Giving God the credit

O.K! This is an unashamedly trivial post on a trivial point about the way many genuinely decent religious believers betray their (often unconscious) double standards when it comes to the influence of God in their lives.
I caught an episode of the I.T.V game show Tipping Point in which contestants win money by answering multiple choice questions for tokens which are then played in a giant “Penny Falls” machine. Each token that falls out of the machine being worth £50.
The game is played in two rounds; the first where contestants compete to gain the highest amount of money, and a second jackpot round where the winner plays for a £10,000 token. Overall the game is a good combination of skill, strategy, general knowledge and dumb luck.
On the show I watched one contestant was introduced as a lay preacher and he quite convincingly won the first round. The host congratulated him on getting through to the jackpot round to which the contestant responded that he must have benefited from some “divine intervention”, pointing heavenwards as he did so.
I thought at the time that he was holding something of a hostage to fortune as there was no guarantee that his luck would hold out for the rest of the show and I wondered how he would explain that if it happened, given that he had publicly credited God with his success so far. I must also confess to the rather uncharitable hope that his game would indeed fall apart so that my curiosity could be satisfied.
Well, as things turned out his jackpot round was disastrous; he failed to answer most of his questions (including one in the religion category, ironically) and the tokens he did win refused to fall in his favour in the machine so that although he came out of the game with a reasonable cash prize the £10,000 jackpot eluded him
So what was his reaction? It was priceless: “I guess my brain and luck deserted me,” he said. Well of course it had, but where was his divine intervention? Had God deserted him at the final moment, or decided he had won enough? Maybe Yahweh was narked at being casually associated with the earlier success or just possibly some other god’s noodly appendages were upon him. But that is not really the point of this.
You can of course do a lot of theological hand waving about what a putative god’s role in all this would be for a true believer participating in a game show, but the telling point is this lay preaching contestant’s response: God is credited a hand in his successes but failure is down to random forces and personal inadequacy, which is an all too typical example of the cognitive dissonance of theists generally.
I even doubt whether this was a conscious distinction on the contestant’s part and whether he even connected his two statements at the time (although if he watched the show back I would hope it would strike him the same way it did me) because to exercise rational thought about “divine intervention” exposes believers to awkward questions that sophisticated theologians have conspicuously failed to answer (to anyone’s satisfaction but their own) for millennia.

Conflict resolution: A difference between Science and Religion

I’m in the process of reading ‘Making Sense of Evolution: The Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Biology’ by Massimo Pigliucci and Jonathan Kaplan. This is not a book that I would recommend by the way unless you have at least a college level degree in genetics (I have) or are otherwise well read in the subject as it is very technical in places and assumes a lot of prior knowledge. I bring it up here however because a couple of the early chapters brought home to me clearly the very different ways that science and religion deal with conflicts of ‘doctrine’ between their respective practitioners.
There is near complete consensus amongst biologists that the modern synthesis account of the evolutionary process is a largely correct description of how Darwinian selection, Mendelian genetics and molecular biology combine to allow species to adapt and radiate (need I mention there is no scientific dispute as to whether evolution is actually true?). However, there are differences of opinion on important questions of detail, one of which is the level at which selection actually occurs.
The (probably) majority view is the one most famously articulated by Richard Dawkins that selection acts on genes and that evolution can be said to occur when a particular gene becomes more prevalent in a population over time as a result of selection pressure. Pigliucci and Kaplan, amongst others, point out that selection most obviously happens at the level of individual organisms (it is the trait that is selected for directly) and that the phenotype (the set of physical characteristics) does not always map easily onto a particular gene. Pigliucci is also sympathetic to group selection theories where selection acts upon the fitness of populations rather than individuals or genes.
There is a certain, if limited, parallel here with religion. Practitioners of a particular religion will agree on the main premises; name of deity, lives of prophets, holy scriptures etc. but frequently display disagreement on finer points of theology and practice. Take the early Catholic Church’s struggle with the Trinity, or even the modern Anglican Church’s dilemma over the role of women in the hierarchy, both examples of a heterodoxy of opinion beneath the surface of a common orthodoxy.
The parallel breaks down however in the different ways science and religion deal with the issues. In the case of the Catholic Church, after convening a council of Bishops and establishing the Nicean Creed the Church then went on a mission to brand dissenters as heretics and literally kill off the opposition. The result over centuries was entrenchment of dogma and multiple schisms with, ultimately, many different sects following their own interpretations and although I don’t see the C of  E branding anyone a heretic over women Bishops, I would not be surprised to see breakaway dioceses comprised of the disaffected.
Religion has no choice but to deal with dissent and disagreement in this way, either by enforcing a creed or disintegrating and factionalising. Why? Because there are no empirical facts to be discovered that can inform the arguments. Theological disputes have nothing to fall back on except their scriptures and their traditions both of which are open to interpretation without empirical data to support them
Science on the other hand does not have this problem. For sure, it develops its own orthodoxies and there are conservative elements that defend them and others that challenge them. True, arguments get heated and nasty and sometimes a faction forms and enmities emerge. But, ultimately all scientists know that at some point the argument will yield to hard facts and experimental data, knowledge and understanding will advance and paradigms may change
In the example about levels of selection above the ‘correct’ answer is not immediately clear. Evolution is a simple idea in principle but turns out to be very messy and difficult to quantify in practice, life being what it is and not easily reducible or predictable. My own intuition, for what it’s worth, is that no matter how complex the interaction between organisms and their environments proves to be the final answer will be found in the genome. Although this may be because I am a product of the W.D. Hamilton and Richard Dawkins generation of biologists who first expounded the gene-centric view of evolution. But Pigliucci, Kaplan and their ilk could easily be correct and as long as it isn’t completely intractable the truth will emerge in the observational and experimental data eventually.

Thoughts on my own moral philosophy.

Well I blame ‘D’ over at She Who Chatters. It’s been a long while since I tried to unravel my own position on moral philosophy, but good old ‘D’ had to open that convoluted can of worms with her latest post (go read it, and all her others too).
So! The first thing I can say with some degree of certainty is that I am a moral anti-realist. I know this for two reasons: 1, someone cleverer than me told me I was and 2, I read up on anti-realism and wiki-walked my way through a few related definitions and found it corresponds with my belief that there are no moral absolutes, no eternal moral truths we can pluck from the ether to be a yardstick (meterstick?) to measure our own morality by and definitely no god given rule book.
Having decided there is no Platonic perfect morality to draw on, another problem presents itself: Does any moral position have a basis in reality? This is essentially a choice between Cognitivism and Non-Cognitivism. Cognitivism holds that moral statements (propositions) can be demonstrably true or false, for example “stealing is wrong” carries the same veritas as “London buses are red”. At first glance this might look as though Cognitivism requires moral realism, but it would in fact be just as correct to say that “stealing is wrong” is a false statement. (The anti-realist position known as Error Theory states that all moral propositions are false). Nevertheless, my own position is that of Non-Cognitivism, which says that moral propositions are neither true nor false but are expressions of opinion (“stealing is wrong” is equivalent to “I believe stealing is wrong” or “Boo to stealing”).
However, many moral propositions while not what a proper philosopher would call ‘truth apt’ do have a high degree of ‘truthiness’ that endows them with a visceral certainty that makes them feel like the basis of an objective morality. This is particularly so of those moral positions that are often considered universals such as murder is wrong, stealing is wrong, cheating is wrong and the like. One would be hard pushed to find anyone in any society that would disagree with those statements (even if they do in fact kill, steal and cheat), possibly because either cultural or biological evolution has encouraged our internalisation of these ethics as a consequence of being a social species. But there is nothing obvious on deeper dispassionate reflection that makes any of these normative ethics intrinsically true. These same gut instincts also tend to inform (or misinform) our beliefs about more contentious moral statements such as; “homosexuality is wrong”, “sex outside of marriage is wrong”, or “recreational drugs are bad”. These are deontological ethics handed down to us by society or (more usually) religion that are even more transparently subjective when actually thought about although often presented as moral givens.
If all morals are subjective, as I believe them to be, we are then left with the thorny issue of moral relativism. I am not a moral relativist and to be honest I don’t think I have ever met anyone who is. It is one thing to acknowledge that different societies and different times hold differing moral standards (descriptive moral relativism) and entirely another to state that it is inappropriate or impossible to judge one against the other (meta-ethical moral relativism). If the latter were true we would not be in a position to agree that slavery, which used to be morally acceptable, is a moral evil and always has been. We don’t tend to say of slave owning cultures “oh, they were just the product of their time”; rather, we judge them as barbarous and backward. In the same way I am not prepared to defend female genital mutilation in Somalia just because it is a cultural norm there. But in my anti-realist, non-cognitive subjectively moral world what basis do I have to deem such practices as immoral?
My answer, for what it’s worth, is that although morals are not objective, outcomes of actions often are. I am a consequentialist and a utilitarian who believes that it is possible to apply reason to moral dilemmas and point to a rational system of ethics which in principle could be agreed on by everyone, ascertaining the costs and benefits of a particular action to the actors involved and devising a course that causes the least aggregate harm or even the most possible good (by harm and good I am limiting these to the measurable, economic and corporeal). However this becomes problematic if a society sanctifies cultural and religious norms to the extent that a critical examination of the assumptions behind them is impossible, requiring reconciling a putative infinite “spiritual” harm against a limited physical good, which is why such societies are able to justify honour killings and the mutilation of children. By rejecting deontological morality I believe I am justified in condemning such actions and rejecting cultural relativism on rational and scientific grounds.
There is not enough space here to explore all the ramifications of this, but Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism whose philosophy of universal utilitarianism can be read >here< and in his book has articulated similar ideas. Also Sam Harris’ book The Moral Landscape offers a scientific route to a moral society.
The links on this page all point to reliable sources of information about moral philosophy, so dive in if you dare…

Feminism and the new atheist schism

One of the problems with self-defining as an atheist is that it is at root a very narrow definition of what a person actually stands for. It really tells the world nothing about you other than you do not believe in the existence of any gods and leaves all the other cultural and political questions hanging.
As a contrast if somebody identifies themselves as an Evangelical Christian it is a fair to assume of them certain attitudes about e.g. abortion, LGBT rights, gender equality etc. and to have grounds to probe their assumptions about evolution, climate change and political allegiances frequently associated with that religion. In other words the kind of religion you follow come with an amount of stereotypical baggage that atheism lacks.
On the face of it that is a good thing. After all, atheists by rejecting all religions are rejecting all the associated dogmas and, in theory at least, building a worldview from first principles. But, since this does not happen in a cultural vacuum and everyone’s life experiences are different the spectrum of political beliefs found amongst atheists is extremely broad.
When I first went in search of an online atheist community some five years ago, the main topics of conversation were around debunking religious apologetics, along with science, cosmology, evolution and a-biogenesis as they cropped up in arguments with (mainly) Christians in the comment sections. These are all “safe spaces” for atheists that give everyone a chance to debate and bait the theists for sport, while generally getting on with each other. But inevitably as the community and the conversation matured the blog posts and discussions moved into more contentious areas, specifically the abortion debate, feminism, racism and other social justice issues which, given the diversity of opinion in atheism was bound to stretch the consensus more than somewhat.
It became clear to regular atheist bloggers, commenters and their readers that atheists are as able to be conservative, sexist, racist, and climate change denialist as they are liberal, inclusive and green and although the prevailing zeitgeist was the latter a sizeable and vocal minority were not
So what happens when the atheist movement starts to debate its own credentials as an inclusive, non-sexist, non-racist movement? How does it react to those of its own who either do not see social justice issues as pertinent to the atheist agenda or who are antagonistic to the assumptions behind those issues?
Ever since the Elevatorgate scandal hit the atheist community back in 2011 a number of prominent atheists have been calling for conferences and events to have a clear and enforceable anti-harassment policy in place so that women and minorities can feel safe and participate on an equal footing with the predominantly white male crowd that these events attract. Personally, I see this as uncontroversial but it has flushed out a number of people who believe that being asked to behave respectfully and reasonably to others in a public forum is some kind of infringement on their rights to free speech. Their response has been to abuse bloggers like Jen McCreight Rebecca Watson and Ophelia Benson among others and accuse them of poisoning atheism with feminism.
What seems to have outraged these people is the suggestion that they may be unaware of their own privilege and possibly be just a little bit sexist themselves. Well I have news for them, they are and probably, so am I. In the same way that everyone’s a little bit racist everyone can be a little bit sexist too and we shouldn’t feel affronted when someone on the receiving end points it out to us.
Anyway, as a consequence of all this it has become almost impossible for those atheists who want to discuss diversity and inclusivity in the movement to do so on open forums due to the constant trolling and ad hominem invective from a particularly loud and obnoxious cabal of commenters and so was founded Atheism+ a forum for atheists who want to align their activism with other causes and marginalized groups. This seems to me to be perfectly reasonable because it leaves the ‘big tent’ of atheism open to all those who would speak out for Church / State separation and the superiority of science, reason and evidence over religion, superstition and dogma, while creating a sub space for those also concerned about the religious attacks on women’s and LGBTQ equality. Anyone not aligned with that agenda need not apply, (which is not being exclusive nor is it an invitation to ‘groupthink’ as we can still find plenty to disagree on about how to meet the social justice goals we aspire to). Besides, those against atheism+ now have their own “Slymepit” to play in.
But does this really represent a schism in the new atheist movement? Actually probably not because unlike religions atheism has no dogmas, not even feminism or LGBTQ rights or racial equality, because none of those things are an aspect of atheism per se albeit they are prevalent attitudes among atheists generally. Social justice is a society wide and global issue and is being addressed by many liberal theists as well as by atheists and all the while the atheist/secular movement is successfully working to counter religious extremism and its influence in governments worldwide the social justice agenda will advance whether all of us agree on the necessity or not.

No women Bishops (yet) is really a victory for equality

So this was to be the General Synod that finally approved the ordination of women as Bishops in the Anglican Church, which as we now know, it narrowly failed to do despite majorities in favour among the Bishops and the Clergy. The vote failed to reach the required majority in the Laity where a compromise provision for parishes that wanted to opt out of the authority of a female Bishop was considered insufficient by some.
To me, looking at this divided and deluded organisation from the outside, this seems like a good result for women who truly value equality, even in such an inherently misogynistic environment as the church.

There is no equality in being a female Bishop when the authority it is supposed to confer can be flouted on purely sexist grounds by conservatives and evangelicals who choose not to be bound by it. By pandering to the reactionary and, lets face it, more doctrinally correct faction of the church the Synod was actually in danger of creating second class Bishoprics notionally led by women but in reality likely to be subordinated to ‘real’ Bishops (A.K.A men).

It’s almost impossible to imagine any other modern institution where this kind of situation would occur. What company for example would appoint a female CEO but then tell its employees that if they didn’t like being led by a woman they could report to a male alternative instead? It’s a bizarre concept that only in the La-La land of religion would have any kind of intellectual traction and I can’t understand why women in the church would seek ordination under those circumstances.

Frankly I don’t give a damn if the Church of England ties itself in theological knots and pulls itself to pieces trying to unravel them, but if I was to offer them some advice it would be to accept that ordaining women is the right thing to do in the interest of natural justice, to tell the evangelicals to like it or lump it and move forward without the encumbrance of a reactionary rump who will condemn them even more quickly to social irrelevance.

Also, while they are at it, the Bishops must realise that they can’t expound gender equality with respect to women and at the same time oppose marriage equality. They are not entirely separate issues, as a church that claims to be for social justice in one sphere cannot discriminate in another and be intellectually honest

One way this situation could be resolved is for parliament to remove the churches’ exemption to equality legislation, which considering the C of E is an arm of the establishment it really should not enjoy in the first place. This would force the Anglican Church to normalise itself in respect to other British institutions or disestablish and forego its privileged position in government and public life. Either option would be preferable to the current anachronism.

What the Devil...!

Remaining in a theological state of mind after the previous post and as we are not long past Halloween let’s talk of the Devil.
You will be aware of course of the well known biblical story of how Lucifer, the most beautiful of all of the angels, got a bit above himself and led a factional revolt to put himself in charge, causing God to cast him and his followers down from heaven into the fiery pit of hell from whence, transformed into a priapic scarlet satyr he exacts his revenge by corrupting mankind and leading them from the true path of salvation. However, if this précis is giving you a warm glow of familiarity, it really shouldn’t: no such narrative exists in the Bible.
Rather like the popular concept that saved people go straight to heaven when they die this too is erroneous and even finding evidence for it in the Bible requires more than a little post hoc selective reading.
Starting with Lucifer, this is never used as a proper name in the bible. The Hebrew from which it is translated actually means morning star or possibly shining one and in the context in which it appears (Isaiah 14:12) is now thought to refer to one of the kings of Babylon, (perhaps Nebuchadnezzar II). In the KJV version this was rendered as Lucifer and is capitalised.

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!

However in Isaiah 14:16 it continues…

They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms;

which is clearly not describing an angel. Most other translations of the Bible have since dropped the KJV version and reverted to the morning star translation.
Then there is Satan, who first makes a cameo appearance in 1 Chronicles where he incites King David to perform a census of Israel, which for some reason God wasn’t keen on. However he gets a starring role in Job, which although a later book of the bible was probably actually written earlier, and here Satan is fulfilling his proper role as "The Satan", meaning "the adversary". Like Lucifer above Satan is not really a proper name in this context but the title of an angel who’s mission is to observe human sin and act as their accuser.
The idea that Satan is a fallen angel and synonymous with Lucifer and indeed the serpent in the garden of Eden is a later Christian interpretation that goes with their concept of Hell as a place of torture and damnation (a concept that Judaism does not have as Sheol was where everyone went regardless of conduct).
Satan does not become Biblically associated with the Serpent that tempted Eve until The Book of Revelation authored sometime in the first century AD which also names him as the devil for the first time

The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.(Revelation 12:9)

It is from this that later portrayals (from the 4th Century onwards) have Satan as a devilish figure with horns and hooves, and the erroneous link with Isaiah’s ‘Lucifer’ begins to be made.
So, even if there was any reason to accept the Bible as a reliable guide to reality it is clear that as far as Old Nick is concerned it really says very little to confirm the popular notion of Satan as most people conceive him to be and as the Church would have us believe.

The Father the Son and Holy Ghost walk into a (chocolate) bar

My ex-wife, for her sins, has recently entered the teaching profession and as an aside to her main subject is teaching classes in religious education. Recently she has been discussing the concept of The Trinity, the doctrine confirmed at the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon which states that God the Father, God the Son and The Holy Spirit are one entity, individually coexistent, omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. It’s a bizarre and illogical concept that even theologians have difficulty explaining, even if they think they understand it.
As an exercise in illustrating the idea her class are asked to come up with an example of “three things in one” that go to make up a whole which, as I have contemplated the task, is a lot harder than it sounds. Coming up with a gestalt of three things is relatively easy and my best effort is a song; which comprises rhythm, melody and lyric as distinct elements that combine to make for one coherent auditory experience yet can also be experienced and understood separately. I am told the example often given to the pupils is a Mars bar (chocolate, nougat and caramel in one), but neither really addresses the concept of the Trinity satisfactorily, because for that each individual element must also be complete in its own right and not only represent, but be the whole.

The point is that God is God, Jesus is God, The Holy Spirit is God while all simultaneously being seperate individuals equal in all respects. In particular Jesus does not come ‘after’ God the Father as in the normal parent child scheme of things.

The reason why finding a meaningful metaphor for the Trinity is so hard is because it is, in reality, meaningless; an idea invented because the early church struggled to reconcile the necessary divinity of Christ with his status as a human being. Some of the earliest schisms in Christianity were over this exact issue with differing sects such as the Monophysites and the Arians which had Jesus as a fusion of mortal and divine in the first case and as subordinate to God in the second. The Nicene and Chalcedonian Councils were intended to put a stamp of orthodoxy on the nature of the relationship between God and Christ and this is the theological fix they came up with.
There is in fact very little biblical support for the idea of the Trinity. Genesis has references to God in the plural (Elohim), which some theologians claim as a Trinitarian reference but more likely reflects the polytheist nature of early Judaism. Later writings such as Isaiah portray God in firmly singular terms and the New Testament is similarly lacking in clear references.
What the early Church appears to have done is create a deity with multiple personality disorder purely for the expedient of avoiding accusations of polytheism (a charge which even so is laid by Muslims on Christianity) while allowing the simultaneous worship of Jesus and Yahweh.
Ultimately believers present the irrationality of the Trinity as a divine mystery that defies human understanding so we shouldn’t be surprised that explanations are hard to come by, but this of course is the hallmark of all religious apologetics; if it doesn’t appear to make sense it is just good old ineffable God and his funky mysterious ways bless him.
If a chocolate sweet can really represent the Trinity, it’s probably a Fudge.