British Airways

I have to admit I don't like British Airways. It's largely because they are very bad at handling children. If you want your bambinas looked after you should fly with a Latin airline. British Airways live up to the myth that the British treat their pets better then their children.

Still, I've restrained myself from putting the boot in over the cross-wearing affair because I know how hard big bureaucracies find it to change direction. Just look at the Vatican's glacial crawl towards a sensible view on condoms. However, I am pleased that public pressure has forced British Airways to cave in and rejig their uniform policy. This was inevitable once the row became big enough. Companies do what is demended to of them and once British Airways realised they'd called it wrong, they were bound to change tack. That said, I am looking forward to the howls of outrage from the secular left (the secular right were right behind the Christian campaign).

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Who Refused to Look through Galileo's Telescope?

According to popular legend, when Galileo presented his telescope to senior cardinals/Jesuits/Aristotelian philosophers/the Inquisition (delete as applicable) they refused to even look through it. This tale has become a standard trope for when we want to attack anyone who won't accept 'obvious' evidence. As the last chapter of my book will be on Galileo, I thought I should try to nail down the primary sources for the legend. So I asked the internet's resident Galileo expert, Paul Newall of the Galilean Library to chase them down for me. His reply was extremely interesting.

There are three peices of evidence that have gone into the construction of the legend, as far as we can tell. The first concerns Cesare Cremonini, a good friend of Galileo and a Professor of Aristotelian Philosophy at the University of Padua. Quoted in a letter from a mutual friend to Galileo, Cremonini says of the telescope "I do not wish to approve of claims about which I do not have any knowledge, and about things which I have not seen .. and then to observe through those glasses gives me a headache. Enough! I do not want to hear anything more about this." It's clear that Cremonini did look through the telescope long enough to give himself a headache but could not see what Galileo could. Frankly, it was more than Cremonini's job was worth to endorse Galileo because it would have refuted Aristotle.

The second case is Guilio Libri, Professor of Aristotelian Philosophy at Pisa and no friend of Galileo's. He died very shortly after the telescopic discoveries were made public. Galileo was viciously biting when he heard the news, writing to a friend to ask if Libri, "never having wanted to see [the moons of Jupiter] on Earth, perhaps he'll see them on the way to heaven?" Did Libri refuse to look through the telescope or look and not see the moons (which was not easy at all, especially if you were old and without the keenest of eyesight)?

Finally, the senior Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius said of the moons of Jupiter "One would first have to built a spyglass that creates them and only then would it show them." However, the fault was with the Jesuits' first effort to built a telescope. Once they had built themselves a better one, Clavius confirmed that he could see the moons.

So who refused to look through Galileo's telescope? According to the historical record, no one did for certain. The argument was over what they could see once they once they did look.

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The Devil's Doctor

I have recently read The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic by Philip Ball and thought I should post my thoughts here. I thoroughly enjoyed it but I'm not sure how much popular appeal it has.

Ball is a successful science writer with half a dozen titles to his name. As a converted journalist, he is good at explaining and writing. His skill, like all good science writers, is to make his readers feel more knowledgeable than they actually are. They finish his books with the proud flush of someone who has run an intellectual marathon, but who really did no more than run around the block.

His latest book, The Devil’s Doctor, proved that he could do history as well. I think this is an excellent first attempt – well written, informative, thoughtful and historically aware. It would have been so easy to get wrong. In his television show The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski claims that Paracelsus was an important figure in the rise of science. He wasn’t. He was an inebriated lunatic with a weird philosophy that even his followers couldn’t understand. His alchemical system may have led to one of the great dead ends of science, but in every other way his work was pointless drivel. There’s nothing anachronistic about saying this – it’s what many people thought in the sixteenth century.

Ball is not quite that negative but he knows the idea of Paracelsus as transitional figure between the Middle Ages and Modernity won’t wash. So instead, he simply describes the man and his times in their own terms. This is what a good historian should do. I’ve read a good few scholarly works on sixteenth century esotericism and still learnt something from this enjoyable book. That said, I was vaguely troubled by it and fear that Ball may have made a mistake launching himself as a writer of serious history. The problem is that the book is a scholarly study backed up with lots of documentation and full of long quotations from the primary sources. It should have been published by a university press and packaged as a monograph. For the popular history market, it is simply too hard and assumes too much background knowledge.

Unfortunately, Ball also makes a few slips that mark him out as an amateur. These sorts of mistakes we all make, but we do it in private and have a tutor to correct us. Ball makes his in public. The worst infelicity is his use of other popular history books, including the wildly tendentious and inaccurate William Manchester and Daniel Boorstin, as authorities. Ball needs to develop a historian’s nose for a dodgy source like Manchester or Boorstin as well as check his quotations in the original. This means that he will probably miss out on the academic market as well.

That said, I hope Ball perseveres. His next project sounds extremely interesting and I am concerned that it doesn’t look like being published when originally planned. Let’s hope he sends this one to OUP and they pick up an author who can write scholarly history well. In the meantime, I expect readers of this blog are exactly the sort of intelligent laypeople who would most enjoy The Devil's Doctor.

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Would You Adam and Eve It?!?

"Would you Adam and Eve it!" is supposedly the Cockney rhyming slang for "Would you believe it!" A question I am frequently asked is, do I believe in Adam and Eve? As I've said before I am a Darwinist and supporter of the findings of evolutionary psychology, so some explanation of how this squares with Genesis 2 is probably in order.

I take the view that all of Genesis up until the start of the Abraham story is mythical. I think Abraham was real enough although I accept that with my historian's hat on, there's not a lot we can say about him. But the creation, the flood and the tower of Babel strike me as myths intended to explain certain facts about the world. The story of the Fall is intended to explain a fact too - that we humans are fallen from God's original conception of us. I take sin and indeed, original sin, to be real enough. Evolutionary psychology has shown us that Saint Augustine was right. Our propensity to sin is heritable, unavoidable and human efforts to wipe it out are worse than useless. Sin is 'of the world' or, in other words, natural.

So when did the Fall happen and what caused it? I don't think it happened at any particular moment. As man evolved into the being he is today, his propensity to sin increased. This came about partly through choice (our freedom to choose reinforced in-built prejudices from nature) and partly through interaction with the world (the environment allowed sinfulness to prosper). You can blame evolution if you like, but I think something went wrong with the world to make evolution function the way it does. It was not inevitable but once started was almost impossible to stop.

I'm only speculating of course and trying to make sense of facts as I understand them. However, I do think theology needs to keep a close eye on science and not hold hostages to fortune. Thus, I fear, the Adam and Eve story cannot be literally maintained.

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Richard Carrier on Christianity and Science

Richard Carrier, the resident scholar at Internet Infidels has started his own blog. One of his first posts is an article on Science and Medieval Christianity. Sadly, it isn't very good.

I don't use this blog for lengthy articles and won't launch an in-depth rebuttal to Carrier's thinking here. Instead, I want to point out two egregious historiographical errors that he makes, which must throw the rest of his article into doubt. Both these errors are extremely obvious and I am certainly not the only person to spot them.

Firstly, Carrier seems very confused about ancient science. He consistently uses terms like 'scientist' and 'methodology' in an ancient context without the slightest indication of what these words are supposed to mean. This suggests that he thinks their modern meanings can be applied to the ancient world. Clearly, they cannot. There was no 'scientific method' in classical Greece and no scientists either. There were a good few philosophers but natural philosophy was rarely their primary concern. Physics, even for Aristotle, was only expected to play second fiddle to ethical matters. This was even more true of the Stoics and Epicureans whom Carrier seems to think were prototype scientists. When early Christians attacked the metaphysics and ethical content of these philosophies they showed a much clearer understanding of what they were about than Carrier demonstrates.

Carrier's second error is more subtle because he only makes it selectively. He appreciates that Christianity is not a uniform pattern of belief. What he does not see is that its theology has developed constantly over the last two thousand years. Early Christianity had very little to say about natural philosophy, it is true. The Early Middle Ages in western Europe were a chaotic battle for survival and Christian theology at the time was geared towards aiding that struggle. Late medieval Christian theology was a very different beast and did have a profound effect on the development of science. One of the commentators on Carrier's article, J.D. Walters, has grasped this. So, for all his faults, has Rodney Stark. Thus, while it is wrong to say that Christianity has encouraged science consistently and at all times, it is quite correct to say that the encourage it did provide, both practical and metaphysical, during critical periods was an important element in the rise of modern science.

My friend Joe Hinman has written a useful article on the positive impact of theology on science.

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The Orpheus amulet

I have finally written an article summarising the evidence against the Orpheus amulet of the cover of The Jesus Mysteries. It also includes my case that at least one of the authors knew about this before the book was published, but didn't see fit to mention it.

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Witchcraft prohibition

Exodus 22:18 famously reads, in the King James Version "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." We hear that this passage was a central reason for the witchtrials craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, it is interesting to compare it with the Latin Vulgate which was the one that would have been familiar in the Middle Ages and to Catholics. It reads "Maleficos non patieris vivere." which means, "You will not allow a practioner of harmful magic to live." It is interesting that the Vulgate is narrower than the King James Version in its definition of the prohibited activity.

Could this be part of the reason for the Catholic Church's unwillingness to launch an assault on magic in the Middle Ages? Certainly the Vulgate understands the distinction between good and bad magic and stipulates punishment only for the latter. And how much effect did the King James Version's translation have in English speaking countries. Certainly, it was the one that the burghers of Salem would have had to hand. The Greek Old Testament uses a word that Liddell and Scott define as "a poisoner, sorceror, magician... a general term of reproach." Does anyone know what the Hebrew term used is?

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Religious Darwinism

The consensus of opinion among the latest crop of 'scientific' books about religion (by Dawkins, Dennett and Wolpert. More are in the pipeline) is that religion is a by-product of some useful evolutionary adaptation. Recently, I argued that this seems unlikely. From an evolutionary point of view, our religious behavior is distinctive enough to be selected for and this can only happen if they give us a reproductive advantage. So, do they? Empathically, yes!

It turns out that today, in Europe and America, religion gives its adherents an enormous evolutionary advantage over non-believers. The facts are laid out in this article from Prospect Magazine. It turns out that religious people are 40% more fertile than their non-religious countrymen. Non-believers don't even reproduce enough to maintain their population. In other words, atheism is a recipe for rapid extinction. The article also explained that you don't even have to go to church or be a regular member of a congregation to outbreed non-believers. These so-called "believing but not belonging" folk do not have as many children as the devout, but rather more than out and out non-believers.

It seems to me that non-belief must be the "virus of the mind" postulated by Dawkins, if anything is. Non-believers have to convert believers to keep their numbers up because they don't have enough children themselves. Once converted to non-belief, they die out in a couple of generations unless they happen to turn religious again. The article suggests that some sort of equalibrium will result where religious people have the children and the non-religous convert enough of them to maintain their population. It will be interesting to find out. One thing seems to be certain. The high watermark of secularism in Europe is already past. No wonder the new atheists are in such a panic.

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The Closing of the Western Mind

Charles Freeman and I have had a productive exchange on my review of his book The Closing of the Western Mind which I reviewed here. You can read the full text of our exchange here. I think our replies make clear the nature of our disagreement and also highlight our different approaches to the business of history. Obviously, neither Charles or I are about to retreat from our positions so I expect that this debate will continue to run.

A quick update. In my last post, I mentioned that Terry Eagleton was an atheist. Apparently, this is not the case. Although he is a Marxist, he is also associated with some radical Christian groups. I think he demonstrates that Christianity is broader than Dawkins can possibly conceive. More criticism of Dawkins and Sam Harris from the position of a non-believer (no doubt about this one) can be found here. This article, in Wired Magazine, is well worth reading because it explains why so many secularists are concerned about the polemics of the 'new atheists' and shows how widespread such disquiet is. Thanks to a correspondent for pointing this one out.

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A fine review of Dawkins

I've got to say that while he's selling a good few books, Dawkins isn't making many friends. We saw Andrew Brown's opinion a while back in the Guardian and Prospect. Now Terry Eagleton has shredded the God Delusion in the London Review of Books. My thanks to Elliot of Claw of the Conciliator for pointing this out. The first paragraph is a classic:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they donÂ?t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.

Eagleton is an atheist and a Marxist, but most famous for being one of the primary vents through which literary theory has oozed into the UK. As such, despite being something of a post-modernist historian (a conservative post-modernist who likes to turn its insights on its creators), I find little to agree with in Eagleton's thought. What's remarkable about The God Delusion is that almost everyone, except Dawkins's precise clones, hates the book. I suppose that means that he is critic-proof, but if I was a professor and all my colleagues accused me of writing drivel, I won't be too happy.

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