Church Militant

For some reason, a church militant scares people. And so it should; the whole of human history is filled with the militancy of all kinds of human groups and cultures — any militant body is designed as an organisation that wins fights.

But why is a church militant different from a state militant, or a civis militant, or a polis militant? Could it be that people actually think that churches should be peaceful and non-militant? The way doves are supposedly emblems of peace? Even the Buddhists have a history of warfare.

The words of the Church's head are these:

Do not think that I came to bring peace on Earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's enemies will be the members of his household

You can find these words in the tenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. In the equivalent readings in Luke's gospel, he says:

I have come to cast fire upon the Earth; and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is accomplished! Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division...

And so endeth this part of an ancient lesson.

Atheism as a Subset of Religion

Of course, the previous post was also connected to other curious arguments I've been having of late. There are a lot of math and science majors out there with funny ideas.

In one of those arguments, I said that atheism is a subset of religion. A famous atheistic pseudo-argument or joke goes like this: "A monotheist claims that Occam's Razor must reduce the total divinity of a viable religion to one. An atheist merely reduces this number by one."

As an admirer (though not adherent) of Bertrand Russell, I can only say that just as the null set is a subset of all sets, so atheism must be a subset of theism. Since theism is a subset of religion, it follows that atheism must be a subset of religion.

However, many atheists contend that atheism is the logical complement of religion, i.e. not-religion. That's plainly not true — atheism is the '0' to monotheism's '1', you might say, but that doesn't mean 0 and 1 are not both values. Neither belief can be proven uncontroversially to be true, and any 'falsification' argument fails simply because of the fundamental asymmetry between 'yes' and 'no'; 'no' is not 'not-yes'.

So, yes, all these controversies are in the end to be avoided. They waste a lot of effort, as the Good Book says.

Naturalism vs Science

I have recently entered a curious pseudo-argument with some people. The issue has been my contention that science is a subset of religion, to which I got a common reply usually summarised as, "No way!" Well, way.

I would have written this up earlier, except that I was too tired, and fell asleep. Besides, there was the sneaking suspicion that such a simple argument must have been promulgated by some more powerful philosopher than I, and the other sneaking suspicion that I might have read it somewhere else and thus could no longer distinguish between what my formulation was and what someone else's was.

So I did due diligence and came up with a little entry by Plantinga in the online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Link to important section here.

Yep, it's as I remembered. "Naturalism is presumably not a religion. In one very important respect, however, it resembles religion: it can be said to perform the cognitive function of a religion."

Science as a cognitive endeavour claims to seek truth, but Darwin's concern (as expressed by Plantinga) goes this way:

What our minds are for (if anything) is not the production of true beliefs, but the production of adaptive behavior: that our species has survived and evolved at most guarantees that our behavior is adaptive; it does not guarantee or even make it likely that our belief-producing processes are for the most part reliable, or that our beliefs are for the most part true. That is because our behavior could perfectly well be adaptive, but our beliefs false as often as true.

Darwin himself apparently worried about this question: "With me," says Darwin, "the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" (Darwin, 1887)

This is the issue of faith that underpins science as a religion. We have to be somewhat Cartesian, without knowing whether this is reliable; it is reliable only because we think it is — it is our thought that assesses our thought.

Naturalism (whether Dawkinsian or any other kind) thus militates against knowing whether science is truth or not. Eventually, scientism is forced to say things like, "Well, your computer works, so we know science is useful." Well, yes. In other words, the issue of faith is lost in works, just as it often is in religion.

Mysteries

Tonight I was at dinner with many people from 'my' generation. That is to say, people born somewhere (to be generous) from 1960 to 1970 or so.

Eventually, the objective of dinner was fulfilled, business was complete, and we settled down to yarn and tell stories as old people (haha) do. We resurrected many ghosts, even among those not dead: Mannix, Ironside, Hawaii Five-O, Knight Rider, The Wild Wild West, the inimitable Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman (and the forgotten Joanna Kara Cameron in The Secrets of Isis before that), glimpses of Steven Seagal in his prime...

The thing is that we were all acolytes at the dawn of colour television. We had participated in the nightly rituals of tuning the old black-and-white CRT displays, reducing hiss and static rain, twiddling the antenna, and even having our access blocked by the TV cabinet being locked. And now we are old, and that particular altar is no more.

The Bonfire of the Vanities

"Vanity of vanity, all is vanity," saith the Preacher, king in Jerusalem. "Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upwards." And much of this wisdom was the profit of painful years, for the Preacher pondered much, and the words of the wise are as goads.

I long ago figured out why religion is trouble. The stakes are very high. If religion describes reality ontologically, then disciplines like the sciences and mathematics, which limit their outcomes and scope of knowledge by their own rigour, cannot claim a monopoly on truth.

And yet, it is by their obvious stranglehold on description, manipulation, prediction and control of reality that science and mathematics have gained their hard-won prominence and domination over the souls of men. A scientific or mathematical theory, absent a 'falsifying dream' (as Hughes's Hawk Roosting has it), has great powers to describe, explain, or predict. It is on the basis of these powers that we are masters over reality as we know it.

But mastery over reality as we know it is never 100%. As the old school joke goes, "The more we know, the less we know we know." Science and mathematics are the guiding daimonia of technology and engineering, and humans will gladly forsake those daimonia for these material fruits of application.

That is why science as religion and mathematics as technology are uncomfortably true to life. No scientist knows anything except what he knows — this is the curse of the empirical and the rule of epistemology; no mathematician knows anything except by what he believes through the working of his rules — this is the curse of the logical and the rule of rationality.

It is only the religious who believe that not only do they not know, but that they cannot know, and what they cannot know is nevertheless of the greatest significance. And if they are right, the brightness of science and mathematics is like a light without lenses or augmentation; it is like using nothing but the visible spectrum and calling it 'diagnostic radiology'. In fact, it is worse; it is agnostic radiology.

This is why there are more and more people willing to blacken religion with the radiation of reason. It is the only way to preserve the new monopoly — by destroying the old one. But which one sees more? Which one is of greater value to humanity? Both might contend that they are the only truth. But the key question we have to ask is, "Can anything be supernatural and still be true?"

What is a Religion?

When dealing with students from a particular kind of institution, I often find that they have the same woolly or imprecise ideas about religion. For example, if they're from a parochial Christian school, they all think that a discussion of religion begins with their own peculiar subsect(ion) of Christianity.

But religion is easy to define more accurately, by anchoring the definition around four points. This has the virtue of coupling accuracy with precision; we can now say what a religion is, and what exactly makes it so.

A religion requires at least four elements:

1. A belief in the supernatural; that is, things which to some extent cannot be examined using the natural sciences. Whether such things can exist is debateable, but one could place abstracts (such as justice, love or peace) in this category on the basis of empiricism.
2. A belief that the supernatural can somehow interact with the natural, even though the natural cannot interrogate the supernatural.
3. A belief that this supernatural interaction has necessary consequences on human behaviour. This would define elements of human morality.
4. A belief that these moral consequences can be usefully codified as a guideline for human behaviour.

Without any one of these four belief elements, a construct purporting to be a religion cannot be one.

A religion, therefore, is based on a set of practical behaviours and attitudes centred around the detailed working-out of these four beliefs. When such a set is recognisable as such, and can be effectively transmitted as a reasonably similar package from one person to another, a religion has been established.

A religion is therefore the product of a) these four beliefs, b) the details of these beliefs, c) the construction of a behavioural construct demonstrating these beliefs, d) the self-recognised consistency of this construct, and e) the effective propagation of this construct. If one of these fails, the religion becomes defunct.

Now, a word on faith. Faith is belief without a necessary sufficiency of evidence. Since belief in the supernatural is a criterion for a religion, and the supernatural is by definition not admissible as evidence in any arena of discussion based on the natural, all religions are faith-based. What is not so obvious is that many other human knowledge endeavours are faith-based too, but we do not make that as clear as when we are discussing religion.

We also try to reduce the amount of faith required in many of these other areas of human experience, except perhaps in the aesthetic disciplines. Religious morality and behaviour is thus very much close kin to aesthetics. Theology, on the other hand, is the religious equivalent of mathematics. See this post for elaboration.

History of Religion

Today I was watching a young person sidetrack a discussion on religion by pointing out the uses to which it could be put (enthusing an army, controlling the people, directing the social order etc). It was amusing in its own way.

But the main thing about religions is that they are the formal structures set up once the fluid narrative of life has begun to set. Just as young trees develop woody structures and young animals develop hard bones, so too does the protoplasm of human experience develop as attempts at some sort of rigour are made.

For a book to be the word of a god, symbolic representation of words must be invented. Writing and the reading of what is written must be developed. The oral tradition must become ossified, fixed as canon. And so on.

Much of this has nothing to do with the uses to which religion might subsequently be put. In fact, one might argue that you need a long lead time, historically speaking, before any religion can be used on the scale of armies, city-states and social movements.

That's not to say, on the other hand, that such uses never existed. The historical evidence tells us that such use has been plentiful and pervasive.

Religion can be self-policing, but about 80% of it is policed badly and leads to effects other than intended. I estimate this is true because of the amount of time spent in religious texts admonishing the faithful against such practices; obviously, these must have been a problem even then, right at the point of codification!

The problem is that deep probing shows that all human thinking tends to act this way, and even more so if it is democratic or scientific. That's because adherents of such otherwise rational philosophies can hide behind two potent defences: the defence of the majority and the defence of the reasonable.

After all, everyone knows that what the majority agrees to must be good, right? Hoho... modern religiosity.

Responses 008 (2011-2012)

The eighth question in the list is one of those questions which elicit a sort of shrug, that odd gesture which some say is peculiarly Gallic. It requests the candidate to do something unusual: "Analyse the strengths and weaknesses of using faith as a basis for knowledge in religion and in one area of knowledge from the ToK diagram."

To do that, of course, one needs to begin by defining 'faith' and its relationship to 'ways of knowing'. The best way to do this is to point out that faith is conclusive belief without adequate evidence — if there were adequate evidence, that would be reason, not faith.

In other words, faith as a basis for knowledge allows us to decide what knowledge is without having sufficient evidence for definitive proof. This already sounds spurious. But it isn't. In fact, mathematics and theology are very similar disciplines. That's because they both rely on leaps of faith such as a belief in axioms, which by definition are assertions of truth without proof.

This means that a careful inspection of all areas of knowledge shows that there is always a gap at the base. We can reason all we like from basic principles, but basic principles have nothing supporting them except faith, whether this is by nature emotional, empirical, or anything else.

But how then to evaluate 'strengths and weaknesses'? Simply put, a candidate must put forward a variety of arguments such as those which attempt to show how faith is an asset in convincing people of the validity of knowledge in various disciplines. How much has to be taken on faith? Does it make the knowledge more accessible? More reliable? Easier to swallow? And so on.

It may prove, on analysis, that certain strengths are also weaknesses. In religion, faith allows humans to reconcile principles that seem beyond understanding; it bridges logical gaps or gaps in perception, and enables acceptance of things that seem beyond comprehension. This can be seen as a weakness from outside the religious paradigm; a science-based paradigm would scoff at the lack of replicable evidence and so on. But it should also be noted that a science-based paradigm is itself based on faith that the universe has governing principles, and is not just a scattershot series of data points linked by our need to find patterns.

That difference is what gives religion the tendency to seek firm principles and stick to them even in the face of what appears to be contrary evidence. Science, on the other hand, seeks similar firmness of principle but is sceptical enough to change its principles when the evidence seems to show something different.

Which is strength, and which is weakness? That is what you must decide. And of course, you don't have to use the sciences as your choice of area of knowledge. The other choices are literature, language, individuals and societies, mathematics, and aesthetics.

When does Science become a Religion?

Over the years, I've thought quite a bit about the place of science in modern life. I think that science was once what it claimed to be, and now has become both quite a lot more and quite a lot less. Let me explain.

In the 19th century, and for a fair bit of the 20th, it was possible for any reasonably resourceful and intelligent human to get the equipment together for an attempt at empirical verification of any scientific principle, theory or statement. You could make your own telescope. You could build your own car or telephone. I have old children's books in which these projects are found.

I think the point at which it all collapsed was when the idea of atomism and the atom was examined further and the true natures (as far as we know) of the nucleus and electron were revealed. You see, not everyone has access to radioactive material or reliable sources of subatomic particles and the means of manipulating, tracking, and identifying them. Not everyone has an x-ray crystallography set-up or a nuclear magnetic resonance machine at home.

What this means is that a lot of modern science is now taken on faith. In principle, you can still go and see for yourself what seems to be happening. In practice, what you see is a digital readout which tells you what is happening. When an apple falls from a tree, you see it, you can catch it, taste it; the fall of an apple is empirical experience. When a radioisotope decays, you have a theory that is consistent with the facts of indirect detection; if you are lucky (or unlucky), you may have visible photon emission or some compound that will fluoresce when struck with the otherwise unseen emission.

In the old science magazines I read when I was a child, you could make your own batteries, taste the increasing tingle as you stacked the cells, correlate that with the increasing glow of an incandescent bulb. But electromagnetism was already something you had to take somewhat on faith, the invisible fields that prickled your hair and moved iron filings were things with no obvious material correlation. The only thing was that you could replicate the experiment at will, and thus persuade yourself that it was true — it was a bit like being able to read the Bible in a vernacular tongue.

Modern technology, the stuff that drives computers and cars, catalytic convertors and chemiluminescence, is something very distant from that practical level. It is disconnected from its scientific principles as far as human society is concerned. As my father-in-law said the other day, "You cannot fix your own car anymore, you can't even find out what is wrong until they plug it into the computer at the workshop."

Science is indeed becoming a new religion, one in which its acolytes and priests rule over a large laity of supposedly science-literate people and, by fiat, an even larger flock of agnostic semi-believers who have no choice but to go along. It is a lot of 'hand-waving' and quoting from researchers.

These researchers have published their findings and the findings can be replicated given enough time and money; this is why we believe in those findings. But increasingly, it is practically impossible to verify those findings, let alone the interpretations grounded in those findings. It is like having to read through a religious text and its commentaries in order to join in a debate, and the reading period gets longer and longer each day.

Right now, training a cutting-edge organometallic chemist probably takes about as long as it used to — six years after O-levels, for a bright young person. However, that person is basing a lot of practice (or praxis) on the shoulders of giants, so to speak; that person has conducted very few of the classic experiments of the past with the detachment that comes from genuinely not knowing the outcome. In many cases, the cutting-edge researcher is taking the entire argument as it is currently established without question simply because everyone agrees it is so and tells the student that it is beyond reasonable doubt.

Thus, science moves forward, like the reclamation of land from the sea, with layers of sand, stone and concrete covering up the foundations of the past that everyone takes for granted. Here is the first question I learnt from four decades of reading science fiction: "If some terrible disaster destroyed all technologies based on electricity and electronics right now, how long would it take for the human race to recover?"

In the past, this would not have included transport technologies — there was a point when land, sea and air transport used no electrical or electronic technologies. This would not have included food-processing technologies to the extent it does now. It would not have led to near-universal starvation, as it might now.

The second question is like unto it: "Would human progress slow noticeably if we waved a magic wand or alien abduction device or other McGuffin and removed the world's top 1000 scientists?"

The answer is probably, "No." But this would not have been true in any age up to about 1914 or somewhere thereafter. We have had an explosion of priests, so to speak, and there is now a large scientific 'middle class'. However, the gap between artisan and technocrat is huge and getting wider. You could make a crystal radio set at home; try making an MP3 player at home and you will see the futility of closing that gap.

Will the means of production catch up in some future nanotech age? Unlikely, unless we can craft intelligent agents to act for us. It would be too complicated, otherwise, for most humans to understand. We are looking into a future where men would be as gods. But the paradox is that none of our descendant futures seems to have transcended time and come back to visit us. Unless... that is what our gods are all about.

Science vs Religion (Again??)

I think it would be a poor sort of faith that shifted its positions based on new findings of empirical and experimental science. I also think it would be a poor sort of science that established its positions based on 'what ought to be' rather than 'what is'.

The problem in science has always, of course, been to establish 'what is' without allowing undue influence by 'what ought to be', because 'what is' is 'what ought to be'. For many religions, it seems to be the other way around — assertions of 'what is' without allowing undue influence by 'what ought to be', because 'what ought to be' is 'what is'.

The core of science is the idea that what we find consistent is actually related to reality. Absent any glitches, we have to assume the 'reality' model is consistent. If we didn't, things would be unreliable. We therefore have a human stake in believing that science gives reliable answers. This is why we believe in what is valid, what is reliable, and what is useful. This is also why we form theories and hypotheses and test them primarily for consistency.

Religions don't offer such consolation. In any religious system of belief based on a key text or a set of such, the words are treated as absolute, but because they are addressed to humans, the meanings are not. We don't even have the solace of proof, since a complete proof of any statement removes the need for faith and hence the burden of moral responsibility.

To put it another way, if we could derive a logical proof of a God or gods and a 100% certainty of the efficacy or truth of a consistent religious system with an all-or-nothing outcome, we would have no free will unless we were insane — you'd be mad to sacrifice everything to not conform.

Is Christianity Divisive?

Before I give any answer, I shall make a specific point. 'Divisive' means 'having the quality of forcing apart, or of causing separation'. It requires that the target of this quality must already be divisible; i.e. it has discrete elements that maintain their individuality once separated, at least for a time.

Is Christianity divisive? The answer is yes. This opinion is arrived at by consideration of its basic mandates as set forth in the New Testament. Jesus himself says:

Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. (Luke 12:51-53)

The equivalent passage in Matthew's gospel (Matthew 10:34-36) says:

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.

In fact, the word of God is said to be "quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." (Hebrews 4:12)

The point, really, is discernment. Although there is to be unity among believers, each issue can cause division. Sometimes, this is a pointless division; sometimes it is useful. It can be pointed out that without the need for division, the epistles would never have been written; each of them is designed to give advice and argument against or in favour of specific practices and philosophies.

But since the Bible can be treated as a weapon, it must be used appropriately. That requires hermeneutic effectiveness and consistency — people who use the Bible as a tool for dividing X from Y must read it like any other key text: it is indeed possible to use analysis of the text to discard spurious readings, and it is something the conscientious user should do.

Christianity is inherently divisive; it says that some people will belong and some won't, it says that some will be on one side and some on the other, it acts in the capacity of a determining (i.e. a boundary-making, from Latin terminus = 'boundary') agent. It need not be so, but sometimes it needs to be so.

That said, there is another possible point. The act of creating meaning is perhaps itself divisive. To say that something is 'red', for example, is to assert that other things are not. If they were also 'red', 'red' would have no meaning.

Would saying that something is 'divisive' then lack meaning? After all, if all meaning divides, then 'divisive' has no meaning.

I think this argument doesn't work: when we say 'divisive', we mean actively so, dividing with intent or with built-in capacity for causing discord. That sense is attested from the 17th century. In that sense, not all things need to be divisive, although they may serve to divide. In Galatians 3, as well as in Colossians 3, St Paul points out that within Christianity, certain categories — race, social status, gender — cease to be relevant.

Christianity, it seems, may be divisive. But it can also serve to unite.

Cargo Cults

I have been somewhat amused in recent weeks to discover that some of my old material has been recycled with patchy amendments and other stuff tacked on. Appropriate somewhat-related ritual pronouncements are then made and the desired results fervently hoped for. It is all very much like a cargo cult.

As I've mentioned before, the three technical components of my educational delivery are notes, visuals, and activities (lectures, odd games, interactive sessions). In every case, I deliberately make them complementary; that is, the notes go with the visuals but they do not directly echo each other.

An ignorant barbarian who saw my notes and the slides that accompany them (or vice versa) would think the two were not linked. However, they are very much linked — by the living agency of the activity conducted by me. It is the live lecture or interaction that binds the two, and is not replaceable without some thought and foreknowledge of the role that the mediating intelligence must play.

This was why the cargo cults were developed: people using the paradigms of their old faiths and beliefs were trying to gain the fruits of new technology and thinking by constructing models of the more visible aspects, like wooden aircraft and wicker observation towers. A sort of intellectual voodoo, so to speak.

I laugh to myself, and continue teaching. The wealth of a student's development is not in the things — notes, slides, stuff — but in the active interaction with an intelligent facilitator and fellow-traveller.

Transdarwinian

In the last couple of decades, the determinists have hit the wall of reality while the atheists have been pushed to another wall by a tide of relentlessly unmindful religionists. The world is turning like Dorothy's house on a whirlwind simply because some people don't know where to stop.

For a start, I say to Christians (who the bulk of the relentlessly unmindful seem to be), "Have you considered what actually is necessary for salvation? Does it include the ideas that the Bible is a science manual and that Man is unable to write a Bible with errors in it? For if so, none are saved since those two points have been clearly and decisively disproved."

But in the humility of my own mind, knowing that I am all too fallible and human and prone to error of all kinds, I think of what might have been. I look at what the Bible says. And I look at what kinds of expression humans typically use. And I look at what we seem to see of history. And maybe...

Two hundred thousand years ago, God (in whose image man the scientist — as well as man the artist — was made) raised one particular kind of animal upright in the plains of Africa. For thousands of years, this animal had been viable, intelligent, but not going anywhere fast. And that is the message of Genesis 1, for it is clear that when God speaks, He speaks to an entire race of humans, male and female, and then He rests. They filled their African world, a world where no less than a dozen different population clusters of breathtaking genetic diversity could be found. This took 130,000 years.

Seventy thousand years ago, God inspired man. For some reason, the mind of man opened, as did the geography of man, and man exploded from Africa. But it was a slow and odd migration, for crossing the centre of the world (where Africa meets Eurasia) and then filling the rest of it with loose groups of random humans, took 60,000 years. And then man decided to build permanent settlements in Eden, where God had finally placed him — for that is what history tells us.

And somewhere around 6000 BC, where recorded history first begins in written language, the second narrative of Genesis has begun. For there are two creation stories in the first three chapters of that book, and one question has always been, why two? And perhaps the first is the story of Man the organism, while the second is the story of Man the inspired. Where inspiration arises, choice follows, and where choice appears, change will come.

Genesis 4 tells us that Cain, the farmer who founded a city killed his brother Abel the nomadic herder. It might have been literal, but it is certainly historical in vision. For the third son of Adam was Seth, and in his time, men adopted organised religion. There is no way to prove that any of these people existed, but history tells us that the kinds of people they represent did indeed arise in that order.

Who knows the mind of God? We see in part, as if through a glass darkly; we know in part and think in pieces. And we don't have all the pieces, and never will have, till time ends.

There is a strange world out there, with mysteries which we know because of our science and our reasoning will not be solved. The narratives we spin and contest may incite fear and division, or inspire great feats of achievement, or may have no meaning at all. But one thing is for sure — Christians spend too much time contesting the little firefights and not looking at the prize they claim to be aiming for. You don't need to fight science to be holy.

Ulysses and the Scientists

Of all poems, perhaps the one that has spoken most (and most frequently) to me from all the world of secular literature is Tennyson's Ulysses. To me, it is one of the markers of that curious cusp of time around which the worlds of science and mysticism and religion met and churned alight the fires of this present age.

We meet the aging king, Odysseus of ancient fame and wiliness, grandson of crafty Autolycus, musing at his home. He wants something to do before the lights go out across his world.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

For him, the quest has always been about knowledge, not war or fame or fortune, not even progeny or technology, even though he has succeeded at both. It is the quest for the new, for the unthought-of, for the saving of things against the tide of night and silence. He sees the game coming to an end, and he is restless to just let it come to that end without a fight. He sees men as active participants in that game, not just pawns:

Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

He does not dispute the Gods or dispute with them; he just wants to do what he can with his active end of the board. It is what impels his quest for knowledge, the idea that he can save something, do something, contend with God if he has to. The idea is not new: even the Old Testament is full of that. What's interesting is that he acknowledges both Time and Fate, Chronos and Ananke, just as the writer of Ecclesiastes does:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

It is the rash scientist who scorns such things or who tries to say that wonder can stem from science alone; wonder is a child of Time and Fate. It is the impulse that sets the wanderer off on his journey to seek what can be sought.

Glorious

Recently, an Atlantean sect proposed to build a most glorious temple with built-in eateries and other entertainments, for the goodly harvest of about 300 million Atlantean thalers. Not to be outdone was another sect, which purposed in their hearts to set up a project costing about 1,000 million Atlantean thalers in total.

Across the world came a horrendous earthquake. 200,000 people died. The Atlantean priesthood sent 50,000 thalers in aid. Some people protested at what they saw was a petty response.

I didn't think it was petty at all. For decades, the priesthood of Atlantis has said that aid is partly from the people and partly from the priesthood. If the people can afford to spend 1,300,000,000 thalers on temples, they can surely spend a few thalers on the disaster-stricken on the other side of the world.

I did some calculations. Even in rich Atlantis, it costs 20,000 thalers to build a classroom in a school. In an expensive school, it can cost 60,000 thalers — I should know, since my family overpaid for one and were never acknowledged for it. But this madness is even greater, because public housing costs about 2-300,000 thalers if you're looking for a reasonable size.

On the other side of the world, a few thalers will buy medicine, security, survival, life. The priesthood has saved at least a thousand lives, while the faithful have built temples. Glorious temples. Great temples. Money-spinning temples designed to entrap more faithful while creaming off their sinful gold. To build more temples. More glorious temples. Greater temples. (And over the years, many, many temples of all kinds, all over the face of the world.)

Temples that will wink from their golden eyes in their titanium faces, while the poor across the world lie dead in a muddy ditch. And one day, the Judge will walk the hallways of history, and He will see this, and He will strike the temples and their memory from the minds of men as He once promised — "I never knew you," He will say.

And the dead will rise. Glorious.

Violence

Violence is necessary even at the atomic or molecular level. There can be no transactions of energy or matter without enormous violence at the submicroscopic scale. This violence continues all the way up into biology at any scale, and thence to sociology and other more macro-level constructs.

The problem with much of the humanities is that they are elaborate narrative artifices or narrative factories designed to allow us to pretend as well as to mask such pretense or pretensions. The simpler (or earlier) the narratives, the less they mask the violence (see the Grimm brothers' fairy tales, for example; also compare Genesis to the Gospels).

The reason we tend to confuse all narratives with religion is that the whole thing is a seamless body of interwoven narratives. There is no literature or avenue of inquiry in the humanities that isn't religious in its roots.

That puts us in a parlous position when discussing violence. Everything is tainted with it, a fact which is as much acknowledged in the old stories (like Cain and Abel) as in the modern narratives.

The argument, therefore, that religious impulses are a major cause of violence (as people like Sam Harris seem to believe) is impossible to test. It is like saying, "Being human makes you prone to violence." The only way to test that is to remove what makes you human and see if you are still prone to violence; since we don't know what it is that we have to remove, and the causes of violence (in general) are too many and too different, we can't really test this assertion.

Likewise, to test the assertion that religious belief is a major cause of violence requires one to believe in turn that the human tendency to be violent is one level higher than the human tendency to have beliefs that can be considered religious. That has to be wrong; it's easier for humans to apprehend and comprehend violence than religion, and requires the use of less brain. Evolutionary biologists would have to agree — it's easier to observe violence in animals (and figure out why and whence this tendency arises) than to observe religion in animals.

Sam Harris and those of his ilk must be wrong. They have been overwhelmed by their own narrative and rhetoric, and have now turned the universe firmly on its head in order to squat in the ruins of the New Atheism.

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Note: Harris is particularly against Islam in terms of one kind of violence. He seems to say that if an increased tendency to commit acts of terrorism can be linked statistically to being Muslim, then all Muslims should submit to the indignity of their ethnicity being used as a tool for profiling. Actually, the statistics can be shown to be distorted by the unique case of the 9/11 incident, which was indeed carried out by terrorists who were Muslims.

Intermediates and Paradigms

Over the last few months, I've seen debates between various stripes of atheists and various stripes of religionists. Those aren't the only kinds of debates. But it strikes me that real-life debates are a lot more contentious and shifty than the sterile closed debates of the Worlds championships, university competitions, and the like — simply because the limits to argument are fewer and less restrictive.

This doesn't mean the debates are more focussed, or that the quality of debate is better. But it does highlight the point that whereas competitive debate is designed to win by achieving a higher score, real-life debate may have real consequences (for example, whether the US gets proper health care or not) or at least, real but unquantifiable effects (for example, whether some religionist reassesses his faith or not).

Sometimes however, I find myself irked by the fact that historical evidence is taken so lightly by both sides. Christians, in particular, are terrible at accepting the awful parts of Christian history. They aren't much better at using the good parts of their history in defence. In general, Christians (and often their cousins the Muslims) tend to have this illusion that their faith has been unchanged for centuries. They share one trait in common with scientists: what I call psychological archaeology.

By psychological archaeology, I mean that these people are convinced that as they unearth more and more of reality, the underlying structure will be revealed and shorn of all distractions until it is a perfect and untainted revelation. For Christians, the phrase, "we see as through a glass darkly, but then face to face" comes to mind; for scientists, the idea that reduction to ever more basic principles, unto grand unification, is a holy grail.

Both look at the world with this in mind; if you tell a Christian that Christian principles don't apply to all aspects of life — or if you tell a scientist that scientific principles don't — the rejection of your statement would be nearly automatic. Both are reductionist in their philosophy; the former will say that for everything God has a purpose, the latter will say that there is nothing that cannot be explained in principle. It is the common idea that 'in the end' or 'as time goes by', we will see more and more clearly.

What I believe, historically, is that science has never been possible without religion. Their close ideological kinship, in the sense of assuming that explanations for certain phenomena must exist, and that it is possible to think logically about what they might be, is made obvious when the historical record is invoked. Mathematics arises from one aspect of religion — the need to measure the world and its changes, such as seasons, tides, and food production. Technology arises from another aspect of religion — the assumption that the world has been given to us to manipulate, or that the world can indeed be manipulated by superior force.

The modern world, from a non-theistic perspective, tends to think that religion doesn't ask questions, that religion makes no tests or advances no theories about reality. Historically, that's untrue. The Bible, for example, is a most contention-riddled book; its protagonists often engage in debate with their God, apply tests by experimental comparison, and advance theories about why God does this or that. Sometimes, God refutes them; sometimes God answers in the affirmative.

Similarly, the track-record of Islamic science is only exceeded by the track-record of technology from the more Asian side of the Eurasian continent. Until the great disruptions engendered by the eventual Western renaissance, and the unfortunate temporary descent of China into introspective feebleness, religion and the philosophy engendered by it were the main driving force of civilisation.

It is easy to say, as many non-theists do, that barbaric things have been done in the name of religion, or that religion predisposes humans to such things. It is also easy to say, as many religionists do, that barbaric things have been done in the name of science, or that science predisposes humans to such things. Both are right, for a simple reason: both are human constructs based on either an implicit or explicit belief that there really is a fundamental truth, and humans are predisposed to occasional acts of barbarism (since by definition, all barbarians are humans).

But it is better to take the historical approach and dig into the heart of all these practices and how their paradigms can be described. They are remarkably similar. And all of them have intermediate stages. All of them have fundamental tenets which are adapted for new realities, and have these adaptations 'written into' canon or at least footnotes.

Proponents of Islam and Judaism may disagree, because their fundamental tenets (or at least, texts) are closely guarded in the original form (or as close as centuries of human guardianship can make it). But new interpretations for new technologies and new ideas happen all the time. Are painkillers prohibited or proscribed? Is evolutionary psychology evil? Do we have free will even if we seem not to have?

In the secular world, these questions are equivalent to the question of whether the United Nations has been a good thing. The answer, quite obviously is 'yes' with the caveat 'but not yet good enough'. It is the same, on a different timescale, with science. Consider the life of the UN from 24 Oct 1945 till today. Based on 54 years of uneven performance, some of us judge its results and make mocking noises. What then do we do with science, based on (conservatively) 500 years of uneven performance? Or Christianity, with about 2000 years of uneven performance?

The answer has to be a historical one. What was the state of the world when X was started? What is the state of the world now? Is it possible to directly attribute any of the changes to X? What is the evidence? Is it unequivocal? And so on. These questions are difficult to answer, and the answers we get may be equivocal or ambiguous.

But more likely, what you will find is that the historical argument will show that science is an evolutionary offshoot of religion, and that both branches continue to thrive in their own niches. Competition between the two is fierce, and yet in the fertile savannas of the mind, there is likely to be more than enough food and water to sustain them both for a long time more to come.

The Bible — Unique or Synthetic?

Much of the criticism of the Bible as a religious text (that happens to be the basis for the most influential religion in the world) comes from a few interesting arguments:

• It is just another religious book.
• It is mythical and/or legendary in content, at best ahistorical.
• It is inconsistent.
• It is arbitrarily assembled.
• It is a piece of artfully-assembled cold-blooded propaganda.

And so on. Frankly, I find that all of these arguments are somewhat spurious; I also find the claim that the Bible possesses a supernatural aura or built-in divine imprimatur to be spurious too.

Let me explain, from a purely literary point of view.

To deal with claims of being just another religious book, I would like to ask just one question. Do you know any other religious tradition in which the moral exemplars are such bad people? The only good one is Jesus, and he is totally unlike anybody's idea of what he ought to be. These characters possess true-to-life traits, something you can only appreciate by reading literature contemporaneous with the Bible. Such psychological consistency comes only with modern literature, with the first instances found in Shakespeare (compare his contemporaries, such as Marlowe, and you will see it at once).

To the idea of it being mythical, legendary etc, I freely admit that it sure sounds like it in parts. However, I am sure that if there were such things as angels and God and so on, any objective record would sound like it was mythical, legendary etc. As for ahistorical, I think there is far too much history in it for my liking. However, I suspect that part of the history was cobbled together from incomplete records, much as our own histories of the much-more-recent Cold War will never be definitive.

To the charge of inconsistency, I think it is inconsistent in the literary sense, as would be any collection of 66 books written by different authors. It's a bit like opening a Penguin Classics collection and expecting the style and content to be uniform throughout. Is it inconsistent in a moral sense? Actually, I'm not sure that question can be asked and answered so easily. If God says that whatever God does is right, what if he appears to contradict himself? Is he still right? By definition, yes. God tells humans not to bear false witness, but he assents to the enterprise of lying spirits (angels bearing tidings of great, err, incorrectness of fact). He himself doesn't lie, though.

The last two claims contradict each other. My opinion is that the Bible was assembled by clear criteria, and hence was not arbitrarily assembled. At which point, some people would say, "Aha! Humans assembled it, how can it be the work of God?" and I would reply, "Aha! I assembled the bookshelf, how can it be the work of Ikea?" The same people might say, "Aha! Humans assembled it, it must be propaganda, subject to human bias!" and I would reply, "Well, I needed a bookshelf, and Ikea makes good cheap ones. It's better than looking for random driftwood and rocks and building a bookshelf."

These are all just starting thoughts. Or maybe, startling thoughts for some of you. But whatever they are, I am 100% certain that the Bible is not just another religious book. It is a weird book. It is not holy by virtue of itself as a printed text, neither does God craft some runes of power into every printed copy. But it is a life-changer for anyone who can stir themselves to read it. I mean, what 1st-century book would record that the resurrected man ate bread, and then broiled fish? Bread might be symbolic, so is fish, but broiled fish? Quirky!

Western Religion

It has occurred to me, since my father first introduced me to the study of diverse religions at a tender age, that the only western religions that have ever existed were either corruptions of eastern religions or belief systems that did not last very long. About the only idea that came out of the western intellectual tradition and might conceivably be considered a major religion is the idea of explicit atheism that also denies the possibility of the supernatural and insists on logical positivism.

I've referred to this idea before, in this post. But the question still hanging in the air is, "How do you distinguish between East and West?" Or is this merely a political construct based on the phrase 'East of Suez'? Edward Said wrote about this 'orientalism' concept in a strongly negative sense, but looking back on the history of colonialism tends to buttress his stand.

Perhaps what distinguishes East from West is not just geography, but the whole idea of God. If 'the North is full of tangled things, and texts, and aching eyes' (Chesterton) or the 'Idea of South' is one of inversion and oddity, then the East is always about the supernatural—that which can never be known, and the West is about the frontier of imagination—that which may not yet be known but can definitely be known.

I wonder what differences there are between northern religions and southern ones...

Cultural Mandate

I was musing on the term 'Cultural Mandate' recently. Like the phrase 'Cultural Revolution', it has a completely different sense from its normal semantic burden when placed in context. In the context to which I am referring, it is the idea that there is an explicit religious directive or 'permission' to engage the world of secular culture from the viewpoint of a specific religion.

I think that this particular idea is relatively meaningless except when contrasted against another idea. This would be the idea that religion is a private thing to be kept out of the mainstream and out of other people's faces as much as possible.

The point I'd make is that no interpretation of religion should assert a 'Cultural Mandate'. Religion is a social phenomenon, and automatically engages culture. It should automatically engage present-day issues and current affairs. This is not to say that it should have the dominant say, but that it will always have some say. Let me show you why I say this.

(I will use the term 'Church' to represent any organised religion in the following points.) Societies that demand the separation of spiritual and secular tend to fall into four logical areas:

1. You can have the 'Church vs State' model in which you do not let churchmen into the state or statesmen into the church. This makes the country effectively a bipartite state. Historically, this idea could be seen in countries like Andorra, which was ruled by a French duke and a Spanish bishop.
2. You can have the 'Church above State' model in which the churchmen are statesmen but first churchmen (often called a theocracy). In such cases, since the Church makes almost everything its business, the secular state is very small in scope.
3. You can have the 'Church below State' model in which the State has all the powers and the Church is tolerated but is not allowed to express itself in all ways, since some of these ways might be detrimental to public order. This is the case for modern France, for example, which protects religious practice as long as it doesn't interfere with public order.
4. You can have the 'neither Church nor State, or whichever is more advantageous' model in which the State professes to also have an official Church. Historically, England and many other European states were like this; you will still find that the ruler of England has the title Fidei Defensor ('Defender of the Faith').

What I am saying with these four cases is that there is no case in which you can take the Church out of the State completely, and there will always be scope for the religious to place their views on offer in the marketplace of ideas.

But hold on, you say, what about those states which actively suppress religious activity?

Well, that is not the separation of spiritual and secular, but the separation of spiritual from secular, with the intent of abolishing the former entirely. In such states, even secular culture suffers and takes on near-religious mythological significance.

My point is that the only reason one might claim to have a 'Cultural Mandate' is that there is actually some force (possibly even from within, such as religious conservatism) that says that people of a certain religion should not act as cultural agents in the secular world. The acts of such a cultural agent would possibly include singing in a nightclub, posting sensual (but not obscene, speaking with cultural relativity) music videos, writing philosophy textbooks, teaching history, or running a wine shop (or coffee house) without posting the relevant scriptural justifications all over the place.

If these activities are seen as inappropriate for practising religionists, I'd probably add being a lawyer (in some religions, it is said that 'the strength of sin is the law'), being a banker or working in many financial organisations (in some religions, it is a sin to charge usurious rates), or trading in any tainted (by religious definition) goods — such as images, foodstuffs, books, or education (depending on what religion it is, and with specifics different for each).

Does a religionist need a 'Commercial Mandate' too? Apparently, it is not so popular a topic, and in fact I've noticed that movements who make noise about cultural sinfulness tend to be very happy and make big justifications for commercial sinfulness (although the reverse is not normally so true).

Well, these are some of my thoughts. There's no solid, meaty, whack-on-the-head conclusion here, except that I don't think a cultural phenomenon needs a cultural mandate.