I was wrong about the new science syllabus

Actually, I’m wrong quite a lot but I’m usually clueless as to what the problem was. In this case, I can see how I went astray.

In October last year, I blogged with some approval on a new science syllabus. It seemed to me that it addressed many of the issues that concern me about how science is viewed by the public. Students would be taught to think about science in a critical way, covering related ethical issues rather than being spoon fed raw facts. Big mistake. I should have known that it was foolishness to agree with Simon Jenkins.

The new syllabus turns out to be rubbish in practice. With history teaching, the problems are the same. Students cannot be expected to think critically about a subject until they have a sufficient grounding in the facts to make sense of them. Otherwise, they are doing nothing more than training to be pub bores. My mistake was to think that what interests me, now, when I have had the privilege to pass through the very finest establishments that English education has to offer, can be applied to students who are still at the start of their journeys. Without a solid grounding in facts, you cannot have a conversation about values.

Academics have long been guilty of getting this wrong. When theory was all the rage, university undergraduates rapidly got the impression that they could put the theoretical cart before the factual horse. Their tutors never realised that when they dissed the greats of English literature as dead white men, their students would actually believe this meant they didn’t have to read them. It may be fair to take a PhD student’s factual knowledge for granted, but you can’t do this with undergraduates, let alone school children.

When my children reach 16, I no longer want them to be able to emphasise with a plantation slave, I want them to know the kings and queens of England in order and the salient facts about each reign. I don’t want them to explain why global warming is a bad thing (if that is still the trendy issue in fifteen years time). I want them to understand the chemical reactions behind the carbon cycle, the periodic table and the properties of most of the common elements. Only then will then be in the position to debate the finer of points of whether we can trust science and who it was who wrote the history.

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The Bible and Historical Writing

In 1099, Jerusalem fell to the First Crusade and the ensuing carnage has never been forgotten. The words of Raymond d'Aguiliers are probably the most famous excerpt from a medieval chronicle:

In the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and
bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place
should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so
long from their blasphemies.

The image of the horses died red with blood sticks in the mind of all who read the passage. It is quoted in every book on the crusades and almost every book on how horrible Christians are. There is a reason, which might not be immediately obvious, why this single anecdote stands as the reference point for the entire massacre. Raymond was making a conscious attempt to tie the fall of Jerusalem in with the apocalyptic prophecies in the Bible. Here is Revelation 6:4 which Raymond clearly has in mind when he describes the blood-drenched horses.

And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that
sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another:
and there was given unto him a great sword.

The question I want to ask is, did the scene described by Raymond actually happen? After all, it is clearly derived from a biblical passage. I ask this, because many scholars and amateurs seem to believe that if an event in the New Testament can be linguistically linked to an event in the Old Testament, then it didn’t happen. Jesus Mythers go further and try to find parallels to everything in the Gospels so that they can declare the whole thing fiction, which is a bit like saying the crusades didn’t happen. They are, after all, wildly implausible ventures.

I would like to make another suggestion. Both the Gospel authors and the crusade chroniclers thought they were writing sacred history. It is natural, therefore, that they were always on the look out for biblical parallels that could hammer the point home. The Bible is a long book and these authors new it very well, so finding these points of reference was not very difficult. I think Raymond did see the blood-drenched horses and it reminded him of the red horse of war from Revelation. Likewise, just because the Gospel writers can link their narrative to the Old Testament is not, in itself, good evidence for ahistoricity.

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Conforming to Stereotypes

A bit too busy for a proper post today. But instead, have a look at the comments below this article in the Guardian's Comment is Free section. Talk about village atheists living down to their reputations. Is atheism cowardly and pretentious? Not necessarily. But posting snide remarks behind a pseudonym certainly is both cowardly and pretentious.

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The Noble Savage

All societies have their myths and one of the most prevalent in the West is the myth of the noble savage. It is as old as Tacitus who praised the free Germans over the civilised but decadent Romans. In the sixteenth century, Frenchman Michael de Montaigne wrote a famous essay favourably comparing New World cannibals to his own countrymen. Today, the myth is as powerful as ever with quaint ideas that Australian aborigines are uniquely attuned to the natural world (ideas that the aborigines, who have good lawyers and want their land back, do much to promote). The pop star Sting gave a huge chunk of virgin rain forest to some Amazonian Indians fondly imagining that they would turn it into some latter-day Eden.

It’s all codswallop, of course, and goes to demonstrate that even the most secular of societies has articles of faith ungrounded in evidence. The aborigines deforested vast amounts of Australia, reducing it to desert, while also wiping out almost all that continent’s large animals. Native Americans did the same thing and, incidentally, very nearly killed off the Buffalo too. As for Sting’s donation, the beneficiaries promptly took up logging and mining on an industrial scale.

Anyone who wants to be disabused of the noble savage myth should read the second chapter of Jared Diamond’s latest opus Collapse. There he recounts how the denizens of Easter Island destroyed every last tree until they could not even built the canoes they needed to escape. Environmental destruction is not a crime unique to Western civilisation. We may be very good at it, but unlike so many people through history, at least we recognise what we are doing.

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Materialism and Immortality

Even though I don’t think you can have a soul without a body, neither do I subscribe to the idea that we are nothing but the material. However, many people do believe this and it is contributed to more than a few crises of faith. So, I want to ask the question, what if we are nothing but meat machines. Does this end any hopes we have of surviving death?

Although nearly all cognitive scientists are materialists, some still hang on to their Christian faith. Nancey Murphy and Malcolm Jeeves are probably the best know Christian experts in this field. However, most people would think that if we are completely material then any chance for personal immortality is gone. In fact, this is not true and ironically, materialism solves many of the metaphysical quandaries about immortality.

Consider two of the most common problems of body/soul dualism. Firstly, it is extremely hard to explain how dementia or Alzheimer's can appear to eat up a person’s personality while believing their soul is still in there somewhere. The soul could be restricted by the brain’s failure, but people who deal with patients with these conditions do not find that this rings true. As one writer said, “I can’t believe the personality can survive death when, so often, if doesn’t even survive that long.”

Secondly, there is the question of where souls come from and how we acquire one. Does God hand out souls at conception or at birth? What about animals? Was there a first human who had a soul but whose parents did not? And would God deign to give a robot or computer a soul if they ever became conscious? Materialist immortality is able to deal with these questions, in my opinion, much more effectively than old fashioned dualism.

Remember, from last week's post, it doesn’t matter which particular atoms our brains are made of as these change the whole time. What counts is the way they combine, move and interact. They form a dynamic system which, by a process no one understands, produces our conscious experience. Thus, there is nothing illogical about the idea that we could be resurrected with new bodies but have the same conscious experience, memories and personality that we had before. Producing an exact replica of ourselves would be impossible in this world (as I said before, you’d need to recreate the entire dynamic system of our brains, not just wire it up and hope for the best). However, it wouldn’t be impossible for an omniscient God.

Christians all imagine that God reads our minds and can hear our thoughts. Thus, he must have a full map of our brains. The only way to access our thoughts would be to watch our synapses firing because that is what our thoughts are. Thus, to be resurrected, you need to be fully known by God. It is easy to imagine that when he gives us our new bodies he can repair any damage to our minds caused by disease, genetic fallibility or even just bad memories. He could rewire our new brains and jog some of the synapses to eliminate the flaws. We would be us but with all that bad stuff, like our genetic predisposition towards sin, excised. The unbearable pain we felt when we lost a loved one would fade, not just because we would be reunited with them, but because the damage to our minds would be undone.

So it seems to me that even if materialists are entirely correct about our minds being nothing but epiphenomena from our brains, God can still keep his promises. And people who have adopted atheism because they think that science has destroyed the soul can return to their faith without compromising their belief in science.

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What is a Cult?

The other day an atheist on the Guardian’s Comment is Free discussion forum defined a cult as a small unpopular religion and a religion as a large popular cult.

There is little doubt that ‘cult’ is a bad word and no one wants to admit to being a member of one. In that way, it is a bit like the word ‘heretic’. You can even decline the entire grammatical form:

I am orthodox
You are unorthodox
She is a heretic
We are a religion
You are a sect
They are a cult

So is it all wholly subjective? I’d like to offer an objective definition of a cult which, I think, captures the essence of what we think cults are.

For me, a religious organisation (broadly conceived) is a cult if they reserve their most important secrets to the initiated. In other words, if their theology is not laid face up on the table, you are dealing with a cult. Christianity, Islam and mainstream Judaism have no secrets. Everything that these religions profess is public knowledge (even if many regular members are ignorant of the details). With Scientology, most people’s archetypal cult, no one gets all the ‘big secrets’ until they have paid big money to move up the hierarchy.

Most cults get bad publicity, but one historical cult has traditionally been given a very easy ride by the media. It is described as tolerant and sometimes, bizarrely, as inclusive. I’m talking, of course, about the ancient Gnostics. They owe their rather cuddly reputation to the wildly misleading bestseller, The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels. In reality, the Gnostics were a cult reserved for men where only initiates were allowed to know the true secrets as revealed by the risen Christ. Nowadays, we can read their confidential documents from the Nag Hammadi Library and they are pretty thin gruel. I expect that the disclosures when you get to the top of the tree in the scientologists are just as disappointing.

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God is not a Scientific Hypothesis

Victor Stenger, well known to connoisseurs of the sharper end of atheism, has a new book out called God: The Failed Hypothesis. No, I’m not going to read it. I have as much desire to read Dawkins’s imitators as I do Dan Brown’s. Besides, even the title shows us that Stenger has made a category mistake.

One of the hallmarks of scientism is the belief that if something isn’t amenable to scientific analysis, it is either meaningless or doesn’t exist. Hence Stenger’s attempts to disprove God by analysing him as a scientific hypothesis. If this argument was valid, you could show that the Mona Lisa doesn’t exist because a woman is nowhere present in the paint molecules laid down by Leonardo. Dawkins, of course, made the same category mistake with his attempt to show that as God is not a material super-being subject to the laws of chance, he almost certainly doesn’t exist.

Now, I hope that no one who reads this blog would accuse me of being anti-science or unwilling to accept scientific discoveries if they are unpalatable. But, I cannot see how, sixty odd years after logical positivism was discredited, intelligent people like Stenger and Dawkins can still be caught in its web. Scientism is so twentieth century.

Thus, Stenger’s book looks like a typical case of choosing the question in order to not get an answer. If it does contain a single original or interesting thought, then please let me know. It would be wonderful to find a new argument after all these years.

However, as glutton for punishment, I will be reading Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell when I get the chance. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea was extremely good and I will defy the poor reviews of his latest book to find out if it contains the same blessed examples of genius and wilful blindness on the same page.

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Reading Dawkins

Michael Krahn, whose blog is well worth a look, is reading The God Delusion. He is writing a series of posts as he works his way through and I found them insightful and interesting. The musically inclined might also want to check out Michael's web site.

We have just bought a house and it is likely to take up quite a bit of time over the next few weeks. However, I will try and maintain the three-times-a-week blog updates, even if some of the posts, like this one, are rather short.

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The Nature of the Soul - What It Isn't

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins quotes a writer who claims that hardly any of the atoms that made up our brains when we were children are still in situ. I can’t track down a source to tell us exactly how quickly all these atoms get replaced, but the idea is highly plausible. The brain is a dynamic chemical system and we also know that when you consume a mildly radioactive substance, scientists can measure how it is spread around the body and slowly disappears again. The upshot of this is that, whatever we are, we are not simply a particular set of atoms. All carbon atoms are identical and it doesn’t matter which ones go into making us.

You might interpret this to mean that if you built an exact copy of yourself, the copy would be conscious and identical to you. Philosophers have been scratching their heads about this for years. Many materialists believe that the copy would be a conscious being in its own right. Christians instinctively shy away from this idea because it throws up the question of whether or not the copy has a soul. Other philosophers suggest that although the copy would act and look like us, it would not actually be conscious. All the lights would be on, but there’d be no one at home. The technical term for one of these unconscious beings is a ‘zombie’. Several sizable woods have been chopped down to provide the paper generated by this debate. More likely, in my opinion, the exact copy of you would be a dead body. Unless you could also get all the atoms in it to move in exactly the same way that they do in you, the result would just be an inert lump. In other words, a corpse.

However, my reading on studies of the brain has led me to draw the conclusion that having a body is essential to having a soul. Without a body, we cannot exist. There is no question that you can detach the soul from the body and expect it to float around like a ghost. The idea that the soul is the ‘real’ person that has temporarily decided to live in a material body comes from Plato. It was part of the package of Greek thinking that the Christian fathers adopted during the first few centuries of our era. The Cathars took body/soul dualism it even further with their doctrines of metempsychosis

You won’t find souls floating around anywhere in the Bible (except perhaps the highly dubious witch of Endor). Indeed, St Paul and the example of Jesus’s resurrection are quite explicit that to be alive, you need a body. Christians believe that we will be resurrected bodily (or they should believe this) and not that we will be disembodied ghosts after death. Plato’s idea made some sort of sense to the Cathars because they believed in re-incarnation. Orthodox Christians reject this and so they have no business imagining that the soul is separable from a body.

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Montaillou

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s classic work of social history, Montaillou, should probably be on every budding historian's reading list. I’ve just finished it and learnt a great deal. Sadly, the English translation is a bit leaden, as is common with academic translations, but it is worth slogging through.

The book is about peasant life in the little Pyrenean village of Montaillou between about 1300 and 1330 as revealed in the Fournier registers. Jacques Fournier was the local bishop and a zealous inquisitor. As Montaillou was a hotbed of heresy, he arrested most of the villagers and exhaustively questioned them. Many were convicted and five of the 114 people interrogated were burnt at the stake. Although they take the form of trial dispositions, historians believe that Fournier’s peasants were largely telling the truth. He didn’t torture them and noted down everything they said whether directly related to heresy or not. The result is a unique glimpse into the lives of illiterate peasants during the Middle Ages. The most revealing thing is that they seem so like us. They work hard but prefer to sit around talking, they have love affairs and gossip about them and they have views on religion from fanatical through to atheist. In some ways, of course, we are very different. Personal hygiene was not a priority (although women deloused each other and their menfolk); violence was normal (if not so common as you might think) and death an everyday occurrence.

The heresy that gripped Montaillou was Catharism. After the Albigensian crusade, the Cathars survived up in the mountains for a few more decades. Their beliefs were a combination of Christianity and Hinduism. The Cathar creation myth told of how the Devil had lured vast numbers of angels out of heaven during the Fall. These angels became trapped in the material world where they were subjected to a cycle of death and rebirth. This metempsychosis meant that you could end up reborn as a rabbit, dog or hopefully a man. Finally, if you died as a believing Cathar your soul could return to heaven. The Cathar priesthood, the parfaits, abstained from meat so as to avoid consuming an animal containing the soul of their late Auntie Mildred. They also said they stayed celibate, although were no more successful at this than Catholic priests. While ordinary Cathars would be sentenced to prison or wearing a yellow cross, a parfait who fell into the inquisitors’ hands would most likely end up tied to the stake. As for Bishop Jacques Fournier, after cleaning the heretics out of the Pyrenees, he got a promotion and eventually became Pope.

Overall, this is a fascinating piece of social history marred only by some turgid prose, for which Le Roy Ladurie can hardly be blamed.

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