Turning Up The Dimmer Switch

As I've been (mainly) off this week, I was able to catch bits of Tuesday's edition of the Today programme on Radio 4, guest-edited by historian Tom Holland. Mr Holland's biggest work so far has been Dominion, in which he traces the influence of Christianity on the culture of the West. Maybe he told part of his own story when interviewed for UnHerd alongside Nick Cave earlier this year; but if so, I hadn't heard it, so here are his words to Amol Rajan a couple of days ago. He'd been given a cancer diagnosis:

They said, this looks terrible. It’s probably spread to your lymph nodes, we’ll let you know the results of all the scans we’re going to give you before Christmas so you don’t have it hanging over you. And Christmas Eve came, and there was nothing. And I went to Midnight Mass at St Bartholomew the Great. And so I sat there and thought, I might as well give it a go. So I made a wholehearted prayer for the first time since I was about ten, I should think. This church is very distinctive because it’s part of a medieval priory and the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared there, it’s the only recorded appearance of the Virgin Mary in London. I went to the place where the Virgin is supposed to have appeared, and I said Come on, please help me out here, because I was that desperate! And my brother James turned out to have been at university with and shared a flat with the daughter of the surgeon, this great man called Bill Hill, who developed this technique where you cut out the infected section of the bowel, and he said, I’ll get in touch with him … And he managed to see the scans and they weren’t nearly as bad as had been thought … I really felt as though I’d massively dodged a bullet there. My rational side says, It’s a reflection of luck, or of privilege … But another part of me did think, Goodness, I’ve been a participant in a medieval miracle. I was a Protestant atheist, and then a Protestant agnostic, and I like the idea that if there’s a God he has such a sense of humour that it was the Virgin Mary who intervened … maybe this is a way I can believe in it, and it makes life much more interesting. … The dimmer switch has definitely gone back up. When I read about medieval people who had a personal devotion to the Virgin, I can now nurture that possibility of a personal devotion to the Virgin in a way that would have seemed – well, I might as well have been sacrificing animals to Athena or something. It’s like a fire I can warm my hands by, and I make sure I keep that fire alight.

I thought this was great - sceptical and yet leading, very gently and very indeterminately, in the direction, not just of Christian spirituality, but of this kind of Christian spirituality. And perhaps the nicest point is that Mr Holland comments with a historian's fastidiousness that the Virgin's manifestation at St Bartholomew's, Smithfield, is her only recorded appearance in London, because of course she may have been around without it being committed to the record.

Picture is another St Bartholomew's, Brighton's, where I was this afternoon. Happy New Year everyone!

The Welcome Mat

It was, of course, a great privilege to be able to host Paula’s Civic Service as Mayor of the Borough, but I’m glad it’s behind us. We were working out the choreography until just before we started, and deciding which of our organist and the Town Band (twenty of them!) was going to play what piece of music. Thankfully both of them were extremely flexible and understanding, and I came away with a respect for the organist’s sense of diplomacy which is not a quality you always associate with church musicians. Mayoral chains of various local authorities glittered around the pews. The centrepiece of this sort of event is an exchange of commitments rather like a wedding, when the Mayor promises to do their best and everyone else promises to support them. Afterwards I blessed the Mayor’s cake, and a gentleman visitor told me how as a young man in South Africa he’d seen a Roman Catholic priest in Soweto blessing a popcorn machine (it was intended to raise money for the Society of St Vincent de Paul, apparently).

As usual whenever I lead a service where I can expect the congregation will include people of a variety of different opinions, I began by acknowledging the possibility that some might not want to say some Christian things, but if so they should just keep Paula in mind; and in my homily – which was about the ambiguities and sacrifices implied in the idea of ‘community’ – I referred to the different ways Christians and non-believers might think about and describe the process of learning to live with diversity and conflict. A young woman who works for one of the charities Paula is supporting during her year as Mayor came up to me after the service, and told me ‘I was quite emotional during the service because as a humanist it’s the first time I can ever remember being specifically included in a religious event. Normally I expect just to let it all go past me, but this time I felt I was welcome’.

How affirming that was! Until I opened my bible this morning and read 1Thessalonians 2.4, ‘we speak not to please mortals, but to please God, who tests our hearts’. I do have an intense dislike of making people sad. If I was challenged to name my strongest motivation in life, I would say that I wanted everyone to be happy. I know they can’t be because some end up wanting things that are incompatible with the happiness of others, and many of us fallen souls wrap ourselves in delusions which need to be eroded before we find happiness; but is it a reprehensible thing to aim at? It might be, if my true instinct is less to avoid pain for others, than too avoid the pain I experience by causing it to them. I suppose my only security is that it is indeed God who tests my heart. Nor can you be confident that a course of action which brings people unhappiness is ipso facto pleasing to the Lord.

I became a believer in 1995, and nearly thirty years later still don’t know with any clarity where the boundary lies between the saved and the lost, or which side of it the young woman who spoke to me yesterday falls; or where I do, for that matter. I leave it to God, and throw myself and others on his mercy. What else can I do?

The Church has never before really faced a situation in which a previously believing culture decides that Christianity is something it wants to turn away from. The first apostles preached to Jews, and the task was to convince them that Jesus of Nazareth was the fulfilment of what they already believed; and to Gentile pagans, for whom ‘God’ was another deity like the ones they already knew. The Scriptures really give us very little clue as to how to approach a world which has judged the Church and found it wanting, or judged Christianity and found it unconvincing, nor do they tell us what God thinks about such a situation.

As the Church of England sacks the ‘independent’ safeguarding advisors it employed to hold it to account precisely because it didn’t agree with the way they were holding it to account, it seems that the Church’s desire for power and security still hasn’t been sufficiently burned out of it, and there is more disciplining yet to go. I increasingly feel that the task of this generation’s believers is to begin, just begin, the work of convincing the world that Christians are not monsters, made monstrous by belief in a monstrous God. A modest aim, but one we will struggle with enough.

The Trouble With Humans

At some point I'll be able to write something upbeat here - but not today! A few months ago I put together a short pamphlet on the relationship of the Church to the climate emergency and the theological issues it raised, mainly because nothing I heard tackled it the way that concerned me. In it, I thought about the danger the politics of climate change seemed to pose of anti-humanism, of falling into a misanthropic rhetoric which viewed human beings as a polluting presence, a disease that nature would be justified in wiping out.  That wasn't very present just a short time back, but it seems to be now. My LiberFaciorum feed is full of it: often brutal and violent, accusatory, angry not with categories of human being (like the Brexit debate), but with humans as such. The Earth would be fine if they weren't around. It's hard to read, and often comes from people I care about and who are even, in at least one case, engaged in work which concerns saving people's lives. 

One of my favourite little stories involves Metropolitan Anthony of Sourezh who, on his first trip back to the Soviet Union from which his family had fled during the Revolution, was welcomed at the airport by a commissar from the Ministry of Religious Affairs. 'Do you believe in God, my child?' asked the archbishop. 'Certainly not,' replied the official firmly, 'As a member of the Communist Party I believe in human beings.' 'Good!', said Anthony, shaking his hand, 'So does God!'

There is a misanthropic strain in Christian spirituality, with disgust at the depth of human sin as its justification, but it's marginal. Rather, we are used to the tension between the fact that human life cannot be radically bad if the eternal Son came to share it and we are to carry on his work, and on the other hand the inescapable truth that humans' response to the arrival of absolute goodness was to turn on it and attempt to destroy it. The liturgy consistently rehearses both. I don't know whether the atheistic sort of misanthropy, released by the climate crisis, has long roots in people's thinking - was it always there - or whether it results from being surprised at how humans have failed? Christians have always known we are Fallen; perhaps non-believers are only now really finding out.

There's a more philosophical question below this, which is how far we should think of humans as part of the natural order, and how far we are separate from it. This is a complex matter for both Christians and non-believers. Traditionally Christians could maintain that humans were set radically apart from the beasts, but accepting evolution muddies those waters: we become both, part of a natural continuum but also endowed with something else, something which makes us capable of great good and also great evil. Our animal nature can be bent in either direction. However, if you're an atheist, everything we have is part of our genetic inheritance, and the way we behave must also derive from it. Whatever selfishness and short-sightedness we display must come from there. If we act badly, it can't be because we are too distinct from nature, but precisely because we are part of it: not because we are insufficiently like your pet cat, but because we're like it too much. If that's true, there's no great sense in castigating humans for being what they can't help. 

The conclusion a Christian must draw is that, if our imagination, the aspects of us that are 'the image of God', can be used positively or negatively; though it be ever so hard, we can choose to exercise the better side of what we are. And we must, for disaster lies otherwise. And without us, Creation returns not to a state of goodness and grace, but to chaos, to inarticulacy, to nothingness; beauty, perhaps, but with nothing capable of discerning, describing or enjoying beauty. Try Romans 8.19-22, which our holy mother the Church made us read last Sunday, if you don't believe me. Blessed Paul, of course, got there ahead of us.

Escaping the Void

Years ago in Goremead I met Hari and Peter. They didn't worship at Goremead Church but had been members of a tiny independent chapel at the far side of the village. Peter had been a teacher and missionary many years before, but had lost his faith and by the time I met him had the beginnings of dementia. I had a couple of conversations with him about what Jesus had actually been on about. 'I don't believe in him any more,' said Peter, 'but I just can't forget about this man. I still love him.' His eyes glistened. Peter recovered his faith a few weeks before he died, and how much this must have been a relief to him and probably those around him too became clear from a volume of poetry Hari sent me after Christmas, compiled from Peter's papers after his death. I began reading them as a break in the middle of the Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, whose relentless Orkney-ness does wear one down after 250 pages. But Peter's verse is not light relief. In fact it makes Thomas Hardy read like Spike Milligan. Meaninglessness and existential angst sprawl over every page: the Void doesn't so much stare back from the book as leap out and shake you round the neck. 

On the train taking me towards my meeting with S.D. last week I found myself trying to answer the question I encourage every Christian to try to answer for themselves, that is, What is it Jesus has done for you? There are general theological answers to this involving sin and redemption, but they didn't play a great role in my conversion, shockingly. If I'm honest, I can't say my sense of the cussedness and wrongness of things, the dark fault line that runs through all our human endeavours and so often turns them to the bad, formed a problem over which I fretted and to which God was 'the answer'. In fact, what Jesus rescued me from, if anything, was the horror of meaninglessness, and reassured me that I and everything around me mattered, on a cosmic level.

I knew about that, but sitting waiting for my connection at Clapham Junction revealed something else. I often say that without Christ we would not know what love truly is, but I hadn't seen the connection between this theme and the existential one. There was a time (very occasionally there still is) when I would look around at my fellow human beings and see what Dr Bones would once have called a parade of meat-puppets, busy microbes doomed to die and striving to ignore the fact. A lot of Peter's poems were about that. But if there was a God, and meaning, and love was possible, and he loved me, then he loved all these silly beings too despite their frailty, frail and silly in ways not much different from the ways in which I am frail and silly. And that meant I couldn't regard them so negatively any more. Jesus not only gave me an example of love, not only taught me what love is, but even made it possible. He made it possible for me to sit at a busy railway station and smile, and dance inside for joy. He not only rescued me from meaninglessness, he rescued me from contempt. 

God knows how I explain that to anyone, though.

Must Try Harder

As an ex-atheist I still have some vestigial sympathy with unbelievers, but I do wish they made it easier. This week, Radio 4 is broadcasting extracts from Stephen Hawking’s final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, and on Wednesday morning the words of the late physicist concerned creation and the Creator and why there isn’t one. I know the book is ‘popular science’ and therefore watered down from the real thing, but really. Hawking relates how the ‘space’ for God has gradually shrunk as science has provided better explanations for natural phenomena: the beauty of science is that it reveals ‘the laws of nature’ behind what we observe, rather than the arbitrary fiat of a deity. All that’s left to God, says Hawking, is kicking the whole thing off, and even that loophole seems about to vanish. When we enter the subatomic realm of quantum mechanics, particles appear and disappear randomly, and this provides a model of how the universe itself, originally subatomically tiny and almost infinitely dense, might have suddenly appeared without explanation and without cause. Furthermore, says Hawking, since time itself only came into existence as the universe expanded in the Big Bang, and causation is a function of time, our natural curiosity as to what ‘explains’ its arrival is misplaced: no time, no need for explanation. The universe merely is.

Now, if the beauty of science lies in its revelation of natural laws, where the apparent randomness of the quantum world leaves it I can’t imagine. If, as one humanist contributor to my friend the Heresiarch’s former blog once commented dismissively and reductively, ‘stuff pops into existence all the time’, that means that at a fundamental level there is no ‘law’; unless there are laws that we haven’t worked out yet, which would make the randomness apparent rather than real (as Einstein insisted, so I understand). And the 'stuff' that 'pops into existence' somehow never turns out to be an infant universe: that event was, as far as we know, unique. Observable subatomic particles (appear to) 'pop into existence' within a pre-existing system rather than outside it, so the two events are not analogous. Meanwhile, disposing of the notion of causation by abolishing time is philosophical sleight-of-hand and nothing more. This is all quite apart from the jejune concept that the only reason for believing in God is that we can’t think of a better explanation for the origin of the universe, or thunder, or the existence of cats (whether or not indeterminately alive or dead). ‘There will always be believers in God, because there will always be people who want that kind of comfort’, concludes Hawking. There will always be people willing to trade their intellectual integrity for emotional security, because that’s what it’s all about. Thanks.

One of my Christmas gifts was Dr David Layton’s book The Humanism of Dr Who, which as an old Whovian caught my eye. Any attempt to draw spiritual lessons from the long-running fantasy series (‘sci-fi’ is a bit of an insult to that genre) comes up against the fact that the good Doctor’s world-view is defiantly secular-humanist, so this book must have been an easier write. I’ve only just begun it, but did scan first through the chapter on religion. And there we find the contention ‘religious “belief” requires “the leap of faith”, the trust that a statement is true apart from any evidence or reason in its support. The religious point of view is that is a belief is held strongly enough, it is true’. This kind of – forgive me – garbage is regularly trotted out by atheists who clearly have never paid attention to religion and religious people at all. Remember, I decided I believed in God on the basis of evidence. I admit gladly that my previous experience and predispositions may have played a role in that decision; that another person with different experience and predispositions might have decided entirely differently on the basis of exactly the same evidence; and that there indeed comes a point where you cannot determine the existence or otherwise of God simply on the basis of that evidence. But that’s what most of life is like: you can’t prove beyond any doubt that a chair is there but that doesn’t stop most people sitting down with a cup of tea. Faith is not exercised on the basis of no evidence at all. Anyone who claims it is isn’t paying attention to the real experience of religion and probably doesn’t want to.

The third atheist outlook I’ve dealt with over this holiday is that of Arthur C Clarke who I looked up after hearing his name and realising I didn’t know that much about him. He apparently ‘could not forgive religions for their inability to prevent atrocities and wars’. My old doctrine tutor said that the best argument for the non-existence of God was the behaviour of Christians, and that I can still absolutely go along with.

God from Both Sides

Christians think a lot about what leads people to faith: less so about what leads them away from it. There’s a silly programme on Radio 4 on which celebrities read extracts from the diaries they kept in their teenage years. While we were away at the Clergy Conference I heard bits of the episode with Pippa Evans as guest. Ms Evans is a comedian and co-founder of the secular Sunday Assembly gathering, and the diary she was reading from covered the years 1997 to 2001 (mostly just the first year or so) when she was 15 to 19, living in Ealing, and very religious indeed.

Pippa Evans’s family don’t seem to have been particularly religious but in her mid-teens she started attending an excitable Baptist church (‘there was a lot of hand-work’); her mother’s theory was that it provided a safe space for the teenager to make the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Ms Evans found an echo in the experience of the show’s presenter Rufus Hound who along with his brother also went through a Christian phase in his teens after their parents divorced: they were looking for a sort of security, he speculated.

Of course the young Pippa Evans had exactly the same maelstrom of emotional concerns as any other young person and in her spiritual setting expected that God would help her work out what to do in a very definite way. At one point, praying about her crush on a friend, she reported ‘God gave me a picture of a hot air balloon and said to me that if I want Ollie I mustn’t pull on the fraying ropes or he’ll slip away’. ‘You believed God was sending you actual visions, and this felt entirely normal?’ asked Hound. ‘If the company you keep says that’s how prayers are answered …’ said Ms Evans, ‘I do remember sometimes seeing things; this would still happen now, but … now I’d say that my brain had figured something out and made a connection – maybe “be less clingy”!’ Both presenter and guest agreed that a large factor in their teenage church attendance was feeling part of a gang, not one bounded by age but by sentiment and belief. Ms Evans’s diary petered out and her near-last entry described how ‘I don’t go to church any more due to a lack of trust and hope in God. Is he there? I think so. Does he care? I’m not so sure.’ The present-day Pippa Evans expanded, ‘he didn’t give me everything I requested, what an arse! … I was trusting a very kind of two-dimensional children’s picture of what God is.’

There are whole essays to be written opening out of this encounter. But, for now, let’s just note that it’s impossible to draw a hard-and-fast line between God and the subconscious. Only very, very occasionally will a Christian ‘receive’ a mental impression so strikingly disconnected from what they may have been thinking about that it can easily be conceived as coming out of a different place from those buried mental processes that go on constantly. A Christian would expect that God works through the unconscious anyway, and the unremarkable nature of such revelations doesn’t rule out a divine nudge behind them. Pippa Evans’s narrative shows how easy it is to shift from one paradigm to the other without any objective, observable difference in mental activity taking place. The picture stays the same, only the frame alters.

My second observation is that I find it really encouraging that, for these two people, Christianity provided a helpful clearing house for the troubles of adolescence. All right, they moved through it, but unlike, say, souls brought up within the Church who all too often, after becoming aware of the tensions, ambiguities, stresses and pains of Church life, fail to make the transition to a mature sort of faith, they have come through without any rancour or regret, at least that I could hear. They don’t seem scarred. Pippa Evans’s involvement with the Sunday Assembly certainly acknowledges something positive about the Church experience, however much those of us who believe might raise an eyebrow at the feasibility of it.

Post Narrative

While we were in Dublin my main book for spare moments was Stephen Jay Gould's Dinosaur in a Haystack from 1996, one of the late palaeontologist's collections of monthly-written essays on natural historical topics. Prof Gould's writings are invariably witty, humane, exciting (for a non-scientist), and stimulating in their breadth and range. I can't judge the details of his views on evolutionary theory, but for most people the shades of opinion on that won't matter. For an atheist, he likes to pull religious language and imagery out of the drawer quite a lot, which may be another reason why Richard Dawkins disdained him so much. 

In the essay 'Can We Complete Darwin's Revolution?' Prof Gould argues that, although the great majority of people accept the broad outlines of Darwinian theory as historical fact, they've yet to absorb the philosophical consequences of evolution. He blames  'evolutionary spin doctoring' which seeks to pick from the wreckage wrought by the great wrecking-ball of Darwinian thought a shining nugget of human self-esteem: we may be monkeys' nephews and nieces, but in some vague way the purpose of the whole exercise has been to produce us. No, says the scientist:

I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again.

Evolution, re-iterates Gould, has no purpose; it therefore does not 'progress', because for there to be progress, there must be purpose by which progress can be judged. Evolution does not work for the good of the earth, for the good of species or that of anything else beyond (arguably) individual entities. (Interestingly, though on the face of it Prof Dawkins is more radically reductionist in arguing that the replication of genetic chemicals is the sole driver of natural selection, while Prof Gould maintained that other factors were at work as well, Dawkins would like to retain the idea of progress, at least to describe organisms becoming better fitted to the exploitation of their own environmental niche: Gould would not allow even that). Old-fashioned textbooks or museum displays which pop human beings at the culmination of the tree of life, the end-point - at least so far - are blinding us to the truth.

Were I not a Christian, I would be cheering such iconoclasm. The other day Radio 4's series Futureproofing produced an alternately fascinating and infuriating episode exploring the effects of technological change on faith. It wasn't as superficial as it seemed to be, let's say. Talking about superficiality, the show's presenters spoke to Professor Steven Pinker. 'Faith is explicitly believing something without a reason,' he opined, which is the sort of damnfool thing anyone should know better than to say, and when asked by the presenter 'What is our purpose?' answered 'Our purpose is to have long, healthy, rich, knowledge-filled, loving lives.' I am at a loss to know where this 'purpose' comes from. Were you to gather the human family together to draw up a document that described what they thought the good life might be, it would indeed probably look something like that, but it still comes from nowhere. In a cosmos devoid of teleology, there is no means of deciding 'purpose' other than arbitrary preference: we are here for no reason, an evolutionary accident, and with no reason for our existence, it can have no purpose either.

But, of course, I am a Christian, and the Church is still absolutely and anachronistically committed to human exceptionalism, to a narrative account of reality that envisages history moving towards a conclusion, and a conclusion conceived in human terms. The majority of Christians who accept Darwinian theory are not certain how the mechanism and the narrative fit together, but don't doubt that, despite the difficulties, fit they must. In the Anglican liturgy, Eucharistic Prayer G puts it in a way it's just as well Stephen Jay Gould never lived to hear:

In the fullness of time you made us in your image, 
the crown of all creation;
you give us breath and speech, that, with angels and archangels
and with all the company of heaven,
we may find a voice to sing your praise ...

In this, liberal and traditionalist Christians will find they have assumptions in common. But there is another way in which Christianity has anything but a narrative of progress. It receives from the past its deposit of teaching, and preserves it: and deviations from that deposit are to be resisted, and perhaps suppressed. While science, as Stephen Jay Gould emphasises over and over again in his essays, proceeds mainly by error and correction, sometimes catastrophic error and radical correction, Christianity doesn't want to progress at all. Even its liberal versions envisage themselves as uncovering the true implications of the documents at its heart and the intentions of its deity. Of course, this is not how it actually behaves; Christians have at all times battered out truth by reassessing what they have said in the past, throwing new facts and experiences against what they think they know, discovering new things among the vast and literally incomprehensible mass of the Biblical texts. Christianity has changed, over and over again, while all the time denying it, and often this has been, just as science does, by making mistakes. Science has been more honest about it, at least.

Circular Arguments

A couple of months ago I was caught up by a statement S.D.’s chum Professor Brian Cox made on the radio when being challenged to give pithy answers to scientific questions. Is there life after death? someone asked. ‘No’, Prof Cox answered definitely, ‘the rules of physics mean there can’t be.’ Now I am no scientist, but that struck me as such a sweeping statement that I wondered which rules of physics he could be referring to. The others in the studio clearly boggled a bit as well, because he stretched the parameters of the game to refer to some recently-published research or something.

Googling ‘afterlife scientifically impossible’ or somesuch phrase revealed that there was indeed a flurry of publicity in the autumn of last year about the comments of Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology about this subject, although I can’t find any reason to think what he said was very recent. The press reports all state that his comments appeared in Scientific American, but I can’t find any articles on the blog or in the magazine that would fit this subject published within the last few years. This dates from 2011, but I think it must be the one referred to. Why it should suddenly acquire such publicity I don’t know; perhaps the reports actually refer to his book from 2016, garbled into a Scientific American article. The Metro alleged that Dr Carroll had arrived at his conclusions ‘after extensive studies’ and one would hope he had, though it’s hard to know what those studies, as applied to this particular field, might consist of.

Dr Carroll’s argument goes back much further than 2011, however. It is that there is no form of consciousness we know of which is not linked to physical processes, whether you think of biology or more fundamentally the interactions of atoms and forces. Without those, there is nothing to bear consciousness; therefore once a living being dies and disintegrates, consciousness becomes impossible. This is called materialism, and it is not exactly a new idea. Arguably it goes back to ancient Greece. You may or may not think it very convincing to argue that a ‘soul’ by its very nature would be immaterial and that’s the point of it, but it’s a debate that has been had before.

Conversely a couple of days ago I was copied in on an extract from The Atheist Delusion, a 2016 movie compiled by US evangelist Ray Comfort to have a go at that rationalist easy target, Professor Richard Dawkins. The first bit interviews a variety of self-described atheists – mainly students – and then bamboozles them by trying to prove they are being irrational in believing that ‘something can come out of nothing’. The coup de grace in the segment is a scene of a debate in which Prof Dawkins is made to look ever so silly by claiming just that. In fact, Mr Comfort runs together the Argument from Design (how can all the complexity of existence come into being without an intelligence directing it?) and the Argument from First Cause (how can something come out of nothing?) in a series of rhetorical tricks which ignore a) that natural selection over geological time is quite sufficient to account for the biological complexity we observe and b) that although it is true that physics cannot explain the existence of the universe, there is no reason to assume that such a putative ‘First Cause’ is God. Among the things Mr Comfort’s film does prove are that Professor Dawkins can be amusingly manoeuvred into saying things that sound daft, and that most atheists aren’t actually that good at picking the holes in other people’s arguments; and neither of these things is a surprise. At least he shouldn’t be quite so pleased with himself at coming up with some ‘new’ knock-down argument against atheism: his case goes back a long way, too, just like Dr Carroll's.

And I suppose the more basic conclusion to draw is that very few people really know what they’re talking about.

No Blinding Light to be Had Anywhere

This is a very lazy post indeed as it mostly consists of someone else's words, but it's too good to let go by. Dr Abacus points me towards the recently-late AA Gill's account of his conversion to Christianity. I see it as a model exemplar of how to 'do evangelism': always be truthful and don't care too much.

"I am a reluctant Christian. I was once interviewed by Lynn Barber and I told her I was a Christian but not a homosexual . . . she didn’t believe either. “You can’t be a Christian,” she said, in her parlour maid’s voice, “you just can’t.” Well I can, that’s the thing with religion. Absolutely anyone can. “But you’re not remotely Christian,” she continued. “It’s another contrarian affectation.” What, like bow ties? “Yes.”

"I wish it were. Having a dose of religion, in my milieu, at this time, is as awkward and inconvenient as not having it in 17th-century Norwich. It would be so much more socially easy to be a vain fashion atheist.

"I was brought up by atheists. I honestly thought I was immune to religiosity. And I didn’t catch it in a Methodist way after signing the pledge, I began to have vague spiritual unease because of art at the Slade and that really was contrarian. I’d go and sit in the back of churches and feel wordlessly moved.

"There was a family friend, an Irish Jesuit and university professor, who occasionally took me out to lunch and I would confide in him. He was a radical libertarian theologist, which was exciting, and he said if at all possible religion was something to be avoided.

Who would willingly lumber themselves with a book full of medieval rules, superstitions and the possibility of an eternity’s agony by choice? Far better, he said, to adopt a general humanitarian goodness, be thoughtful, charitable and kind and trust in the benevolence of providence to see you all right. He pointed out that, statistically, religious belief had no actuarial benefits: you didn’t get to live longer, or have less cancer; religious people didn’t have prettier spouses, politer children, more sex — quite possibly less sex — nicer offices or better weather. They did, on the other hand, get guilt (point of order here: it’s the Catholics and Jews who get guilt, Protestants and Muslims get shame). And of course remorse.

"You don’t really believe that, do you, I said. “Adrian, I wish to God I did, but I can’t because the space is already filled with a belief in God.” I think I’ve got it too, I said. “Which flavour are you?” Well, that’s rather the thing, I’ve got a formless faith.

He said: “If you want my advice, go with what’s closest to home. Faith is ethereal, the practice of faith is cultural. If you become a Zoroastrian or a follower of Cao Dai, a marvellous Vietnamese Christianity that believes Muhammed, Moses, Louis Pasteur, Shakespeare, Lenin and Victor Hugo are all saints, then you’re going to have to learn a lot of stuff . . . and get over a whole lot of other stuff before you get to the good stuff and it’ll have very little to do with your soul.

"“Weren’t you baptised into the Church of Scotland? I’d stick with Protestantism. Actually, I think it rather suits you . . . low to middle. Anglo-Catholicism would bring out the worst in you, all the dressing-up would get out of control and you’d become an architectural pedant doing brass rubbing.”

"So that’s essentially what I am — a lazy, middle-range Protestant with a mildly pedantic crush on the King James Version and the Book of Common Prayer."

Stick and Carrot

A friend of mine posted this story on Facebook a few days ago. I apologise for the offence of reproducing an image of Mr Bieber here, but you get the point. Further down the comment thread, somebody else stated, 'One of my favourite TV quotes ever, from True Detective: "If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then, brother, that person is a piece of shit." ' 

'Piece of shit' isn't language I can imagine St Augustine using, but if it's the only sort of language on offer, I can accept and own it. I know I'm not the person I could be, and in fact admitting it seems to me to be nothing more than sanity. If you look in the mirror in the morning and think to yourself, 'Nothing about me needs change or improvement; I am the best I could possibly be', what does that say about the sort of person you are? Are you Donald Trump, perhaps?

I remember a similar conversation with an atheist friend years ago who claimed I was exaggerating my faults and that rationally viewed I was not that bad a person and perfectly capable of behaving decently without imaginary divine assistance. I suppose that as one moves forward in the spiritual life one discovers more about one's own sins, revealed by the light of God shining on your thoughts, words, acts and motivations. It doesn't surprise me that atheists can't grasp the significance of the inner life and its external ramifications. 

I can say nothing about Mr Bieber and would prefer to say as little about him as possible, but I can't say that 'divine stick and carrot' has any motivating effect on my behaviour. I leave my ultimate fate to him, knowing that finally I can't change it by what I do. God is perfectly just: so, if in the end I am flung into the outer darkness where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, that will only be what I deserve, and were I in my right mind I would take the same decision about myself. There is no point fearing or resenting perfect love and justice. Rather, any desire I have to be a better person is prompted by contact with the holiness of God and knowing that he loves and cares for me, and the desire to respond to this love and care; fear of what might otherwise happen to me, at least in that gross and brutal way of understanding it, plays next to no role at all.

Calming the Twitter Storm

We had a discussion about this after Mattins yesterday morning - concerning the ludicrous little spat the CofE publicity department got itself into after posting a Tweet referring to praying for celebrity unbeliever Richard Dawkins after he suffered a minor stroke a couple of days ago. The assembled Anglicans at Morning Prayer in Swanvale Halt (all four of us) were unanimous in feeling thoroughly uncomfortable and sympathetic towards those who accused the Church of a bit of internet trolling.

I have no doubt that whoever stuck this on Twitter thought they meant it sincerely; although I also doubt that there cannot have been a little frisson of ironical pleasure at being able to do so. And that's probably the problem. It isn't just that Dr Dawkins will not care whether anyone is praying for him or not: I regularly pray for a great many people who have entirely different world-views from myself, and have no intention of stopping regardless of what they might think about it. These are people I love, I'm a Christian and it's What We Do. But I don't feel the need to publicise the fact. 

Making a point of announcing that you're praying about a particular matter leaves a bad taste and not just because we're English and feel embarrassed about religion and emotion. What's the point of doing so, especially in this particular way? I'm reminded of the 'Pray for Paris' hashtag that zipped around the globe after the terrorist shootings there in November, and which several people I know with close links to France and its very secularist official culture got thoroughly aerated about. The declaration that you're praying about something, unless it's only passed around other Christians for their encouragement and information, soon becomes less about the prayer, or who you're praying for, than about you and your self-image, and I think non-religious people - normal people - can see through this very easily.

For an organisation, a Twitter feed isn't just about sharing your thoughts or what you're having for dinner. It's part of your public relations. That's why you can access the CofE Twitter account through the Media and Communications section of the website. Therefore, what goes up on that feed is what the CofE wants people, especially media people, to know about it. You may note, if you have a look, that not much of its content relates to praying for this or that at all, and as there is so much stuff in the world Christians might pray about, you might well ask what's so special about Dr Dawkins. What's special about him, clearly, is that he's the world's most public atheist, and that's why I can't take at face value the Revd Arun Arora's very defensive defence of the original Tweet as something entirely innocent and with no edge to it whatever: a bit of Lenten self-examination might be in order. 

Public relations isn't just about sending out via social media the things you want people to know about you: it also involves having some sense of how normal people will react to that content, and it seems the CofE is still some distance away from that. 

Head Above the Parapet

Had I still been a liberal - and still more a Liberal Democrat - I probably would have voted for Tim Farron as party leader, normally being drawn to people who aren't 'safe pairs of hands' but who might actually cause a bit of trouble, who have a few jagged edges and unpolished surfaces. 

The decision wouldn't necessarily have been affected by his much-reported Christian faith, although in the British context it makes him even more an outsider, and therefore interesting. As Mr Farron has pointed out, in the US politicians are virtually obliged to invent a faith, while in Britain they feel compelled to deny it. 

This will bring him problems. Of course Christians vary like clouds in the sky, and for some Mr Farron's unsoundness on matters such as same-sex marriage is enough to deny him the title at all. His interview on the Today Programme yesterday gave something of the flavour of what he may be in for from rather less specialised audiences: John Humphrys gave rather a lot of time over to the MP's prayer life and how that might feed into his political attitudes. His question 'Would you seek advice from God before making important political decisions, such as whether to invade Iraq or something?' drew the response that 'this is the shocking revelation that a Christian says his prayers sometimes'. I thought Mr Farron took it all rather effectively, replying that what you pray for is wisdom rather than a particular answer, that everyone, religious or secular, brings value judgements to a decision, meaning Christians could conscientiously reach quite different conclusions about a specific matter. So why bother? Mr Humphrys insisted. 'It's what we do,' Mr Farron countered.

In a largely secular society, this is a fair matter to inquire about. People don't understand how a person's prayer life might work because they don't do it themselves, and seem to believe:

1. That a Christian will pray and expect to receive an answer by a voice or some means that they can interpret as supernatural;
2. That prayer requires setting reason to one side (when told that Mr Farron would 'consider the evidence' in a decision, Mr Humphrys insisted 'So you wouldn't ask God for advice?') in deference to some other authority - the Bible, an ecclesiastical magisterium, or an internal concept of God. 

Believe this, and somebody in a position of power admitting to praying becomes creepy and worrying. It's not unreasonable that reasonable people should want to know more.

At times over the last 15 years or so the Liberal Democrats appeared to be turning into the political wing of the British Humanist Association, so Mr Farron's ascendancy - albeit in the circumstances of the party's shredding in the elections - is remarkable. Of course, those who are perturbed by the role God might play in his decision-making processes probably need not be very concerned, as for some time to come no Liberal Democrat MP will be taking any more momentous decision than what colour to paint his constituency office. 

Mr Fry and the Worm

The religious views of Stephen Fry are well known so I am as befuddled as he says he is by the shocked reaction to his recently-publicised interview with Gay Byrne on RTE. Mind you, Mr Byrne himself looks strangely shocked in the video. Perhaps he didn't really know who this Fry cove was. Asked what he would say to God at the gates of heaven, Mr Fry answered that he would confront him with the horror of earthly life which his divine fiat has caused, and refuse to enter the Empyrean on God’s terms even if he were given the chance.

“Yes, the world is splendid, but it also has in it insects,” he said, “whose whole life cycle is to burrow into the eyes of children and make them blind. They eat outwards from the eyes. Why? Why did you do that to us? You could easily have made a creation in which that didn't exist.”

I'm not sure there is such an insect, in point of fact. There is a range of ocular parasites, but they are mostly fungi or nematodes rather than insects, and don’t eat the eyes of their host. Some of them seem to infest children or young adults disproportionately, but that’s not the same as their life cycle depending on human children.

What Mr Fry probably had in mind is river-blindness, an affliction widespread in some African countries, and which, rather famously, was the reason David Attenborough gave for not believing in God. Once again, the cause of the disease is a worm rather than an insect, although insects spread it. Still, although human beings are the worm’s definitive host, it doesn't particularly afflict children, and only a minority of people who are infested end up having ocular problems, since the worms can inhabit other areas of the body too. Nor does it eat its way out through the eyes: instead, the blindness is caused by scarring to the eye tissue brought about by the body’s reaction to the bacteria released by immature worms when they die.

Mr Fry is also, I expect, half-recalling the reason that other great naturalist Charles Darwin gave for not believing in God, the ichneumon wasp. It lays its eggs in caterpillars and the larvae do, indeed, eat their way out of their hosts. Ichneumon wasps don’t bother human beings, though.

Put all these elements together and you get an insect whose life cycle depends on burrowing into children’s eyes and then eats its way out of them, which is a great rhetorical device but doesn't exist; a Gothic trope, a testament to our horror at the idea of being consumed from within. It’s a QI fact, something you think you've heard somewhere but is really invented from bits and pieces of other things which are true.

Enough fun. None of this matters very much. Any one of these horrible afflictions would be enough to accuse God, and for Creationist Christians this is a real problem. You might be tempted to lay such evils at the feet of the Devil, but traditional Christianity has always insisted that the Devil can’t actually create anything, only make up illusions and tricks; another way of absolving God is to put the horrors of life down to the Fall, the effects of human sin echoing and reverberating through the created order (perhaps this is not far off the mark: earthquakes, floods and volcanoes aside, diseases that affect humans have always, necessarily, coincided with human wickedness). Even then, God has allowed it to happen. More liberal Christians can’t hide God behind the random processes of evolution, either, because ultimately he is responsible for their specific results even if he hasn't deliberately designed them, and why he has chosen to work through such a colossally wasteful, violent mechanism is a speechless mystery. 

The only comfort is that, of course, Christians (and the ancient Jews) have always been aware of the problem. It is an unusual believer to whom these thoughts have never occurred and who has never turned over the same questions in their mind. Behind Stephen Fry and David Attenborough's blinded children lies Dostoevsky, Ivan and Alyosha’s conversation in The Brothers Karamazov:

I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don't want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. … too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.

And behind Dostoevsky lies the Book of Job, written into the very Scriptures themselves. The only answer Job gets from God to the question of why he, an innocent, has suffered, is basically ‘Look, I know what I'm doing, all right? Hush yer wheesht.’ It’s not much of answer, to be honest.

I don’t take very seriously Mr Fry’s insistence, later in the interview, that atheism is not just not believing in God, but also, assuming there is a God, rejecting him as malicious and insane: as Byron said, ‘to look the tyrant in his everlasting face, and tell him/His evil is not good’. Evolutionary biology has at least relieved us of that horror, of necessarily believing the universe to be actively malign, a place of persecution and dread; no, that’s just a pose. Nobody assuming that could survive mentally. There would be no reason for belief at all but for Christ’s cross and the empty tomb; and those of us who find ourselves Christians, working back from that point, we are committed thereby to a God who shares our suffering and redeems it, and yet also presides over it. We have to trust it makes sense somewhere, but can’t imagine how that might be.

Perhaps one day we might. One of the stories that brings me most comfort is Albert Einstein’s rueful admission that he’d come to a dead end developing a unified field theory because the maths didn't exist to enable him to do it. Criticising Christians for not being able to reconcile God and suffering is perhaps like having a go at the ancient Arab mathematicians who first conceptualised the zero for not being able to come up with differential calculus as well: we have more thinking to do yet. Perhaps a great deal. 

A Culture of Suspicion!

As light relief to having a go at my own religion, here's a short jab at non-Christianity for a change.

I know a number of people who are vegans and pro-animal campaigners. A short while ago, one of them put up this photo on a well-known social-networking site:

This prompted a lot of discussion, arising out of the quotation in the picture. I can't find the thread now so I can't quote from it, but it was mainly along the lines of how wicked Christianity in particular and religion in general is for promoting exploitation of animals, and, in contrast, how atheism, being natural and rational, promotes instead respect and kindness towards them.

William Ralph Inge? I thought. I recognise that name. He was, it doesn't take long to confirm if you want to, the famous Gloomy Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in the 1910s, 20s and 30s; this quotation is from Outspoken Essays, published in 1922 and based on an earlier lecture.

As always, it only takes a moment to look this up but you have to have a mental culture of suspicion. I suppose it may be having a background in studying history that I automatically want to know the context of any statement or fact I'm presented with, what the qualifications are of the person who is quoted or who reports an event. This is another tiny instance of our willingness not to question or investigate things that conform to our preconceptions, made all the more glaring because of the sad assumption behind it that atheists can't be unkind to animals or Christians promote their welfare.

'River Out of Eden', by Richard Dawkins, 1995

I recently finished Dr Dawkins's best book (by repute), River Out of Eden, and very much enjoyed it. It's easy to see why Dr D has acquired his status as a communicator of science: it's extremely lucid and accessible and in places rather beautiful even though it contains those notoriously savage statements about 'blind pitiless indifference' and humans 'dancing to the music' of DNA. I only had trouble with the discussion on the reproductive efficiency of seals which became a bit clotted, and am indeed grateful for the explanation of analogue versus digital forms of information-exchange which I'd never properly understood before: even though that raises the question, as it isn't anywhere near the field of evolutionary biology, of how reliable the Dr is in areas which aren't his specialism (I wouldn't know). There is only one bit which makes one cringe: Dr Dawkins mocks the stupidity of an anonymous female student who has, he can't resist pointing out, a 'slow rural accent'. That's really rather disagreeable.

Bothering God

It's not a surprise that Heresy Corner has been discussing the ban on saying prayers as part of the agenda of local authority meetings. Along with other local clergy, I've led the prayers at the start of Hornington Town Council meetings on a couple of occasions and couldn't actually remember whether they were part of the formal agenda or not. A congregation member who's an ex-councillor recently confirmed it for me: they aren't, but were quite intentionally put before the formal calling-to-order of the meeting when the practice of praying publicly was revived some years ago. It's a moot point, though: prayers only occur when the Mayor has been led in and the mace put in its place, even if attendance is only recorded from the end of the prayers onwards.

I feel conflicted about leading prayers on these occasions. I'm very aware that there is, let's say, a possibility that, even if none of the councillors positively objects to being present, their degrees of devotion may differ. I therefore find myself framing the petitions in such a way that, if you are serious about offering the business of the Council to God, you can use the time in that way, or if (the Lord forfend) you're indifferent about doing so, you can let the words wash over you. It's not exactly an intense demonstration of faith - not that I am very prone to intense demonstrations of faith. Would the prayers be more genuine, the faith more profound, if the Christian councillors were praying privately on their own without the formality of the meeting and the intervention of a professional?

The Hornington prayers were instituted by the Lib Dems on the Council. I wonder if Dr Evan Harris knows?

Sorts of Anger

God has had plenty of rage and frustration directed his way from Swanvale Halt lately. Just after Christmas a devout and lovely lady from the congregation, who's waited nearly two years for a knee operation which has been delayed and delayed owing to infections and problems, was rushed into hospital with what turned out to be a ruptured intestine. This was itself probably due to the painkillers she's been taking at terrifically high levels for months and months to cope with her knee and back. For a while it looked as though she was about to die and I spent four hours with her on New Year's Day in expectation of that happening. But she's still here, now tracheotomised and ileostomised and heaven knows what else, somehow keeping going. I had this in my mind when I preached on the Sunday before last about the injustice of things and the uselessness of some forms of comfort, which people seemed to appreciate. As St Teresa said, 'Lord, no wonder you have so many enemies, when this is the way you treat your friends'.

The other day I heard Mad Trevor ranting and shouting in the church while I was in the hall next door. There's no point intervening when he's like this, and I don't have anything to contribute anyway, so I let him get on with it: I suspect spiritually it's rather positive. What he was saying wasn't even especially mad. He has been somewhat persecuted by life, has had a rough time of things, and, it seems to me, has every right to be angry.

Over at Heresy Corner the Heresiarch's correspondents (including myself)have been commenting on philosopher Alain de Botton's idea for a 'Temple of Atheism' in the City and his theories as to why atheists of his generation are rather less angry and strident than their older fellows, such as Dr Dawkins and Mr Hitchens. As one pointed out, Dr Dawkins isn't even that angry, and pointed us towards this post by Greta Christina, who really is.

I could make niggling points about bits of it, but, in broad terms, I find it unanswerable. There is so very, very much for Christians to be ashamed of historically, and to guard against in the way they try to think now, and any sense of Christian entitlement to special treatment from a largely non-Christian polity is grotesque.

I sometimes wonder that I am not angry about the right things. All my moods of anger seem essentially selfish, arising from a sense of my own entitlement, of jealousy or wounded amour propre. I have discovered more and more of it thanks to the process of being a priest. But apart from that I'm almost excessively easygoing, very prone to making sympathetic noises to people in bad situations without being able to cut through the emotion and visualise the process that leads to the bad situation, the structure, the relationships of power and injustice. Christ was angry on occasion. Perhaps I need to work on it.

"Somebody as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2011/oct/24/richard-dawkins-video-interview

You read this headline and the first thought is how completely self-parodic it is. Then you reflect and think, well, you know what Dr D is driving at. Jesus is, in many ways, a great sceptic, a great questioner of tradition and observance, a rationalist. You can understand a degree of fellow-feeling the good Doctor might experience when he contemplates our Lord.

And then you think a third time. The trouble with the proposition of ‘Jesus the Sceptic’ is that, if that’s how he appears, that’s how the Church represents him, because the Church’s representation of Jesus is all we have. We only have the Bible stories to judge his 'intelligence' by, the same Bible stories that insist he was the Son of God and came back from the dead. As Christian scholars have generally accepted for some time, there simply is no ‘real’ Jesus who can be pitted against the Jesus of scripture and tradition – at least, none we have access to – quite apart from how silly it is even to imagine as a game lifting a human being out of their own time and context and dumping them in another one. Jesus, in atheist terms, isn’t alive today and couldn’t be, because if he was he wouldn’t be the Jesus we think we know. But Dr D, nothwithstanding his other virtues, does have a simplistic approach to anything outside his field – especially, as here, historiography and philosophy.

Parish Easter

This is a picture of the Altar of Repose on Maundy Thursday, but it's still from the Triduum (I posted pictures of the high altar bedecked for Easter last year).

This year we moved the Paschal Liturgy to the early morning for the first time in over thirty years; twenty-odd people came, and we ironed out almost all the teething problems from last year. One of the congregation arranged champagne and pain-au-chocolat for breakfast! We followed that with Communion according to the Book of Common Prayer at 8am (again, the first time that's been used for years), and finally the 10am, with smoke, aspersing, and a baptism. It was a huge relief after all the privation and restraint of Lent and Holy Week. Numbers-wise we were about the same as last year overall, though I've heard that other local churches had record attendances.

I spent a certain amount of time over the Sacred Triduum arguing with atheists over on Heresy Corner about the resurrection. My friend the Heresiarch will insist on putting up stuff over the holy season that he knows full well I will have to comment on and so diverts my attention dreadfully ... Anyway, his point was regarding Derek Murphy's book Jesus Potter Harry Christ which argues not only that there are parallels between the eternal Son and the boy-magician, but also that 'Jesus' was a fictional vehicle to bear certain mystical ideas on which the idea of the historical rabbi-teacher was based.

Of course I think this is tosh, and, when you examine the idea, utterly incredible, but it excites my sympathy (because there is no killer proof of Jesus's existence, only a weight of circumstancial argument) rather more than all those laboured attempts to explain the faith of the early Church by arguing that they made a mistake, or were covering the truth up, or any of the other stories that get concocted. If the 'there-never-was-a-Jesus' line is gathering popularity among atheists, it could be a recognition that the alternative explanations are simply too strained and implausible to bear weight.

Living in a Strange Country

'I don't have a problem with Jesus,', said Cylene the Goth, the American in Britain, over dinner. 'I'm fine with Jesus. Jesus was great. It's being made to feel a pariah unbeliever I can't take.

'Imagine you think there's life on Mars and hardly anybody else does. Yet they can't help reminding you you're wrong, all the time. People come and knock on your door to tell you, Did you know, There's no life on Mars? Athletes get their medals and say how great it is and then, 'By the way, There's no life on Mars', and everyone cheers. It says on all the coins and banknotes, 'No life on Mars!!' Schoolkids line up in front of the flag everyday and chant in unison to remind themselves There's no life on Mars. Is it any wonder I got to hate religion? It's just self-defence.'

Compared to that, the UK seems so refreshing to Cylene. There's an Established Church, but it's polite and reticent and tries not to annoy.

I know hot Christians decry the Church of England for its lukewarmness, but it has its benefits, and it arises from kindness. Jesus preached to the congregation: the nation of Israel was already supposed to believe, was already 'inside', and in any case, if any of us could preach like he did, would it really get up the atheists' noses? The rest of the time he said nothing until people asked him questions. Seems like a good pattern to me. Reticence about spiritual matters is right: you don't know where people are until you talk to them and get to know them, don't know what they need. And liturgical religion is just that, reticent. Its predictability and control allows space for individual emotion and reflection; it meets people in a variety of different places. And reticent public religion gives people who aren't 'inside' space as well. Long may that continue.