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.