Coming to faith through Dawkins

Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: 12 Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity by Denis Alexander
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought this was a very good book and well worth reading.

A couple of weeks ago I was at the book launch where Denis Alexander, one of the editors, introduced it by interviewing three of the authors, and the following morning I heard him speak on genetic determinism, which happens to be his academic field. Dr Alexander, and the authors, made the book sound interesting, and so it was.

What bothers me a bit about writing a review, no matter how much I enjoyed the book, is that it is in effect a collection of twelve reviews of a book that I haven't read, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Note: Though this piece is based on a review I wrote on GoodReads, it goes beyond the review in being more wide-ranging, and also more personal

The God Delusion is a polemic against religion in general and Christianity in particular, and in this book all twelve authors describe how reading it had the opposite of the intended effect on them.

Obviously not all readers will find Dawkins's book counterproductive, and indeed for some of these authors it initially wasn't; but in all of them it ultimately produced the opposite effect to what the author intended. Many of these authors were looking for something to confirm or reinforce their atheism, but instead The God Delusion had the opposite effect and made them doubt it.

Several of the authors had also read, and been similarly influenced by others of the so-called New Atheists, notably Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. I haven't read any of their books either. The nearest I got was picking up The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris in a book shop one day, and glancing through it. I was curious to read what he had to say on the topic, but I didn't want to spend any money on it, so thought I'd wait till I could find someone who had a copy of the book and was willing to lend it to me. From my skimming through it I couldn't see anything new about the "new" atheism though; it all looked very much like the "old" atheism I'd learned about as a first-year university student through the arguments and the tracts handed out by members of the university Rationalist Society led by the redoubtable Dr Eddie Roux. These arguments and tracts were more rational, more logical, and more coherent than a lot of the stuff put out by the "New Atheists" and their followers seems to be.

Some of the contributors to Coming to Faith through Dawkins are working in the same or related academic fields as Richard Dawkins, and admire his work as an evolutionary biologist, and say how disappointed they were when they read The God Delusion, which fell far below the standard of his scientific works. Celebrity in one discipline does not necessarily make one an expert in another, unrelated, field. For more on that, see here.

Though I haven't read any of the works of the "New Atheists", I have encountered some of their disciples and fans online. I usually try to avoid being drawn into arguments with them, as most of them tend to be more dogmatic than their heroes, and their logic tends to be even more simplistic, so that the arguments go round in circles. They love to recite the creed of valid and invalid arguments, often just before asking question-begging questions or setting up a straw man, so one thing I learned from this book was that even the models they base themselves on do that.

One of the best examples of that came from a colleague at work who was an agnostic, and tried to join an online group for discussing atheism, agnosticism and so on. But he was blackballed because he had a heretical view of the nature of God. It turned out that in order to join the group one had to not believe in the god that Sam Harris didn't believe in, having exactly the same nature and characteristics. No other god would do. 

One reason I haven't read any of the works of the New Atheists is that I'm not much interested in the question of the "existence" of God. I have never been convinced by any of the arguments for the existence of God, and I suspect that most Christians are unaware of them, much less convinced by them. Some parts of Coming to Faith through Dawkins mentioned the Cosmological Argument and a couple of others. I'd have to look them up to find what they are, so I just skimmed through those parts of the book. 

That is also another of the reasons I try not to get involved in arguments with soap-box atheists online or in person. The arguments wouldn't convince me, so why would they convince them? The only times I do comment are when the atheist asks a question-begging question, or demonstrates some other logical flaws.

One such question, however, I did relay to Dr Denis Alexander when he spoke on genetic determinism, because it seemed to be right in his field. Someone who bills himself as a talented sceptic asked on Twitter (alias X) "What is the biological cause of the fear of death?"

I took his question at face value, and answered: "Natural Selection. Those who do not fear death do not survive long enough to reproduce."

He didn't comment, but I suspect that that was not the kind of answer he was looking for. There may have been a hidden sub-text; there usually is a hidden sub-text to such questions.

And most questions asked by soap-box atheists seem to start in the wrong place and with questionable assumptions, like "What evidence do you have for the existence of God?" (I learned from Coming to Faith Through Dawkins that the demand for "evidence" is a prominent characteristic of the New Atheists).

Any response is likely to be met with "The onus is on you to provide evidence." But who determined the onus? The onus-putters. The question belongs to Humpty Dumpty; it's really "Who is to be master? That's all."

The authors of Coming to Faith through Dawkins come from many different Christian traditions, and many different academic fields. They come from five different countries (three of them are South Africans -- the ones who were at the book launch). Some of the contributions appealed to me more than others, but because of the variety anyone who has any interest in questions of science and faith, or related questions, should find this book interesting.








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Overdone stuff on Facebook

On Facebook recently there seems to be a proliferation of pictures to illustrate sayings, slogans or cliches.

It tends to be the opposite of the "Occupy" movement -- 99% are bad or meaningless, and a waste of bandwidth. The words themselves aren't worth much, but on the principle that "a picture is worth a thousand words" people seem to try to give the impression that something is meaningful when it is actually meaningless by wrapping it up in pictures.

Now perhaps this is all a matter of personal taste. I've occasionally "shared" a picture that I thought was true or witty, and some people have then liked my "status" (status? as in married or single? HIV positive or negative? Employed, unemployed or retired? Refugee? Asylum seeker?).

Here are some of the sillier ones I've seen recently.



The only message I get from this one is that atheists are just as self-deluded as the rest of humanity. Whoever produced this conveniently ignores (and obviously wants to persuade other people to ignore), things like the Butovo Massacre.

And then there is this one.

At one level, the message is much the same as the previous picture, but in a sense it is worse.

The sentiment expressed is true enough, and I have no problem with that. The problem is not with what is said, but rather with what is not said, because the implication is that those, like the person pictured, to whom the saying is attributed, who are willing to shed blood and take innocent life in the name of national pride and imperial hegemony will, of course, bring a true and lasting peace.

Bah, humbug!

Like the first picture, it tells you half the story, and tries to get you to ignore the other half.

The next one, however, is the worst of the lot.

The one of Hillary Clinton shows something she said and shows a picture of the one who said it.

But in this one, the words don't matter, because I'm pretty sure the silly-looking git in the purple jacket and bow tie never said it at all. I've seen his face on Facebook dozens of times, with all kinds of opinions attributed to him, some of them utterly contradictory.

At least with Hillary Clinton you know who she is, and you know that she is part of a government in whose name have been done many of the things that she ascribes to the name of religion.

But who is the bloke with the purple jacket and the bow tie? And does he actually know what opinions have been ascribed to him by countless thousands of Facebook posters? They are so contradictory that he can't possibly agree with them all. And why should his supposed endorsement make the sentiment expressed any more acceptable?

I say nothing about the sentiment itself -- in this case the content is unimportant. It's just a question of why this guy's endorsement is thought to be important. It's about as silly as those old advertisements in the 1940s and 1950s that showed an actor in a white coat endorsing a particular brand of toothpaste.

On the other hand, I did think that this one was funny, and probably would not have worked so well without the pictures.



Which just goes to show that it's probably all a matter of taste, after all.

Ridiculous beliefs

I came across this when someone retweeted it on Twitter, with the comment "Ridiculous beliefs".

I agree.

The problem is, though, that I cannot recall ever meeting anyone who actually believes that.

Can you call something a "belief" if no one believes it?

If any member of the Orthodox Church said they believed such things, they would, sooner or later, be told that they were heretical. The whole thing is heretical, and every single clause is heretical.

The Roman Catholic Church, I should think, would have a similar reaction. I don't know if they still have the Inquisition, but they'd revive it pretty quickly if lots of people started saying that they believed that stuff.

Protestants?

Well, it's a bit harder to say with Protestants , because there are so many different varieties of Protestantism that it is conceivable that there is some sect, somewhere out there, that might believe one or more of those things. But, as I said, I haven't actually met anyone who believes them.

But, in one sense, that would be beside the point. It's obviously a caricature, and it's not meant to represent any beliefs that anyone actually holds.

So what is it meant to represent?

What is it supposed to communicate, about what, and to whom?

Perhaps we could try to deconstruct it.

Here are some of my attempts at deconstruction. If anyone can come up with other ideas, please add them in the comments.

1. My first thought is that it is a piece of "feel good" propaganda by militant atheists for militant atheists. By caricaturing Christian beliefs, and presenting them as ridiculous, they can feel smug and superior when comparing themselves with Christians. So it enables them to feel good about themselves. Some may be aware that it is a caricature, others may not, but that doesn't matter much, because the main point is to feel superior.

2. The second one is a little more sinister. This is that it is propaganda by by militant atheists for ordinary don't care atheists, for agnostics, for anyone who is not a Christian, and who is ignorant about Christianity, with the aim of getting them to reject Christianity because they reject a caricature. It is possibly calculated to stir up hatred for Christians. In other words, it is a caricature verging on "hate speech".

But in deconstructing it, we need to go a bit deeper than that.

Where did the caricature come from? What is its source?

A friend of mine, now a retired Anglican bishop, once wrote the following about Christian mission:

The Church exists for mission, not merely by words, but by representing Christ. Its work is not to convert, that is the Holy Spirit's work; ours is to preach (Mark 16:15). `Think not of the harvest, but only of proper sowing.' We bear witness, whether they hear or whether they forbear' (Ezekiel 2:5 etc.). Our task, and it is quite sufficient to keep us going without bothering about the consequences, is to make sure that if people reject Christ, they reject Christ and not a caricature of him, and if they accept him, that they accept Christ and not a caricature. If they reject, we remember that Christ got the same treatment - in fact half our problem is that we require something better than the success of Christ. We are not to cast pearls before swine (Matthew 7:6) - we are not to try to `fix up' people's salvation against their will; `to try to force the word on the world by hook or by crook is to make the living word of God into a mere idea, and the world would be perfectly justified in refusing to listen to an idea which did not appeal to it'. This is the way we seek Christ's success. The Church is not to be like a mighty army, pressing on regardless; it is more like a bloody doormat - a phrase which could even fit the Master of the Church himself, for it is only by the cross and precious blood of Christ that we are what we are, and he himself is the way on which we must tramp and maybe wipe our boots as we come to the Father (John 14:6). This is the kind of Saviour we represent.

And I suggest that in many ways the caricature has come from Christians themselves, from Christians who have done some of the things suggested in the paragraph I quoted -- tried to fix up people's salvation against their will, tried to make the living word of God into a mere idea, tried to present a caricature of Christ rather than Christ himself.

And that is in fact the original sin, because it goes back to the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve presented a caricature of God to the snake.

God said to Adam and Eve that they could eat the fruit of any tree in the garden but one. And the snake asks what God said, and Eve said that God had told them not to eat from that tree, but also not to touch it. That is an extensive exaggeration of what God said. An ogre God sounds more impressive than the true God. And right up till now there have been Christians who have presented an ogre God.

I was once at a church youth group where an evangelist was speaking. At the time there were some popular bumper stickers on cars that had a picture of a smiley face, and the legend, "Smile, God loves you."

The evangelist denounced these in no uncertain terms.

"That's wrong," he said. "God doesn't love you, he is very angry with you because you're a sinner. He was so angry that he killed His Son."

That was presenting an ogre God, a caricature. And one doesn't have to take the caricature a whole lot further to get to the statement, in the picture above, "I will kill myself as a sacrifice to myself."

So I would say that if atheists want to reject Christ, then it is better that they reject Christ rather than that they reject a caricature of him, or even accept a caricature of him.

But it is much more important that Christians should not present a caricature in the first place.

Look who's defending Western Christian Civilisation now!

Back in the 1950s and 1960s the National Party government in South Africa kept passing more and more repressive laws, which it claimed were necessary to defend Western (or "White" -- the terms were interchangeable in Nat vocabulary) civilisation.

What were they defending it against?

The Communist menace, that's what.

One of the first repressive laws they passed was the Suppression of Communism Act (Act 44 of 1950).

The National Party in South Africa and the Communist Party in Russia fell from power a couple of decades ago. The National Party has since disappeared from the scene, its remnants being absorbed into the DA and the ANC, which are now the two biggest parties in the South African parliament.

The Russian Communist Party, however, still exists, and look what they're up to now:
В Госдуме создают депутатскую группу по защите христианских ценностей - говорят, что для пропаганды : Новости : Накануне.RU, which, being interpreted means

And here it is, from the horse's mouth:

We intend to develop international cooperation for the common defense of Christian values, because we believe that the future of Europe, as well as the future of a revived Russian Federation does not conclude in a plantation of permissiveness, of total consumption, dehumanization, flouting the basic norms of human common life, and a return to traditional, orthodox Christian values.

That's from Sergei Gavrilov, a Communist Party representative in the Russian Duma.

Sergei Chapnin, an Orthodox journalist in Russia, comments on Facebook:

What a disgrace for Russia! What a mockery of history! The Communists are going to defend Christian values​​, "the Communist Party Guide never took anti-Christian positions. You can not put the Communists in the current blame the sins of 20s, the acts of" militant atheists "Yaroslavl-Gubelman or the latest large-scale" Khrushchev's "persecution of the church in the early 60's" (S. Gavrilov, the Communist Party).

One doesn't know whether to laugh of cry.

Aids, Atheists, Condoms and Catholics

Some prominent British militant atheists, like Polly Toynbee and Richard Dawkins, have accused the Roman Catholic Church of being responsible for the deaths of millions of people in Africa from Aids, because of their teaching that the use of condoms (and other forms of contraception) is morally wrong. This, claim these atheists, has caused millions of Africans to die from Aids.

Hat-tip to The Pittsford Perennialist: Is the Pope Responsible for the Deaths of Millions of Africans? for the link to this article:

Shameless Popery: What Impact Does Catholic Teaching Have on AIDS in Africa?

This is a common meme. Arch-atheist Richard Dawkins used this same argument to argue that the Catholic Church was in the running for the major institution that “most deserves the title of greatest force for evil in the world.” So let's tackle this argument head-on: Is the Catholic stance against contraception responsible for the AIDS-related deaths of millions of Africans?


Well, why not see what the data says? After all, these are the same atheists who routinely crow about being interested in real knowledge and reason, rather than faith. So let's put their faith to the test. If the Catholic Church's teachings against condoms are causing millions of Africans to contract AIDS, we should expect to see heavily-Catholic countries with far higher AIDS rates than their non-Catholic counterparts. So I decided to compare the rates by region and by country.

The post is quite interesting for the comparative statistics and graphs it gives for the rates of Aids infection, though one could perhaps argue for a long time over the accuracy of the statistics and the reasons for the differences.

But there is really no need for these statistics to show that the arguments of the atheists are not merely wrong, but also remarkably stupid.

I think it is generally accepted that Aids is a sexually-transmitted disease (STD). And one of the main reasons for its spread is sexual promiscuity.

The Roman Catholic Church, however, teaches that sexually promiscuous behaviour, such as fornication and adultery, is morally wrong. If using a condom is regarded as morally wrong, so is fornicating.

So why should people like Richard Dawkins and Polly Toynbee assume that people who have chosen to ignore their church's teaching by committing adultery will suddenly start observing it by not using condoms while doing so?

They might well not use condoms while committing adultery, but it is highly unlikely that their church's teaching on contraception will influence them when they have already chosen to ignore its teaching on adultery.

Or perhaps they think that Tom Lehrer's satirical song about the Irish lass who murdered members of her family one by one is a serious piece of sociological research:

And when at last the police came by
Sing rickety-tickety-tin
And when at last the police came by
Her little pranks she did not deny
To do so she would have had to lie
And lying, she knew, was a sin, a sin
Lying, she knew, was a sin.

Religion and politics

Religion and politics don't mix -- well that's what the pietistic evangelicals of the religious right used to tell us back in the days of apartheid. Therefore, they concluded, Christians should not criticise political leaders and their policy of apartheid and the ethnic cleansing that resulted from it. "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's".

Now the boot is on the other foot, and it is the secular humanists and the "new atheists" who are saying that religion and politics don't mix, and one gets the impression that if they had their way there would be two voters rolls, an A roll for atheists, to elect 350 members of parliament, and a B roll for agnostics, who would be allowed to elect 50 members of parliament, and the rest would have no vote at all, and everyone knows that all war, hatred and oppression in the world has been caused by religion, and until the superstitious have come to their senses they should not be allowed to vote.

But what about the politicians themselves?

Over the last week there have been several news items about prominant politicians and their religious views, practices or utterances, to wit Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama and Jacob Zuma. These have been interesting, but even more interesting have been the responses.

Let's start with Jake the Fake. So far no one has put it better than Tinyiko Sam Maluleke's Blog - Thinking Allowed!: Welcome to Jacob Zuma's Heaven:

“When you vote for the ANC, you are also choosing to go to heaven. When you don’t vote for the ANC you should know that you are choosing that man who carries a fork … who cooks people.” Thus spake the son of God to loud cheers and unstoppable giggles. And not for the first time, mind you. He spoke before, he is speaking now and he will speak again. How many times before, has he underlined the intimate relationship between the ANC and the Lord? With uncharacteristic calm and collection, our Jacob has pointed out that until the Lord returns, the ANC will rule. To the ANC has ruling authority been granted during this interim period of uncertainly — the in-between period — the period between the ascension of Jesus and the return of Jesus. Only those who hide in the ark called ANC will survive the trials and tribulations of the current age! You have heard it said before that Jesus will return to fetch the righteous and the holy, but in Mthatha last Friday, Jacob the son of God said to you, Jesus will return to fetch those clad in the black, green and gold.

'Nuff said. If you want to read more, go and read the rest of it on Tinyiko's blog.

Then there was this: Putin on Mount Athos pilgrimage:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has visited the monastic community of Mount Athos in Greece, one of Orthodox Christianity's holiest sites.

He was the first Russian leader to visit the male-only community, on a narrow, rocky peninsula east of Thessaloniki, Russian TV reported.

The trip was part of Mr Putin's two-day visit to Greece.

He has openly embraced the Orthodox faith, despite having served the atheist Soviet regime as a KGB officer.

Well, I suppose that makes him an apostate atheist, but at least he has gone to the source, unlike the days when the leader of the Russian Communist Party, anxious to acquire some of the magic pixie dust that fell from the church, which public opinion polls showed was more trusted by the people than politicians, decided to visit a church one day for a photo-op, and lit a candle with his cigarette lighter.

And then there is Barack Obama.

If Putin was a convert from atheism, Barack Obama, was a convert from agnosticism and, rather touchingly, seems as much concerned about his own family as about religion in the great affairs of state or the fortunes of his party. Barack Obama affirms his Christianity | The Guardian:

The US president told the national prayer breakfast in Washington that he prays for peace in the Middle East – and that he also asks for God's assistance with his 12-year-old daughter, Malia.

'Lord, give me patience as I watch Malia go to her first dance, where there will be boys. Lord, let her skirt get longer as she travels to that place,' Obama recounted.

Obama's speech today was laced with Biblical references in his most public affirmation of his faith. With many Americans under the illusion that he might be a covert Muslim, Obama explained: 'I came to know Jesus Christ for myself and embrace him as my Lord and Saviour.'

Obama described his upbringing as 'not religious', his father as a non-believer and his mother 'grew up with a certain scepticism … she only took me to church at Easter and Christmas – sometimes'.

The response of one American (but typical of other responses) to this news was to say "The Koran permits lying if doing so benefits Islam."

We are urged to pray for rulers and civil authorities, so let us pray for all these leaders. But especially Barack Obama, because he is evidently president of a nation of lunatics.

How I found God and peace with my atheist brother

The journalist brothers Christopher and Peter Hitchens have gained some notoriety for their radically different views on the relative merits of atheism and Christianity, and even at one point had a public debate on the topic.

In this article Peter Hitchens gives his testimony, as it were. How I found God and peace with my atheist brother: PETER HITCHENS traces his journey back to Christianity | Mail Online

It appears that their sibling rivalry goes back to their early childhood, and that their parents at one point even persuaded them to sign a peace treaty, which Peter admits he was the first to break.

In a recent post I quoted something very critical of the British Daily Mail and its poor journalistic standards, and so when someone recommended this piece by Peter Hitchens to me I nearly didn't bother to read it. But it would have been a pity to let prejudice keep me from reading something as interesting as this.

Saving the Soul of Secularism

Recently someone sent me, quite unsolicited, a link to this article Saving the Soul of Secularism:

Since February 2003, millions in the U.S. and around the world have participated in marches, rallies and varied protests, making a bold, ethical stand against U.S. military aggression. Citizens have engaged in persistent resistance to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of U.S troops.

While numerous humanists have and continue to be actively involved in the anti-war movement many others are too narrowly focused on issues such as church-state separation and promoting science education.

The time has come for humanists to actively assert that they are as committed to peace and ending U.S. militarism as they are to the separation of church and state. If we can see the threat to freedom posed by the mixture of church and state, we must see the threat to freedom posed by militarism.

The very legitimacy of secularism and freethought is at stake. Humanists, atheists, and assorted freethinkers along with the organizations that represent them: the American Humanist Association, American Atheists, Secular Student Alliance, Freedom From Religion Foundation, Center for Inquiry, among others, should join anti-war/peace organizations in calling for a dramatic change in U.S. foreign policy away from neo-liberal imperialism and militarism.

This strikes me as very strange.

I can understand why humanists, who believe that human beings have intrinsic value, might see militarism as a threat to human freedom and therefore a bad thing.

What I find difficult to understand is the logic of urging atheists to support such a cause. I can see no logical connection between atheism and a response to militarism (or to pacifism, for that matter). There is nothing about atheism that makes it desirable that atheists should join anti-war or peace organisations. There is also nothing about atheism that makes it undesirable. Atheism, as atheism, is surely quite neutral in regard to such moral imperatives.

Why should an atheist, by virtue of being an atheist, believe that neoliberal imperialism is a bad thing? Some atheists have clearly believed that it is quite a good thing.

It is possibile to say, as Marx and Lenin did, that it is incumbent on a communist to be an atheist. But the reverse is not true. It is not incumbent on an atheist to be a communist. An atheist can just as easily be a neoliberal imperialist.

This seems to be "fluffy bunny" secularism, as some of my (neo) pagan friends would say. They seem to be getting carried away by moralism.

A.N. Wilson: believer, unbeliever, believer

A.N. Wilson, the novelist and literary biographer, has returned to the Christian faith after a spell as an atheist (hat-tip to The Inklings: A.N. Wilson).

New Statesman - Why I believe again):

I haven’t mentioned morality, but one thing that finally put the tin hat on any aspirations to be an unbeliever was writing a book about the Wagner family and Nazi Germany, and realising how utterly incoherent were Hitler’s neo-Darwinian ravings, and how potent was the opposition, much of it from Christians; paid for, not with clear intellectual victory, but in blood. Read Pastor Bonhoeffer’s book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer’s serenity before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to look forward to.

His article about his reconversion is quite interesting, and that is one of the more interesting bits for me at the moment, perhaps because a couple of days ago I participated in a survey on beliefs, which seemed to me to raise similar questions. I did the survey, and it begged too many questions. I thought the authors needed to examine their presuppositions, and ask themselves whether they could assume that those who answer the survey question share those presuppositions, otherwise they might totally misinterpret the answers they receive.

As another person who took part in the survey put it

The assumptions seem to be that people go from "believing" to "not believing" in:

a) Monsters
b) Santa Claus
c) God or gods

Interesting correlations, those. They do have a couple of questions for those who came to believe in God as adults, but most of the questions have an underlying assumption that people don't go from unbelief as children to belief as adults, which made it difficult for me to respond to the survey. I had to leave several notes in the boxes that asked for explanations.

My own observation was that, concerning monsters, Chairman Mao, who I assume was an atheist, said that "monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed".

Chairman Mao also made frequent reference to "paper tigers" and "bean curd tigers" -- could it be assumed that he believed in the existence of those as a child, and that he could have said (if he were still alive to do the test) whether he stopped believing in them when he was 8, 16, 32 or 64?

The test asked if one had "seen" monsters. Chairman Mao said that US imperialism was a bean curd tiger -- what kind of sense does it make to ask whether one has "seen" US imperialism, either when one is awake, or when one is dreaming? Can one "see" abstract things physically, which is what the designers of the survey seemed to assume? Could I say that I had "seen" bean curd tigers at the age of six, but that I had stopped "believing in them" by the time I was 8, and thereafter only "saw" them in my dreams? What would Chairman Mao have said if he had been asked to take a test like that?

The designers of the survey seem to assume that human beings think like computers, and are not capable of abstract or symbolic thought.

They also appeared to assume that people stop believing in God/gods because of injustice in the world, and continue to believe in God/gods because of justice in the world. The possibility of the reverse being true did not seem to have occurred to them. That, I thought, was the most ridiculous assumption of all, and it is linked to what A.N. Wilson said about Bonhoeffer's Ethics.

Oh, if you want to try the survey for yourself, you can find it here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/DevelopmentofBeliefsNew.

I haven't read much of A.N. Wilson's work, in fact the only book of his I've read is his memoir of Iris Murdoch. When I saw it in a shop, going cheap, I bought it, because I wanted to learn something more about Iris Murdoch and what made her tick. I thought the book was a biography of Murdoch, but it was not; it was more like an autobiography of A.N. Wilson. I was misled, as I flipped thoruhg it in the shop, by a chapter headed "I want you to writye my biography". But it is a memoir rather than a biography. And that's OK, as long as one understands that. Memoirs can make useful sources for biographers, but biographies they are not.

I've sometimes thought of writing biographies of some people that I have known, but I realise that I have neither the time nor the energy nor the patience nor the resources to do it. To write a good biography is a huge task, and I simply don't know how biographers manage it. Where do they find the money, for a start, to travel around and collect their material? From publishers' advances? But the publishers must then be pretty certain that they are going to make a lot of money out of sales, and the only biographies for which they will do that are the badly written ones, the ones hastily tossed off by hack journalists after the death of a celeb, not properly researched, but enough to keep the fans happy and paying. So the biographers who get the money don't need it, and the ones that need the money don't get it.

So I don't blame A.N. Wilson not for writing a biography of Iris Murdoch, but perhaps he will one day. It will be interesting to see if his reconversion to Christianity changes his attitude to ppeople like C.S. Lewis and Hillaire Belloc, for whom he has written biographies. Will he rewrite them, or write an addendum? Or will he claim that what he wrote was just the objective truth. It will be interesting to see.

Atheist evangelism

A group of people in Britain are engaging in "atheist evangelism" by sponsoring bus advertisments with the slogan "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life".

Simon Barrow: People are as likely to be sceptical about the 'atheist bus' as they are about being sold religion:

This week the 'atheist bus' project finally gets wheels. After scrambling around for a few thousand quid, the money has finally come in to perambulate an inspiring message ('There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life') around our streets, bringing merriment to millions...

To those without a huge vested interest in promoting or dissing religion, this probably looks a slightly odd initiative. Frankly, the slogan is a bit anodyne. It's the non-believing equivalent of 'God may very well exist. Now have a nice day'. But it will probably still be enough to upset counter-evangelists of the kind who like to tell everybody they are going to hell for not subscribing to their particular doctrine, and who think atheism is very, very naughty.

Simon Barrow also comments about it in his blog FaithInSociety, and several others have also commented on it. In fact, so many people have commented on it that further commentary might seem to be redundant.

I tend to agree with Bishop Alan’s Blog: London Atheist ads: Shome mishtake?, when he says: "Perhaps this particular ad is more agnostic than atheist, and we still have to await a genuinely atheist poster ad."

But what interests me are the values expressed by the ad, which are assumed rather than explicitly promoted. They are not really atheist values, because there can be no specifically atheist values, since atheism is the absence of something. Atheists may have all kinds of values, and all kinds of reasons for holding them, but the values and the reasons for holding them owe nothing to atheism. Marxism-Leninism, for example, is strongly atheist, but the values it espouses are not based on atheism, but on a particular theory of economics and history. Ayn Rand, who detested Marxism-Leninism, and proposed an alternative, capitalist ideology, was also an atheist. One could multiply examples, but the point is clear -- there are no specifically atheist values.

I don't know whether the sponsors of the bus ad are calling what they are doing "evangelism". But "evangelism" means "spreading good news", and the sponsors clearly believe their message is good news and they are spreading it, so it is evangelism of a sort.

But what is the message that they intend to convey? And what is the message that people receive?

I can't speak for others, but I can say what message I receive from the ad. Whether it is what the sponsors intended to convey, I don't know. But if any of them read this, perhaps they can tell me if I've got it right or wrong. And if the intended message doesn't get across, then it means that there is either something wrong with the sender, or with the message, or with the recipient.

So what is the good news?

"Behold I bring you glad tidings of great joy: There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life".

And that sounds like another message I've been hearing a lot on TV lately:

"You only have one life, so make it a full one with world-class entertainment."

Both messages seem to have the same underlying values, the same basic message:

Eat, drink, and be entertained, for tomorrow we die.

The advertisements are being placed on British buses, so they will be read by rich and well-fed Westerners. Simon Barrow notes elsewhere (Cold water, buses and shared humanity | Ekklesia) that it raises interesting issues about "the extent to which the philosophy reflected in the bus slogan - ‘There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’ - is widely shared (much more than many church leaders seem aware), and so on."

And yes, that philosophy is widely shared in prosperous Western societies, even if that prosperity is under threat of a recession.

And we see on TV how people "enjoy life" in Britain -- teenagers getting drunk. They send each other inane messages on their cell (mobile) phones, with scarcely a thought about the fact that in parts of the Congo armed groups are fighting to control access to coltan, one of the ingredients that makes such "enjoyment" possible, and that people, including teenagers and young children are being enslaved or killed as a result.

Will the message on British buses come across to people in strife-torn Congo as good news, so that they can "enjoy life", and have a full one, with "world-class entertainment"?

Oh yes, the message, the philosophy, of the slogan is widely shared in the rich West.

So how do I interpret it?

There is probably no God, so go ahead and enjoy your life, even if it is at the expense of other people. There is probably no God who cares about them, so you don't need to care about them either.

Forty years ago I was studying for a Christian doctrine exam, and instead of reading the text books for the course I read a book written by a Methodist minister in Zambia, Colin Morris. It was called Include me out: confessions of an ecclesiastical coward, and this is how it began:

The other day a Zambian dropped dead not far from my front door. The pathologist said he'd died of hunger. In his shrunken stomach were a few leaves and what appeared to be a ball of grass. And nothing else.

Colin Morris's book wasn't aimed at rich well-fed atheist evangelists, but rather at rich well-fed Christian ones, and at ecclesiastical bureaucrats, and he challenged them to think about how the message they put across, in words or deeds, in what they did and what they didn't do, could have come across as good news to "an ugly little man with a shrunken belly, whose total possessions, according to the police, were a pair of shorts, a ragged shirt, and an empty Biro pen."

There is probably no God, so it doesn't really matter if your leaders, using your taxes, rain down bombs on people in Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, just so long as you continue to enjoy a full life, with world-class entertainment. There is probably no God who cares about them, so don't let their plight interfere with your enjoyment of life.

Some of the things Colin Morris said 40 years ago are just as valid today, and they apply to all rich well-fed evangelists, atheist as well as Christian, including me.

Much theological writing is a highly elaborate conspiracy against that little man with the shrunken belly and his skeletal brethren. It is an exercise in endless qualification, dedicated to showing why we cannot take the words of the Galilean Peasant at their face value or follow His example simply. Let some Manchester bus conductor murmur that he can follow the words of Jesus but cannot follow the words of some of the men who followed Him, and he will earn himself a lecture. This would be to the effect that Jesus cannot be understood except within the whole framework of the History of Salvation and that he did not actually say many of the words reported of him in the Gospels, so he must take our words for what is fact and fancy, because we know!

The biggest problem for Christians with the philosophy behind the bus advertising is not that it is unacceptable, but that its message of hedonism is accepted all too easily by so many Christians. Again, to quote Colin Morris:

Our failure towards the little people of the earth is more than a lapse of simple charity for which sincere contrition can atone. When our Churches have crumbled and our vestments have rotted and the wind blows through the ruins of our ecclesiastical structures, all that will stand and have eternal significance are creative acts of compassion -- the effectual signs of the presence of the Kingdom.

Because the Gospel is simple, the judgement is immediate. It awaits no historical summing up of all things. It can be put plainly and in first-person terms. I saw a starving man and there was no gnawing pain in my belly. I saw a hunchback and my own back did not ache. I watched a pathetic procession of refugees being herded back and forth sleeplessly, and I slept well that night.

Atheist irrationality and social blogrolling

Look Who's Irrational Now - WSJ.com:

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that's not a conclusion to take on faith -- it's what the empirical data tell us.

'What Americans Really Believe,' a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

Hat-tip to Stephen Murray.

I wouldn't really have paid much attention to this, were it not for the high proportion of militant atheists on Scoutle, a relatively new social blogrolling site that I've been trying out. As a result of that, I've seen an unusual number of atheists posts trumpeting about how rational they are, and how irrational everyone else is. An agnostic friend had a run-in with some of them about a year ago, and told me how irrational he found them, so there's not much new there. It's just interesting to see a bit of research backing up the anecdotal evidence.

As for Scoutle, well, it's an interesting blogging tool, and perhaps will improve once more people are using it and it has a bigger variety of members. The idea is that instead of going looking for interesting blogs on Google or Technorati or Amatomu and such sites, you send a "scout" out on Scoutle to go and do the looking for you. Your scout then presents you with a list of possibly interesting blogs, which you can then confirm or reject. I'm assuming that it learns from these confirmations and rejections and learns to revise its choices -- a bit like Stumble-Upon, only for blogs instead of ordinary web pages.

Though it has some quirks (like showing lots of militant atheist sites to a Christian blogger like me), I'm willing to give it a go because some of the other sites that are supposed to do something similar seem to have been misbehaving recently. Technorati, for example, has been quite slow. If you want to find out what they are saying in the blogosphere about Thabo Mbeki's ousting as president, you want to read it today, and not wait until Technorati gets round to pinging the blogs in two weeks time.

Another one that is disappointing recently is BlogExplosion. It is really a sort of manual version of Scoutle. You select a category of blogs you want to see, and a category of blogs you don't want to see, and it shows you the former and not the latter, and a few others thrown in for variety. In my case, I want to see blogs on books and literature, and don't want to see ones on business. But the last few times I've used it, it's shown me blogs on anything but books and literature, and very often repeats the same ones I saw last time, and worst of all, some of them haven't been updated since the last time I saw them. While you are looking at blogs on BlogExplosion, it shows your blog(s) to other people, so when I do that I try to do it just after I've posted new things on my blogs, so that the people who read them won't see the same old posts umpteen times. At least it gives you the option to say "don't show me this again".

As I said, Scoutle does much the same thing, but the process is automated. You don't have to go through five dull blogs to find one interesting one. Scoutle is supposed to find them for you. So if you've got an interesting blog, please join Scoutle now!

Atheist's bizarre attempt to convert Christian

One sometimes hears of fanatical Christians with over-enthusiastic in-your-face proselytising, but it seems that Christians don't have a monopoly. Atheists sometimes resort to such methods too.

clipped from www.eadt.co.uk AN ATHEIST subjected a devout Christian woman to a “relentless” campaign of harassment in which he smeared dog faeces on her car and urinated on her doorstep. Timothy Brown, of Edwin Avenue, Woodbridge, may seek medical help after a year-long bid to change Helen Watson's religious beliefs. Brown, 37, who is married and has a child, pleaded guilty at South East Magistrates' Court in Ipswich yesterday to racially aggravated harassment between September 1, 2007, and September 10 this year. The ordeal began in September last year after Mrs Watson had placed a religious fish sticker in her car. After that point, she would regularly find that another sticker had been put on top of it with words such as “myth”, “deceived”, “sucker” and “fiction”, which she said were derogatory to her religious views.

Hmm, Clipmarks doesn't seem to work tto well. Let's try "Blog this":

EADT - Atheist's bizarre bid to convert Christian:

AN ATHEIST subjected a devout Christian woman to a “relentless” campaign of harassment in which he smeared dog faeces on her car and urinated on her doorstep.

Timothy Brown, of Edwin Avenue, Woodbridge, may seek medical help after a year-long bid to change Helen Watson's religious beliefs.

Brown, 37, who is married and has a child, pleaded guilty at South East Magistrates' Court in Ipswich yesterday to racially aggravated harassment between September 1, 2007, and September 10 this year.

Hat-tip to Solomon Hezekiah.

The atheism meme

Hat-tip to Elizaphanian for this one.

Q1. How would you define “atheism”?

Being without God or gods

Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?

No, my parents were atheist/agnostic.

Q3. How would you describe “Intelligent Design”, using only one word?

Dunno.

Q4. What scientific endeavor really excites you?

Alternative energy sources

Q5. If you could change one thing about the “atheist community”, what would it be and why?

Give them a better sense of intellectual history, especially Christian intellectual history (ditto from Elizaphanian).

Q6. If your child came up to you and said “I’m joining the clergy”, what would be your first response?

You can't do it unless you're called, and if you're called you can't do anything else (ditto).

Q7. What’s your favorite theistic argument, and how do you usually refute it?

I don't have any favourite theistic arguments (ditto).

Q8. What’s your most “controversial” (as far as general attitudes amongst other atheists goes) viewpoint?

er... bearing in mind where I'm coming at this from, probably that God=meaning (ditto).

Q9. Of the “Four Horsemen” (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris) who is your favourite, and why?

Since I've never heard of Dennett, I'll pick him. He can't be worse than the other three, though I admit that I might think better of them if it weren't for their admirers ("There is no god, and Sam Harris is his prophet")

Q10. If you could convince just one theistic person to abandon their beliefs, who would it be?

Anyone who believes in the God that atheists don't believe in.

On the futility of arguing with atheists

Elizaphanian has been posting a series on atheism, and reading the comments on one of his posts has convinced me more strongly than ever of the futility of arguing with atheists.

An agnostic friend of mine came to the same conclusion, and I blogged about it in Militant atheism goes West. Since he puts the case much more convincingly than I can, I won't repeat his arguments here.

But one thing I will repeat. A blogging friend wrote in his LiveJournal about the new brand of atheist TV evangelists. He has now deleted his LiveJournal, so links to it will no longer work, and I hope he won't mind if I reproduce his post on That fool Dawkins

Rational debate about the existence/ non-existence of God, and the ethical implications thereof, is good. It belongs to human dignity to seek to discern what is true.

There is an academic discipline which studies questions such as what constitutes a warranted belief, what religious language ‘means’, whether it has a possible reference and what it means for our conceptions of the good life. That discipline is philosophy. There is also an academic discipline whose remit of study includes the atrocities committed in the name of religion. That discipline is history.

So why, when Channel Four want to air a programme about these issues do they give air-time to a biologist with no training whatsoever in either discipline? Moreover one whose previous pronouncements in this area have only been published because he has piggy-backed on his (justified) scientific reputation and which, considered in their own right, are unworthy of a moderately bright A-level student..

Yet another example of the ignoring of the humanities in mainstream culture and, in spite of the irrationalism of our age, the persistence of the Victorian cult of the polymath scientist. Boo, hiss.

Pagans and Neopagans

In a comment on another post Yvonne Aburrow writes:

Small grumble... why do Christians (even lovely ones such as your good self) always insist on the "Neo-" prefix? Is it to emphasise that you don't believe we have continuity with pagans of the past? Sure, we don't have the equivalent of apostolic succession (we call it initiatory lineage), but there is a continuity of ideas via the Western Mystery Tradition, and many another strand of thought and feeling. Also, the pagans of the classical world didn't call themselves Pagans, so I don't give them a capital P - but I do give it to modern Pagans because they identify as such.

Of course, given that you belong to a tradition with unbroken apostolic succession, maybe you should call all other forms of Christianity Neo-Christian...

This post is an attempt to respond to that.

I should say right at the start that in addition to being a Christian I am a curmudgeonly language pedant. I tend to be fussy about language and usage, and distinctions between the meanings of words that some might think hair splitting.

And for me, "pagan" is a general term, whereas "neopagan" is a more specific one.

"Pagan" started off as Christian slang for non-Christians. As the historian Robin Lane Fox puts it in his book Pagans and Christians:

In antiquity, pagans already owed a debt to Christians. Christians first gave them their name, pagani... In everyday use, it meant either a civilian or a rustic. Since the sixteenth century the origin of the early Christians' usage has been disputed, but of the two meanings, the former is the likelier. Pagani were civilians who had not enlisted through baptism as soldiers of Christ against the powers of Satan. By its word for non-believers, Christian slang bore witness to the heavenly battle which coloured Christians' view of life.

"Pagan" continued to be used as Christian slang for non-Christians right up to the middle of the 20th century. Paganism was not a religion. It was the state of not being a Christian. In Europe, perceptions of religion began to change with the growth of modernity. I don't want to go into that in too much detail here, but should just point out that modernity gave rise to the modern conception of "religion" and "religions", and the idea that Christianity was one instance of something that belonged to a wider category, one religion among many. Such a notion would probably never have occurred to anyone before the 17th century. What it led to was a notion among some people that the term "pagans" applied to adherents of non-monotheistic religions, so that anyone who was not a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim was a pagan. But still, no one was a self-described pagan.

In the 19th century, though, some people did begin to describe themselves as pagans. They accepted the Christian understanding, with an extension. Not only were they not Christian, they were not religious. Those who accepted "pagan" as a self-description were secular humanists.

An example of this usage can be seen in a book by Rosalind Murray, The Good Pagan's failure. It was a book of Christian apologetics written by one who had been a Good Pagan, but had become a Christian. I used to have a copy, but can't find it. The following excerpt from a review, however, should make it clear what the book is about, and how the word "pagan" is used in it.

The Good Pagan's Failure. By Rosalind Murray. (Longmans, Green, 7s. 6d. net.)

Miss ROSALIND MURRAY has attempted to interpret liberal humanism to the Christian, and Christianity to the humanist, to examine the misunderstandings which inevitably arise between the supernatural outlook of the "totalitarian" Christian, and the cultivated, "moderate", humanitarian worldliness of the Good Pagan. Miss Murray is singularly equipped to make this attempt, having known both worlds, and she has achieved a work of immediate value.

At its best (and Miss Murray knew it at its best) that humanism possessed qualities of culture, moral refinement, honour, and humane sensibility which were remarkable; today its essential weaknesses have worked themselves out, and the Good Pagan stands back in hurt surprise at the sight of a world in ruins. His intentions were so good, his heart so kind; what has gone wrong? Miss Murray examines his failure with intelligence and sympathetic insight, and shows how by his exclusive preoccupation with this world, his confidence that with bread (and kindness) alone man could be happy, the Good Pagan was forced to shut his eyes to the world's imperfections, to the facts of suffering, poverty and sin. But "by excluding Heaven we have not abolished Hell, by denying redemption we have not been redeemed, the sinner is still there, in the world and in ourselves".

Rosalind Murray, as the reviewer points out, was a member of both worlds. Her father, Gilbert Murray, was a well-known advocate of secular humanism. And Rosalind Murray's use of the term "pagan" was fairly widespread and well understood for the first two-thirds of the 20th century.

When I was teaching in the theology faculty of the University of South Africa (Unisa) in the 1990s, the faculty issued formal tutorial letters to students to say that they should not use words like "non-Christian" and "pagan". Their intentions were good. The people who compiled the letters thought that these terms were insulting, and that it was not good to be rude to people. The problem was that they were a little naive, and did not see how their own prohibition was actually a manifestation of an attitude of superiority. If it is bad to call someone a pagan or a non-Christian, that implies that one thinks that Christians are superior to non-Christians, the therefore it is rude to imply that a person is so inferior as not to be a Christian. I doubt that many pagans would be fooled by this disingenuousness. It actually patronising condescension at its worst.

At the same time, and especially since the mid-1960s, many people were happy to call themselves pagans, not because they were irreligious, but because they were religious. Many of them were consciously trying to revive the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe. But even in this sense, "paganism" did not refer to a single religion, but to a group of religions, some of which had their own names. Asatru, for example, as the revival of ancient Norse religions, Hellenism was the revival of the pre-Christian religion of the Olympian gods. There were new composite religions like Wicca.

Yvonne objects to the term on the grounds that it implies a lack of continuity, and in a sense it does: Asatru is not a continuation of ancient Norse religion. Hellenism is not a continuation of ancient Greek religion. They are revivals. The term "paganism" also covers what some have called "paleopaganism", which includes not only the ancient religions of Greece and Rome, but also religions that are still practised at the present day, including African and American traditional religions. And many modern pagans themselves have come up with, and are happy to use, terms like "neopaganism" and "paleopaganism" and indeed have helped to define them. While I don't agree with everything in that article, I think it does help to clarify the definitions of the terms.

Perhaps, as a postscript, I should say a little more about the question of "superiority", as manifested in both the Unisa tutorial letters and in the article referred to in the previous paragraph. After all, I remain a Christian -- doesn't that mean that I regard myself as superior to pagans, whether neo-, meso- or paleo-?

And the answer for me, at least, is no.

Someone once likened Christian evangelism to "one beggar telling another beggar where to get bread".

It's a good analogy. A beggar who finds bread is not necessarily better than one who has not. He may be "better off", but he is not "better". That is the point of the discussion of the Good Pagan's failure. Why the epithet "good"? The point is that the failure is not necessarily a failure of ethics or morality. Many pagans live better and more moral lives than many Christians, and some indeed have higher ethical and moral standards than some Christians. The moment that Christians assume that they are morally superior to others simply because they are Christians, they've lost the plot. And, as Isaac Bonewits points out in his article cited above, that has happened quite often, There is nothing in the Christian faith to justify such attitudes of moral superiority. And when we do adopt those attitudes, we simply show how much we are still sinners.

it seems to me...: the god delusion: a source criticism

Anyone who has done courses in Biblical Studies at university or done postmodern literary studies should find this exercise in deconstruction interesting: it seems to me...: the god delusion: a source criticism.

It seems that the book The god delusion is based on two very different and sometimes contradictory sources, H and A, which have been drawn together by a redactor, R, who tries to harmonise them.

Consciousness of absurdity and the absurdity of consciousness

It was G.K. Chesterton who said:

the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose.

To which I would add that having a state of consciousness is more absurd even than having an altered state of consciousness.

Absurd?

Well, yes.

Back in the 1960s there was a genre of "theatre of the absurd", and in one such play, A resounding tinkle by N.F. Simpson, one of the characters turns on a radio and hears a parody of an Anglican church service, with its versicles and responses:

V: Let us weep at the elastic as it stretches
R: And rejoice that it might have been otherwise

V: Let us sing because round things roll
R: And rejoice that it might have been otherwise

V: How flat are our trays
R: Our sewers how underground and rat-infested altogether

V: As a river flows always towards its mouth
R: So is sugar sweet.

V: Let us laugh with those we tickle
R: And weep with those we expose to teargas.

You get the idea -- but where is all this leading to?

It leads here:

V: Let us throw back our heads and laugh at reality
R: Which is an illusion caused by mescaline deficiency

V: At sanity
R: Which is an illusion caused by alcohol deficiency.

V: At knowledge which is an illusion caused by certain biochemical changes in the human brain structure during the course of human evolution, which had it followed another course would have produced other biochemical changes in the human brain structure, by reason of which knowledge as we now experience it would have been beyond the reach of our wildest imaginings; and by reason of which, what is now beyond our wildest imaginings would have been familiar and commonplace. Let us laugh at these things. Let us laugh at thought.
R: Which is a phenomenon like any other.

V: At illusion
R: Which is an illusion, which is a phenomenon like any other.

V: Let us love diversity.
R: Because there is neither end nor purpose to it.

V: Let us love simplicity.
R: Because there is neither end nor purpose to it.

V: Let us think and think we think because leaves are green and because stones fall and because volcanoes erupt in a world where seas are salt.
R: Amen.

Forty years later I came across this blog: Memoirs of an ex-Christian: I am my brain, in which the writer says, among other things

current advances in science, especially in neuroscience, are pointing to the disconcerting realisation that the soul is simply a product of, and is totally dependent on, the brain. In a fascinating article on the mystery of consciousness, published in the latest edition of Time, Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard

I'd also read something similar in an op-ed article in a Sunday newspaper a couple of years ago, to the effect that some neuroscientists and psychologists who have studied human consciousness had come to the conclusion that there's "nobody home". Such a conclusion might fit well with Buddhist anthropology, which generally denies the "self". It differs from Christian anthropology, which is based on the ultimate significance of the person.

But we didn't need neuroscientists to tell us this. Philosophers have pondered it for centuries, and most moderately bright 16-year-olds go through a solipsist phase. For me it was triggered by reading "The new reality" by Charles L. Harness, which for me was a paradigm shift that shaped my understanding of paradigm shifts.

I suspect that the question whether there is a "ghost in the machine" is not one that will be answered by neuroscience. It ends up in a circular argument, like a snake swallowing its own tail. Pinker's article gives numerous instances of the brain's limitations and the way in which it can be deceived. Why should it not be deceived when it tries to understand its own functioning?

The blogger (following Pinker) goes on to raise another question:

For some, this idea can be incredibly disconcerting. Not only does it rule out an afterlife, but it also brings up the question of morality: how can someone be moral without having to account for their actions in an afterlife? Steven Pinker, in the Time article, argues that the materialistic view of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the supernatural view of an afterlife, as it forces us to recognise the interests of other beings.

Is this anything more than wishful thinking?

If we rely solely on what neuroscience can tell us, the only system of values we can derive from it is nihilism: nothing exists, nothing is knowable, nothing has value.

Whether or not there is a ghost in the machine, one cannot derive values from the mechanism alone.

And Pinker errs when he says that "the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul", because the biology of consciousness provides no proof whatever for the value of anything. He also errs if he thinks that Christian morality, for one, depends on the dogma of an immortal soul. It doesn't.

Christian morality does indeed have unprovable dogmas as its basis, but it is just not the dogma of an immortal soul or an afterlife in which there are rewards and punishments. The basis of Christian morality is the idea that persons exist and have value. This is unprovable. But it is precisely the same dogma that lies at the basis of Pinker's proposed morality, and it is equally unprovable, and it cannot be derived from the biology of consciousness. It is derived from the consciousness of consciousness, which is not quite the same thing.

A Christian theologian, Paul Tillich, once said, "It is the greatness of Christianity that we can see how small it is. The importance of being a Christian is that we can stand the insight that it is of no importance."

And perhaps this too can be paraphrased and extended, as I paraphrased and extended the quotation from Chesteron at the beginning. The importance of being a Christian is that we can stand the insight that it is absurd.

But it seems to me that those, like Pinker, who claim to be able to derive morality from the biology of consciousness, do so because they cannot stand the insight that it is absurd.

And then, of course, there is that fool Dawkins.
-------

This a "synchroblog" posting, which means that other bloggers will be posting on the same day on the general theme of "Altered states of consciousness". Here are links to the other synchroblog postings.

• Shamanic Vision and Apocalyptic Scripture at Phil Wyman's Square No More
  
• Can prayer be an example of Alternate Conciousness? at Eternal Echoes
  
• Better Than I Was [at times], Not Better Than You Are by Mike of Earthsea
  
• Emotionalism vs rationalism at Adam Gonnerman's Igneous Quill
  
• Consciousness of the absurd and the absurdity of consciousness at Steve's Notes from Underground
  
• The Unconscious Christian by Matt Stone
  
• Hypnochristians at Jamie's More Than Stone
  
• The extreme consciousness of the Spirit by Les Chatwin
  
• The Spirit of the Lord is upon me at Mike's Musings
  
• What is reality? by David Fisher at Be the Revolution
  

Added in July: here's a belated link that would have been a worthy addition to this Synchroblog: Altered States, by Anthony North.