Belliefs without evidence

Andrew Brown, in the comments to his article Resurrection shuffles, has said

... the claim for god is that he is not a thing amongst other things, as Santa would be, supposing he existed. In that sense the orthodox Christian belief is that god does not exist; certainly not in the sense that anything else might be said to. So there couldn't be evidence that such a god exists in the way that there could be evidence for or against a martian teapot. There might be reasons for believing/trusting/worshipping etc. But they are not evidence.

That last bit is very curious. Reasons for believing without evidence! When I asked him about it, essentially he told me to piss off. But it still remains a curious thing to say.

Now, maintaining an outwards how of believing something without evidence - yes, we've probably all done that at one time or another, but that isn't actually the same as believing itself.

You can mistakenly believe on the basis of what you think is evidence, but that isn't quite the same thing - you are basing your belief on evidence even though it is of much poorer quality than you are aware of.

What Andrew Brown seems to be claiming is that one can make a conscious decision to believe something, knowing that the belief is unjustified, i.e. lacking in supporting evidence.

Can anybody shed light on this mystery?

The Defeat of Creationism

The argument science has with creationism has been won. All that remains are mopping-up operations to persuade the remaining doubters as to the truth of the matter.

That might seem rather an over-optimistic statement in the light of the current situation, such as the large number of Americans who don’t believe in evolution, or the antics of Harun Yahya in Turkey, and the teaching of creationism in some British schools which have received funding from Sir Peter Vardy. As Adam Rutherford suggests, creationism seems to be on the march.

But consider this. Creationists have invented Intelligent Design, and ID claims to be a scientific theory with respectable evidence backing it. The primary reason for this tactic was to get round the constitutional prohibition in America on the establishment of religion, by passing off a religious idea as a respectable scientific theory so that it could be taught in public schools. That effort failed spectacularly with the Dover Trial at which several prominent ID proponents such as Michael Behe were thoroughly discredited when an attempt by the Dover Area School District to teach ID in public schools was successfully challenged in court.

Nevertheless, by inventing ID and claiming to be scientific, the creationists have committed a far more fundamental error. They have seen how much prestige science has with the public as a source of truth about the way the world works, and they want some of that prestige to rub off on them. It is very interesting to notice that creationists don’t seem to have a problem with most science, they target Darwin’s theory of evolution and that alone.

Darwin has a particular reason for raising their ire. It was Darwin’s theory which undermined the Teleological Argument (also known as the Argument from Design) as a convincing reason to believe in the existence of God. Briefly stated, as it applies to life, the Argument from Design goes as follows.

1. Living things are so wonderfully complex and apparently designed for their environment that they could not have come into existence naturally.
2. Therefore living things are products of intelligent design.
3. Therefore, there is a powerful and vastly intelligent designer who created living things, and we call that designer God.

Darwin demonstrated that the original premise is not true and therefore the line of reasoning which follows from it is worthless, no matter how impeccable the logic involved. He showed that evolution by natural selection is a means by which creatures exhibiting the most amazing appearance of design could come into existence without the need for a designer. Creationists have never forgiven him for it, because although they claim to live by faith, they in fact have rather a high degree of respect for logic and evidence, and they were most put out when their favourite apparently knock-down argument for the existence of God was undermined.

It is that respect for evidence that has led the creationists into their present error. In seeing the prestige of science and wanting to acquire some of it for themselves, they have invented the “theory” of Intelligent Design, and in doing so they have implicitly accepted that science sets the terms of the debate, i.e. that this is not about faith, but rather about evidence.

They are not content to persuade people merely to have faith in the existence of God, they are attempting to prove God’s existence on the strength of their evidence. That evidence, as shown by the Dover trial, is pitifully weak. That is partly because, despite the fact that they are dressing up ID as science, they don’t really understand what science is really about. They are acting as if everybody cherry-picks the best data and hides the rest in order to come to the conclusions they want to reach. That is what the ID proponents do themselves, and they assume everyone else does likewise. It seems that they genuinely haven’t twigged that scientists cope with all the inconvenient data as well, and then come up with theories that can address both the convenient and inconvenient results.

We can’t stop people from believing irrational things - we all do that from time to time. But creationism as a systematic assembly of ideas has sown the seeds of its own destruction by trying to take on science on its own terms. All we need do is ensure that as many people as possible get a sound education in scientific principles, so that they can in due course make an informed decision for themselves as to the merits of evolution and of ID. That is not an entirely trivial task, and it is not made easier if some teachers aren’t able to cope properly with the subject, but at least it is perfectly clear what needs to be done.

Israel and the Golden Rule

The Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is a universal ethic, common to all the major religions of the world. With some differences in formulation, the saying has been ascribed to Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Brihaspati, Confucius, various Greek philosophers including Epicurus, and even (in Leviticus 19:18) to God himself.

In past times, it was widely assumed that some people should not benefit from the equal application of the Golden Rule, in that they did not qualify as human beings. It was argued that some people were primitive, childlike, created to be subservient, and were therefore only fit for manual labour. Within that definition, slavery was thought to be morally acceptable or even righteous, even though in practice the slave trade resulted in the deaths of millions of slaves. However, others challenged that idea, and upheld the equal applicability of the Golden Rule to all humanity. The conflict between these ideas resulted in the American Civil War, costing hundreds of thousands of lives. The task wasn’t finished with the end of that war, and a century later, America had a further conflict (fortunately with far less bloodshed) over whether blacks should enjoy full civil rights. Fifty years on, the victory of the civil rights movement has enabled Barack Obama to become president.

Similarly, there has been conflict in Europe between the idea of the state having the responsibility to assure equal protection under the law to everyone within its borders, and the idea that a self-defining group of people can form themselves into a state and enjoy the resulting benefits to the exclusion of anybody in the vicinity who does not fall within the ruling group’s definition. World War Two became (in part) a conflict between these two ideas. That war ended up costing tens of millions of lives, including those of approximately six million Jews.

The issue remains active and topical to this day. Seth Freedman has described the conflict he sees between the Zionism of the Israeli political class and “traditional Jewish values” (he includes a specific reference to the Golden Rule). The arguments offered by various commentators in favour of Israeli government actions in refusing to countenance Palestinian statehood bear an eerie resemblance to the justifications for slavery in past centuries. And today, Dimi Reider has described Netanyahu's insistance on using the term "Jewish State" at every opportunity.

As Andrew Brown has suggested, this is a conflict, not a problem, and conflicts have outcomes, not solutions. Either everybody is covered by the applicability of the Golden Rule or they are not. There is no middle ground available. If you take the view that the Golden Rule is universally applicable, then there is ultimately no compromise you can reach with those who would limit its applicability to their chosen people. You cannot condone their activities without accepting their principles.

To expect Israel to treat its whole population (and not merely its Jewish population) equally under the law is not to wish harm to a single Israeli or to a single Jew anywhere in the world. If you accept the universal applicability of the Golden Rule as the guiding principle of morality, there is no scope for antisemitism or any other variety of racism. Nor does expecting Israel to abandon its exclusivist principles in any way immunise Arab governments or political movements from criticism. Many Arab governments are unlovely dictatorships which, for all that they may preach equal protection, fall far short of those ideals in practice. Neither Israel’s nor the Arab world’s failures can be used as an excuse for each other.

Experience suggests that these kinds of conflicts can end up costing large numbers of lives, but that this is by no means inevitable. The apartheid government of South Africa was a pariah not so much because its human rights abuses were particularly bad (there were and are worse examples elsewhere), but because it enshrined unequal protection under the law within its constitution, thus putting it in the wrong side with regard to equal application of the Golden Rule. The demise of the apartheid government was achieved without widespread political violence even though violence was loudly suggested by some to be inevitable almost until the moment when the transfer of power took place. This suggests that an arrangement can be offered to those who practice exclusivist philosophies concerning the manner and the rate at which changes are made, in order to find a way of preventing such a large-scale military conflict with its attendant loss of life.

What can Catholics do?

I don’t think any decent person, Catholic or otherwise, can be anything other than sickened at events described in the Ryan Report. I have the greatest of sympathy for those honest Catholics who have discovered what is going on and who, like Madeleine Bunting, are wondering what to do.

Leaving the church may seem a momentous step, and indeed it is, one which many Catholics may baulk at, for it is not their Christian ideals which have been found wanting, but the human institutions in which they have placed their trust.

There is a way of expressing displeasure at the institutions while not abandoning your Christian ideals. I think and hope that it might be highly effective.

Continue to attend Mass, if that is what your conscience requires of you. Continue to take communion. But make it clear that you will give no more money to the church or to any Catholic charity and that you are diverting your charitable giving to secular charities instead.

You can say that this state of affairs will remain in force until you are satisfied that the Church’s institutions have been cleaned up, that all known paedophile or abusive priests have been removed from positions in which they can do any further harm, that all relevant evidence has been passed to the police and that the Church will in future operate a policy of openness and co-operation with the secular authorities regarding breaches in the law by Catholic priests and officials.

Only when you are satisfied that all this has been done will you consider that the Church is a fit steward for your charitable donations and resume your giving to the Church and its associated charities.

It is only by means of contributions from the faithful that this appalling system has been able to continue for so long. I’m sure the great majority of Catholics had no idea what was going on, and so cannot be held collectively responsible for events. But now that you do know what was going on, you have a responsibility to do all in your power to see that it is stopped, that those responsible are brought to justice, and that this can never happen again.

For most individual Catholics, you have just two effective means. One is to withhold your contributions, and the other is to express your concerns. Better still if you do both at once, with an explicit link between them. I hope that as many Catholics as possible worldwide will write to their Archbishop and tell him what they think of the situation and that they are withholding their contributions unless and until it is sorted out to their satisfaction.

You do have the power. Go forth and use it.

The conflict between science and religion

There’s been a lot of public discussion about the conflict between science and religion, whether there is one, and what it consists of. I think it might be worth looking at this in some detail.

First of all, I’d like to describe a bit about science, what it is and how it works. The press tends to report science much as it does politics - looking for disagreements and arguments between authority figures who can be persuaded to say uncomplimentary things about each other, and each of whom will defend their view in order to persuade others. The problem is that science isn’t actually like that.

Scientific theories are descriptions of the way the world works. You start with observations. Let’s take a very simple example. You notice that when you throw a stick up in the air, it falls to the ground again. No matter how many times you throw it up, it always seems to come down again. So you generalise this into a theory.

What goes up, must come down.

Although it is expressed in a very primitive fashion, this is in fact a respectably formed scientific theory. Other people can also throw sticks in the air and see if they come down for them. They can also try with other objects, such as stones. If they all come down, that is said to confirm the theory. If any of them don’t, it disproves it.

Now, suppose on some occasion, you throw a stick up and you don’t see it come down. Must the theory be changed? Not necessarily. There are various possibilities that you have to eliminate first. The most obvious one is that you lost sight of the stick and didn’t see it land. Or perhaps it got stuck up a tree. These sorts of problems are what scientists call measurement error, and it happens frequently, in fact far more often than truly new results that disprove existing theories.

Once you have established that your theory is probably correct by throwing lots of sticks, stones and other objects up in the air and seeing that they do come down, you can try to refine it. For instance, you can ask how fast do things come down? So you vary the experiment, you throw things up with different amounts of force, and measure how high they get and how long it takes for them to return to the ground. After doing this enough times, you are able to work out that the acceleration is constant, and is about 9.8 meters per second squared. In other words, every second, the downward speed of the falling object increases by 9.8 meters per second. This means that for instance if you know the speed with which a cannonball comes out of a cannon, and you know the upward angle at which it is fired, you can predict pretty closely where it will land. That is quite a useful thing to know in battles. And as it happens, Galileo, who famously dropped two different-sized lead weights off the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in order to demonstrate constant acceleration, wrote artillery manuals that would predict the fall of shot in this way.

But very light objects don’t seem to behave the same way. Balloons and feathers fall far more slowly. What of them? The number is no use if you can’t tell what objects it applies to and what objects it doesn’t. And so you have to start taking into account air resistance, and work out how much that affects the figures. And so on.

This is a very simple example, but it describes exactly what science is about. You make observations, and get your theories to fit them. And if you then get observations which aren’t predicted by the theories, once you have eliminated the possibility of measurement error, you have to change the theory.

That is why, whenever an experiment is reported in a reputable peer-reviewed scientific journal, there is a very specific format that has come to be used. First you describe what the experiment was intended to test. Then you describe your methods, how you went about testing it. Then you describe your results, and finally you offer any hypotheses that you think could be generalised from the results.

This separation has a very particular purpose. No scientist expects his word to be taken on its own authority. Scientific papers are written specifically so that others can repeat the experiment and see whether they get the same results. They can also look at the methods and may point out some measurement error that the original scientist didn’t think of. Or somebody might think of an alternative theory that explains why the results are the way they are. The scientist writes everything down that he or she can think of that might mean the experiment is wrong. Scientists are of course human, and don’t always manage to meet this high ideal. But this is what they aim for.

Now where does the conflict with religion come in? First let’s explain what the conflict is not. This is not about hordes of atheist scientists who have discovered evolution as the new religion, appointed Darwin as their prophet, chosen The Origin Of Species as their sacred text, and have declared war on all competing religions. That is the old religious way of thinking, and if you have understood anything at all of what I have written above, you will realise that scientists don’t think that way.

In practice there are two parts to the conflict. First is the business of always starting from observation. If you have no observations, you have nothing to make a theory about. As a result of scientific discovery we have learned that many things previously thought to be the work of God intervening in the world to enforce his sense of morality are in fact the result of natural processes. We have learned that many diseases are caused by germs, and that antibiotics work to cure them irrespective of whether the person being cured is a sinner or righteous. We know the cause of lightning, and that a lightning conductor works just as well on the roof of a brothel as on the spire of a church. These answers seem to conflict with what religion has told us.

The thing is, in all these observations and discoveries, we do seem to be a bit short of actual sightings of God. That means that science can’t really offer any theories about God, because we have no observations on which to base theories. Every time a scientific discovery has been made in an area previously thought to be evidence of God working in the world, it has turned out that the phenomenon can actually be explained by the consistent operation of unchanging natural laws. There hasn't been a single case where the scientists have concluded "Oh, it turns out that this is God working in the world after all".

The other part of the conflict is the question of testing and cross-checking. Scientists are trained not to accept each other’s authority. They want to check the evidence by trying things out for themselves and seeing if they get the same results as each other. This can get very complicated. For instance, human beings are very complex and varied, and don’t always react in the same way to things, and so your results have to take this variability into account if you are testing things like whether particular drugs work to cure a disease. Almost all the complexity of modern experimental science is in trying to get rid of measurement error and cope with this sort of variability, so we can be sure that we really know what we think we know.

Religion works in a somewhat different way. The most important is that you are not supposed to check things, you are supposed to accept them as a matter of faith, and that holding fast to this faith is regarded as a good thing of and for itself. Several passages in the Bible say words to the effect of “Do not put the Lord your God to the test”. This is absolutely the complete opposite of the way scientists think.

Some religious people, seeing that scientists have gained a lot of prestige in terms of having their explanations of the world accepted by the public, have decided that they ought to try offering what they think of as scientific evidence in support of biblical stories. Unfortunately, again they are thinking in the opposite way from the way real scientists think. They start with a Biblical story (e.g. of Noah's Ark) and develop a theory from it (e.g. that there was a worldwide flood). Then they look around for evidence that supports the theory and carefully ignore anything that offers an alternative explanation. So long as they use lots of long sciencey-sounding words and write papers with lots of impressive-looking footnotes, they can fool quite a few non-scientists into thinking that they are doing real science. But it isn’t so. Real scientists start with observations before forming a theory, and if some observations don’t match the theory, they don’t cherry-pick the ones that fit and ignore the rest. As a scientist you have to deal with the inconvenient observations as well as the ones which gave you the result you expected.

The conflict gets at its sharpest when considering what should be included when teaching science to children. Scientists, not unreasonably, want science lessons to be about the finding-out process of real science. Some religious people want the pseudoscience that is designed to support their religion included instead, and for this to be accepted on authority.

The crux of the conflict between science and religion is the conflict between evidence and authority.

Spong - A Place to Begin

Spong starts out by laying out the paradox of his position.

I Am a Christian. … I believe that God is real and that I live deeply and significantly as one related to that divine reality.

I call Jesus my Lord. I believe that he has mediated God in a powerful and unique way to human history and to me.

I believe that my particular life has been dramatically and decisively impacted not only by the life of this Jesus, but also by his death and indeed by the Easter experience that Christians know as the resurrection.

So far, so conventional. But just two paragraphs later, he says:

Yet I do not define God as a supernatural being. I do not believe in a deity who can help a nation win a war, intervene to cure a loved one’s sickness, allow a particular athletic team to defeat its opponent, or affect the weather for anyone’s benefit. I do not think it appropriate for me to pretend that those things are possible when everything I know about the natural order of the world I inhabit proclaims that they are not. (My emphasis)

Over the next three pages, he goes on to summarize the ramifications of that paragraph. In doing so, he dismisses much of Christianity as it is traditionally understood. Jesus as the Incarnate Son of God, miracles such as raising the dead and restoring sight to the blind, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection as a physical event, the Ascension, the Apostolic Succession, Original Sin, scripture as the sole source of ethics, and scripture as revealed truth are all consigned to the dustbin of outdated beliefs which cannot be justified in the face of current knowledge of the world.

The whole of the book is a search to see whether this contradiction can be resolved, whether it is possible to retain the Christian baby while throwing out the theistic bathwater, whether it is possible to speak meaningfully of God while not thinking supernaturally, and if it is possible, how one might go about it.

In essence, this requires that the word "God" be redefined in such a way as to remove the supernatural connotations it currently holds. If you wish to travel any distance with Bishop Spong, this is the first challenge to overcome.

Spong is not looking to convince atheists, and doesn’t expect the secular world to take much notice of what he has to say. Nor does he intend or expect to persuade anybody of a fundamentalist viewpoint, which he characterises as those who believe in scripture as the literal revealed word of God, and who believe in the miraculous Virgin Birth, in substitutionary atonement achieved by the death of Jesus, the physical Resurrection, and the literal Day of Judgment in which we are all assigned everlasting places in Heaven or Hell.

His target audience is narrower.

They are people who are spiritually thirsty but know that they can no longer drink from the wells of the past. … Their doubts and questions mean only that they at last have found a way to put their heads and hearts together. ... They still posess a profound God-consciousness, but that God-consciousness never quite fits the molds that religious institutions say are the only ways that one can think about God.

I'm not part of the audience that he defines, but am more than ready to engage in conversation with them to see what points of agreement can be found.

Blogging Bishop Spong

I’ve decided that I ought to write a blog analysing and exploring A New Christianity for a New World. In a way, I am perhaps an unusual person to do so - I am an atheist, a member of the “Church Alumni Association” which Bishop Spong refers to in the first chapter of his book, and so am not a member of the specific audience whom he was aiming to address.

There have been plenty of discussions between theists and atheists. I have participated in quite a few of them myself and have written several articles published in the Belief section of the Guardian’s Comment Is Free website. But as Spong correctly points out, the debate is mostly pretty sterile. In my view this is largely because the two groups not only think differently but often find it hard to comprehend the extent to which the other side operates according to entirely different principles. It is perhaps worth pointing out some of those differences.

Those who take the side of what they regard as traditional religion, particularly in its modern fundamentalist form, assume that atheists and scientists think as they themselves do. In other words, they think that atheists regard their atheism as a religion just like their own but operating in competition with it, with atheists treating Darwin as their God and The Origin Of Species as their sacred text, and engaging in holy war against all other religions.

However, they notice that science has gained a great deal of prestige among the public, and they also realise that scientists bang on a good deal about evidence. Seeing that the public is impressed by evidence, they go about gathering their own, inventing scientific-sounding theories like “Intelligent Design” and carefully cherry picking and if necessary distorting the available data so that it can be made to appear to support their ideas. I’m sure that in some cases, they genuinely believe that this is what real scientists also do.

Of course, they fail to recognise that scientists go about their business in an almost diametrically opposite way. Scientists actually mean it when they talk about basing their theories on evidence - not merely the convenient bits that behave as expected, but especially the inconvenient and unexpected results. It is through looking as and accepting the inconvenient and unexpected results that science has made its greatest advances.

Unfortunately, those of a scientific persuasion often misjudge the religious almost as comprehensively as they are themselves misjudged by the religious. Once you have been trained in a scientific evidence-based way of thinking, it becomes hard to imagine that people can function effectively while using profoundly unscientific thought-processes. They therefore assume, quite incorrectly, that if the scientific facts are explained using sufficiently short words and simple phrases, that the religious will “get it” eventually. They find it hard to understand that since fundamentalists didn’t get into their position by examining evidence, providing further evidence is not going to get them out of it.

In most cases, the overall result is a dialogue of the deaf, with the religious regarding the non-religious as hostile, and the non-religious concluding that the religious are stupid. I want to get beyond all that. I realise that the religious are not stupid, but are simply thinking in a different way.

I claim to represent nobody but myself. If others decide they agree with me or are persuaded by my views, then that is entirely their business. Like all people, I am wrong sometimes, and fail to recognise that I am wrong until somebody else points out the error of my ways. But I like to be right as much as possible, and I can only learn to be right more often by deliberately seeking out opposing and different views, so that my errors can be shown to me. If by expressing my views I can also help others occasionally to discover their own previously unrealised errors, then so much the better.

I also feel that it is worthwhile opening up a dialogue between the strain of Christianity represented by Bishop Spong and at least some small corner of the secular world. At least it will be a different conversation from those I have experienced when engaging with traditional theists.

I have no authority and claim none. The motto of the Royal Society (Britain’s equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences) is nullius in verba “On the word of no one”. This represents the idea that nobody should be regarded as an authority - what matters is whether what they say can be shown to be true. Darwin is regarded as a great scientist not because people simply decided to accord him that status, it is because he went to the trouble of gathering a very great deal of evidence - 20 years’ worth - and publishing it in order to describe the reasons he advanced his theory of evolution by natural selection. By publishing the evidence along with the theory, he made it possible for others to check his methods and see whether they obtained the same results. He was only recognised as a great scientist once others had done so. What he said what not taken on trust I expect nobody to agree with me simply because of who I am - I’m a nobody who has a bit of a way with words. If you decide to agree with me, do so because the evidence supports what I say, and if you disagree, do so because you have better evidence to hand, and tell me what it is.

I don’t know whether anybody has done anything quite like this with one of Spong’s books before, I’m certainly not aware of any atheist having done so. I’m not in the least bit interested in proving Spong either right or wrong on any subject. Although I started out this post by identifying myself as an atheist, you may understand me better if I describe myself as being more fundamentally a sceptic. I don’t really like to believe anything unless there’s a reasonable degree of evidence for it, and if in the course of writing this blog and reading any comments on it, I find evidence for God that I was previously unaware of, then I’ll quite happily cease to be an atheist. All I want to do is add another perspective to the debate, and hope that in doing so, we can all inch our way a little closer to the truth - wherever it might eventually be shown to reside.