I'm Back

It’s been a while. The new job has allowed me little time to write anything here. I’ve been very flattered by a few emails imploring my return (very few in fact, but still nice) and have now hit upon a wheeze to re-activate this blog. A new laptop computer that I can use on the long train journey into work means I can finally find some time to write. I am not sure how well this system will work but I am prepared to give it a go. However much anyone missed my thoughts, I have missed inflicting them on the world far more. Apart from the new job and new child, I have little to report. My PhD is still not granted although the final hurdle is in sight. Nor has God’s Philosophers been published. If you have not had a chance to look over the first chapter and sign my register of people wanting to see it published, then do please spare a moment at the web site here.

Before I got the computer, I read on the train. This has meant a substantial number of books on the ‘to read’ list have been knocked off. They include Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, John Julius Norwich’s A History of Venice, Francis Pryor's Britain in the Middle Ages, business bestseller The World is Flat and Jared Diamond’s Collapse. If anyone is keen on my thoughts about these, let me know. I may eventually get around to writing some brief reviews of them anyway. Of course, ‘to read’ lists never get any shorter. I’ve been adding to mine some big picture economic history – The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes and The Green History of the World by Clive Ponting among them. I’d like to see if the rumoured link between science and prosperity has been noticed by historians of the dismal as well as of natural science.

Lots of things have happened while I’ve been busy. Richard Dawkins has admitted he likes Christmas carols (although who will be left to sing them if he gets his way, I have no idea. For a tradition to survive, it needs to be alive and not just a quaint museum piece, which is how he views the festival of the Nativity). In Rome, Italian communists have kept the Pope from opening a university year by complaining about a remark he made seventeen years ago about an event nearly four centuries before. In 1990, Benedict XVI had said he agreed with the late Paul Feyerabend that the trial of Galileo was “rational and just.” As the final chapter of my book will make clear, this is true in a narrow sense, but it hardly exonerates the Church from the initial mistake of banning heliocentricism. I expect the Pope acknowledged that too, but he is just going to have to get used to be quoted out of context by troublemakers, whether Muslim or atheist.

The neo-atheist storm shows no signs of blowing itself out but neither has the standard of debate improved. I have now had one email from someone for whom Dawkins’ book has been a disturbing experience. I’m not sure if that is a great return from sales approaching a million, but then it is hardly a great book. Christopher Hitchens’ companion screed, God is Not Great was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by none other than Dawkins himself. Needless to say, it was hardly a critical examinations of Hitchins’ arguments. Various other articles have appeared here and there. I’ll note a few of them over the next few posts. Having managed to type this post out, despite the train bouncing around like a revivalist minister, I am confident that there will be some more to come.

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Peter Lipton

Peter Lipton, the head of the History and Philosophy of Science Department at Cambridge, where I am a graduate student, died suddenly at the weekend. He was simply the best lecturer I've ever come across. A few years ago, a course on the logic of induction that he taught was booked into a seminar room because of its specialised nature. But not just his students and those taking the relevant course turned up. I was among those who packed the room to the rafters (and it was not a small room) simply because he was doing the lecturing. Mercifully, next week we were moved into a full scale lecture theatre and everyone could get a seat.

He took religion very seriously and had many interesting things to say about its relationship with science, even if I did not agree with many of them. A debate he took part in at the London School of Economics still sticks in the mind of my wife whom I had dragged along. Reflecting on the same debate, when I had one of my all-too-few chats with him in the department, Professor Lipton delivered an important dictum of his own subject of logical inference: "Just because Peter Atkins thinks a statement is nonsense is no evidence that it is." Although an atheist, Professor Lipton took his family to synagogue on Saturdays and was fully engaged with his religious culture. He represented the honest doubter whom we can all hope has a place in heaven.

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Sue Blackmore Flogging a Dead Horse

Every now and again, you come across an idea that you thought must have died. But lost causes seem to walk the earth in a state of undeath long after they should have been buried at a crossroads with a stake through their hearts. Memes are one such idea. Susan Blackmore is actually still arguing that religion is a bad meme or a mind virus. Honestly, I'm not joking. It's all here. Dawkins's old insult rises again.

No, I'm not going to bother refute this nonsense. But if anyone suggests to you that God is a meme, I suggest you point out to them that we have plenty of evidence that God exists and none for memes at all.

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Interruptions to Service

It has been a while since I last managed to post anything here. I've got a moment now waiting for our week-old baby to wake up and demand a feed. My wife has already departed for bed so I am alone waiting for young sir to call for his cup. I also started a new job last week which means I will have less time going forward as well. I will try to compose something over each weekend and post about this time on Sunday, but cannot promise anything for the moment.

Thank you for everyone who has signed up as interested in God's Philosophers. The list is ticking over nicely at the moment. Also, my PhD has been awarded a pass subject to one of the examiners signing off on some corrections. Not too long now, I hope, before I really am a Dr.

Anyway, thank you for your patience. Do please check back from time to time to see if I've managed to post anything. Or add this blog to your readers. I am still reading and will have thinks to say about books as I finish them.

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Nature and Nurture Reprised

I have taken some flack for allegedly being a genetic determinist. Regular reader Jack Perry has written a post on his blog, Cantanima, about his son. Jack was wondering if, as a parent, he can do anything about the way his eleven-year-old has decided not to believe in God. Was this, he wonders, all determined by genes?

Let me first lay down what the science appears to tell us. Many human traits have a heritability of roughly 50%. This includes personality, religious proclivity and political allegiance. Fifty percent means half – so about half of who you are is genetic. We know this because identical twins have identical genes and we can test them to find out how different they are from each other. We find they share about half their characteristics (actually, it is more complicated than that but works out to about 50% overall). Non-identical twins have about a 25% correlation to each other, as do siblings who are not twins and children to their parents. This is because we take half our genes from each of our parents. If you share half your genes with someone then you will have a quarter of your heritable traits in common with them.

I think most of us can live with our genes having a half share in ourselves. St Augustine identified this long ago and called the propensity we get from our genes to behave other than we would like ‘original sin’. He also realised it was inherited from our parents. Clever guy, St Augustine.

The shocking fact is not that we are half made from our genetic natures. It is rather than we can find no room for nurture. If genes are half the story, we naturally assume that the other half must be our upbringing and environment. The trouble is, we have no evidence for this at all.

Over the years, scientists have conducted loads of twin studies. They take identical twins who have been separated at birth. As adults, these twins have exactly the same amount in common with each other as when both twins have been brought up by their birth parents. In other studies, it has been found that an adopted child has nothing in common with their adopted parents but the usual 25% correlation to their birth parents, even if they have never met them. This seems to mean that parenting does not have an effect on the traits contributed to by our genes. And, if parenting has no effect, it is hard to believe other environmental factors do either. For instance, in Freakonomics we learn about work in the Chicago schools system, where places are allocated at random, shows no correlation between pupils’ performance and the school they go to, once schools reach certain minimum standards.

That leaves the 50% of ourselves, for which our genes do not appear to have responsibility, unexplained. Personally, I am quite pleased that we are left with this gap. If scientists had said we are half determined by our genes and half by our environment then there would be no room left for self determination. I would suggest that the other half is who we want to be. We do have the freedom to decide. As even Richard Dawkins admits on the last page of The Selfish Gene, we can defy our DNA. Jack may not be able to make his son more likely to return to God. Instead, it is the boy himself who will decide where he wants to go and what he wants to believe in. Again, the theologians of old were right and science has just caught up.

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Asking a Favour

I hope regular readers will forgive me for once again asking, please could anyone who follows my writing sign up their email at my book's website where I am trying to gather enough people to interest publishers in my book on medieval science. Registering here creates no obligation on your part. The list will only be used to try to convince publishers that there is a market for my work. You will not be sent any emails apart from one confirming your registration and another when the book is published.

Getting published in non-fiction is almost impossible unless you are already either a journalist, a publisher, a celebrity or a senior academic. The quality of the book has almost nothing to do with it. Almost all popular history is written by journalists and the genre suffers seriously as a result. So, by signing up on my list you will also be helping to strike a blow for history to be written by historians rather than amateurs with the right friends.

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Digging for Manuscripts

There is an interesting article in the Times about the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. Most readers will know that this is a building, first excavated in the eighteenth century, which gave up an entire ancient library of some 3,000 scrolls. Using modern technology, we can read them (they were badly damaged in the eruption of Vesuvius that buried the villa). In general, the contents of the scrolls have been a big disappointment for amateur classicists as they mainly contain deservedly forgotten works of philosophy and poetry. Some good stuff has turned up, but precious little.

I find all this darkly amusing. People imagine the ancient world's literature must have been amazing and the fact we have lost so much a complete tragedy. Well, it is a pity. But the fact is that the stuff that was preserved are, in the main, the best bits. Their survival is precisely because they were valued more highly and more likely to be copied. True, quite a lot of dross survived too. In general, though, the discoveries from papyri have either confirmed what we already know, or shown that we have missed less than we thought. I've blogged previously about Menander and how his rediscovery in the sands of Egypt was a serious let down. We have since learnt to appreciate his shallow little comedies for what they are, rather than what we hoped they would be.

The Times article speculates about what manuscript treasures might still lurk in the villa of papyri. Digging there will shortly resume although there is no guarantee that there is another library to be found. All classicists have a wish list of what texts they'd like to recover. For me it is largely history rather than science or literature. Top of my list, though, would be Luke/Acts. Given the villa was destroyed in 79AD, the discovery of a Gospel would finally put paid to the arguments that these documents are too late to be reliable.

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Professor Watson in Trouble

I have never had much time for James Watson or Francis Crick. They seemed to me to combine overbearing arrogance with over achievement. The treatment of Rosalind Franklin and the way she was airbrushed out of history still causes my hackles to rise, even though the picture has now been largely corrected. Both Watson and Crick were also neo-atheists before the event. Watson is quoted in The God Delusion, IIRC, as finding theists so embarrassing that he has no idea what to say to them.

So the I allowed myself half a smile at how he has come a cropper with some inflammatory remarks about race and IQ. Any one who bases conclusions about general intelligence on the outcome of IQ tests is being extremely foolish. Richard Dawkins himself has been uncharacteristically silent over Watson's defenestration, but his familar Sue Blackmore did try to defend him up to a point.

The most interesting article is in today's Guardian because it sheds some historical light on the whole matter. Johnjoe McFadden looks at the history of the eugenics movement. The supporters of eugenics are a role call of prewar 'freethinkers': George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Marie Stopes and Virgina Woolf. What the article does not tell us is that both Catholic and Protestant Churches fought hard and ultimately successfully for the human rights of the handicapped, disadvantaged and mentally ill. However, the death blow to eugenics was the Nazis actually doing what English progressives only talked about. Only by changing sides have freethinkers been able to get onto the right side of this argument and start to champion universal human rights themselves. Watson, perhaps, never realised that the world has moved on.

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Why do Religious People give more to Charity?

An increasing body of research is showing that, on average, religious people are happier, healthier and more generous, at least in the United States.

This has been a bitter pill for some non-believers to swallow, but before we draw too much from these results, we have to ask a vital question: what is causing what? Readers will recall my praise of Jonathan Haidt’s article on Edge.org which touched on these questions. Aside from Sam Harris’s rant, this drew some more measured criticism. A correspondent pointed out Mark D. Hauser’s response which suggests that religion need not be a cause of the way religious people behave. Granted that religious people give more to charity, as Haidt pointed out, how do we know that religion is the cause of this generosity? Perhaps the sort of people attracted to religion are simply more likely to give to charity any way. Perhaps religious people are happier not because of their beliefs but because they lack the atheist’s clear-eyed pessimism.

Of course, we have been here before. We used to imagine that children grew up like their parents because of the way their parents raised them. Science poured cold water on this idea and has shown than nurture is irrelevant – it’s the parents’ genes that count. We also know that a predisposition towards religious belief or the lack of it is heritable. So, if the genes that give someone proclivity to believe in God also give them a tendency towards looser purse strings, we could not say that religion itself makes people generous. This might sound like a long shot, but we cannot dismiss the possibility without subjecting it to rigorous testing. We need to find out if religious people whose parents were non-believers have pockets as deep as those who were born to religious parents. Likewise, atheists with godly ancestors should be tested against those from a line of sceptics. If religion itself is a cause of generosity, health or happiness, the atheists should score the same, regardless of who their parents were. Likewise, with religious people from different backgrounds. As we already know that upbringing makes no difference to these traits and genes were ruled out by the experiment, we could be confident that religion itself was the deciding factor. In that case, non-believers would have to accept that religion has real benefits.

Of course, none of this has much impact on the question of whether or not a religion is true. Neo-atheists, like the right-wing Thatcherites as they dismantled Britain’s uncompetitive industrial sector, may have to tell themselves, “We may not be very nice, but at least we are right.”

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Pity the Rabbits

I like rabbits. Not as pets, where they are a waste of perfectly good carrots. Instead, I like to see them hopping around misty fields first thing in the morning and making the countryside seem full of life. I am also extremely fond of casseroling them although for eating it is better to search out a French farmed rabbit instead of the English wild ones that the local farmers practically give away.

Late last week, I had to catch a train into London, but the car park at the station was full, as usual. No problem for me as I knew a little country lane where I could leave my car for free. After my business in town, I walked back down the little lane towards my car and saw a rabbit ahead. Strangely, it ignored me. When I got really close, it hopped forlornly around my feet without making any effort to get away. This was clearly a very unhappy bunny.

Next day, the set up was the same and with my car parked in the lane, I was walking back up towards the station. There was my rabbit again, but this time it was a great deal thinner. Standing in the middle of the road had led to its inevitable meeting with a car (mine, for all I know). I've seen plenty of squashed animals but this one was quite disturbing. Its eye, which I hadn't seen from above the night before, was swollen up and completely closed by a pink callous. Death by tyre had been merciful.

It was not until later that I learnt the terrible truth about my rabbit. The excellent Rod Liddle, one of my favourite journalists, had had a similar encounter and he knew what it meant. Myxomatosis is back. It arrived in the 1950s when it wiped out most of the English rabbit population, not to mention many of the animals that feed on rabbits and can't get hold of the French farmed ones. Liddle has set out the horrible details of this disease in his article so I won't repeat them here. The resurgence of myxomatosis is evolution in action. The few rabbits that survived the 1950s outbreak had a high degree of immunity. The virus survived but only gave them a bad dose of flu rather than a lingering death. But the genome of the virus has been clicking away like a rubic cube looking for the combination that will get it past the rabbit's immunity. Rabbits may breed like rabbits, but they have nothing on a virus. It was only a matter of time.

Now, they are dying. My wife has noticed it even if the news media has not. No one knows how bad it will get but it is likely that the misty mornings will be still next summer. And if you see a rabbit transfixed in your headlights, running it over is probably the kindest thing you could do.

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.