned, what is usually meant is how governments and health systems have coped with a pandemic; what was done well, what was done badly. An examination of these issues is clearly worthwhile And in the same vein all of us can perhaps reflect on how we responded, following guidelines or otherwise, wearing masks, getting vaccinated and the like. But this is thinking at  a particular level. And if it’s the only thinking that’s going on, we’re likely to draw only partial conclusions and learn partial lessons.

It has always seemed folly to me to draw direct lines between awful events, even big ones, and the judgment of God (discussed previously here). I don’t have the insight of an Amos or Jeremiah. But the pandemic is an event of global scale. It might, and probably will, be explained eventually by things like human skulduggery, incompetence, and individual and collective stupidity. But the ability of a virus that, while not benign is certainly not the most dangerous, to bring complete global dislocation must at a minimum say something about the basic fragility of modern life. Indeed, the pandemic has surely alerted us that to the fact that some of the most welcome aspects of modern life have amplified the dangers posed by the virus itself. International air travel, a boon to education, commerce and leisure in recent years, has facilitated rapid, global spread of the virus and its variants. The internet and social media, which have so improved communication and information transmission, have been used to transmit conspiracy theories and vaccine scepticism, depressing take-up in some quarters, with the attendant increased risk to health and life. Yes, science and technology have provided remarkably effective vaccines in a record short time, and this has saved lives. But the basic point stands – modern life is fragile, more fragile than we realised, and perhaps in some ways more fragile than in the past.

The virus is one evolving global tragedy, but it come at the time of of another - climate change. The UK Met office issued its first “extreme heat warning” this week. This follows record hot temperatures in North America, and freak summer floods in continental Europe. These events have either cost lives or are projected too. This is on the back of other disturbing evidence of the climate change scientists have been warning about for decades. The human cause of climate change is much less disputable than the proximate cause of the pandemic. Over decades rather than years, we face the severe consequences of what we have been doing to the planet. The scale of the action required to mitigate the effects of these action has begun to foment protests. But there is no sign of most of us really getting our heads round what is required to avoid what is coming. Much of this can be understood in (far from simple) naturalistic terms. Models can be built. Projections made. But are there deeper lessons?

For what its worth, here is my tentative thinking so far. The Bible closes with the book of Revelation, in which, among other things, a series of disasters is described. I had always thought of these as occurring over short periods of time, with a purpose that was quite obvious to those experiencing them. As a reader of Revelation I know that they serve to demonstrate to the whole of humanity that ignoring God, rebelling against Him, and living without reference to Him is self-defeating and ultimately only leads to unescapable judgment. Unfortunately, this isn’t the lesson that is learned from those suffering them. However, Revelation is highly symbolic and there is nothing in the text that demands that what is outlined occurs over short periods. So could infolding disasters like the pandemic and climate change, be two such calls to reassess where we stand in relation to the God who created the world that we are despoiling?

We appear to be in a transition out of the pandemic at least. The practical, political and medical lessons should all be learned. We’ll see if they are. But the clamour and rush for a return to “normality” should not drown out deeper lessons that could be, and perhaps need to be learned.

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.