Richard's Blog

Dangerous religion?

With Dawkins lining up alongside Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris et al. in attacking religion in general - rather than just the Christian Faith in particular, Keith Ward's book Is Religion Dangerous? looks like it could be a good read... the problem is that I've already got another of his on my already aching shelves unread and there's just too much of a queue....

...which makes me very grateful for TheCenTriC's summary of the work including a good set of quotations and summaries of the main sections... problem is that it reads so well I suspect I will just end up ordering it anway... :o)

Catching up...

Yet again, rather a backlog in my 'Must blog this sometime...' files - hopefully enough here you'll find something worth pausing for thought (or a smile - sometimes more therapeutic!):

• Adrian has been sending the rest of us involved in leading worship in All Souls links to a new way of learning fresh songs - watching them on YouTube! Here's a couple of recent ones, one of them from Hillsongs, the other from Chris Tomlin.

• A couple of good cartoons courtesy of CartoonChurch.com: What the clergy do all week and What your pew says about you

• Those of you who did the Digging Deeper series on Tom Wright's book "Evil and the Justice of God", might be interested in a review (link is direct to it in pdf format) by Don Carson - it's mostly a summary of the contents (no bad thing), but there's a critique too which is worth pondering.

• An interesting piece in the Guardian online about the takeover of Tescos-and-the-like being like all-pervasive/invasive(?) weeds... "harsh but true???".

• This time from Ekklesia online news is a story saying that a US court has ruled Pringle Chips are not satanic - phew! :o)
  The semi-serious bit of the story comes here:
  

  The stars in fact stand for the thirteen original American colonies. But the arrangement of stars in the symbol was said to secretly spell out the Revelation 13:18 "number of the beast": 666.

  Without examining the facts, many people, most notably evangelicals, signed petitions against Procter & Gamble and boycotted their products in the 1980s and 1990s.

  "Without examing the facts..." - I wonder how many times we all get caught out that way?
  

   

• Finally a quite brilliant piece from Hugh of gapingvoid.com - summarising a seminar he did on blogging to business leaders. If you're in business of any kind, marketing or just interested in the way the internet is changing (...has changed) the landscape completely, it's a must-read. [Cartoon from Hugh's site - click on the image for a full-size version]

Sorry for the somewhat random nature of the collection... enjoy!

Dawkins' Delusion revisited...

I know that there are some who read this blog whose eyes glaze over when they see Dawkins' name - mostly because it's assumed the debate is for "science nerds" (using the term gently, since I suspect I come under that category!), but it's actually a much wider one - a sociological and philosophical one that's captured a huge amount of attention from a significant and influential group of people.

I've nearly finished the book itself and I'll post some of my own comments soon, but here's a quick re-cap on the previous posts (in case you've missed them) and two developments from the last few weeks...

• I first reported on the book back in October following a TV interview with Dawkins by Jeremy Paxman.
• A month later I posted an excerpt from (and link to) what was - until today - the best review/rebuttal of Dawkins I'd read, from (agnostic or atheist) Terry Eagleton.
• Then in December a collection of links to various responses, including one from Alister MacGrath.

Now a couple more links to send your way - both well worth a look if you've either read Dawkins' attack on religious faith or if you've had any comments from friends or colleagues from their reading:

• The Dawkins Confusion is a 'feature-length' review online by Alvin Plantinga, who is John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and one of the world's most renowned philosophers. He is nothing short of scathing, but his critique is unique - in my reading at least - in that he takes the fight to Dawkins directly, not just by defending against his arguments but by claiming that Dawkins' "naturalist" philosophy is at odds with his very espousal of evolution and reliably rational thought:

Toward the end of the book, Dawkins endorses a certain limited skepticism. Since we have been cobbled together by (unguided) evolution, it is unlikely, he thinks, that our view of the world is overall accurate; natural selection is interested in adaptive behavior, not in true belief. But Dawkins fails to plumb the real depths of the skeptical implications of the view that we have come to be by way of unguided evolution. We can see this as follows. Like most naturalists, Dawkins is a materialist about human beings: human persons are material objects; they are not immaterial selves or souls or substances joined to a body, and they don't contain any immaterial substance as a part. From this point of view, our beliefs would be dependent on neurophysiology, and (no doubt) a belief would just be a neurological structure of some complex kind. Now the neurophysiology on which our beliefs depend will doubtless be adaptive; but why think for a moment that the beliefs dependent on or caused by that neurophysiology will be mostly true? Why think our cognitive faculties are reliable?

The rest of the piece is a quite superb bit of rigorous thinking outloud - and I'd love to sit in on a debate between him and Dawkins!

• The other development is the publishing of the book I trailed back in January by the MacGraths (Alister and his wife Joanna - who is herself an academic, in her case in the field of the psychology of religion) - The Dawkins Delusion. I've started it and I'm glad to say it (so far) doesn't betray the slightly wooden style of some of MacGrath's books - it's a short, easy and entertaining read. Well worth buying and having to hand if a friend gets hooked by the Dawkins bait...

Free Will?

Just how free are we?

Fundamental to our self-understanding as humans is the belief that we are responsible for our own actions. Clearly the edges of that get blurred a little when someone's past and upbringing are taken into account, when we factor in the influence of genetic make-up or perhaps chemical imbalances that affect someone's mental state - but there is an incredibly deep-rooted belief in a "self" that is more than merely a prisoner of a physical body/brain.

An article in New Scientist + another bit of Dawkin's book (still not finished - too many other more interesting things to finish!) + a BBC website report have connected to raise the issue...

The BBC picks up this story:

Scientists say they have found the part of the brain that predicts whether a person will be selfish or an altruist.

Altruism - the tendency to help others without obvious benefit to oneself - appears to be linked to an area called the posterior superior temporal sulcus.

Using brain scans, the US investigators found this region related to a person's real-life unselfish behaviour.

It's interesting that the scientist involved is quoted as saying "...understanding the function of this brain region may not necessarily identify what drives people like Mother Theresa..." - but why not?

Dawkins would say - though I'm sure much more eruditely (and more accurately) than I - that the "drive" for such behavious is revealed in evolutionary terms by its function (either directly or in quite complex and subtle ways) as benefiting the genetic make-up that promotes it (or in some cases by being the accidental by-product of something else that's beneficial - that's how he sees religion, by my understanding).

Into that heady mix, add a recent article New Scientist magazine:

Two Hypotheses Emerge.  Hypothesis One says that free will is an illusion, that our consciousness of free action is as illusory as our experience of rainbows as “real objects”.  Hypothesis Two says that our experience of free will reflects something real in the brain mechanisms that produce and sustain consciousness.

… Hypothesis One runs dead counter to evolution and [“it is totally unlike biological evolution to give us an extremely costly phenotype… that plays no role in the survival of the organism”], Hypothesis Two is consistent with our experiences, but seems crazy.  Besides, it gives us three mysteries for one:  To solve the mystery of free will, you have to solve the mystery of consciousness, and you do that by relying on the mystery of quantum mechanics.  Hypothesis One is consistent with our scientific view of how the world works, but we cannot live with it.

When I discussed these issues in a lecture in London, someone in the audience asked:  “If Hypothesis One were demonstrated to be true, would you accept it?”  Notice the form of the question:  If it were demonstrated that there is no such thing as free, rational decision making, would you freely and rationally decide to accept that demonstration?
[John Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California. New Scientist, 13th January 2007]

Interesting question in terms of truth - especially in a 'post-modern' climate - if a scientific "truth" is seemingly "unliveable", does that mean we have to (a) ignore it and live as if it isn't true, (b) change our entire approach to life [which seems to make more sense than the new perspective], (c) wonder whether the 'scientific' approach misses an entire body of evidence - our own self-knowledge.

Is it not possible to argue that, in scientific evidence terms, my own life-long experimental results in being 'me' should have at least some part in the discussion?

Schism

There are some rumblings in the evangelical 'wing' of the Church of England that I'm chewing over to blog on properly before Christmas - in the meantime, Dave Walker (as so often) nails why the whole thing's so important:

Cartoon by Dave Walker.

"Left Behind" - only wish it had been...

I posted on the blog as long ago as last June about the production of a highly controversial video game, aimed at teenagers and based on a dispensationalist reading of Revelation:

...The game is based on the best-selling series of "Left Behind" books, which offer an account of the end times as predicted in the biblical book of Revelation ...The game is set in New York City, where the Tribulation Force clashes with the Antichrist's Global Community Peacekeepers in a tale that makes the United Nations a tool for Satan. Each side attempts to recruit lost souls in the battle for the city. "Eternal Forces" is a so-called real-time strategy game — players act as battlefield generals for their virtual armies, deciding where to place units and when to order attacks or retreats.

In the game, Tribulation squads unleash the usual arsenal against the Antichrist: guns, tanks, helicopters. But soldiers lose some of their spirituality every time they kill an opponent and must be bolstered through prayer. The failure to nurture good guys causes their spirit points to drop, leaving them vulnerable to recruitment by the other side.

The player's choices prompt intervention by angelic forces or unleash demons who feast on the faithful. As players progress through the increasingly difficult levels, they see Scripture passages presented as secret scrolls and hear inspirational music.

Now the BBC has picked up the story now the game is being released. Many groups in the States are mobilising to oppose it, with the game's promoters quoted as saying that...

...their detractors "have a clear hatred of Biblical Christianity".

Well, I guess that puts me in my place!

The BBC piece is interesting in that it delves into the dynamics of the game a little more closely, revealing at least a more subtle side to the way it works, citing one analyst:

"Your characters can do physical combat, but when they do, they lose morale and have a greater chance of becoming evil. In some sense, that can represent what happens. In the real world, you can't get involved in a gunfight and walk away and forget it."

On the other hand, it also looks at how Islamic extremist groups are also trying to use games to promote their cause.

Christians who are parents of teenagers, and youth workers too, are often desperate to find something to engage their children with the Christian faith. Please don't let it be this.....

The "Anti-God Backlash"...

It was as a title to a posting on Ruth Gledhill's (Religion Correspondent for the Times and resident of Kew as it happens!) blog that I first saw the phrase "Anti-God Backlash":

... I welcome the resurgence of religious fervour in modern society, while condemning without reserve its more extremist manifestations. One example of such is of course the scientist Richard Dawkins. ... Scientists such as Dawkins appear to subsist in a state of furious astonishment that the Enlightenment did not reached its own supraphsyical climax with the extinction of all religious belief by the millennium. Instead, it is belief in the Millennium that seems to be growing, especially on the other side of the Pond, where Dawkins is headed this week to promote his new book, The God Delusion ...which is heading to be the Christmas Number One. [Sun 15th Oct 2006 - Times Online :: Articles of Faith]

I'm part-way through the book itself, as it happens, so I'll post more on that when I finish it... In the meantime, Gary Wolf was provoked, also by Dawkin's book, into writing an article for Wired magazine, on The Crusade Against Religion. He coins the term "The New Atheists" to describe a militant unbeliver (like Dawkins):

The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban. ... Even those of us who sympathize intellectually have good reasons to wish that the New Atheists continue to seem absurd. If we reject their polemics, if we continue to have respectful conversations even about things we find ridiculous, this doesn't necessarily mean we've lost our convictions or our sanity. It simply reflects our deepest, democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there's always a chance we could turn out to be wrong. [Wired :: Oct 23 2006]

The issues needling people seem to come into two main categories. There's the rise in awareness of some of the tensions seen as being inherent in a multi-faith society and there's the currently vexing issue within the church of sexuality and how that plays out in Christian's influence on society at large.

On the former, the debate over the wearing of veils by some Muslim women or a cross by a Christian working for BA has rasied specific issues to do with the public display of religious conviction - resulting in its own debate on the BBC website - Should modern Britain be a more secular society? The comments go on for miles, but are worth a skim to get the feel of some of the strong feelings aroused.

On the latter, even Elton John has joined in the fray:

"I think religion has always tried to turn hatred towards gay people," he said. "Religion promotes the hatred and spite against gays. "But there are so many people I know who are gay and love their religion."

According to the singer-songwriter, 59, his solution would be to "ban religion completely, even though there are some wonderful things about it". He added: "I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. "But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate."
[BBC Online : Sun 12th Nov 2006]

Finally, it's worth noting the hatchet job the Telegraph did on the recent Evangelical Alliance report on "Faith and Nation". You can read the EA's full response here.

In a nutshell, this is good news and bad news. Good news because at least it means that faith (in its many forms) is at least on the agenda and the conversation gets going. Bad because it ramps up the temptation on religious folk to get their backs to the wall and see the world as the enemy... and, in those terms at least, as Hugh puts it on Gaping Void:

 

The Dawkins Delusion?

I blogged about Richard Dawkin's new book a few weeks' ago (which generated a healthy bit of comment and debate) and I've even bought it and begun to read it (I've resisted the temptation to fling it across the room several times!), but there have been a couple of fantastic articles about it that you really shouldn't miss if you're interested in his take on religion in any way.

First up is a quite brilliant "review" ("demolition job" might be a more appropriate description) that first appeared in the London Review of Books. Terry Eagleton, Professor of English Literature at Manchester University, writes about the book in such a way that it's almost impossible to pick the best bits of it to quote - you really must go and read the whole thing... but to whet your appetite, here are the opening and closing sentences:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins ...are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster.

...In its admirably angry way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago. The book is full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion, fundamentalist or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing their damnedest to bring it about. But Dawkins could have told us all this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned individual in his book - if you count God as an individual.

There's plenty in between of detailed rebuttal of Dawkin's claims - the review really repays a details read.

The other review can be found reprinted on the same (Fulcrum) site and is by the Bishop of Thetford, David Atkinson. His approach is also worth a read.

More on the web...

They've redesigned the site-within-a-site Religion & Ethics section of the BBC website and it's well worth a look. It has to be said that it was due a revamp - the old "brown is the new black" look did rather add to the slightly worthy tone of the content and it was quite tricky to track down particular articles. A nice fresh feel now - lots of photos! - and an easier navigation system make it more of a pleasure to read.

Some interesting articles linked to from the front page - and from the monthly news email you can subscribe to:

• Humphreys in Search of God - for devotees of the BBC R4's Today programme, you'll want to try and catch its foremost presenter, John Humphreys, interviewing key religious leaders to answer his "his unfulfilled desire to believe in God.". Rowan Williams is first up... Programme details and times are on the site.
• The Ethical Consumer - a site-within-a-site-within-a-site! Basically a set of very effective picture + fact thought-provokers. Might be rather good to talk through with children the effects of how we live?
• Jehovah's Witnesses - an example of the site's very useful 'one-stop-shop' summaries of different faiths. Useful for GCSE work, but rather wider in application than that. I wonder how much of this you knew about the JW's?

There's lots else besides - about religious feasts and festivals, key beliefs and ethical debates. It's pretty even-handed, though falls over occasionally on some of the more thorny issues where it doesn't quite manage to keep its own editorial stance out of the way (issues like abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality are examples to varying degrees).

Happy surfing!

"Showbiz" Christianity?

Thanks to Dave & to Duncan who pointed me in the direction of this piece (with accompanying 'blog' entry and lively comments!) in the Telegraph online:

Terry Waite, the former Church of England envoy, yesterday criticised the "popular entertainment" style of many Anglican services. He preferred the quiet contemplation of Quaker meetings, he said.

... He said too many vicars now behaved like television hosts and worshippers were so busy standing up and sitting down they had no time for silent contemplation.

"I do feel that the new ways of conducting services border on showbiz," he said. "Yesterday I went to a service, I won't say where. The clergyman wasn't wearing a cassock, and immediately before the sermon he said, 'Right, I'll take off my jacket first', and in prime ministerial style he did so.

"He then proceeded to walk around the church. That sort of television presenter approach doesn't ring any ecumenical bells for me." Mr Waite said Anglican services had become too regimented and lacked time for peaceful reflection... [more]

Quite apart from not being sure what "exumenical bells" are, there's much else one could say about this (and I really ought to start wearing a jacket so that I can take it off like Blair - and perhaps we ought to get a see-through lecturn and podium too?!)... but before we're too dismissive it's worth seeing where we might learn from this.

For me it's a decent reminder neither to presume on what people will find helpful in worship, nor (more specifically) to miss the fact that the more "lively" end of the church (including All Souls) is pretty poor at silence and contemplation.

The former issue is to do with confusing 'contemporary' with 'spiritual' - just because the Charismatic revival in the CofE has been led by contemporary (and generally loud) music doesn't mean that's the only way of being genuinely spiritual. There are many people who are looking for "peaceful reflection" as well as joy and exuberence.

This connects directly with the more specific challenge of how, within the general bustle and hubub of our Sunday mornings, we can give a bit more by way of space and time to reflect and to listen... Thoughts..?