Humanism is not a religion (Part 1)

At the beginning of his excellent introduction to humanism, Stephen Law (2011a) lists some of the things that characterize a humanistic outlook, including a respect for science, and reason more generally, and a commitment to moral values. Nowhere do humanists describe themselves as having faith (of the religious kind) in anything. Humanism does not involve belief in the gods or in the supernatural. Humanism is not a faith position, unless “having faith” can mean waking up in the morning and believing that there is an independently existing world.

There is also a clue in the word itself, which provides a hint to the attentive reader that a humanistic worldview is primarily concerned with humans rather than gods or chipmunks or badgers. Of course, insofar as humans have to do with gods or chipmunks or badgers, so too do humanists take an interest in those species of both the natural and imagined worlds. (See the series “Why do you care so much?”.)

Given that this is all pretty straightforward and uncontroversial, I was surprised to read the following in this Face to faith piece (accessed 02.12.11) by Savitri Hensman:

Christian, New Age, humanist or whatever, all would be welcomed, provided they played down aspects of their faith that might pose a challenge to mammon’s dominance.

(I’m not sure which I find more offensive as a humanist, being accused of having faith or being lumped in with the New Agers.)

The odd meaning of this isolated quote is understood in context as part of Hensman’s theme, that if “mammon-worship were a dominant religion” then mammon would have its own priests. She clearly regards this idea as ludicrous – what possible connection could there be between mammon and religion? – and yet I have often been struck by the theological character of the world of finance. The following is from my review of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis (the quotes from pp. 79, 218, 229):

“Financial markets are a collection of arguments. The less transparent the market and the more complicated the securities, the more money the trading desks at big Wall Street firms can make from the argument.” Theologians, like bond traders, depend upon a “meaningless flow of words” to keep their delusions alive; the Church, like Wall Street, employs smart people who are “basically wrong about everything” and a little too keen on self-regulation. And, strangely, church and finance both cater in their own ways to personal greed. After all, what is credit but the promise of having what you can’t afford, and salvation the promise of what doesn’t exist, eternal bliss?

24.11.11 The Bentham Lecture 2011: 300 Years of Hume (Peter Millican)

Why do philosophers (unlike historians, psychologists, etc.) continue to study Hume? The questions we call philosophical tend to be difficult and “progress by philosophers does not necessarily register as progress in philosophy” to outsiders.

Hume was a pioneer in the science of man, and his method has been useful recently in cognitive science (cf. Jerry Fodor). Philosophy is open to both new and old approaches. In discussions of the so-called hard problem of consciousness, we often hear that subjective experiences cannot have a physical basis, and it is thought that Hobbes’s notorious materialism (there is no soul stuff) can’t be true because matter can’t think. Hume showed that we cannot establish causation a priori just by sitting in an armchair, and therefore the idea that matter cannot give rise to consciousness is refuted. So many philosophers are ignorant of this point.

There is a current fashion for armchair metaphysics, all a priori, which is a very active area. “My own suspicion is that this fashion will fade” but the bandwagon will produce some decent philosophy (perhaps meta-metaphysics?).

The economists’ idea of a perfectly rational agent who always acts to maximize their utility is a fantasy. [cf. Frank]

Hume’s Fork: is this idea a relation of ideas or a matter of fact?

The reason of animals is largely instinctive [cf. System 1 thinking].

Hume’s dangerous message was that we are clever animals, not lower angels.

Darwin read lots of Hume and took him seriously. Compare these two passages, the first from Origin and the second from Dialogues:

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!

If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what surprise must we feel, when we find him a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving? Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labour lost, many fruitless trials made; and a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making.

Hume’s treatment of the problem of evil (10 and 11) is essential for any student. How come there is disagreement and a range of interpretations of Hume’s writings? I believe the proliferation of interpretations is a sign of the immaturity of the field. Serious, careful Hume scholarship is relatively recent, and it is not yet the rule to back up a claim with citations to the text [I find this astonishing!]: when you make a claim, show where it came from.

Of miracles has generated a surprising diversity of reaction, with scholars misunderstanding terms, what is meant by the laws of nature, proof, etc., according to their own prejudice. Hume’s argument is far better than his critics would allow, but Millican still believes it is flawed, and there is room for multiple readings.

Hume was sceptical of faculty language, e.g. of talk of the faculty of reason, of the imagination, etc. H. H. Price is good on Hume (Hume’s Theory of the External World).

Millican believes 10.1 (accessed 29.11.11) is based on a presupposition that fails, since he doesn’t think Hume fully understood the logic of what has since become standard probability theory. We need to adjust to a “probability of testimony” in 10.13:

That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish: And even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.

So this should be:

That no testimony is sufficient to render a miracle more probable than not, unless the testimony be of such a kind that occurrence of false testimony of that kind would be even less likely than the fact which it endeavours to establish...

Hume is a giant of philosophy, of whom there are so few, compared with the more modern, modish philosophers. Millican noted the serendipity of Einstein reading Hume before he developed special relativity. Einstein acknowledged that positivism suggested his theory, and in a letter he emphasized the contribution of Hume above that of Mach. Hume encourages us to see connections everywhere, and in that sense is one of the least specialist philosophers.

Q&A

Millican gave a robust assessment of Rousseau (employing some arcane jargon) in response to a question about the Frenchman’s meeting with Hume – “Rousseau was an absolute nutter” – in contrast with Hume himself, who, by all accounts, was a thoroughly amiable and decent chap. Hume thought there might be a brotherhood between them, but it all ended in tears. Adam Smith regarded Hume very warmly.

To a question about Hume’s attitude towards induction, Millican referred to his own short paper, Is Hume an Inductive Sceptic? (Part of his answer made me think of System 1 thinking.)

In the Dialogues, Hume puts the following in the mouth of Philo:

...the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence...

This is Philo’s “confession”, which is saying almost nothing.

On his deathbed, the last paragraph Hume ever wrote, his final word, includes:

...whether the rotting of a turnip, the generation of an animal, and the structure of human thought, be not energies that probably bear some remote analogy to each other...

This is what Millican meant by “artful writing”. Of course Hume was an atheist.

Millican’s own particular interest is in the social sciences, and spoke enthusiastically about how writing computer programs could be wonderful for philosophy. Against much inertia (“How many Oxford academics does it take to change a light bulb? Change?”), he has a new degree starting next year.

He finished with a suitable blast against religion, which has too much influence in society, corrupts our morals, and stands in the way of a secular society, which would be better for all of us.

Very reliable online versions of Hume’s works are available at http://www.davidhume.org/texts/.

Who do you think you are kidding, Dr Williams? (Part 1)

There are no famous theologians as there are famous footballers, historians, scientists, political leaders, etc., etc. (there are even famous cooks, for goodness’ sake), and so this series on theology (which will not last for eternity but will certainly feel like it) will be addressed to the archbishop of Canterbury, who is at least sort of famous for having been on telly and for having a pointy hat and pointy eyebrows, even if very few people (Christians included) could say what are his principal theological achievements.

To set the scene, consider the following remarkable statement by Sunday reporter Trevor Barnes concerning the UK Council of Christians and Jews (the UK’s first inter-faith group). The Council has, apparently, entered its “mature phase” and “is confident enough to explore theological differences and to subject absolute truth claims to rigorous intellectual scrutiny”.

First, “mature phase” might be expected to apply to a round of Stilton and not a committee. In fact, the phrase is apt, since, according to Barnes, earlier in its seventy-year history relations between Christians and Jews on the Council were somewhat tetchy, with both sides regularly throwing their opponents’ theologies out of the pram. (This is, of course, relative. Jews living, say, 700 years ago, when they were the subject of widespread discrimination and persecution, would no doubt have found tetchiness a positive relief. It’s not progress in theology that allows Christians and Jews to talk to one another without one side inventing the Ghetto to shovel their neighbours into. After all, if the Bible is the unchanging word of God, John 8:44 presumably means the same now as it did to the Christian rulers who expelled Jews from their countries and worse. Religious interpretation – that fickle whore – has actually been mercifully guided by the moral decency of humanism and prodded by secular arguments into turning a blind eye to all those biblical verses unambiguously endorsing hatred and violence.)

But I digress. It is not the detail of the Council’s discussion that is of interest, but their method, which it is claimed involves subjecting “absolute truth claims to rigorous intellectual scrutiny”. Is the presence of “absolute” here an insurance policy against empirical embarrassment?  “We’re not making truth claims relative to the universe,” the theologian seems to say, “the kind that mere science troubles itself over, the kind that can be settled by appeal to the facts. Oh no, our claims are absolute, and therefore beyond enquiry and reason and practical exploration. Our claims can only be backed by faith.”

What good “rigorous intellectual scrutiny” when the standard being used is faith and not reason? Anything goes! Clever people can be wrong about many things, and sometimes a group of clever people together can be very wrong, unless there is an error-detection mechanism at work. The ability to manipulate concepts and arguments is certainly an intellectual skill, but the conclusions reached count for nothing if care is not taken over the premises. There is a world of difference between a valid argument and a sound argument.

Charles Babbage, mathematician and computer scientist (1791–1871), is reputed to have said:

On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

The wrong premise at the core of every theological argument is the existence of some kind of super-agency. Of course, theological arguments are enthymemic with respect to this premise, which is taken as read: the existence of God is an example of a tacit assumption without which the conclusion of many theological arguments would be a non sequitur (Warburton 2008, p. 59).

I don’t know how the Council of Christians and Jews conducts its business, but I recently saw on stage what I imagine was a similar display of “rigorous intellectual scrutiny”: the RSC’s production of Written on the Heart (especially the opening scene as the scholars and priests – although not quite all fifty-four involved in the translation – gather in Ely House). Towards the end of the play, after years of work on the new translation of the Bible for King James, after countless discussions and disputes, there are still few remaining matters of contention, including whether “fold” should become “flock”.

E = mc² it ain’t.

22.11.11 A 21st-Century Séance (Dr Susan Blackmore)

Abstract When Susan Blackmore attended her first séance back in 1971 she already knew something of the history of spiritualism: its beginnings with two young girls in New York State in 1848, its rapid spread across America and Europe, and the Victorian rage for private séances where a medium might be gagged and bound inside a curtained cabinet while astonished sitters in the blacked-out room awaited “physical phenomena” such as disembodied voices, wisps of ectoplasm from the medium’s orifices, or even materialised spirits. She never experienced any such inexplicable thrills! Indeed after Michael Faraday’s conclusive experiments in 1853, and countless subsequent exposures of fraud one might have expected the whole circus to disappear. But no – it is still with us. After a decade of avoiding the paranormal, curiosity tempted her to accept an invitation to just such a séance in October 2011. She will report on what precautions she took, what happened, and whether or not she witnessed the promised inexplicable physical phenomena.

Susan Blackmore hadn’t been to a séance for thirty years when she received an email from “Clare” (not her real name) to a 21st-century séance. Sue got out of research into the paranormal and is now a thoroughgoing atheist unbeliever, but that transition resulted in her getting quite a bit of upsetting hate mail from believers who couldn’t understand how she could betray her former beliefs. (She pointed out that she never received hate mail from sceptics when she was a believer.)

The email contained the classic “open mind” line and Clare revealed that she regarded Sue as a project, a challenge, “a really hard nut sitting at the top of the pile of sceptics” whom she wanted to win over to belief. Sue accepted the invitation to a physical séance.

Physical mediumship is characterized by the following (supposed) spiritual phenomena:

• direct voice
• levitation
• apports (appearances out of thin air)
• transfiguration
• ectoplasm (the really exciting bit)
• full materialization and de-materialization

Sue admitted she wasn’t an expert on fraudulent séances, but she performed a few cursory checks of the garden shed where the great experience was due to happen. What was striking was how similar the setup was to Victorian seances – nothing much had changed in a hundred years. One of the few concessions to modernity was the use of plastic cable ties instead of leather straps around the arms of the medium. (Such binding is not much use if the arms of the chair are removable and the medium can just get up and walk about, but the arms of this chair seemed well fixed.)

Sue was expecting something special – not the otherworldly manifestations Clare was expecting, of course, but a ritual and solemn approach appropriate to the nurturing of altered states of consciousness. There was, however, a lack of seriousness, and no sense of spirituality even when the opening prayer was read out, or rather dictated like a shopping list. Instead, to accompany the tedious moaning and banging of the medium there was an Abba soundtrack.

When one of the participants felt the hand of the materialized spirit, she said, “It feels warm just like a real person.” At which point Sue had to hold back from shouting, “That’s because it is a real person!”

Sue was apologetic that she didn’t have more answers: “I don’t know what to make of it. Why do they do it?” Why are they convinced by a spirit calling himself “Yellow Feather” and doing a bad impersonation of a Native American Indian?

In a follow-up email, Clare reported that one of the others present (Jerry) had found the evening stimulating: “I’ve been trying to think of words to adequately describe what I felt and saw but it’s impossible.” And because of the rule against taking in any kind of recording device that might help with that description, we’ll never know what it was Jerry couldn’t describe. (See the Atman blog on the difficulties of transcribing experience.)

The participants in séances often express the desire to do good, although the good is couched in terms of the triumph of the “spiritual” over the “material”. They, like the rest of us, are natural-born dualists, but unlike some of us they don’t question the assumption that there is a non-physical, immaterial, independent “soul” separate to the body and which can survive death and communicate with the living.

Sue was glad to have taken part in the séance, but couldn’t see anything spiritual about the experience. She’s not religious, and so spiritual for her means asking the basic questions about what it is to be human, how we express kindness, love, wonder, purpose in our lives, what makes a good life. The trouble with the séance was that it fell short on pretty much all counts.

One reason why people engage in such activities is that it’s fun. (Spending two hours in a blacked-out shed with a bunch of spiritualists is not my idea of fun, although the tea and cake after would be nice.)

I personally can’t think of many worse ways of spending an evening. At least in church you might hear some fine music, and you could always doze off during the sermon. What really gets my motor running is theatre, which has its own rituals and special places, where experiences of all kinds can be had, without being weighed down with mumbo jumbo.

The Greeks had a word – eudaimonia – for a certain kind of happiness which translates literally as “good spirit” but which probably means something more like “human flourishing” or “life well lived” (Gilbert 2007, p. 36). I’m not sure they would be rushing to apply this word to the antics of these particular Abba afficionados. After two millennia, shouldn’t we have moved on from such activities? Or perhaps we should not be so quick to judge the quality of other people’s subjective experiences, as Gilbert elsewhere suggests?

The futility of prayer, Part 2

There is a moving final scene in Stephen MacDonald’s wonderful play about the friendship between Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Not About Heroes. With only a week to go before the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, at 5:45 on the morning of 4 November, Wilfred Owen’s Company led the crossing of the Sambre Canal. His men remember him, going among them, encouraging them, joking with them. He began to help them to fix some duckboards at the edge of the water. That’s where he was machine-gunned to death. MacDonald continues (1987, p. 79):

The Armistice was signed exactly one week later... At eleven o’clock, the fighting stopped. At twelve o’clock, the victory bells were ringing out in Shrewsbury. Bands were playing, crowds cheering. His mother and father began, in gratitude, to pray. Then the telegram arrived.

The futility of prayer, Part 1

In this “What I'm really thinking” column (accessed 20.11.11), a terminally ill patient writes: “I can count my real friends on the two fingers that I'd like to raise to the rest of them”:

Then there's, “But I pray for you every day.” Every day? Does your compassionate God not tell you that he's heard your prayers before, to stop repeating yourself, get up off your knees, pick up the phone and talk to me instead?

On moral systems, Part 1

During an interview with General Lord Dannatt, during which the former head of the Army talked about whether the military could teach the rest of society anything about moral values, Edward Stourton put the following question (Sunday 13.11.11):

The other question it raises is whether it’s proper to talk about instilling moral values or whether what you’re essentially doing in the armed forces is instilling a code of conduct, because if you’re talking about instilling moral values you are talking about using a moral system, and it’s quite difficult to see how you do that in a society where there isn’t a consensus about, for example, Christian belief.

This reveals several questionable assumptions, which are common in discussions about moral values.

• Repeated use of “instilling” implies a blank slate view of human nature, in which things like moral values have to be acquired by children from adults. Against the blank slate view is a variety of compelling evidence (Pinker 2002), including our possession of an innate language instinct. There is also growing evidence of an innate moral sense.
• It is assumed that religion and ethics naturally go together, which is not surprising given that Sunday is a BBC “Religion & Ethics” production (there is no BBC category called “Atheism & Ethics”).
• There is a blind spot, in that secular moral values which might cross both national and cultural boundaries aren’t in the frame.
• Strangely in this religious context, there is a kind of relativism at work. The reference to a consensus about Christian belief implies that a Christian’s moral values may differ from those of another religion.

With the phrase “code of conduct” Stourton distinguishes between arbitrary social conventions (e.g. the rules of football) and what he probably believes are absolute moral values (e.g. it wrong to commit murder). However, these supposedly absolute moral values, if they are handed down by God, are actually as arbitrary as the rules of football, in that goodness is determined by fiat rather than by appeal to a standard of goodness that is independent of God (as shown by the Euthyphro dilemma).

For the religious, where lies the true distinction between the arbitrary and the absolute?

Moral values originating from a supernatural source have all the same problems as divinely revealed knowledge: how do you know whether such knowledge can be trusted? This holy book says one thing, which is contradicted by another holy book. In this scheme, there are as many moral systems as there are people who claim to be able to communicate with the divine: no wonder the religious are often confused about what is right and what is wrong!

Recognizing the natural origin of moral values would help clear up much of this confusion, and allow progress to be made in ethics. No one would claim that the rules of football are part of human nature. They have to be taught explicitly. In contrast, according to Boyer (2001, p. 198), we “all have moral intuitions (‘My friend left her purse here, I must give it back to her’), moral judgements (‘He should have returned his friend’s purse’), moral feelings (‘He stole his friend’s purse, how revolting!’), moral principles (‘Stealing is wrong’) and moral concepts (‘wrong’, ‘right’)” that are part of a normally developed human nature.

A Darwinian perspective enables a better understanding of both the origin of moral behaviour and how it develops in humans, and it also provides the fundamental polarity that is the basis of many moral values: what is good or bad for the organism is what allows that organism to flourish or causes it to suffer. This principle operates deep within the physical world (even single-celled organisms are either repelled or drawn towards stimuli), and in that sense it is “absolute” in that all life respects it. Of course, that “absolute” does not survive translation into complex domains: what is good for the lion (a meal of freshly killed gazelle) is not good for the gazelle, and what is good for the gazelle (the lion and her cubs starve) is not good for the lion.

One of the major themes of Robert Frank’s (2011) latest book, The Darwin Economy, is that there is often a conflict between the interests of individuals and those of the group. Darwin recognized this at work in many of the species he observed, and Frank recognizes the same conflict in our economic life.

There is I think a sense in which moral behaviour is an attempt to resolve this conflict, or at least turn down the volume. After all, one man on a desert island would find it easier to follow the ten commandments than one man in New York. Only in the presence of other people do we have to worry about whether our interests align with theirs. Out of all the animals, of course, humans are best equipped to reflect upon their situation and to take steps to mitigate their bad behaviour.

The courtesy of humanism

There was a moment towards the end of the Q&A session following Steven Pinker’s talk when a gentleman asked a very peculiar question, more of a statement really, about the providential nature of the Christian God. In a single, inspirational hour, Pinker had taken us on a tour of human history to show the many ways in which violence has declined, providing a wealth of detail to illustrate a remarkable story. What is perhaps more remarkable is that Christianity can take very little credit for this, despite the word “peace” being prominent in its various publicity campaigns.

While I don’t know what the ratio of theists to atheists was at this talk, given that Pinker himself is an atheist, and given the warmth of the reception and the rapt attention, my guess is that this man was a lone voice. How unusual, in a country with a long Christian history, with an established church, for the tables to have been so thoroughly turned. How encouraging!

Also worth noting is the behaviour of a group of reasonable and largely non-religious people, which compares favourably with the many historical examples of the brutal treatment religious majorities often dished out to minorities. Imagine turning the clock back four hundred years and being the sole atheist in a room full of Christians. I doubt they would have sat calmly and quietly and allowed the atheist time to speak. More likely they would have dragged him out and stuck him in the stocks or worse.

Humanists don’t tend to murder people who disagree with them, they aim to provide reasons and arguments. What I’m proud of is the way our behaviour illustrated in a modest way the major theme of Our Better Angels: the decline of violence.

Quasi-factual propositions?

I was intrigued by this phrase, which appeared in a Face to faith piece by Theo Hobson (accessed 11.11.11) and which I haven’t come across before. I don’t know what it means (it doesn’t appear in either the Oxford or the Shorter Routledge encyclopedias of philosophy), and so is very likely to come in handy for believers, who don’t like their mysteries too much disturbed by the clear light of reason and comprehension.

Hobson is worried that he doesn’t have a proper “sense of vocation” to become a priest:

It feels more or less the opposite of a clear majestic summons from on high – alas (wouldn’t that be nice?).

That final parenthesis is telling, since as far as I’m concerned it would not be nice at all if he mistook a voice in his head for the voice of a magic man in the sky. That little word “calling” begs an awfully big question, that of agency in the universe other than what is visible in life on Earth. There is no evidence of such an agency existing (for example, those who infer a creator of the universe must prove that the big bang was not a random event, for if it were it would not need an explanation), but there is a great deal of evidence concerning how we infer agency in all sorts of ways, with our splendid theory of mind.

Hobson’s preference is to downplay beliefs (despite his taste for theological jargon) and go for ritual instead:

But do I really, fully believe in it all, or enough of it to sound like an exemplary, professional believer? Well, we Anglicans claim the right to be seemingly evasive here. It’s complicated, belief; it’s not black and white, neat and tidy. What matters is not that we assert our belief in quasi-factual propositions, but that we perform it in ritual, in the set prayers and actions of worship. Ritual is central to my attraction to the church.

Fine, if he wants to engage in rituals – the smells and bells bit of religion – but he shouldn’t confuse belief with the justification of belief: a belief ought to be capable of being expressed clearly, in a “black and white” way if you like; what is complicated is determining whether or not it’s true. He anticipates being asked “awkward questions, like whether the virgin birth really happened”: here, the belief couldn’t be simpler – did or did not such and such a virgin give birth in such and such a place at such and such a time? – and the answer (beyond all reasonable doubt) happens to be equally straightforward: in absence of any credible evidence whatsoever, no. What is so difficult about that?

Of course, one reason to downplay beliefs is to avoid having to defend their truth. (There are some – John Gray, for example – who don’t believe in the truth of many religious beliefs but who argue that belief isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, anyway.) But Christianity depends on a few crucial beliefs, which the Christian must believe are true, otherwise they are not a Christian. Hobson can try to dilute religion to ritual, but there will always be a core set of beliefs that must be held, for example, for Anglicans, the Thirty-Nine Article of Religion (accessed 11.11.11). Whatever beliefs Hobson chooses to embrace, he should bear in mind Daniel Kahneman’s good epistemological advice (2011, pp. 153–54):

Your probability that it will rain tomorrow is your subjective degree of belief, but you should not let yourself believe whatever comes to your mind. To be useful, your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.

The context of eternity

In this Face to faith piece (accessed 02.11.11), Steven Hepburn describes how he prayed for the soul of his recently deceased father, and he has a poke at atheists:

My dear father was not a Catholic. The customary alliance of hardline fundamentalists and militant atheists will no doubt unite to suggest that the logical consequence of my belief system would thrust him into that third and much less popular destination of hell...

It’s difficult to convey just how inappropriate the words “customary” and “militant” are in this context. The inference Hepburn intends his readers to draw is that atheists are militant while Catholics are not. An important sense of the word is “warring; engaged in warfare” and while I am not aware of any Wars of Atheism occurring at any point in the history of humanity, we do have the European Wars of Religion between 1520 and 1648. As Steven Pinker (2011, p. 142) puts it:

With the people who brought us the Crusades and Inquisition on one side, and the people who wanted to kill rabbis, Anabaptists, and Unitarians on the other, it’s not surprising that [these wars] were nasty, brutish, and long. ... During the Thirty Years’ War soldiers laid waste to much of present-day Germany, reducing its population by around a third.

When peace finally came, no doubt the meek and mild religious folk were the first to celebrate, and those nasty “militant atheists” the last to put down their blood-soaked weapons? Pinker (ibid., p. 143) continues:

It wasn’t until the second half of the 17th century that Europeans finally began to lose their zeal for killing people with the wrong supernatural beliefs. The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, confirmed the principle that each local prince could decide whether his state would be Protestant or Catholic and that the minority denomination in each one could more or less live in peace. (Pope Innocent X was not a good sport about this: he declared the Peace “null, void, invalid, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time.”)

Oh dear. That papal parenthesis would be quite hard for even Alistair Campbell to spin. It seems that the phrase “militant Catholics” is far more warranted by the historical evidence than “militant atheists”.

At the other end of the scale to militancy against whole populations is intimidation of the individual. It was Catholics who burned Giordano Bruno at the stake and, a few years later, threatened Galileo with torture, and these were of course far from isolated lapses of an otherwise peaceful institution. So what for history? Why would a man of faith care about reason and evidence? Faith permits you to believe anything you fancy, and to engage in an Orwellian rewriting of history if that serves the faith.

As for this “customary alliance” between fundamentalists and atheists, how is such a thing possible when religious believers of all kinds and for centuries tortured and burned atheists for their unbelief, and excluded those not charred to a crisp from full citizenship?

Is it caring to pray to an imaginary god so that an imaginary entity (a soul) can move on from one imaginary place (purgatory) to another imaginary place (heaven)? There are many adjectives that spring to mind, and caring is not one of them. For a humanist, caring for someone means acting in that person’s interests during their lifetime, and cherishing their memory after they have died. Fretting over the whereabouts of a non-existent metaphysical construct seems like a distraction.

Hepburn expresses a revealing thought in the following sentence:

Death is placed in a context not only of eternity but of community.

The part about community is unproblematic, but the context of eternity – is that a good thing? Or might stretching out the timeline in fact erode our ability to care because it – almost literally – leaves no time in which we can care? Pinker (ibid., p. 143) argues that people started to place a higher value on human life during the Age of Reason:

Part of this newfound appreciation was an emotional change: a habit of identifying with the pain and pleasures of others. And another part was an intellectual and moral change: a shift from valuing souls to valuing lives. The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence. Death is a mere rite of passage... The 17th century is called the Age of Reason, an age when writers began to insist that beliefs be justified by experience and logic. That undermines dogmas about souls and salvation...

The Age of Reason began four centuries ago. Should someone tell the pope?

A missed opportunity: the 10 trillionth digit of pi

Lucy Mangan was not impressed by the following stupendous feat of calculation (accessed 02.11.11). Mathematicians Shigeru Kondo and Alexander Yee wrote some code “for a computer” that figured out the 10 trillionth digit of pi. I know, I almost wet myself with excitement too. But imagine if Jesus – instead of trolling around pulling off stunts that were ten a penny at the time – had drawn a circle in the sand, and then a diameter, and then revealed the knowledge of the 10 trillionth digit of pi (revealed in the sense of divine revelation). He might have had to invent zero and the decimal system, but, hey, he’s supposed to have risen from the dead so elementary arithmetic can hardly have been beyond him (although advocating an end to slavery apparently was). Of course, the religious would say that we “militant atheists” would only scoff at such tales of a miracle even if Jesus had indulged in a little geometry. That’s not evidence of divine revelation! That’s a lucky guess!

But what if he’d also written down (in a way that could be authentically dated to around 30 CE, unlike the earliest surviving gospel manuscripts, which are copies of copies of copies (and so on) of originals that no longer exist) the 10 trillion and tenth digit of pi? And the 10 trillion and eleventh digit? And so on, each digit (assuming it is correct) increasing the unlikelihood of Jesus simply being a lottery-winning kind of guy. It wouldn’t take many correct digits on quite a modest scrap of velum for us atheists, two thousand years later, to at least have to scratch our heads and be a little more impressed than Lucy.

Oh, and what is the 10 trillionth digit of pi? Apparently, 5.

Holy lies, Part 2

Any group challenged by an outsider often simply closes ranks to dismiss any criticism, which is why the following remark by an elderly woman who called herself Sister Ruth caught my eye:

He’s the only real Christian among them. The others are all liars, cheats and frauds.

She was referring to the Reverend Giles Fraser, the canon chancellor of St Paul’s, who had just resigned. According to this report by Stephen Bates (accessed 01.11.11), she stepped up and embraced and kissed him. Whatever she was, she was clearly not an unbeliever, a member of a despised out-group as far as many religious believers are concerned.

We don’t know what lies Sister Ruth was thinking of when she made her allegation, but it’s a fair bet she wasn’t talking about one of the biggest holy lies of all: prayer. The same report quoted the dean unwittingly giving the game away about this long-standing scam:

I am glad the cathedral is open again. It is no fun praying in an empty church.

Why should it matter whether the church is full or empty? If prayer achieved even one-tenth of one per cent of what is claimed, then the social circumstances in which it is conducted shouldn’t matter. Of course, it is precisely because prayer does not work that the social circumstances are so important, especially to the religious specialists who benefit from the business drummed up. (The £20,000 daily cost of running St Paul’s isn’t all spent on keeping this beautiful building in tip-top condition: a fair proportion must be needed to cover the salaries of the priests.)

There is a huge amount of anecdotal evidence that prayer doesn’t work, but then there’s anecdotal evidence that prayer (and homeopathy and psychic communication with the dead and so on) does work, so we turn to science to discover the truth of the matter. Benson et al. (2006) published the results of a multimillion-dollar study on the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer in the American Heart Journal. As Robert Trivers (2011, p. 299) puts it:

The results were unambiguous: no effect whatsoever of intercessory prayer on the outcome, no hint of a benefit.

Should we be surprised? Only a person of faith would attempt to explain away such findings. The rational part of any sane human being must agree with Trivers:

A bizarre belief widespread in many Christian circles is that of the power of intercessory prayer. That is, many people seem to believe that a group of people in a room, scrunching up their foreheads in intense concentration on behalf of someone miles away about to undergo surgery, can have a positive effect on the outcome. Were this to be true, the laws of physics would have to be violated on a daily... basis, by a deity who chooses to alter reality in response to the pleas of petitioners according to some unknown criterion.

Whose public space?

At 2.30 p.m., on Friday 21 October 2011, St Paul’s officials put out a press release saying they were closing the cathedral for the first time since the Blitz: “We have done this with a very heavy heart, but it is simply not possible to fulfil our day to day obligations to worshippers, visitors and pilgrims in current circumstances.”

Anti-global finance protesters (Occupy London Stock Exchange) had been camped outside cathedral for several days when this widely reported decision was taken, which conveyed the impression that the cathedral was thoroughly barracaded. In fact, Zoe Williams reported (accessed 27.10.11) that she didn’t meet anybody who was inconvenienced in any way:

You would see, by a factor of 100, more people obstructing one another if you walked three minutes to the tube station. And the clarification at the end of the St Paul’s statement – “Today is about our ability, practically, to carry on our mission with free and open access to this public space and treasured place and I hope that the protesters will understand the issues we are facing, recognise that their voice has been legitimately heard, and withdraw peacefully” – did not, frankly, clarify.

Why would a Christian church, supposedly in favour of truth telling, misrepresent reality? Was it because they no longer had the public square all to themselves? Did they see their territory – in this case, the physical space on the western edge of the cathedral – dwindling and did they feel compelled to make a stand?

Britain is an increasingly secular country, and all the better for the change, but beware those who are left behind, who see themselves on a shrinking island of influence, encroached on all sides by people they choose to characterize as their enemies – they do not always act within reason, although they are likely to act in their own interests.

Secularists who advocate a separation of church and state and an end to religious privilege are used to hearing apologists for religion stridently declaring that they will not be driven out of the public square. This is of course a misrepresentation of the secularist position, which simply opposes such political arrangements as, for example, the automatic right of a certain number of bishops to sit in the upper chamber of parliament. As a secularist, I am not interested in what religious believers get up to in the privacy of their own homes, so long as it’s between consenting adults and doesn’t involve child abuse. Equally, religious believers are free to come into the public square and inform the rest of us of their opinion that, say, gay marriage is an abomination. The point about freedom, which some followers of bronze age beliefs haven’t yet caught up with, is that we’re free to disagree and denounce their views, preferably courteously, but always reasonably.

(Incidentally, at last night’s Conway Memorial Lecture, Professor Philip Schofield talked about Jeremy Bentham’s rather low opinion of St Paul, whom he regarded as a power-hungry and opportunistic fraud who relied upon the credulity of his Gentile followers and tirelessly promoted his philosophy of asceticism. As for religion itself, Bentham saw it a series of well-defended fortifications, and that the best strategy was to attack each in turn in order to destroy the whole. He began with St Paul.)

09.10.11 Barry Cryer – Butterfly Brain (Theatre by the Lake Keswick)

A packed theatre for Barry Cryer, the nation’s gagmeister-general and the obligatory clearing house for all jokes, according to Simon Hoggart. His sidekick for the evening was Colin Sell (chuckling along for the most part with the rest of us), the much abused pianist on shows like I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. Cryer wore a showbiz waistcoat while Sell was very smartly turned out as a concert pianist, complete with grand piano and several very silly and very enjoyable songs that he probably rarely gets to play at Carnegie Hall.

In keeping with Cryer’s encyclopaedic comedy store inside his head, the loose theme was a tour from A to Z of anything that took his fancy. Advertising brought to mind Bernard Matthews walking down the aisle of a supermarket, picking up a pack of sliced turkey and saying, “It’s Norfolk and good!” A pack of sausages emblazoned with the handsome features of Antony Worral Thomson provided further information in the form of an instruction: “Prick with fork”.

A psychic wanted to know how superstitious his audience really were, so he asked how many people had seen a ghost? Most people’s hands went up. How many people had ever touched a ghost? Fewer hands went up. For a bit of a laugh, he then asked how many people had had sex with a ghost? He was surprised when a single hand went up, and so he called the gentleman up on stage, and repeated the question. Oh no, said the gentleman, shaking his head, I thought you said, “had sex with a goat”!

A white horse walks into a pub. The guy at the bar is amazed, and says, They’ve named a whiskey after you! What, Eric?

The Bible never describes Jesus as laughing or having a sense of humour, so telling any kind of joke could be seen as a deeply irreligious and impious activity. (Similarly, Jesus is never described as masturbating or having sex, so naturally these activities too are rarely promoted in the pulpit. Joking about sex is beyond the priestly pale.) So, perhaps inspired by the immortal line, “Blessed are the cheesemakers!”, Cryer pulls on a surplice and launches into evangelical preacher mode, inviting us to “find cheeses” and “to talk about cheeses” and so on in a marvellous sing-song gospel style.

Keeping with the holy theme, a priest, a vicar and a rabbi were talking about their miracle experiences. The priest recalled being in a light plane during a terrible storm, and he prayed and prayed and then – praise the lord! – for 100 yards all around the plane the storm abated and he landed safely. The vicar told the story of when he was on a trawler off Grimsby during a raging sea, and he prayed and then – praise the lord! – for 100 yards all around the sea became calm and he made it to shore safely. The rabbi thought for a moment, and then remembered walking down the street on his way to synagogue on a Saturday when he came across a bag of money, which of course he couldn’t pick up since it was the Sabbath. He prayed and prayed, and suddenly – praise the lord! – for 100 yards all around it was Wednesday.

(Colin Sell recently performed his 22nd symphony. Everyone who heard it agreed it was quite long enough at twenty seconds.)

Humanism at the heart of Christianity?

In a word, no, although many Christians like to talk about humanist values as if they were Christian values. Phil Mercer, Dean of Christchurch Cathedral, New Zealand, talks about the aftermath of the earthquake (Sunday 02.10.11):

There’s been a strong sense of the presence of God for those of us who are Christians...

Nothing objective available to a non-believer? If I bump into a friend in the supermarket, the sense of my friend’s presence leads me to form the relevant belief. The point is, even strangers could form this belief about my friend’s presence.

This is not an act of God, this is the planet doing what the planet does. . .

But isn’t the planet, according to Christianity, a part of God’s creation? And aren’t creators usually responsible for the proper functioning of their creations?

We’re now talking about the really important things. . . we think we’re in control of everything that goes on around us. . .

It doesn’t take an earthquake for me to think I’m not in control of everything in my own life.

We’re not actually [in control of everything that goes on around us]

We don’t need to appeal to a supernatural reality to accept this conclusion. One reason we’re not in control is because we’re not omnipotent. But, again according to Christianity, isn’t God in control? Why does God, who is supposed to be all powerful and all good, allow natural disasters to occur?

We’re caught in this life that we’re part of and it’s uncertain, and there’s risks and there’s dangers as well as wonderful opportunity and delight. . . What’s really important in life?

Not believing in magic sky gods for starters.

The really important things are about relationships, about family, about caring for one another, and community . . .

A Christian making a very good case for humanism!

. . . and those are the sorts of things at the heart of the Christian faith.

Then he spoils it by mentioning religion. In fact, he’s wrong about what’s at the heart of the Christian faith. The things he lists are not exclusive to Christianity, and are nothing to do with having faith in the religious sense, so they can hardly be said to be defining elements of that faith. As Cunningham (2010, p. 174) points out:

I acknowledge that Christians have provided compassion for the less fortunate, comfort for people in time of loss, and  ministry to the sick, but all these good works are possible without adding the religious element.

What is at the heart of the Christian faith is a set of irrational beliefs about a supernatural realm that doesn’t exist. Phil Mercer is perhaps taking inspiration from Humpty Dumpty when he offers this rose-tinted view of Christianity, but the moral of Lewis Carroll’s (himself Dean of Christ Church College) great story is that playing with words doesn’t change objective reality.

Paint Christianity inch deep in PR gloss, its dirty little secret remains: you have to believe what is (according to any reasonable account) untrue to be true.

01.10.11 (10.00 a.m.) Pocket Comedy of Errors (Propeller at the Hampstead Theatre)

It wasn’t just the text that had been exquisitely cut to fit into an hour’s traffic on the stage, the set had also had to accommodate itself to the main production (No Naughty Bits). Against the backdrop of a bright blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds, two large blue bins, stuffed and overflowing with last night’s rubbish, flanked a single graffitied corrugated steel door. Appropriately, it was as if Propeller was squatting for a bit of guerilla theatre, adapting superbly to the constraints of the time and space available. The company also adapted to the younger audience, for many of whom this was probably their first encounter with this play, and possibly with Shakespeare. Judging from their enjoyment of the show and the many intelligent questions in the Q&A afterwards, Propeller have again proved their versatility. This is a show that’s aimed at kids that grownups can enjoy. Indeed, I think it was Kelsey Brookfield who confessed they had left quite a bit of the filthy innuendo in to keep the mums and dads amused (although a nun in a miniskirt thwacking a riding crop doesn’t leave much room for an innocent interpretation). For blogs on the full version see Propeller at Norwich and Propeller at Hampstead.

There was a smaller cast to match the reduced set and text, with three of the six players from the full-length production. The one thing that wasn’t cut down in any way was the talent, and the energy and clarity they packed into this performance. As the audience assembled, half the cast was on stage, getting into musical character, half hidden by sombreros. Dominic Tighe was patrolling the aisles as the strict Hispanic Officer, sadly lacking the squeaky leather trousers since he was doubling up as Antipholus of Syracuse, whose costume was purple trousers and a lurid tropical shirt. “Your iphone will become my phone” was his novel take on the usually officious announcement.

There are not many interludes in the action, with so much to pack into a single hour, but one thing I liked was making room to focus on a speech. For example, for the drop of water speech Tighe comes forward and addresses the audience directly, which both spelled out an important detail of the story as well as showing us all how well blank verse can  convey a beautiful image:

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE. He that commends me to mine own content
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.

It’s not long before we get back to some funny business, as he reasons

They say this town is full of cozenage. . .

while three creep up behind, with whistly things, and he puts hands over eyes: “Mother always used to say, close your eyes, they’ll go away.”

Instead of Luciana unpeeling a banana, on mention of possible “troubles of the marriage bed” one of the characters holding a bunch of flowers lets them droop, exactly the kind of adult-orientated symbol that (I hope!) would pass by without meaning for the children in the audience.

There’s plenty of knockabout that’s comprehensible by all, as the epistemic comedy gets going. Antipholus thinks his (real) servant Dromio is jesting - “Yea, dost thou jeer and flout me in the teeth?” - when he’s remembering giving gold to the other Dromio (he has a highly justified false belief), and the multiple stage directions - “Beating him” is very common - are accompanied by a range of slapstick whistles and bells and bangs. Huge fun, and a philosophical illustration of the problem of knowledge. The combination produced a big reading on the GB dial.

When Adriana appears, and (mistakenly) recognizes them, they look puzzled, and it’s nothing to do with her being played by Jonathan Livingstone in tiger print tights and a gaudy yellow jacket.

How can she thus, then, call us by our names,
Unless it be by inspiration?

This version keeps the suspension of action as Antipholus unclasps himself from Adriana’s embrace as well as the suggestion of action as Antipholus reclasps himself to Adriana (”I’ll entertain the offer’d fallacy”). Again, that adults-only meaning is layered on the more obvious “this is the fairy land” expressions of wonder and mystification. A rousing When the Saints Come Marching In is played on the trombone, and two traffic cones double up as megaphones for the two Dromios’ closed door scene. The fart joke is kept (of course) and played up a notch, with a machine gunning mime. Tam Williams as Antipholus of Ephesus, is as flummoxed as his yet unrecognized twin, but for different reasons: he can’t get into his own house, and neither can his servant. The scene ends in chaos as the alarm is pulled from the door (a comedy unspooling to reveal an unconnected lead), an alarm that seems to have a life of its own, a swing of the crow that knocks out a tooth from poor Dromio.

Luciana puts a remarkable question to Antipholus of Syracuse and follows it with a remarkable piece of advice:

LUCIANA. . . . Shall, Antipholus,
Even in the spring of love, thy love-springs rot?
. . . if you like elsewhere, do it by stealth

The unmarried (younger?) sister is herself looking for a husband, and cannot help flirting a little even with her sister’s husband (as she thinks, mistakenly). On “Gaze where you should” Kelsey Brookfield as Luciana remembers herself and pulls her tiny white cardigan across her (hairy) chest.

Richard Frame as Dromio of Antipholus gets to do his spherical speech, a routine that worked perfectly in the full-length version and was ready made for this kind of production. When he later encounters the other Antipholus, there is the usual uncomprehending exchange:

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE. A ship you sent me to, to hire waftage.
ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS. Thou drunken slave! I sent thee for a rope;
And told thee to what purpose and what end.
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE. You sent me for a rope’s end as soon
You sent me to the bay, sir, for a bark.
ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS. I will debate this matter at more leisure,
And teach your ears to list me with more heed.
To Adriana, villain, hie thee straight;
Give her this key. . .

Even though Antipholus has just had good evidence that his servant has either gone mad or is playing the fool, he hands him the key and sends him on a crucial errand. This struck me as odd, perhaps simply demanded by the plot, and yet it’s psychologically plausible on two counts: Antipholus hasn’t got much choice but to trust his servant, and it’s very difficult to dislodge a highly justified belief (think how difficult it is to dislodge religious beliefs, and their justification is on much weaker ground than the direct evidence of your senses).

Given the growing evidence of madness, it’s not surprising the quack Doctor Pinch is called upon. (That famous invocation “packetofcrispus” has already failed to work.) He has the (supposed) power to heal the body and cleanse the spirit of all those imaginary demons he persuades you are real. His zha-zham works on selected believers but not on Antipholus of Ephesus, who remains unmoved, until he is bundled into a wheelie bin along with one of the Dromios. A nice touch was the credit card machine to take $500 payment for his “cleansing” services.

The duke, essential for the resolution, is a lisping, white-bathrobed hedonist sipping a cocktail, who has to make sense of the story. Since changing costumes at this point just isn’t possible, the expedient of simply holding up the costume on a hanger solved the problem of presenting the character. The duke might well say, “This is stwange!”

The mayhem makes way for a series of moving meetings between four pairs of characters who each thought they would never see the other again, a real TJ, culminating in: “Embrace thy brother”. Silence, eyes closed, the rest of the cast leave the stage to the two Dromios, who open their eyes in wonder as they see themselves reflected in another human being, as if in a mirror.

Q&A

Lots of good questions, including why an all-male company? According to Tam Williams, it was an accident arising out of Edward Hall’s gathering a particular group of friends – who happened to be male – for a production. There was no political agenda. Another good question about how to play a woman, and I think Jonathan Livingstone said there’s the main problem of playing another character, and the fact that the character is of the opposite sex is just one more layer. One of the cast said it was all a bit of a “head fry” (actually a better expression than the unexpurgated version).

One girl asked who wrote it? Shakespeare, was the simple answer, and the question complimented this production, since it obviously came across as relatively modern. About 97% was original Shakespeare.

Why wheelie bins? The company’s interpretation of the “dark place” the two characters are taken to – I think this was a real “Ah-aah!” moment for the questioner, and goes to show how important this kind of work is, to develop these ways of thinking about theatre and story telling and so on.

Any teachers wanting an introduction to Shakespeare, this kind of Pocket production is a no-brainer with a company as talented as Propeller, precisely because it stretches the brain as far as it can go. Brilliant.

(A bonus in the bar afterwards, bumping into Tony Bell, who played Dr Pinch in the full version. Like the cast of The Belle’s Stratagem, I got the feeling the cast really enjoy working together, and that comes through in the quality of the show.)

06.07.11 The Comedy of Errors (Propeller at the Hampstead Theatre)

In the previous blog I didn’t quite get round to finishing writing up the production we saw in Norwich in February this year, so in this blog I’ll pick up where I left off with the same production second time round. Our two theatre-going American friends who came along on our recommendation loved the show – apparently, blokes dressing up as women for comedy has never taken off over there.

The clue’s in the title as to what kind of play this is, but as with much of Shakespeare, his comedy is rarely straightforward. In the very first scene we must digest a tragic tale, of a family torn asunder in several ways. That is bad enough, but then added into the mix is an enmity between two cities that makes the Arabs and Israelis seem like good neighbours. Simply for being a Syracusan, Egeon must die. The duke himself draws a gun and is about to execute Egeon when he decides instead to let the old man ramble on, seemingly interminably if done badly, but John Dougall mismatches a powerful voice to his broken spirit and tattered clothes and delivers a gripping prologue. So effective is his telling that the duke gives him till sundown to raise a ransom, and we don’t see them again until the final resolution.

Husband and wife (Antipholus of Ephesus and Adriana) are going through a sticky patch (not unlike the tension between Oberon and Titania and between Theseus and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Meanwhile, Antipholus of Syracuse and Dromio of Syracuse have been bantering on the themes of baldness and time (typically Shakespearean) when they see a strange woman looking their way (2.2.99–100):

. . . soft, who wafts us yonder?

Adriana has made a big entrance from the rear doors, taken a stance centre stage, and beckoned her wayward husband (as she thinks) with a gesture that is to wafting as steel is to gossamer. Then she embarks upon a big speech, the kind of diatribe her husband quite probably richly deserves, every line of which reminds us of her belief that she is actually addressing her husband. Of course her real husband would feign surprise, play the injured party, have a “who me?” expression. Of course he will throw glances of amazement at Dromio (and he return them) as she reveals a little too much of her private life in this public space.

The lookers-on serve a dual purpose. The first is to provide a prurient audience that on the final syllables of (2.2.131–32)

I am possess’d with an adulterate blot;
My blood is mingled with the crime of lust;

go “Ooh!” and “Aah!” in cringing unison. The second is to reinforce her belief, because they too mistake the Syracusans for their Ephesian brothers.

Antipholus responds to this long speech with a simple truth that is simply ignored (2.2.138):

Plead you to me, fair dame? I know you not . . .

By now, however, and given the long list of marital crimes of which he is accused, he would say that, wouldn’t he? He is proving her point with this further outrage, and this time Luciana steps in to take her sister’s part.

Antipholus reasons perfectly (2.2.157–58):

How can she thus then call us by our names? Unless it be by inspiration.

Inspiration here means “divine or magical revelation” and so a supernatural wildcard is thrown into the mix. What else could explain the carry on? There is, it seems, evidence of such forces at work, however inclined we are to purely natural explanations. As a means of acquiring knowledge, revelation, of course, does not exist (because the gods or spirits who would do the revealing do not exist), but in this fictional world, as well as in Elizabethan England, such a belief was more reasonable than it is today. Regardless of the degraded epistemic nature of revelation, the overwhelming tenor of the play is one of rational dialogue working towards the truth. In the end it is reason and a respect for the facts that resolve the play.

On (2.2.165)

Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine . . .

Adriana twines herself around Antipholus in classic style, crotch to crotch, with leg raised and wrapped round his hip. Antipholus, admirably, continues to reason (2.2.172–77):

To me she speaks; she moves me for her theme.
What, was I married to her in my dream?
Or sleep I now, and think I hear all this?
What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?
Until I know this sure uncertainty,
I’ll entertain the offered fallacy.

During this aside, the whole cast freeze frame and hold their pose while Antipholus unclasps himself and steps back to ask himself, is this real? In one of the key lines of the play he recognizes the possibility of fallibility. As Lynch argues (2004, p. 29):

Skepticism is the Janus face of our concern for truth. The very fact that objective truth is a goal of our inquiries is what opens the door to skepticism, and vice versa. The possibility that we could be wrong implies that truth is independent of our beliefs; and the objectivity of truth in turn implies that we could always be wrong.

As if to drive the point home, Antipholus slots himself back into Adriana’s embrace on “offered fallacy”, a phrase with added oomph in this all-male production.

The magical theme echoes A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and when Luciana asks Dromio to “go bid the servants spread for dinner” he concludes, again with some reason (2.2.180):

This is the fairy land.

The scene ends with Adriana unwittingly sowing a few more seeds of confusion, as she and her sister insist that Antipholus comes in for dinner and Dromio act as porter, letting no one enter. This could be a creaky plot twist, but there are good psychological reasons why Adriana doesn’t want to be disturbed, as she makes more than peace, she hopes, with her husband. Her lascivious enunciation of words like “shrive” makes clear what she has in mind, and privacy is what’s needed.

As one master–servant pair exit, the other enters, and the next scene (3.1) begins with master and servant at odds, each disbelieving the other’s account of recent events. They are soon united (as were their brothers in the previous scene) in their amazement at being locked out of their own house.

The front door is part of the rear wall pushed forward, with an intercom attached, into which both Dromio (of Ephesus) and Antipholus (of Ephesus) speak to Dromio (of Syracuse), in growing frustration (Antipholus of Syracuse being busy upstairs in the bedroom department). The presence of Angelo and Balthazar is important for all sorts of reasons. First, Antipholus has invited them in, which is why he’s trying to enter the house now. Second, Balthazar eventually counsels restraint, once Antipholus has called for a crowbar to force his way in (if he breaks down the door the twin Dromios will be discovered too soon). Third, Balthazar persuades Antipholus to “depart in patience” (3.1.102) and to return later to “know the reason of this strange restraint” (3.1.105), which again prevents premature discovery. Fourth, having public witnesses to any activity contributes epistemologically to the maintenance of a coherent web of beliefs – Balthazar points to “some cause to you unknown” (3.1.99). Fifth, it’s funny. Angelo and Balthazar are standing by, looking on at this crazy scene, and we can understand their confusion and sympathize with it because we know what’s really going on. Thomas Padden and Wayne Cater as Angelo and Balthazar are like Laurel and Hardy in more than just their respective shapes (lean and starved-looking versus rotund and well-fed), generating lots of comedy.

Propeller make sure we get the fart joke (”break it not behind” 3.1.84) with some excellent wafting, reminding us just how lowbrow Shakespeare can be, and by the end of the scene the intercom is buzzing constantly and being ripped out with a never-ending comedy cable spooling out, still buzzing as Antipholus stamps on it, manically. Even a piece of disconnected electronic equipment is possessed in Ephesus.

It’s not just intercoms that are misbehaving. Antipholus, legitimately as far as he’s concerned, fancies Luciana, and begins a long speech of love with “Sweet mistress” (3.2.29–52). Luciana, of course, sees things rather differently, although is a little more ready to step into what she thinks are her sister’s shoes than you might think. (If shrewish Adriana is not going to warm his bed, why not lonely Luciana?) She repulses him at first (3.2.54–54):

What, are you mad, that you do reason so?

Antipholus replies:

Not mad, but mated . . .

and when he commands – “Give me thy hand” (71) – she complies, only to retract her arm speedily, once it has been kissed. Got a big laugh.

As Luciana exits Dromio returns with tales of the kitchen wench, with wonder written on his face as if he has just visited all the continents of the earth, which in a sense he has. Richard Frame delivers a fantastic comic interlude, utterly pointless plotwise but epistemically priceless: the knowledge he recounts testifies to his working senses, and goes to further establishing his capacity for forming rational beliefs about the external world, this particular world being made of grease and tallow (“it’s not funny” is his extra-textual deadpan as he paces out the width of the stage to measure her width “from hip to hip” (101)). He returns to centre stage and, arms outstretched, he revolves them into a vertical position, concluding: “she is spherical” (105). Another big laugh.

Actually, such jesting is not quite immaterial to the plot, since it sets up Angelo’s final line, after he has handed over the gold chain (a very bling triple looped affair, entirely in keeping with Thomas Padden’s gold-toothed, stubble-chinned, lamé-jacket-wearing, shifty-looking character, far removed from the respectable city gents that were the forerunners of bankers – oh, perhaps not so far removed) (162):

You are a merry man, sir; fare you well.

Angelo is clearly used to the Ephesian twins jesting with each other and their friends, and simply takes this in his stride. He is not about to ask too many questions or hang around to trip up the plot.

By the interval, we hadn’t seen anything of Tony Bell, but he came on stage to chivvy us all out into the bar to see the cast perform a medley of 80s classics, with I think most of them taking a solo turn. Brilliant, and they weren’t shy about saying how much they’d raised on their tour for charity, so the buckets were soon filling up to the sound of  “Material girl”. An all-male company ending on “Sisters are doing it for themselves” rounded off by far and away the best interval ever. Not much rest for the cast, but more great entertainment for us. In Norwich, they followed us down the stairs and onto the stage via the stalls. Here in Hampstead they were first back through the doors. Dominic Tighe as the Officer was one of the first back on stage, singing the bossa nova song The Girl from Ipanema, except she is from Epidamium and sitting in the front row.

Given that music saturates this production, it’s entirely appropriate that the chain – one of the essential epistemic props – has its very own musical signature, a ting that sounds every time it’s mentioned, a running joke that gets funnier as it gets more frequent.

Entrances are dramatic opportunities. We’ve already had Adriana’s, which left the Syracusans’ jaws well dropped. This time they are amazed by the Courtesan’s entrance: Kelsey Brookfield in afro wig, playboy bunny ears, miniskirt, tightly corsetted pneumatic bosom, eyelashes that could stand in for the steel hawsers on the Golden Gate bridge, and a pose inspired by a cross between the streets of San Francisco and Raymond’s Revue Bar.

She is not a character right-thinking citizens are supposed to approve of, though her reception – “Satan, avoid!” (4.3.39) – immediately attracts some sympathy from us. Being accused of being “Mistress Satan” by a stranger is a bit harsh, especially since she happens to be epistemically crucial, providing a rational commentary on the Syracusans’ behaviour (see Sell A Door at the Greenwich Playhouse [ADD ref]).

She is also important in setting up the most striking (literally) character in the whole play, by provoking talk of the devil. Pinch is listed as a schoolmaster, but Tony Bell plays him (worringly convincingly) as a revivalist evangelical faith-healing preacher man from Bible-belt Barnsley or thereabouts, and his entrance outdoes all others: dry ice machine on full blast as he swims through the smoke from the rear in a blaze of light. Ironically, as soon as this man of God appears all hell breaks loose. He is keen on casting out devils, so first he must of course find some, and he enquires of the poor lady just in front of us in the front row: “Do you have the devil inside you, madam?”

In Norwich, he appealed to the devils Delia-style – “Let’s be having you!” – and to Norwich City Council to cleanse the city of them. In Hampstead, the devils were commanded to get back to Peckham, which might be a bit rough for even a seasoned demon. Dromio and Antipholus of Ephesus have just been arguing over the rope’s end, on which the master believes the servant has spent 500 ducats. They are, to say the least, agitated, and good candidates for accusing of being possessed, if you’re in the exorcism racket. So, on come a couple of wheelie bins, courtesy of Camden Borough Council, and Pinch asks the devil-woman: “Did you put the cat in the bin, madam?”

Authority in the person of the Officer is somewhat sidelined as Pinch works his tricks, and undermined every time he strides across the stage to arrest a character by his squeaking leather trousers (a duck whistle, I think, blown in time amplified the squeak). Again, epistemically speaking, this is crucial, since authority often represents security of knowledge as well as law enforcement.

Antipholus, in the bin, is in a rage, naturally, and bounces along, bunny jumping towards Dromio, one of the objects of his anger. They are wheeled off, and Pinch doesn’t exit of his own accord either, but is assisted off stage: “Have you come to take me away?” That’s not the last we see of him, but for the moment sanity resumes, until Dromio and Antipholus miraculously reappear (4.4.137–38):

LUCIANA. God for thy mercy, they are loose again.
ADRIANA. And come with naked swords.

Except of course these are the Syracusans, not the Ephesians, and for swords they have a plastic spade and a toy net, which they swoosh around like Elizabethan light sabres. They exit and then come back on to meet the merchant and Angelo. Dromio brandishes his net, but the merchant (I think) takes out a lighter and sets off a small blaze, which finally makes them seek sanctuary in the priory.

Whether they would have done so if they had seen the abbess is another matter. The final entrance doesn’t quite top the earlier ones, but Chris Myles as the abbess Emilia cuts another striking figure, a high white collar and wimple affair framing his face, a little black dress leaving lots of fishnet stockinged leg on show, and purple calf-length boots. She is not the stereotypical holy woman, at least in appearance, but she shows why she is in charge of the priory with her first words (5.1.38):

Be quiet, people.

She soon turns agony aunt, and seems well-equipped to advise Adriana on her marital problems. Now, we are used to celibate priests dishing out all kinds of advice about how people should conduct their sex lives (or even whether they should have any kind of sex life), and we rightly mock them for their trouble, and restrain their influence wherever we can. As we will soon find out, however, the abbess is not entirely without experience in this department of human life, and shows some insight in her questioning.

Her counsel consists not merely of words (5.1.57–59):

ABBESS. You should for that have reprehended him.
ADRIANA. Why, so I did.
ABBESS. Ay, but not rough enough.

She flexes her whip and has a glint in her eye. Even the feisty Adriana is no match for this woman (which is perhaps why, when she later demands justice “against the Abbess” (5.1.135), she grinds the word out through gritted teeth).

The return of the duke signals that the plot is winding up to its resolution. Egeon is on too, silent for the moment, awaiting execution. A messenger enters and ends with “they will kill the conjurer” (5.1.159). Adriana in a couple of lines sums up the epistemological nature of this play (5.1.180–81):

Peace, fool, thy master and his man are here,
And that is false thou dost report to us.

Her beliefs about the nature of the world are well justified, and she therefore believes them to be true, and the messenger’s to be false, and she reacts as many do to the idiocy of others who hold false beliefs. As Lynch (2004, p. 24) points out:

We assume that our mind more or less perceives the world as it is.

But of course we can be wrong, and all the characters will soon discover this universal and rather important truth about themselves.

Rather overshadowing this delicate philosophical enquiry is the final appearance of Pinch, who comes rushing on stage, starkers as well as stark raving mad, with a lit sparkler stuck up his bum (actually held in place by a strategically placed hand, else we all would have been shamed). He dashes across the stage and exits through the auditorium, brushing close to those sitting on the row ends. Spectacular in all sorts of ways, and surprising how bright a sparkler can be in a darkened space.

Sam Swainsbury as Antipholus of Ephesus, by this time beside himself, delivers a highly charged speech summarizing all his actions and beliefs, laying his rational case with some emotion before the duke (5.1.216–19):

My liege, I am advised what I say;
Neither disturbed with the effect of wine,
Nor heady-rash, provoked with raging ire. . .

Some agree with him, others don’t, the chain figures prominently (the tinging becomes incessant) and tempers fray, so everyone is at someone else’s throat. The duke intervenes (5.1.271–72), Richard Clothier dryly commenting as he observes the mayhem around him:

Why, what an intricate impeach is this!
I think you all have drunk of Circe’s cup.

On “intricate impeach” everyone freezes, forming a tableaux of one-on-one violence. Luciana (who has previously produced a set of numchuks before going all chest-pumping pub carpark) is mid karate kick, leg raised and the edge of her foot an inch away from the face of one of the Dromios, who’s bent over backwards to avoid the kick.

Once Emilia brings on the Syracusans, all begins to be resolved. Brother is reunited with brother, wife with husband, parents with children. This kind of thing always gets the needle pushing into the wet zone on the TJ dial, but the waterworks really start when the stage clears to leave the twin Dromios alone, to marvel at each other. The final lines, spoken by Dromio of Ephesus, are a wonderful celebration of unity and amity (5.1.428–29):

We came into the world like brother and brother,
And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.

Outstanding.

26.09.11 The Belle’s Stratagem (Red Handed Theatre Company at the Southwark Playhouse)

A second chance to see this great production. The post-show discussion with Jessica Swales and some of the cast brought home how odd it was that such a great play has languished in obscurity for so long, and how much of a risk was involved in putting it on. I’m glad Swales did take that risk, and put so much work into editing three scripts into one and gathering a cast (out of more than a thousand who applied) who could do it justice. Compensation for working for an actor’s wage was having an enormous amount of fun, both in character and as a bunch of people doing what they love. (One reason they don’t get paid so much is that people like us bulk buy using the Southwark Playhouse season ticket scheme. We bought four tickets and still only spent one-third of the cost of a single ticket for the Old Vic Richard III.)

In the masquerade, Mr Hardy disguises himself as a woman (after working through a list of more likely candidates). In the original, Swales said, Cowley has him in Jewish costume. This was one of the few changes she made, to keep us from getting distracted by a casual anti-semitism, and it was a good call, especially as Robin Soans made a fine dame (maybe angling for panto work?).

London, Big Ben-style chimes, Lincoln’s Inn, the whole cast teaming onto stage singing a ding-dong song. The stage clears, and a sweet-natured Saville and his servant, Dick, are met by the dastardly Courtall. Cowley has introduced two main characters, not rivals in Sheridan’s sense but holding rival principles: should a man conquer or commit to a woman? One is embodied by a fresh-faced Jeremy Joyce as the scrubbed Saville and the other by an urbane Marc Baylis as the man-about-town Courtall.

One of my ongoing fascinations is with Darwin’s dangerous idea, and with evolutionary thinking more broadly applied. While gender is a cultural construct with political implications (for example, we can decide that differently gendered individuals should be equal before the law), the two biological sexes are different in ways over which we have much less control, if any. Sex is not just about the bits you rub together, but about how you behave, the psychological strategies you employ in seeking reproductive opportunities. Cowley didn’t know about Darwin, of course, but if this play is anything to go by she did know about mating strategies, and those of Saville and Courtall are opposites ends of the gallant spectrum.

Cowley puts her drama first, and allows her characters and situations to entertain and not lecture us. Still, if you’ve been paying attention, by the end you may have learned something about the great drama that is human nature. At this point in the play, however, we can simply enjoy Courtall’s theatrical terror at the prospect of meeting his country cousins – all “rusticity, innocence and beauty” – and go along with his characterization of them:

COURTALL. Cousins of our days come up ladies, and with the knowledge they glean from magazines and pocket books, fine ladies; laugh at the bashfulness of their grandmothers, and boldly demand their entrees in the first circles.

This seems a remarkably modern complaint, and it’s about to be given a late-twentieth-century twist. First, we glimpse some hope for Courtall when he admits that his “conscience twitched” him, but we know that twitch will not hold back his libertine appetite. Then, Saville cries out – “there’s a bevy of female Patagonians coming down upon us” – and they exit to make way for four pairs of fluttering eyes and swishing petticoats. The rhetorical question they put is:

Shall I tell you what I want, what I really, really want?

And the answer they supply is: zig-a-zig-aah. One poor guy in the front row catches the eye of Cassandra Bond’s character, who is scarily stary and starry eyed as she bears down on him. Jackie Clune, who is taller and has – how to put this delicately? – slightly more bulk than her three co-stars,
has to lower herself a little in her Little Miss Muffett Dress, and lower her voice to deliver the immortal line:

If you really bug me I will say goodbye.

Given this character is the “gumby wench” (my wife’s phrase!), this is possibly the most terrifying interpretation of an upbeat song imaginable. A brilliant insertion of grrl into Georgian manners.

Michael Lindall sweeps in as the handsome Doricourt, except some of the sheen has been dulled by the morning’s business at Pleadwell’s.

SAVILLE. Did your heart leap or sink, when you beheld your mistress?
DORICOURT. Faith, neither one nor t’other: she’s a fine girl, as far as mere flesh and blood goes. But . . . nothing more.
SAVILLE. Is not that enough ?
DORICOURT. No! She should have spirit! Fire!

Doricourt anticipates heroes like D’Arcy, who demand more than just a pretty face, and Cowley is showing us how notions of decorum can backfire when it comes to love.

Cassandra Bond reappears as a worldly chicken-leg-eating maid, holding her palm out to a hack as he hands over one coin after another. Gossip is the real currency, of course, and Flutter is the chancellor of that particular exchequer. Villers marks him as one “who always remembers everything but the persons and the circumstances”. Christopher Logan’s superb Flutter scampers to and fro, not so much in the business of communicating information as making sure his camp presence is never absent for too long:

I never related a falsity in my life, unless I stumbled on it by mistake; and if it were otherwise, your dull matter-of-fact people are infinitely obliged to those warm imaginations which soar into fiction to amuse you; for, positively, the common events of this little dirty world are not worth talking about, unless you embellish them. . .

Odone avoids the evidence question

About halfway through the conversation between Richard Dawkins and Cristina Odone (accessed 26.09.11), he asked how she decided which parts of religious teaching and scripture to doubt and which to accept, adding:

RD: As scientists, we do it by evidence.
CO: You can’t boil everything down to evidence!

If you turn up the heat, and boil everything down only to find nothing, what then? The difference between people of faith like Odone and people of reason like Dawkins is that one expects to find some residue of evidence underpinning every belief while the other is happy with an empty pan. Reduction is not always a bad thing, especially if you’re trying to enjoy the good things in life, like gravy.

Christian beliefs, in particular, depend crucially on certain historical propositions being true, and how we usually determine the truth or otherwise of such beliefs is by appeal to certain types of evidence, often written but sometimes archaeological and so on. Scholars, of course, do not take documents such as the gospels on faith or at face value. (Even at face value, there are many deficiencies in the gospels as supposed accounts of historical events. For example, internal contradictions – in the absence of external corroboration to resolve the issue one way or another – cast doubt on the accuracy of many details.)

Dan Barker, who was an evangelist before seeing the light and becoming an atheist, was astonished to discover that the book he had lived by for so many years was not what it seemed, and refers us to Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman “for documentation of this fraudulent tampering with the bible” (Barker 2008, pp. 233–34). In a later book, Forged, Ehrman (2011, p. 5)  puts it bluntly:

The Bible contained errors. And if it contained errors, it was not completely true. Eventually I came to realize that the Bible not only contains untruths or accidental mistakes. It also contains what almost anyone today would call lies.

In Misquoting Jesus Ehrman (2005, p. 7) puts a key evidential question:

What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals!

If you’re Odone, of course, or anyone prepared to accept on faith alone, it doesn’t matter that we don’t have the autographs, because that would be boiling the Bible down to evidence.

Odone’s avoidance of the evidence question is unsurprising in someone who would also be unlikely to embrace the phrase “the God delusion”: the reason why someone is said to labour under a delusion is because their belief is not reasonable, not warranted by the available evidence. Someone who declares with absolute conviction that they are going to win the Lottery is deluded, as I’m sure Odone would agree. The reason why they are deluded is not because their belief is certainly false. After all, they might win the Lottery. It is simply because the chances are heavily weighted against their winning the Lottery, a judgement all reasonable people, considering the evidence, will reach.

This is why it is common to find religious believers operating an epistemic double standard. What is a reasonable objection to someone certain they will win the Lottery becomes an outrageous and offensive insult to someone certain they will win Everlasting Life. (The difference between the Lottery and Everlasting Life, of course, is that we know that people have won the Lottery.)

Crystal healing and the P12

I was waiting for a P12 to take me past Cathay Street when I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake. I’d checked online, but the schematic on the bus stop, which showed the bus only going as far as New Cross, didn’t tally with my expectations. I dealt with the cognitive dissonance between my beliefs about where the bus was heading and its actual destination by standing there, monitoring a rising tide of mild panic. I should have remembered something I’d heard on the radio, when Studs Terkel quoted James Cameron’s last column: “hope subsides, curiosity remains”.

Hope that I was on the right route was indeed fading fast, but my curiosity kicked in and I made enquiries. A woman confirmed that I was mistaken about the P12: it was the P13 I wanted. The slight inconvenience of having to check the facts and the epistemic (if hardly epic) humiliation at being proved wrong were more than compensated for by the resolution of that dissonant state of mind and a feeling of relief at being able to get on with my day.

Later that week my wife attended a family funeral, and met a women she didn’t know who commented on the amethyst necklace she was wearing. Amethysts, apparently, are “very healing”. The moment passed without my wife pulling out a copy of Trick or Treatment and reading chapter and verse on all things alternative. Sometimes in social situations it seems best to pull a veil over the elephant in the room. (Sceptics should of course be wary of veils, given how useful they are to purveyors of bullshit, as Stephen Law (2011b, pp. 35–36) explains in a section on the Veil Analogy.)

With the benefit of hindsight and from within the safety of a hypothetical, I imagined my wife saying, calmly, and with sincere concern for the woman’s well-being, “You realize those things don’t actually work? I mean, I’d hate you to get sick because you didn’t see a doctor.”

Now imagine if someone had come up to me at the bus stop and said, “You know this bus doesn’t actually go beyond New Cross? I mean, I’d hate for you to be late for an appointment because you got on the wrong bus.”

Here are two possible responses:

• “I don’t care what you think about it, I’m not going to change my belief about the P12.”
• “Thank you for taking the trouble to point out my false belief about the P12, I really appreciate it.”

One of these responses would be thought of by most people as bordering on the rude if not downright insane. The question is, why is that same kind of response perfectly acceptable when beliefs held on faith are challenged?

The ruminations of John Gray, Part I

In a Point of View (accessed 23.09.11, available as a podcast) called “Believing in belief” (16.09.11), John Gray argues that the scientific and rationalist attack on religion is misguided. Apparently, atheist critics overrate the importance of belief to religious believers. (If he’s right, shouldn’t they then be called religious experiencers or religious practitioners?) He begins with Graham Greene’s conversion, in which the author was more impressed by his priest talking about “the challenge of an inexplicable goodness” than by any arguments for the existence of God.

Gray conveniently passes over the word “inexplicable”, which for the religious is almost as useful as the word “mystery” in their efforts to avoid stretching themselves intellectually. Is it reasonable, however, to claim that goodness is “inexplicable”? While no sensible person would attempt to give an all-purpose explanation relevant to all situations, surely, if we are so inclined, we can explain good behaviour in all sorts of ways, without reference to the supernatural? For example, Dennett (1995, p. 403) cites John Dewey, who thought Darwinism should be the foundation of any naturalistic theory of meaning:

“I only insist that the whole story be told, that the character of the mechanism be noted—namely, that it is such as to produce and sustain good in a multiplicity of forms.”

Priests, of course, aren’t known for their digressions into Darwinian thinking while preaching about the good.

Greene admitted to not being that bothered about the arguments for religion: he simply accepted the truth of the propositions on offer (why those propositions, the Christian ones, and not some other set, such as those belonging to Islam?). Should we admire him for this? I certainly don’t, although Gray seems to think that we should. For me Greene is like the shipowner in W. K. Clifford’s essay “The Ethics of Belief” (Clifford 1999, pp. 70–96). He too couldn’t be bothered to check the facts, and simply accepted that his ship was seaworthy without taking reasonable measures to ensure that it was. The consequences for those on board when the ship sank were immediate and devastating. The consequences of Greene’s epistemic complacency were not as obviously grievous (though how do we count the lives lost to superstition through the ages?), although, as Clifford argues, he is as morally culpable, for “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”.

(It’s interesting that Clifford’s spiritual journey was in the opposite direction to that of Greene. In the introduction (ibid., p. xii), Timothy Madigan writes that, deep in the study of Aquinas, Clifford at first revelled in supporting Catholic doctrines, but the impact of evolutionary theory altered his views. Greene, if he couldn’t be bothered with arguments for God, could hardly be expected to read On the Origin of Species.)

Gray moves on to the “dull debate on atheism”, in which religion is mistakenly reduced to a set of beliefs, or propositions about the world the truth or otherwise of which can be decided by appeal to the evidence. Ignoring his personal judgement on what counts as “dull”, two points can be made.

First, I don’t recognize the debate: the atheists I read all understand perfectly well that religious experience and practice are both important, in addition to belief. For example, the long historical perspective of Lewis-Williams (2010, p. 115) accepts that “science developed in the cocoon of religion” and that humans in a range of cultures were “struggling with a rickety structure of interlocking religious experience, belief and practice”.

Gray must have listened to some very ill-informed atheists if he thinks that we regard science and religion as making equivalent bids to describe the world. He is rather conveniently overlooking the crucial difference between the “two different ways of knowing about the world and life – science and supposedly revealed knowledge”. Even if religion were just a set of beliefs, it would still be fundamentally opposed to the scientific project, which places revealed knowledge in the category of psychological experience. (This is not a dogmatic refusal to “see the light”, of course, since there are plenty of ways in which a rational person might be persuaded that such knowledge was indeed of divine origin.)

Second, on the importance of beliefs within religion, Gray mistakenly generalizes a conclusion when in fact there is a fascinating variation: it may come as a surprise to him that not all religions are the same. Here is Bart Ehrman (2011, pp. 6–7):

Most people today don’t realize that ancient religions were almost never interested in “true beliefs.” Pagan religions—by which I mean the polytheistic religions of the vast majority of people in the ancient world, who were neither Jewish nor Christian—did not have creeds. . . Truth was of interest to philosophers, but not to practitioners of religion. . . Religion was all about the proper practices: sacrifices to the gods, for example, and set prayers. . . .

He contrasts this aspect of pagan religion with the predominant view of many Christians, which is that “if Free-will Baptists are right, Roman Catholics are wrong”, to take two sects at random. Erhman continues:

Christians insisted that it did matter what you believed, that believing the correct things could make you “right” and believing the incorrect things could make you “wrong,” and that if you were wrong, you would be punished eternally in the fires of hell. Christianity, unlike the other religions, was exclusivistic. It insisted that it held the Truth, and that every other religion was in Error. . . . The Christian religion came to be firmly rooted in truth claims, which were eventually embedded in highly ritualized formulations, such as the Nicene Creed. As a result, Christians from the very beginning needed to appeal to authorities for what they believed.

Note the description of the Nicene Creed as a “highly ritualized formulation”: here, belief becomes part of ritual, and cannot be separated in the naive way Gray imagines.

We are only two minutes into a ten-minute broadcast, and Gray has already notched up an impressive list of misrepresentations and misconstruals. He then refers to “the confident assertions of the New Atheists” (a dog whistle phrase no doubt interpreted by some as “the arrogance of the New Atheists”), which is a bit rich, since in any argument it is the religious who rely on unsupported statements of belief (the epistemic dimension of faith): the New Atheists have an annoying habit of actually backing up their claims with reasoned argument and evidence. As for confidence, this comes through beliefs being grounded in fact, rather than being plucked from fantasy. It is also a highly contingent confidence: again, all the New Atheists I have read know that they might be wrong, that they might be proved to be wrong. What is so provoking to the priestly caste and to their strange bedfellows such as Gray is that we are unlikely to be convinced by a couple of verses in a two-thousand-year-old book, or by any amount of ritualistic moaning and eye-rolling.

Two and a half minutes in and Gray aligns himself alongside Wittgenstein (the philosopher’s equivalent to Einstein). He reiterates the view – certainly mistaken with respect to Christianity – that religion is not really about beliefs.

What practitioners believe is secondary, if it matters at all. The idea that religions are essentially creeds, lists of propositions that you have to accept, doesn’t come from religion.

Gray concedes that there are areas of life where “having good reasons for what we believe is very important”, but if rigorous procedures are useful for establishing the facts in laboratories and courts of law and hospitals, and so on, why is that epistemic discipline suddenly dispensable when investigating, for example, the existence and activities of deities? Surely, on such important matters (and don’t the religious love to talk about the “big questions”?), we ought to take more care over establishing the facts of the matter? Indeed, if pressed, a Christian must discriminate between the voice of God heard as supposedly by Abraham and the voice of God as supposedly heard by Peter Sutcliffe, and how is this to be done except by appeal to some standard of reasoning that does not get bogged down in question-begging circles? Of course, as an atheist I don’t believe it can be done, and presumably Gray agrees, so why this limiting of the scope of reason?

Four and a half minutes in and we are told that art and poetry are not about establishing facts. Goodness, I was convinced that Twombly painting I saw last week was an actual representation of Bassano, the village in Teverina! Scientific inquiry “is the best method we have for finding out how the world works”. Goodness, a second true belief emerges from the oracle! As if to make up for this sudden lapse into truth telling, Gray quickly soils the airwaves with a hackneyed claim:

If we know one thing, it’s that we know our current scientific theories will turn out to be riddled with errors.

Error is always a possibility in many areas of science, but this is a crude characterization that ignores the certainty of much of our hard-won knowledge. For example, if we survive for a million years, it is unlikely that the number 92 will ever be discovered to be the wrong number of naturally occurring elements. This is, as Larry might say, pretty, pretty, pretty certain. We are never going to come up with a “better” estimate.

Five and a half minutes in and we are told that religion is a collection of myths or stories that captures something science can’t. Has he ever spoken to a Christian? Did he get the impression that the historical veracity of the gospels was an optional extra? Were heretics burned at the stake because they didn’t like a story?

That Gray is confused by the concept of truth is illustrated by the use of the word in his reference to the “truth of scientific theories”: theories, like arguments, are collections of linked propositions, and in themselves cannot be either true or false. Only propositions can describe facts about the world.

Myths can’t be verified or falsified in the way that theories can be.

Again, this is loose talk. There is a sense in which you can prove a theory right or wrong, but really you are finding weaknesses or strengths in chains of argument. Again, truth is a property that resides in premises and conclusions, not in arguments.

Symptomatic of this muddled thinking is the following vague claim:

I’ve no doubt that some of the ancient myths we inherit from religion are far more truthful than the stories the modern world tells about itself.

An example of one of these “silly modern stories” is that science enables us to live without myths. Well, I try to live myth-free, and there’s nothing silly about that at all. The fact that I try to live without myth doesn’t mean I live without stories. Moreover, I resent the implication that a respect for science and reason necessarily devalues storytelling. Quite the contrary, in fact, since once you ditch worn-out myths you can get on with some real creative business.

Six minutes in:

There’s nothing in science that says the world can be finally understood by the human mind. If Darwin’s theory of evolution is even roughly right, humans aren’t built to understand how the universe works. The human brain evolved under the pressures of the struggle for life.

Again, from someone who has just accused the New Atheists of making “confident assertions”, this takes the biscuit. In summarizing chapter thirteen of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, one of those New Atheists shows why Gray is probably wrong:

When generate-and-test, the basic move in any Darwinian algorithm, moves into the brains of individual organisms, it builds a series of ever more powerful systems, culminating in the deliberate, foresightful generation and testing of hypotheses and theories by human beings. This process creates minds that show no signs of “cognitive closure,” thanks to their capacity to generate and comprehend language.

(Dennett 1995, p. 400)

Gray continues:

Darwin’s theory is unlikely to be the final truth. . . we’ll always be surrounded by the unknowable. . . science has become a vehicle for myths, chief among them the myth of salvation through science. . .

Excuse me? Salvation? Apparently, some of us are deluded into thinking that science may help “humanity march onwards to a better world”. Now, Raymond Tallis may have gone off the rails in large parts of Aping Mankind (2011), but he’s spot on with this remark, aimed at Gray and his ilk:

Contempt for the idea of progress has always been attractive to some because it justifies sparing yourself the effort of trying to leave the world a better place than you found it. (p. 4)

Gray continues:

Evangelical atheists who want to convert the world to unbelief are copying religion at its dogmatic worst. They think human life would be vastly improved if only everyone believed as they do, when a little history shows that trying to get everyone to believe the same thing is a recipe for unending conflict.

Passing over the egregious slur (evangelical, conversion, dogmatic – and the worst of it is to imply that at the heart of every atheist is the void of unbelief), take the example of scientists trying “to get everyone to believe the same thing” when that same thing is atomic theory. Far from “unending conflict” the scientific project brings together people of all nationalities and backgrounds, regardless of class or gender or sexual orientation, in ways unimaginable to any religion, and it generates harmony out of disagreement (as opposed to fatwas and hatred).

What we believe doesn’t in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live.

And doesn’t what we believe influence how we live? The beliefs of religious parents who prefer prayer to proven medical treatment, and whose child has appendicitis, may destroy that child’s life with their false beliefs.

It is not that we atheists want everyone to share the same beliefs. Far more important is that we examine how we arrive at those beliefs, what prejudices and assumptions were present at their formation, what biases were at work, and whether they are backed by reason and evidence or held in conflict with reason and evidence.

Of course it matters how we live. But, strange as it may seem, it is non-believers who take belief more seriously than believers.