Christian faith is like soup*

Mark Vernon

In the Guardian, Mark Vernon comments on new books by Rowan Williams and Francis Spufford, beginning by asking, "What's it like to be a Christian?" He expands this to mean, "...what is faith as experienced?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/aug/19/rowan-williams-francis-spufford-christian

On Spufford's Unapologetic:

A central worry for him is not that the rational justification for belief has been undone. Faith is not about that anyway: as Coleridge noted, the best argument for Christianity is that "it fits the human heart".

As if "fits the human heart" means anything. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite the fan of metaphorical language. But metaphor (along with simile, its more straight-talking cousin) is useful only up to a point. Great for feelings, intuition and opinion, but not much cop at conveying fact. Metaphors and similes are useful for pointing out near equivalencies, but unless one is aware of the inevitable mismatch between the metaphor and the thing for which it is metaphorical, one can be easily misled — or unknowingly uninformed — as to the actual nature of the thing being discussed.

On Williams' The Lion's World:

None of this proves the existence of God in the way a science would demand because its evidence arises from the inner lives of individuals.

Evidence of what? Indigestion? More imprecise mystery-mongering.

It does, though, reflect a strand in the philosophical discussion of God, often forgotten today. Pascal drew attention to the problem God has in revealing himself to creatures he has made to be free, because if God were to offer irrefutable evidence then that would force a relationship of coercion, not love. God's solution, Pascal proposed, is to "appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart, and [to remain] hidden from those who shun him".

How very … convenient.

Williams' book is largely about C. S. Lewis, so the preponderance of what Daniel C. Dennett calls deepities should not be a surprise.

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*You didn't notice your soup bowl is directly under a leaking roof. No wonder it takes you so long to finish it, and no wonder it's so … thin.

The Rev. Canon Dr. Giles Fraser, Sniper-in-Chief

Giles Fraser

Is Giles Fraser attending the World Atheist Convention in Dublin this weekend? I don't know what he was expecting, but he seems to have been surprised by one of the speakers, Richard Green of Atheism UK (whom I was pleased to meet at the most recent Winchester Skeptics in the Pub). Anyway, Fraser has written up his reaction in the Guardian.

What is distinctive about Atheism UK, Green insists, is that it's an atheist organisation for all atheists, including those not committed to humanism. "We cater for atheists who are not humanists," he says.

A laudable goal, I would have thought. I'm all for inclusion. But Fraser manages to look down his nose at it.

These days, atheists who are not humanists are an unfamiliar breed. Most atheists, and in particular the new atheists, regard themselves as committed humanists. Indeed, they are new in name only for they appeal back to the atheistic humanism of the Enlightenment, with its optimism about human nature and strong belief in the power of human reason and the inevitability of progress.

It's no good castigating the "new" atheists for not being new — this soubriquet was coined not by the likes of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Dennett, but by their detractors (such as, dare I suggest, the Rev. Canon Dr. Giles Fraser, Canon Chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral).

The sunny optimism of the Enlightenment – not least its commitment to progress and a sense of the intrinsic goodness of human nature – was profoundly dented by the horrors of the first world war and the Nazi death camps.

Three paragraphs in, and we're on to the Nazis. Well done Giles!

The Enlightenment hadn't found another word for sin.

Why on earth would it need to?

And just as Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, a developing anti-humanism started to announce what, in less gender-conscious times, Foucault was to call "the death of man". Indeed, Nietzsche himself insisted the belief in humanity was itself just a hangover from a belief in God and, once God was eradicated, the belief in human beings would follow the same way.

It may come as a surprise to Fraser, but Nietzsche is not the atheist God — because, well, you know, it's in the description: "atheist". Nor do atheists, or even humanists, need a belief in human beings. Speaking about belief in this way is simply a misuse of the term, much like bemoaning atheistic denial of "sin".

Richard Green's "atheists who are not humanists" could meet in a phone box. Indeed, the new atheists simply duck the challenge made by atheistic anti-humanism, believing their expensive scientific toys can outflank the alleged conceptual weakness of their humanism.

Aside from the pejorative sniping it doesn't surprise me that Fraser makes a specific quantitative claim without backing it up. And who says that "atheists who are not humanists" are in favour of anti-humanism (whatever that is)? As for expensive scientific toys outflanking the alleged conceptual weakness of their humanism — what does that even mean?

Thus they dismiss the significance of philosophy just as much as they have always done of theology – as if the two were fundamentally in cahoots.

I see little evidence of atheists or humanists dismissing the whole of philosophy (A. C. Grayling,  Daniel C. Dennett, Stephen Law — to mention just three atheist philosophers off the top of my head). As for theology, Giles you can keep it. I've no use for your kind of theology, especially as you seem to believe it doesn't even have to be true.

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Eric MacDonald has read Fraser's peanut and dismembers it with a sledgehammer.

Giles Fraser lays aside his woolly mantle to review Sam Harris

Tonight Sam Harris is discussing morality with Giles Fraser. As I previously blogged, this is the event nearest to me, out of Sam Harris's three announced appearances on his UK book tour. Nevertheless I decided not to get a ticket because so far I've been severely underwhelmed by Giles Fraser (his recent spot on the Today Programme with A. C. Grayling is an example).

Earlier today, however, I discovered that last Saturday Guardian Online published Giles Fraser's review of The Moral Landscape, and reading it I found myself wishing I had swallowed my misgivings and arranged to attend the discussion. (The fact that IQ2 decided not to live-stream the event after all, is but one more regret.)

So what is it about Fraser's review that has brought on my change of heart? Mostly it's because he seems to have cast off the woolly mantle that has to date muffled anything of his I've come across. He reviews The Moral Landscape in a forthright manner, with hardly any wishy-washy equivocation. I still think he's wrong in most of what he says about the book, but his review convinces me that his discussion with its author would be more interesting than I had thought.

Fraser takes some potshots at Harris, but I think they misfire. For instance, on David Hume's point that you can't derive values from facts:

But Harris will have none of it. Science has sold itself cheap. The peace treaty must be torn up. Science can indeed tell us about morality. Indeed, science can determine morality.

Fraser also commits — on a grand scale — what might be called the "not my religion" fallacy:

With regard to the god Harris describes, I am a much more convinced atheist than he – even though I am a priest. For Harris asks constantly for evidence, with the implication that if he discovered some, he would change his mind. My own line would be that even if the god he described was proved to exist, I would see it as my moral duty to be an atheist.

He goes on to imply that he's heard it all before:

What is presented as Harris's big new idea is really just reheated utilitarianism with wellbeing in place of pleasure.

I also think Fraser has missed one of Harris's key points:

There are so many problems with utilitarianism, it's a pity Harris does so little to address them. How can one quantify the sum total of wellbeing produced by a single action when the potential consequences of any particular action are infinite? So keen is he to turn morality into science that Harris presses on regardless. His demand is that all morality be calibrated on a single scale. Yet if one observes what it is that people call good (and isn't observation a scientific golden rule?), instead of assuming what good ought to look like, one surely recognises very different sorts of moral value.

It seems to me that Harris does indeed address this — it's what I understand by there being different peaks in the moral landscape. Fraser legitimately raises the necessity of some kind of metric for determining how high up the peaks or deep in the valleys moral actions are, as have other critics, but Harris isn't saying he's got all the answers. He's asking for science to be brought to bear on moral questions. Fraser, however, won't have it:

Harris sees the great moral battle of our day as one between belief and unbelief. I see it as between those who insist that the world be captured by a single philosophy and those who don't.

Here we see Fraser's woolly equivocation breaking through once more. It sounds to me like a plea not just for pluralistic society but for pluralistic belief. Such is, after all, the Anglican way.

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UPDATE 2011-04-13:
The mp3 audio of the Fraser/Harris discussion can be downloaded here:
http://iq2.podbean.com/mf/feed/bhegmw/sam-harris-IQ2.mp3

A protest song to define protest songs

A fascinating article by Dorian Lynskey in today's Guardian online tells the story of "Strange Fruit", the protest song that defined the career of jazz singer Billie Holiday.

It is a clear, fresh New York night in March 1939. You're on a date and you've decided to investigate a new club in a former speakeasy on West 4th Street: Cafe Society, which calls itself "The Wrong Place for the Right People". Even if you don't get the gag on the way in – the doormen wear tattered clothes – then the penny drops when you enter the L-shaped, 200-capacity basement and see the satirical murals spoofing Manhattan's high-society swells. Unusually for a New York nightclub, black patrons are not just welcomed but privileged with the best seats in the house.

You've heard the buzz about the resident singer, a 23-year-old black woman called Billie Holiday who made her name up in Harlem with Count Basie's band. She has golden-brown, almost Polynesian skin, a ripe figure and a single gardenia in her hair. She has a way of owning the room, but she's not flashy. Her voice is plump and pleasure-seeking, prodding and caressing a song until it yields more delights than its author had intended, bringing a spark of vivacity and a measure of cool to even the hokier material.

And then it happens. The house lights go down, leaving Holiday illuminated by the hard, white beam of a single spotlight.

Click to read more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs

Creationist twaddle in the Guardian

This article by Alastair Noble in the Guardian's Comment is free section was flagged at RD.net. No doubt it will be kicked to death — deservedly so — but I did find some particular dumbosities that made me wonder whether the Guardian is being deliberately provocative having it appear on their site:

As a former science teacher and schools inspector, I am disturbed that proposals for science education are based on near-complete ignorance of intelligent design. I also think the views of most British people in this matter should not be so readily set aside.

I am disturbed that a former science teacher and schools inspector should propose the teaching of non-science in a science class. "Near-complete ignorance" is pretty much the most anyone can know about intelligent design, because there's nothing there. And scientific truth is not a matter of public popularity — even if every last British citizen thought creationism was true, that would not make it so.

It is an all too common error to confuse intelligent design with religious belief. While creationism draws its conclusions primarily from religious sources, intelligent design argues from observations of the natural world. And it has a good pedigree. A universe intelligible by design principles was the conclusion of many of the great pioneers of modern science.

Intelligent design is a religious belief (and was declared so by Judge Jones in the famous Dover trial in America). If you look at the natural world and conclude that it was intelligently designed, you must take the next step and ask who designed it. Aliens? God? You choose, but you must base your choice on scientific evidence. If you have no evidence, then why are you proposing this as science? Intelligent design does not have "a good pedigree". It's true that great pioneers of modern science were creationists, but they were pre-Darwin. They were also religious, along with the majority of the population at the time.

It is easily overlooked that the origin of life, the integrated complexity of biological systems and the vast information content of DNA have not been adequately explained by purely materialistic or neo-Darwinian processes. Indeed it is hard to see how they ever will.

Actually the integrated complexity of biological systems has been largely explained by evolution and natural selection. The information content of DNA will probably be explained too. It may be hard for you to see how, Mr. Noble, but just because you can't imagine it, that's no excuse for throwing your hands in the air and proclaiming it must have been done by aliens or God. There's progress on the abiogenesis front too — I understand it's been suggested in some quarters that the production of life in the laboratory may be achieved within a few years.

In an area such as this, where we cannot observe what happened directly, a legitimate scientific approach is to make an inference to the best explanation. In the case of the huge bank of functional information embedded in biological systems, the best explanation – based on the observation everywhere else that such information only arises from intelligence – is that it too has an intelligent source.

The "observation everywhere else" is that information is created by human intelligence. That's a sample of one, from which you cannot extrapolate anything because it's statistically unsound. Much of biology that was once thought to be irreducibly complex has now been shown to have evolved, or to have plausible evolutionary pathways to its present form. There's no reason to suppose that the presence of information in DNA will not be similarly explained.

There is a tendency in school science to present the evidence for evolution as uniformly convincing and all-encompassing, failing to distinguish between what is directly observable – such as change and adaptation over time through natural selection – and the more hypothetical elements, like the descent of all living things from a common ancestor. The evidence for these various strands is not of equal strength.

The research accruing from the complete sequencing of both the human genome and the genomes of other animals makes it far more likely that all living things have a single common ancestor, now that we understand so much more about how DNA works. Evolution by random mutation and natural selection is a scientific theory that's been consistently hammered for 150 years. Every scrap of new evidence uncovered has had the potential to falsify the theory, but instead has reinforced it, to the extent that evolution can be considered as much a scientific fact as the "theory" of gravity.

If you insist that intelligent causation is to be excluded in the study of origins then you are teaching materialist philosophy, not science.

I'm at a loss to know how intelligent causation could actually be taught in a science class. What do you tell the students? What demonstrations do you devise? Let's say, for instance, you're looking at the structure of primitive, single-celled organisms and you want the students to understand how they might have come into existence. You might talk about amino acids and self-replicating molecules — or you might simply close the textbook and say, "An intelligent causative agent caused the first cells to come into existence." That's not science, that's an intellectual cop-out.

I believe current government guidance is wrong in denying intelligent design the status of science. However, it does encourage teachers to handle it "positively and educationally". That's a small step in the right direction.

"Intelligent design" is not science.