Yet There Is Method In It

I decided to post on a few issues that were more observational in style rather than completely confrontational (as were my comments before).

“What is most extraordinary about this attack from Dawkins is his utter conviction that people of religion all truly believe in that ’sort’ of deity.”

Assuming people believe in the Christian God is described in the New Testament (or old) then, yes, they do believe in that sort of deity. Reference to http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/int/long.html and associated pages. Dawkins is talking about a God that the majority of Chrisitans believe in and staying “only extremists believe that” is not addressing the point he is making. Believes don’t usually think of their God as having unfavorable characteristics (resulting from self-serving bias), but Dawkins finds God lacking in a few areas. For example the Catholic Pope’s attributes on Women, homosexuals, etc.

“But of course, there are those Christians who hold a literalist view of Genesis and who happily and sometimes ignorantly maintain that their view is the correct one. This is just grist to the mill for Dawkins of course who can then merrily debunk them as delusional members of the lunatic fringe of humanity.”

You are implying that about 47% of Americans are on the lunatic fringe on humanity! Although amusing, I would not call it a fringe but more like a significant minority.

It is pretty likely that the authors of Genesis, specifically the creation account, chose [‘It could have been like this’] and provided an answer that they hoped would satisfy the enquiry.

“With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care,—the first instinct is to abolish [wegzuschaffen] these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none.” Nietzsche.

Myth making is not a good method of explanation unless you are lucky – its better to admit a gap in our knowledge.

Another criticism of Dawkins is that having made this appeal to a future where science can show everything and knows all that is true, he is still unable to answer the question that once Liebniz posited ‘Why is there something, rather than nothing?’

That question has been bugging me and I have thought of a few points.

• The question presupposes that the world had a “choice” to be “something” or to be “nothing”. The questioner should first ask “Could the world have been nothing, rather than something?”
• The question presupposes that there is a reason why there is something. The questioner should first ask “Is there a reason why there is something, rather than nothing?”
• Wittgenstein would say the language game we are in has just defined the question into existence. To be stumped by this question is just a misuse of language and with analysis, simply dissolves. (Apparently.)
• Science never claimed to answer “why” questions. It is rather good at “how” questions though. Again we encounter the “is-ought” problem of Hume.

“Read in context [the Quran] becomes surprisingly less hostile.”
This makes me question how holy books are accessible to an average reader (or anyone at all). There may be historic context that you are not aware of that inverts the meaning of any passage or commandment. I am not saying we should totally ignore context but the historic context can be subjective or controversial. What certainty does a book have if we cannot say anything certain about it? (In fact it becomes a little more like God – very badly defined. Any attempt to do so says more about the believer than God.)

“Out of interest then, if a book is so fundamentally dangerous, why dont we ban it or burn it? Or do you agree with me that it is the interpretation of the texts in a book that kills people, if so then is this not the influence of political, and military thinking?”
Who mentioned banning it? I hope you do not think there are only two options: enforced religion, banning religion? And if the leadership that caused the interpretation is religious (e.g. the Pope) then can be finally lay the blame at the door of religion?

To be continued…

AC1

“[scientists] are seemingly no nearer to a grand theory of everything than we were when we first embarked upon this quest.”

Your comment is echoed in the last words of Isaac Newton, who was perhaps the most significant “proto” scientist: “I don’t know what I may seem to the world. But as to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

But the difference between Science and non-science schools of knowledge is that Science is progressive. For example, astrology gets no closer to truth because it cannot find and correct mistakes by comparing itself with reality. “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” Newton.

I can’t see how you can think we are no closer to the theory of everything (TOE) than before. Newton did not know about relativity or quantum mechanics. We know more than he did. This is progress to the TOE. I am not sure if we can reach the TOE but it might happen in my lifetime. I am not sure if you are distinguishing between the TOE (which might be indiscoverable or not) and the possibility of science can understand everything (which also may be impossible).

There is much more to be said on this topic, in light of Wittgenstein etc, etc but that is for another time.

(In the same thread on religion, you commented: “…Dawkins and Hitchens have more pressing purposes at hand, surely having demonstrated the unlikelihood of God they must now demonstrate how science is a more reliable answer to all of our uncertainties.”

This is yet another example of turning the discussion away from religion and on to irrelevant issues.)

Anti Citizen One

Senior police officers have renewed their call for a change in the law on how long a terror suspect can be held without charge. BBC

Occasionally to the outside reader it may seem that AC-1 and myself are living on completely different planets. Well I can safely put that theory to rest. Generally there are many issues we discuss where 3 steps occur. Firstly we both start at the same point, a question about something. Secondly we apply our methodologies to resolving or understanding or narrating the question we have posited. Finally we reach a conclusion. What has suprised AC-1 and myself is how often we agree with the first and the last, the question and the answer, but we disagree or at least differ with our approach to reaching those answers. And of course occasionally as you will have noticed we find ourselves fundamentally in disagreement with perhaps all three steps.

Why do we sometimes seem to disagree so bitterly when at othertimes we have few problems reaching consensus?

Whilst thinking about this I was reminded of the typological analysis of theology provided by Hans Frei. When trying to write a narrative history of theology Frei realised that the common analytic terms for theology, i.e. orthodox, conservative, liberal, radical and so on, were insufficient. For many theologians or theologies differed in spite of their similarities. For example liberation theology (politically radical) involved a conservative literal and analogous reading of scripture. So he proposed a new model to describe different theological methods, and he called this the Five types – Two extremes. And he used the analogy of a straight line with two ends (the extremes) and three intermediate points which represented general Academic Theology.

1————-2————–3—————4————–5

1= External Extreme 2-4= Academic Theology 5= Internal Extreme

These five types represent the different methodological and ideological approaches to theology. But this system oculd perhaps also be used to cover any philosophical question.

The Five Types

Type 1 The External Extreme

In this type total priority is given to an external and contemporary worldview, philosophy, or practical agenda. For example atheist materialism, or feminist ethics. Take atheist materialism as an example, in this world view the physical world is all there is to know, it is brute fact, therefore the claims of Christian theology are viewed with extreme suspicion. Any approach to theology made in this type is made solely with reference to the external extreme, so theology is viewed and described or explained through the medium of that external extreme. Thus religion is explained in terms of history, genetics, psychology, economics, sociology, philosophy etc. The external extreme approach is to assess theology in terms of whether they fit the external framework.

Type 2 Synthetic approaches to external frameworks.

This type takes external frameworks seriously in their own right, but attempts to apply them to an understanding of religion and to develop a unique theology from out of this. An example is various forms of Christian Existentialism, Christian Socialism, Political Islam, Liberation Theology. This approach sometimes has a tendency to lean towards type 1, where the external philosophy colours the theology so for example Liberation Theology is sometimes criticized for its unabridged reference to marxist theory.

Type 3 Correlation.

This approach does not allow an external framework, such as existentialism to influence the theology. But similarly it does not adocate a theological primacy either. It chooses to establish dialog, and embraces all sorts of philosophies and world views. It is typically the attempt to synthesize culture and faith. Critics of this type though describe it as a tightrope act and that any form of theology using this type inevitable becomes faith taking-over culture, or culture taking-over faith, for example.

Type 4 Can be described as orthodoxy. It is similar to the internal extreme of type 5 in that it insists that no other framework may dictate how to understand theology/faith, but it differs in that it acknowledges that in order to justify type 4 it must be continously tested against other frameworks and it must be able to provide a coherent description of itself in relation to other positions. Type 4 unlike the previous types acknowledges that a theology is not just an intellectual position but is also a way of life shared by others. It is best exemplified by the Anselm quote “faith seeking understanding.”

Type 5 The Internal Extreme

This type is the mirror opposite of Type 1. It allows of no other framework other than its own. In this case though the referenced framework is internal, examples range from biblical literalism to papal infallibility, to the primacy of internal experience. It encompasses often uncomfortable extremes (that seem unrelated) from christian fundamentalism to the primacy of the Wittgensteinian language game.

The Language game approach would state that the task of theology is to make clear what sort of ‘game’ say Christianity is, and then to draw the rules and describe what the consequences for living within this language game are. The ultimate rule in the language games theory is to say that it is pointless to try to justify Christian faith in alien terms (i.e. scientific materialism) for that would entail switching games and/or breaking the rules for one or the other.

The Extremes, AC-1 and El Sordo

This model (I think) provides a neat example of how sometimes AC-1 and myself operate in relation to each other. For example our approach to the question ‘Does God Exist’ results in almost irreconciliable differences at every step of the way. It is becuase AC-1 probably falls into type 1 on this question, approaching it from the perspective of an atheist materialist, and because me (El Sordo) approaches it from type 5 as a wittgenstein language games practitioner. The problem with the two types is that it sometimes precludes diaolog between the two on those issues where they belong to diametrically opposed frameworks.

I hope this goes someway to explaining and rationalising our occasional spats and it does help me sometimes to remember this typological model when our dialog fails.

You wrote: “Either way it is the conviction and hope that, as Dawkins wishes: “religious readers who open this book will be atheists when they put it down.” It is towards this type of atheist that the perjorative ‘militant’ is prefixed.”

By this logic, anyone who tries to influence people to their point of view is a ‘militant’. Several entire professions could be labeled as such – politicians, public relations, lawyers, priests, etc… This is therefore not a useful label.

To let Dawkins defend himself: “It is too easy to confuse fundamentalism with passion.” “.. I know what it would take to change my mind [about evolution], and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming.” Dawkins, The God Delusion

I am sure if God talked to Dawkins, he would not be an atheist but probably still a scientist!

Anti Citizen One

This is an expansion really of some of the ideas developing out of the post concerning the claims of ‘militant’ atheists and the discussions myself and AC-1 have had about arbitrary beliefs (non-evidence based belief) and there value or lackof.

I want to consider a variety of phenomonal events and scientific research, observations and speculations that suggest that reality is not quite as it may seem. And that arbitrary belief may not be quite so arbitrary after all.

Our starting point in this journey is probably the solopsistic skepticism of Descartes in his first meditation. The sceptical questioning of whether we can trust our senses. The anti-realist conclusion is that we can only be certain of our being thinking and that anything else (such as an experience of the external world) can only be believed to be true, but cannot be convincingly known to be true. One classic example is the Brain in a Vat argument. Science offers us a similar cautionary theory when it talks of the observer effect. Where the act of observing or measuring a given phenomena may influence its outcome.

The Vision of Our Lady of Fatima

On 13 October 1917 at Cova Da Iria in Fatima Portugal, 70,000 people gathered to witness a miracle. Six months previously three children, Lucia Dos Santos and Francis and Jacinta Marto saw an apparition of a lady in a globe of light hovering over a tree. The lady spoke to them, telling them not to be afraid and that she had come from heaven. She announced that she would return to the same spot for six consecutive months at the same time, and that on the final occasion she would perform a miracle.

On the final apparition most people in the crowd reported not being able to see the Lady of Fatima, but it was recorded that 70,000 onlookers including the curious and the outright sceptical did witness a most unusual phenomena. The editor of the Lisbon daily newspaper O Seculo (a pro-government and anti-clerical secular paper) described it as the dancing sun. This was the description given almost universally by the witnesses that the sun danced across the sky. Closer inspection of the accounts reveal that what was observed was a huge silver disc descending from the clouds, rotating rapidly, performing aerial tricks and changing colours and emitting a heat that dried the soggy clothing of the witnesses who were stood in the rain.

What are we to make of this. There are numerous explanations posited.

1) The reports are simply untrue and a mass fabrication. However the large number of witnesses, the presence of sceptics including Dr. Joseph Garrett, Professor of Natural Sciences at Coimbra University among others suggests that witnesses believed that they observed the described phenomena.

2) The events truly were miraculous. This hypotheses may require a substantial leap of faith for atheist scientists, and for that reason I am not proposing it seriously, but it is a possibility amongst the others. This theory becomes difficult when one considers the possible scientific explanations for the phenomena and the difficulty of verifying the existence of (for example) heaven where the Lady of Fatima claimed to have come from. What is accepted even by the unmoved sceptics is that an event was predicted to occur, and consequently did occur.

3) The events are open to scientific explanation. First of all this must be true as the event was ‘observed’ by many so some comparison of the witness accounts can lead to the development of scientific hypotheses. Science has excluded the possibility of a solar event, there are no astronomical or meteorological phenomena reported that day by any observatory that could lend explanation to the event. However some have speculated about light interacting with stratospheric dust clouds causing the changing of the colours, this theory (widely accepted as possible) does not explain the reports of the disc moving, or emanating heat. Most scientists investigating the phenomena have concluded that there are possible scientific explanations for some of the reported phenomena but no overall conclusive explanation is evident. Many scientific researchers on this event also conclude extra-natural explanations not to be out of the question.

4) One common, and now substantially rejected explanation is that the 70,000 experienced a mass hallucination. It is rejected on the grounds of the numbers of witnesses, the variety of witnesses including scientific sceptics and that the phenomena was observed up to 18 kilometres away, by persons not involved in the events at Fatima.

These are some of the possiblities but one conclusive fact, relevant to this post though is evident, all of the witnesses are convinced of the truth of what they saw.

Postscript: the angel of Mons

This tale recounts how in 1914 at the Battle of Mons the British Army on the verge of defeat overcame the German forces by virtue of assistance from a ghostly or angelic army. The story achieved huge popularity at the time, and also gained credence when following the war a number of soldiers from both sides reported witnessing the said phenomena. Most scholars today reject that the event occured, due to the lack of credible witnesses, the lengthy delay (many years) between the event and the accounts given by alleged witnesses, and the existence of a work of popular patriotic fiction describing similar events. In short it is believed that the legend of the angels of Mons is nothing other than an urban myth created by sourcing various stories and projecting the wish-fulfillment of a society still in shock at the horrors of war. However it can be said to have had a functional value to society, much in the same way an imaginary friend provides a coping mechanism for varying crises.

Jung and the Seance

In Flying Saucers psychoanalyst Carl Jung recounts his experience, or rather lack of one, whilst attending a spiritualist seance with four other people. All four people claimed to have witnessed a vivid globe of light hovering over the abdomen of the medium conducting the seance. Jung claimed not to have seen any such thing. Over the course of his investigations Jung was convinved that the other four believed they had witnessed something, and that they were not lying about their experience. Furthermore he was professionally satisfied that his four companions were of a sound mind and not suffering from delusions, individually or en masse.

What is interesting is his confirmation of the mental state exhibited by those who have experienced religious/spiritual phenomena, as classified by Psychologist William James in his book the Variety of Religious Experiences. Jung describes that his companions, in common with other subjects who claim to have had such phenomenological experiences, found it “absolutely incomprehensible” that he could not see what they could see.

Jung concludes (with some importance for my conclusion on the value of arbitrary beliefs in the context of reflecting reality and truth) that what is “seen with our own eyes” acquires a realness commensurate with our notions of objective reality.

An Intermission: and why William James believes Science should pay more attention

The lectures (in ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’) discussed the distinction between symbolism and reality. Symbols, such as the word “steak” on a menu, do not embody the actuality of the objects they represent. The word “steak” on a menu merely points to some slab of meat in the back of the restaurant. In a similar way, James posits that all of science is fundamentally detached from reality since the tools of science are merely pointers to some actual objective realm. He criticized his audience for the scientific tendency to ignore the unseen aspects of life and the universe. As an example, he discussed the way the notion of a lemon causes salivation in the mouth of an individual; while there is no lemon, there is clearly a process occurring worthy of academic inquiry.

A moral to the story of the Four Blind men of Cathay

This was an ancient parable about the limitations and expectations of human knowledge. It has many contempories in philosophy, from the Brain in the Vat, to Plato’s Cave. It is worth retelling in brief.

The four blind men of cathay walking forward grasp with their hands in order to feel their way towards their destination. They all speak aloud what it is they are feeling in order to help their companions along the way. The four blind men stumble towards an object. The first feels a wall, the second feels a pillar, the third feels a snake, and the fourth feels a vine. Yet despite their perceptions they do not realise that what they are all feeling is an elephant.

The moral, some philosophers have observed is that there is not, despite our attempts to wish to the contrary, a strict commonality to our perceptions. Where there is, or rather where there is expected to be, it is in fact the consequence of a democratic urge towards conformity.

Opinions and Social Pressure

In 1951 Solomon Asch, renowned gestalt psychologist and social scientist published his research titled ‘Opinions and Social Pressure‘. His experiments undertaken at Harvard concerned the effects of social pressure upon perceptual judgements.

When asked to correctly match the length of a line with that of one of three lines presented, participants made the ‘wrong’ choice less than 1% of the time. However, in a group where the majority was coached beforehand to unanimously choose the ‘wrong’ line, the decision of the unknowing participants was measurably affected. Under group pressure minority subjetcs agreed with the majority’s ‘wrong’ judgements 36.8% of the time even when the length of the two allegedly equal lines differed by as much as seven inches.

Asch states: “That we have found the tendency to conformity in our society so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern.”

Other research appears to support Asch’s observations, including the famous Milgram experiments into the obedience of subjects to authority figures, even to the extent of performing acts that are in conflict with their personal conscience. And a 2005 study using MRI scanners which showed that social conformity engages regions of the brain devoted to spatial awareness. In other words, experimental subjects who gave in to group pressure actually saw things that way. Conformity was due to a change in perception rather than conscious judgment!

The relevance of this research is valid with regards ‘miraculous’ phenomena, religious experience, Instrumentalist scientists, in fact every truth-claim, or belief-based thought system, and worldview.

Why do we seem compelled to conform?

According to psychologist J.R.Smythies in his Analysis of Perception, it is because we have taught ourselves to conform. This theory proposes that the world of the child is quasi-hallucinatory, but that as they grow up they learn to ignore aspects of their reality that are considered hallucinatory by the adults around them.

Fans of Douglas Adams will not fail to notice the similarity of this idea to the SEP field (Somebody Else’s Problem).

Jean Piaget, natural scientist and developmental psychologist has consistently over the course of his published works demonstrated that notions of perception being innate or genetic are as yet unproved. In his work The Child and Reality (1972) the extent to which perception is learned becomes clearer.

The child learns to see geometric forms; the child learns to percieve in three dimensions; the child learns to establish objectal relationships. The ability to perceive may be innate, but it is clear that we learn what to perceive.

The media perceptions of non and pre-literate societies.

In 1961 Professor John Wilson of the African Institute of London University published “Film Literacy in Africa” (Canadian Communications v1 #4 summer 1961) describing his experiences of trying to teach non-literate tribes to read using film. The film that they were to watch was also supposed to teach them about sanitation. About 30 villagers watched the film and at the end of the film they were asked to recall what they had seen. To the suprise of the researchers they immediately answered “A chicken.” This was all they had seen in the film. The Chicken was flying away because it was scared. It is believed that chickens held some spiritual value for this community. Later the researchers studied the film and couldnt see a chicken. Eventually they discovered that in the corner of a couple of frames almost impercetible to the eye there was indeed a chicken taking flight.

Further research indicated that the villagers had been virtually oblivious to everything else in the film, seeing nothing prior to or after the chicken that was worthy of any recount of perception.

“when we questioned them further they had seen a man, but what was really interesting was that they hadn’t made a whole story out of it, and in point of fact, we discovered afterwards that they hadn’t seen a whole frame they had inspected the frame for details. Then we found out from the artist and an eye specialist that a sophisticated audience, an audience that is accustomed to the film, focuses a little way in front of the flat screen, so that you take in the whole frame.” The Chicken was truly the “one bit of reality for them“.

Anthropologist Nigel Barley in his work with the Dowayo tribe of Cameroon discovered a similar phenomenon when showing them photographs. It would seem that pre-literate peoples are unable to ‘see‘ the image until theyhave ‘learned‘ to focus on a point above the flat surface.

What do we see?

Cyberneticist and Phycisist Heinz Von Foerster attempts to explain that the human mind does not percieve what is ‘there‘ but what it believes should be there. We are able to see because our retinas absorb light from the outside world and convey the signals to the brain. The same is true of all our sensory receptors. However our retinas do not see colour. Von Foerster describes them as being blind to the quality of their stimulation and responsive only to the quantity.

“This should not come as a suprise, for indeed “out there” there is no light and no colour, there are only electromagnetic waves; “out there” there is no sound and no music, there are only periodic variations of air pressure; “out there” there is no heat and no cold, there are only moving molecules with more or less mean kinetic energy, and so on. Finally, for sure, “out there” there is no pain. Since the physical nature of the stimulus – its quality – is not encoded into nervous activity, the fundamental question arises as to how does our brain conjure up the tremendous variety of this colourful world as we experience it any moment while awake, and sometimes in dreams while asleep.”

The answer is that the brain perceives what it wants to perceive. In the words of Michael Talbot We are not born into the world, but born into something that we make into the world. Or from Von Foerster “The Environment as we percieve it is our invention.”

We do not observe the physical world. We participate with it.

We may suspect Talbot proposes that the “out there” that Von Foerster is reduced to speculating about has the same ontological reality as Schrodingers Cat. Everything is grounded on its opposite. If the yes or no of Schrodingers cat is dependent upon which reality the consciousness decides to edit out, the yes or no of an “out there” universe must be assigned to the same category.

A note on Anti-Realism

In philosophy of science, anti-realism applies chiefly to claims about the non-reality of “unobservable” entities such as electrons or DNA, which are not detectable with human senses. For a brief discussion comparing such anti-realism to its opposite, realism, see (Okasha 2002, ch. 4). Ian Hacking (1999, p. 84) also uses the same definition. One prominent anti-realist position in the philosophy of science is instrumentalism, which takes a purely agnostic view towards the existence of unobservable entities: unobservable entity X serves simply as an instrument to aid in the success of theory Y. We need not determine the existence or non-existence of X. Some scientific anti-realists argue further, however, and deny that unobservables exist even as non-truth conditioned instruments.

A Conclusion of sorts.

In order to wrap this up I thought I would quote from John Lilly and his book the Human Biocomputer who neatly surmises my thoughts on the place of arbitrary beliefs in the field of knowedge, reality and truth.

“In the province of connected minds, what the network believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally.”

Was prompted to ask this question yesterday whilst watching the Wimbledon Men’s Singles Tennis final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.

I’m not usually a fan of tennis, but this was a captivating match of highs and lows, or emotional and physical fluctuations. It was also considered one of the great tennis finals of all time, and the eventual winner Roger Federer equalled Bjorn Borgs record of 5 Wimbledon titles in a row. It was hard not to disagree with the analysis that I was watching history in the making (which is a tautology) and that I was watching a sporting legend in the making.

But I wondered why is sport of such social and cultural importance to us?

I know the obvious answers that sport has its origins in the martial activity of man. That athletes, wrestlers, javelin throwers, archers, horse-racing, shot-putters were all engaged in a false-war activity. It’s sometimes easy to forget that medieval jousting contests (despite the danger to limb and life, including to the spectator) was a sporting event.

Then there is the tribal element to sport, that peoples unite in a common support for the nation, their district, their community. The modern support that many young men and women give to Football clubs is a manifestation of this. Replace sense of community with a sense of pride in the badge, the jersey. Supporters feel they own the club they support, that they employ the players to represent their hopes and ambitions.

But then nowadays any martial element to sport as a preperation for war is just a social memory. Soldiers are not expected to complete their training these days on ‘the playing fields of Eton’ or elsewhere for that matter. Though admittedly it is still a means of learning about and engaging with competative behaviour, as important on the battlefield and sports field as it is in the world of business.

And culturally sport is perhaps less cohesive than it once was. There is television for example, where a particular sports team may have its supporters situated on the opposite side of the globe, paying supporters even who may have no idea where Manchester (for example) really is. And of course people have a very different idea of social identity as cultures intermingle.

Of course there is the simple answer, it is all just a game, a recreation, a bit of fun, maybe even an act of escapism. But I can’t help but think that it is slightly more purposeful, that there is something more cohesive about sport than its purely being fun. I dont pretend to know what the answer is, but having watched the great Tennis final yesterday I pondered whether it was a sense of shared hope, of myth-making, of taking joy from arbitrary beliefs (i.e. the idea that sport matters) that draw so many people to it.

This was my favourite news article of the day, perhaps even of the week so far. Research from the Institute of Education in London has shown that children who have an imaginary friend (with whom they are not afraid to interact with) have enhanced creativity which furthers their communication and articulacy skills whilst boosting their self-confidence.

Contrary to previously held beliefs that such behaviour was either abnormal or escapist, educational psychologists now believe that it is a perfectly acceptable coping mechanism for a variety of challenging issues from parental break-up to bullying or lack of self-esteem.

This seems like a nice example of arbitrary beliefs* being useful.

*Beliefs without justification or evidence, (similar to faith style beliefs).

It is also the imaginary and intellectual equivalent of the transitional object, such as the teddy-bear or comfort blanket that very young children use to start their developmental differentiation between self and other, me and not me.

Another example posited in the article was this one. “But it is not just children who converse with invisible companions. Explorer Dave Mill created his imaginary friend Nobody at the age of 34 as a survival mechanism during a solo walk to the North Pole.”

Iain Duncan-Smith former leader of one of the most Right wing Conservative Parties in opposition has published a report that he hopes the new centrist Conservative Party will adopt. In the report IDS attributed most of societies ills to the development of an underclass. This underclass was created, he believes, by the breakdown of the family and of traditional moral values.

He identified a number of key elements that he believed disproved the old Tory theory that overall wealth and wellbeing, even that of the poor was improved by general increases in social wealth. He suggests that the underclass was never going to get better of its own accord and that it needed a helping hand up.

For example he suggested that alcohol tax rises by 10% in order to cover NHS treatment costs for alcohol abuse (a problem he associates with the underclasses). Furthermore he believed that prisons should build drug-rehab wings, that local health authorities should stop handing out free clean syringes to drug addicts and that methodone treatment for Heroin addiction should cease and that the addicts should just go ‘cold turkey’.

But his overall commentary was on the ‘family’ and the ‘welfare state’ he believed that more should be done to deny freebie handouts to the idle (not his words I must emphasise) and that the state must reward marriage with tax-breaks and welfare benefits as opposed to cohabiting partnerships or single-parents.

This bizarre attempt at compassionate conservatism is alarming because of two things. Firstly most people who are comfortably well off will agree with his diagnosis of the underclass and his prescribed solutions. Secondly he appears to be harking back to a ‘Golden era’ where society was better off. The so called age of ‘Victorian values’.

Yes there is an underclass, I call them the have nots. No not everyone that he and others believe to belong to this underclass truly do. But more importantly wake up politicians and people there never has been a golden era of social values. Social problems such as drug addiction, alcohol addiction, teenage parenthood, the breakdown of marriage, crime, the unemployed, the unemployable… these things will not be solved by tax-breaks and tweaking the welfare benefits system.  Where there are exceptions to the rule (i.e. tax-breaks) there are the scrupulous who will manipulate it to their favour. For every person who cheats the benefit system or who is a ‘burden’ on society for refusing to work there is a seemingly respectable law-abiding person shafting the state or their neighbour for everything they can get.

A recent example has been the managers of private equity firms who have bought large companies, stripped them of their assets and then sold them on for huge profits. Thanks to a loophole and a tax-break system not meant for them, they have escaped paying 100′s of millions of pounds. They pay less tax on their earnings (percentage wise) than domestic cleaners do.

So lets stop harking on about golden eras and social collapses and a return to good old traditional values. Lets re-make our cultural values, cut our cloth accordingly and finally realise that a fair society with oppurtunity for all can only be created when those who can, those who belong to the upper social strata ‘the haves’ pay their proportional way in society.

Yes, according to Peter Lewis, and according to a variety of writers who have challenged, for example, Richard Dawkins and his latest book the God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens and his polemical work God is not great.

One particular aspect that seems to get on these authors goat is the oft repeated claim by Dawkins or his disciples that religion is evil, or is a major source of evil in the world. Further to this it is their stated aim that they should wish to eradicate religious belief from the world. Although perhaps sometimes they would prefer to use the language of liberation, as opposed the language of intolerance. Either way it is the conviction and hope that, as Dawkins wishes: “religious readers who open this book will be atheists when they put it down.” It is towards this type of atheist that the perjorative ‘militant’ is prefixed.  Likewise Hitchens happily switches from analytical language to polemical and judgemental language in the short course of a sentence when he says: “Religion is man-made. Religion poisons everything.”

It is not worthy of serious commentary at this stage to refute the arguments that wars, intolerances, hatreds and so on are the offspring of religious belief, Anymore than it should be  necessary to keep reminding people of the particularly atheist characteristics of certain totalitarian regimes, including Stalinism and Nazism, who between them possibly contrived to industriously murder somewhere in the region of 50 million people, as recently as the last century.

That violence between one man to another, between one state to another exists is undeniable, to then specifically attribute the source of this violence (even in atheist regimes) to religion, borders on the hysterically delusional. It is a rather unfortunate and unjustified observation to attribute fault, say to religion, the behaviour of its most extremist adherents, just as unjustified as it would be to state that all Germans are culpable for the actions of the Nazis, that all socialists are tainted by Stalin and Mao, that all white europeans bear the burden of responsibility for slavery.

I am reminded at this stage of a criticism levelled at Dawkins by Alister McGrath, who reminds us that Dawkins in his own book challenges the selective use of data, yet all the while for the purposes and advancement of his own argument collapses into that very fallacious practise of data selection. Dawkins, and for that matter most of the ‘militant’ atheists for whom religion is an institution to be abolished, have a tendency to abandon the scientific, acceptable and rigorous pretences of evidence-based scholarship, often presenting examples of the pathological as though it were the normal. All the while presenting anecdote as though it had the same scholarly value as evidence garnered from a whole host of primary sources.

Then of course there is the casuistical use of scripture by its opponents. Particularly handy for this retort is the Old Testament, whose myths, tales, ritual prescriptions and socio-cultural accounts come in for a great deal of atheist critcism. For example Krauss (in the previously posted article with Dawkins in the Scientific American Magazine) declares in solidarity with Dawkins: “If one believes that homosexuality is an abomination because it says so in the Bible, one has to accept the other things that are said in the Bible, including the allowance to kill your children if they are disobedient or validation of the right to sleep with your father if you need to have a child and there are no other men around, and so forth.” Such observations of course lead Dawkins to present such rational descriptions of the God of the Israelites as being “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak.” And for good measure he adds “A misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, megalomaniac and capriciously malevolent bully.”

What is most extraordinary about this attack from Dawkins is his utter conviction that people of religion all truly believe in that ‘sort’ of deity. There probably is a core band of homophobic, rascist and malevolent bullies who do glorify in such a characterisation of the deity, but then again there are equally capriciously malevolent scientists who have sought to inflict pain and misery upon their victims. Yet these demonic figures, lets use the abhorrent Dr Josef Mengele as an example, are by no means truly reflective of the benign and even benevolent majority of scientists and scientific motivations. I certainly could not criticise medical science and hold up Dr Harold Shipman as a paradigm of everything that is wrong with medicine and expect to get away with it. Yet it would appear that it is this puerile approach that Dawkins and Hitchens seem to be so ready to use.

It is incredible that in the case of Dawkins, a highly respected scientist in his own right, who in all fairness is also motivated to defend science from its ignorant detractors, he is so willing to abandon scientific notions of evidence based research in favour of personal prejudices. As the literary critic Terry Eagleton said in criticism of the God delusion: “Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false.”

Where, the question goes, in Dawkins and in Hitchens work is the scientific literature on the relationship of harmful and healthy aspects of religion?

But for now lets return to scripture. Its critical use as a weapon against belief seems to bely the fact that as intelligent scholars both Dawkins and Hitchens should be aware of the nature of myth-making throughout human history. Let us take Genesis and the creation story as an example. First of all if anybody was to take an absolutely literalist view of the creation account they must at first contend with the fact that there are two different accounts given. Then as we now know through the various branches of science there is a huge wealth of evidence to debunk for example the idea that the world was created in literally seven days, or that it was a recent event in the nature of 6000 years ago. But for hundreds of years theologians and biblical scholars have proposed that seven days did not literally mean seven calendrical humanly measured days as you and I would experience it. They refer to a letter from Peter in the New Testament who says that a Day to God is like a Thousand years to us. And no, theologians did not then infer that creation took seven thousand years then. What they did infer was that the creation account was a myth chosen as a form of explanation to satiate the intellectual hunger of those who asked the philosophical questions of why, where and how?  Science of course has the methodology to give us the answer to the question how, and very often also to where, but more on that in a moment.  As for the 6000 year old earth, or young-creationist ideal, that isn’t even a biblical assertion, rather it was ‘calculated’ by a bishop many hundreds of years ago, ironically in the quest for scientific certitude. But of course, there are those Christians who hold a literalist view of Genesis and who happily and sometimes ignorantly maintain that their view is the correct one. This is just grist to the mill for Dawkins of course who can then merrily debunk them as delusional members of the lunatic fringe of humanity. But where is his account of the views of the patristic fathers? Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen, Augustine, Eusebius, and Basil did not believe the Genesis account depicted ordinary solar days and read creation history as an allegory as well as being theologically true. An allegorical reading of scripture would, if we are to accept the scholarly credentials of these great thinkers be acceptable. So why then is the Creation story to be taken as a myth and not as literal truth? Well, other than scientific sign posts that point to the obvious, let us consider the reasons for making myths, a peculiarly human activity. Is it not feasible to believe that at some stage in human social development, when a common language emerged and when common social cause was found, lets say in a fledgling religion, that a person enquired ‘how did it all begin?’ Accepting this as a feasible allegory in itself there are three options, respond to the enquiry with an ‘I don’t know’, respond to the enquiry with a ‘It could have been like this’, or simple ignore the question hoping it will go away.  It is pretty likely that the authors of Genesis, specifically the creation account, chose the second option and provided an answer that they hoped would satisfy the enquiry. Of course they made the myth because options 1 or 3 do not satisfy the question, and the myth as it has come down to us today, took the form that it did because the authors some hundreds of years BCE did not have the knowledge and understanding of the universe that todays scientists benefit from. Is this not comparable to the often ham-fisted or ‘factional’ attempts at explanations that parents offer to their small children when they ask sometimes uncomfortable enquiries about things, either the parents do not think the child capable of understanding, or about which the parents do not have sufficient understanding about themselves?  Is this not perhaps comparable (although not equivalent) to telling a child who asks ‘where did I come from?’ not that they came from under a cabbage patch, or were delivered by a stork (both fictions), but that they came from mummy’s tummy, or that they were born because their parents loved each other?

It would seem from the denunciations of Dawkins and Hitchens that even allegory is inadmissable. Must we then, as it would seem they propose, refuse to read the Iliad and the Odyssey because Homer’s existence is as historically uncertain as is the siege of Troy? Must we also reject the axioms of Euclid, who my never have existed and who have been the collective pseudonym for a committee of mathematicians?

But Dawkins and Hitchens have more pressing purposes at hand, surely having demonstrated the unlikelihood of God they must now demonstrate how science is a more reliable answer to all of our uncertainties. This is not to deny sciences usefulness in the field of human knowledge, but it is a small observation to make that science is hardly complete, that we are seemingly no nearer to a grand theory of everything than we were when we first embarked upon this quest. That scientific knowledge is by its nature transient, that the great theories and theoreticians of the past probably will or already have been superceded by those who have demonstrated a greater clarity and refinement in their thinking, is not beyond any doubt.

Dawkins of course subscribes to the belief that eventually one day science will know everything there is to know. Note my italicisation of the word belief, for of course, much to chagrin of Dawkins and likeminded others, to talk of a completion of scientific knowledge, something that not even the majority of scientists are convinced is going to occur anyway, is to make vague appeals and speculations about matters that they just cannot possibly know.

Another criticism of Dawkins is that having made this appeal to a future where science can show everything and knows all that is true, he is still unable to answer the question that once Liebniz posited ‘Why is there something, rather than nothing?’ Now the content of the question is unimportant, what is central though is the enquiry why? Liebniz, like many others of science and of faith, of no science and not of faith, is asking for a purpose. This is where Dawkins becomes derailed. He cannot provide a purposeful explanation, so he adheres to the theory that there is no purpose, that there is no need for explanation. “The Universe has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” This of course satisfies the criticism levelled at Dawkins that he is an amateur theologian, that he does not have sufficient background knowledge of the topic to be able to speak with any authority on the matter. His response? Theology is a non-subject about a non-entity, therefore why should he waste his time learning about an irrelevance when he can be focusing on debunking the central tenet of religious belief… God?

But lets get back to purpose, or more specifically Dawkins’ view of universal purposelessness. His view, as expressed at Douglas Adams funeral is that the universe is finely tuned, in fact exquisitely finely tuned, so much so that a slight imperceptible difference in the values of gravity and the strong nuclear forces of the sun would have rendered life here impossible. Of course there are numerous other fine tuned elements to the existence of the earth and to life on earth, each of which had it been slightly different would have caused enormously varied consequences for earth and lifeforms on earth. But, having acknowledged this, Dawkins and his particular school of atheism choose to explain this by means of a non-explanation. It is all simply luck, random chance and an infinite number of improbable coincidences.  A neat, tidy but alas dogmatic and doctrinal argument that seeks to disengage from the debate.

Of course the problem that Dawkins and Hitchens et al face, is why do so many people, including scientists and people of reason, believe in a God that does not exist?

The standard answer is because believers are deluded, so much so that perhaps out of a fear of death they choose to create a God in order to fulfil their wishful fantasies about living beyond death. Interesting notion, actually I have some sympathy towards this, every religion seems to have a preoccuppation about death and what happens to the ‘person’ after death. But this does not infer wish fulfilment or delusion, it is in fact a perfectly reasonable response to a common existential problem for the living.

Hitchens and Dawkins detest faith, they detest religious belief and they would like to see it eradicated. For Hitchens “we distrust anything that contradicts science or reason.” A pity then that he should spend his life rejecting belief beyond evidence, perhaps he should become a recluse and withdraw from the world, after all he cannot enter into a taxi without having a degree of faith that the driver knows how to drive, that the car isn’t about to explode, that the destination isnt still attainable. Perhaps he should even reject Dawkins when he calls non-thinking faith ‘evil’, after all he can only take it on faith that Dawkins is who he says he is, that he knows what he purports to be an authority upon, and that the theories (seemingly sound) that he defends or promotes may not one day be so thoroughly superceded that in the future people may look back and wonder why so-called learned men were so deluded.

Perhaps also we should ridicule the geneticists who expound their theories using the model of DNA, the particle phycisists who talk with certainty of electrons and the cosmologists who maintain that the universe is full of Dark Matter, a ‘thing’ which is by its nature neither observable nor measurable. Instrumental non-existing entities, in other words belief in things beyond evidence.

All in all it would appear that many of the attacks by Dawkins and Hitchens and the ‘militant’ atheist brigade are indeed puerile and threadbare. This is not to deny that we must be vigilant to safeguard scientific progress, that we must shun the most fundamentalist forms of activity based on belief without evidence. We must of course as Dawkins is occasionally trying to do provide a critique of religion.  But to dismiss it as poison, evil, brainwashing, child abuse to name but a few of the criticisms is to fall into a horrendous observational and personal fallacy. I’m reminded and would wish to remind the militant atheists of the agnostic, skeptic, science writer Michael Sherman who stated that “Religion, like all social institutions of such historical depth and cultural impact, cannot be reduced to an unambiguous good or evil.”