Honor your Fuhrer and master

‘The Ten Commandments are a code of living to which there’s no refutation. These precepts correspond to irrefragable needs of the human soul; they’re inspired by the best religious spirit and the churches her support themselves on a solid foundation’

Adolf Hitler – Quoted in Table Talk (24th of October 1941) Von Rintelen in attendance

Having had an unhealthy obsession with the Third Reich for some time I have decided to do a series of posts on Adolf Hitler’s religious views as well as well as a broader discussion of Christianity and Nazi Germany. Whilst trawling through a number of sites in preparation for this, I came across a fascinating article about the discovery of a Nazi bible. The creation of this bizarre work was ordered by Adolf Hitler in order to replace the old and new testaments with something more conducive to Nazi Ideology. Hansjoerg Buss of the Nordelbischen Church Office discovered the book in an archive search. It had evidently been printed in 1941 by a company in Weimar and was shipped out to thousands of churches across Nazi-occupied Europe. For a long time, almost nothing was known about Hitler’s Bible, since believers burnt almost every copy. However, a few copies were discovered in German churches at the end of the 1980s, although their discovery was not widely reported.

Hitler’s plan was to gradually 'Nazify' the church beginning with a theological centre he set up in 1939 called ‘The Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life’. Walter Grundmann was appointed as its academic director and wrote in 1941, ‘The Bible must become Jew-free and the German people must see that the Jews are the mortal enemy who threaten their very existence’. The Institute, financed by a consortium of regional Protestant churches and receiving additional funds from church headquarters in Berlin, claimed to be a “research” organisation, but mainly just produced antisemitic propaganda. Its membership consisted of over 40 university professors, students of theology, bishops, ministers, and religion teachers, and its activities included frequent conferences as well as publications. Their brief was to 'cleanse church texts of all non-Ayran influences'. As the article notes:

‘Hymn books were also trawled and 'Ayranised' with no references to make the party elite balk during the few times they were ever likely to find themselves in a Christian church…At its height, a team of 50 worked on re-writing hymn books and the Bible.’

The bible alterations are interesting. The 10 commandments appear to have been extensively rewritten and two more added for good measure. These 12 commandments were listed as follows:

1. Honor your Fuhrer and master.
2. Keep the blood pure and your honor holy.
3.Honor God and believe in him wholeheartedly.
4. Seek out the peace of God.
5. Avoid all hypocrisy.
6. Holy is your health and life.
7. Holy is your well-being and honor.
8. Holy is your truth and fidelity.
9. Honor your father and mother -- your children are your aid and your example.
10. Maintain and multiply the heritage of your forefathers.
11. Be ready to help and forgive.
12. Joyously serve the people with work and sacrifice

The King James Bible is a little under 800 pages in paperback form. The Nazi 'Bible' was 750 pages, after the references to Jews had been banished and Nazi "improvements" added. In the new edition of the psalms, words of Jewish origin, such as messiah, Jehovah and halleluiah, were altered and the city of Jerusalem was referred to as Eternal City of God. The crucifixion of Jesus was presented as resulting from a battle he fought against the Jews. In the 1940 edition, the following words can be found:

“The Evangelical Jesus can only become the savior of our German people, because it does not incarnate the ideas of Judaism, but fights against them mercilessly’.

Finally, Jesus’ ancestors, according to the Nazis, came from the Caucuses, therefore there was no way that the savior could have been Jewish.

Hitler was well aware of arguments that were central to the Institute: that Jesus was an Aryan, and that Paul, as a Jew, had falsified Jesus’s message, themes he repeatedly mentioned in private conversations, together with rants against Christianity as a Jewish subversion of the Aryan spirit. Referring to the rewritten bible in a memorandum to the institute in Eisenach, he wrote ‘The book will have to serve the fight against the immortal Jewish enemy!".

On the theological level, the Institute achieved remarkable success, winning support for its radical agenda from a host of church officials and theology professors who welcomed the removal of Jewish elements from Christian scripture and liturgy and the redefinition of Christianity as a Germanic, Aryan religion. Members of the Institute worked devotedly to win the fight against the Jews. This took them to greater and greater extremes, abandoning traditional Christian doctrine in exchange for coalitions with neo-pagan leaders, and producing vituperative propaganda on behalf of the Reich’s measures. Their goal was to achieve a kind of second reformation by purification, authenticity, and theological revolution, all in the name of historical-critical methods and commitment to Germanness.

This effort to Nazify the Church appears to have only been a temporary charade. According to Ian Kershaw’s biography, by 1944, urged on by the hotheads in his party, Hitler appears to have resolved to destroy the churches after the war.

There would, he made clear, be no room in this utopia for the Christian Churches. After the trouble of the summer he had to take a line which appeased the party hotheads but also restrained their instincts. For the time being he ordered slow progression in the 'church struggle'. 'But it is clear', noted Goebbels, that after the war it has to find a general solution......there is namely an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic world view'.(Ian Kershaw, 'Hitler : Nemesis' p 449)

His later pronouncements followed the same theme.

It was necessary, commented Hitler, not to react to the seditious activities of the clergy; 'the showdown' would be saved for a 'more advantageous situation after the war' when he would have to come as 'the avenger'.(Ian Kershaw, 'Hitler : Nemesis' p 509)

He was determined, after their insidious behaviour, he said, doubtless playing here on the many compliments fed to him by Goebbels and the other Gauleiter, to destroy the Christian Churches after the war. (Ian Kershaw, 'Hitler : Nemesis' p 516)

Possibly some version of Christianity might have survived had the Nazis won the war and carried out their purge, but as the wartime activities of Grundmann’s institute show, it would have contained none of the most essential orthodox dogmas. What would have remained would have been the vaguest impression, combined with anti-Jewish prejudice and unquestioning worship of the Fuhrer and the Nazi state. In keeping with the Nazi approach to all areas of life in the Third Reich, the religious life of the nation was to be colonised completely by Nazi ideology. Hitler might have approved of the Ten Commandments, but then again he would do, he had them rewritten.

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Multiverse or bust!

Most articles on the Anthropic principle tend to focus on the value of the cosmological constant (or dark energy) which has to be exact to within one part in 10¹²⁰ in order for the universe to conceivably give rise to any life at all, let alone complex carbon based organisms that can examine the stars and marvel at their good fortune. Now dark matter appears to be getting a look in. According to the New Scientist:

The total amount of dark matter - the unseen stuff thought to make up most of the mass of the universe - is five to six times that of normal matter. This difference sounds pretty significant, but it could have been much greater, because the two types of matter probably formed via radically different processes shortly after the big bang. The fact that the ratio is so conducive to a life-bearing universe "looks like a tremendous coincidence", says Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ben Freivogel, also at UCB, wondered if the ratio can be explained using the anthropic principle which, loosely stated, says that the properties of the universe must be suitable for the emergence of life, otherwise we wouldn't be here asking questions about it. …..Freivogel focused on one of the favoured candidate-particles for dark matter, the axion. Axions have the right characteristics to be dark matter, but for one problem: a certain property called its "misalignment angle", which would have affected the amount of dark matter produced in the early universe. If this property is randomly determined, in most cases it would result in a severe overabundance of dark matter, leading to a universe without the large-scale structure of clusters of galaxies. To result in our universe, it has to be just the right value.

You probably know where this is going…

In a multiverse (!?!!?), each universe will have a random value for the axion's misalignment angle, giving some universes the right amount of dark matter needed to give rise to galaxies, stars, planets and life as we know it. Freivogel combined the cosmological models of large-scale structure formation with the physics of axions to predict the most likely value for the ratio of dark matter to normal matter that would allow observers like us to emerge. He assumed that the number of observers in a universe is proportional to the number of galaxies within it.

In Freivogel's model, changing the ratio of matter type impacts the formation of galaxies, and hence observers; for example, too little dark matter would prevent the formation of galaxies and stars. His calculations show that of all the observers that might exist across the many universes, most would live in a universe with the dark matter abundance found in ours. In other words, we would be less likely to be here if our abundance of dark matter were different

Just when I had stopped worrying about the nefarious activities of my multiverse clones, another anthropic coincidence turns up!. I recommend Max Tegmark’s guide for the perplexed, as well as Jim's series for misanthropes (part one and part two). In this piece Amanda Gefter wonders whether there might not be another option:

Physicist John Wheeler once offered a suggestion: maybe we should approach cosmic fine-tuning not as a problem but as a clue. Perhaps it is evidence that we somehow endow the universe with certain features by the mere act of observation... If we in some sense create the universe, it is not surprising that the universe is well suited to us.

This is not entirely implausible. Referring to Genesis I see that:

'In the beginning God decided to create the heavens and the earth
And lo, God decided to hire Consultants for advice on 'change management'
And they did say to God, 'we advise that you outsource the process of creation'
This can be done by subcontracting to quantum observers thus achieving time and energy savings
So God created quantum observers, and the consultants said that it was good
But lo, the observers were incompetent and ended up creating a universe containing haemorrhoids, muzak, traffic wardens and A.C Grayling'

Perhaps global warming is just a quantum projection of our own self loathing. Its an intriguing thought.

EDIT : Other articles on the subject of multiverses have appeared in Discover magazine here and Guardian Comment here.

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The Birth of Human Rights – Part two

"As regards humans, it is shown that from the beginning of their rational nature, they were born free, as in the law Manumissiones of the digest, Title De iustitia et iure (Dig 1.1.4 )..the reason for this according to Thomas (on the sentences, 2.44.1.3) is that a rational nature in itself is not ordered to some other as its end.. For liberty is a right (ius) necessarily instilled in man from the beginning of rational nature and so from natural law (iure) as in Distinctio 1 (of the Decretum) in the chapter Ius naturale at the words, Omnium una libertas (Dist. 1.c.7)...."

Bartholomew de Las Casas

‘For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature’

John Locke

Two great contingencies were to arise after 1300 which were to bring rights language and the philosophy of rights to the fore and to begin building a place for it in Western political theory. The first was a great dispute between Pope John XXII and the Franciscans, an order of friars which was founded in the early 13th century. The early Franciscans shunned worldly goods and chose to live a life of poverty, but with the growth of the order, some of the friars became in favour of moderating the traditional insistence on absolute poverty. In reaction to this, an extreme group of Franciscans known as the ‘spirituals’ refused to compromise, insisting that their lives of absolute poverty were a faithful replication of those of Christ and the Apostles. They maintained that they had achieved the highest and most perfect form of the Christian life, abandoning all property and retaining for themselves only a ‘bare factual use of things’. The Pope decided to condemn this, probably because if this were true then the church, which had always owned property, had never exemplified an evangelical way of life. In 1323 it was declared heretical to maintain that Christ and the apostles had nothing or that they had no rights in the things they actually used. The pope’s argument was that there could be no just use of anything without a right of using it.

The dispute inspired the Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher William of Ockham who joined a dissident group in 1328 and subsequently produced a flood of works attacking the Pope and defending the order’s position. These drew heavily on the established tradition of jurist discourse and contained frequent citations of earlier canonistic texts. Ockham took up the canonist’s argument that there exists a natural right to the necessities of life. The Franciscans had renounced every type of worldly right, to sue in court or to own property, but they still had use of a natural right to use external things which was common to all men and was derived from nature, not from human statute. ‘The friars do have a right’ he argued ‘ namely a natural right’; it was not renounceable because it was necessary to maintain life.

In his later works, William of Ockham was to attack the whole doctrine of papal absolutism, by turning the scriptural idea of Christina freedom into an argument for natural right. Scripture, Ockham said, depicted Christian law as a ‘a law of perfect liberty’, but the Popes absolute power would reduce the people to servitude. Instead the limits of power should be defined. Ockham reminded the Pope that governments existed for the common good, but that there were individual natural rights of subjects, ‘the rights and liberties conferred by God and nature’. Natural Rights were now being used in a new context, to challenge the claims of absolutist government.

By 1500 the natural rights tradition was becoming moribund and with the coming of Machiavelli and the ‘new monarchies’ the concern was with orderly government rather than individual rights. Humanists referred back to the world of Greece and Rome and found arguments for Monarchy, mixed government and republicanism, but none for natural rights. This changed with the European discovery of America and the colonisation of Spanish America. Spanish scholastic theologians began to raise questions about the inhabitants of these lands and considered whether they possessed natural rights that Europeans were bound to respect. Could rights be universal or were some people just natural slaves as Aristotle had taught?.

The most passionate debater was Bartoleme de las Casas, the great defender of the Indians who wrote that ‘all the races of mankind are one’. He argued that Indians possessed human rights, a right to liberty, to own property, to defend themselves and to form governments, claiming that ‘they are our brothers and Christ died for them’. In doing so he appealed to the judicial tradition of the earlier jurists. For example, he used the old maxim that Quod omnes tangit ‘what touches all is to be approved by all’ to prove that Spanish rule in America could only be legitimate if the Indians consented to it. By this he was referring to each individual’s consent, the claim of the majority must not outweigh the rights of minority individuals withholding consent, the minority must prevail. ‘Liberty’ wrote Casas, ‘is a right instilled in man from the beginning’.

In response to this, his adversary Sepulveda referred to Aristotle’s concept of natural slavery and the humanist tradition. Indians, he declared, were barbarians and therefore born to be enslaved. Casas responded by pointing to the cruel and barbaric behaviour of the Spaniards; he then presented an image of wild savage men who lived alone in the mountains like brute animals without any civilised society. Even these men, wrote Casas, the most degraded class of human beings, have rights; specifically a right to brotherly kindness and Christian love. Others such as Francisco de Vitoria used the jurisprudence of the Ius commune and theological doctrine to construct a lucid, clear argument for the natural rights of native Americans. They did possess just dominium, and their lands could not be taken from them without cause.

The writings of the Spanish Neo-Scholastics breathed new life into the tradition and allowed it to flourish in the centuries ahead. The conduit though which the concept of natural rights passed into the modern era was the Dutch Protestant jurist, Hugo Grotius. In his work, De jure belli, Grotius grappled with the meanings of right ("ius") in all of its meanings, attempting to prove that "just wars were fought to defend or assert rights or to punish violations of them". He explored all the meanings of "ius" and defined it as "a moral quality of a person, enabling him to have or to do something justly. Grotius has often been called the "Father of International Law but according to Brian Tierney he might also be called the Modern Father of Natural Rights, for Grotius influenced "all the major rights theorists of the next century, Selden and Hobbes and Locke in England, Pufendorf and Leibniz and Thomasius in Germany, Domat and Pothier in France". With the religious dissent, rebellions and wars that would follow, new situations would arise in which the likes of Locke, Paine and Hobbes would bring natural rights into political discourse. As Tierney concludes in The Idea of Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law:

‘The idea of natural rights grew up- perhaps could only have grown up in the first place –in a religious culture that supplanted rational argumentation about human nature with a faith in which humans were seen as children of a caring God. But the idea was not necessarily dependent on divine revelation, and later it proved capable of surviving into a more secular era’.

More than half a century after the UDHR the status of human rights is again precarious due to objections rising from cultural relativism and historicism. There have also been accusations of 'rights inflation' and a ruining of 'the delicate and hitherto durable equilibrium maintained by the common law'. Samuel Huntington, in his Clash of Civilizations, presents our modern culture of rights as a Western peculiarity with no resonance for the rest of humanity. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has declared that "there are no such rights and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns. Yet as Tierney has argued in a recent essay:

‘A more widespread recognition and effective implementation of human rights in the future is neither inevitable nor impossible.... It is harder to spread ideas and ideals then to export artifacts; but in modern times, even on the level of political thought and practice, the most ancient oriental civilizations have been moulded in part by external influences. China imported Marxism from the West; India and Japan derived their constitutional structures from Britain and America. Moreover, all the great world religions have taught respect for the value and dignity of human life, and this is the only necessary grounding for a doctrine of universal rights.’

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God's Philosophers to be published

I am very pleased to announce that Icon Books have agreed to publish my book God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. Icon are a British publishing house specialising in non-fiction for the more intellectual end of the market. In particular, they have published many excellent books on the history of science by historians like John Henry, Stephen Pumfrey and Patricia Fara. I can also recommend their Introducing… series which is made up of fun illustrated guides to difficult ideas. Finally, anyone who shared my obsession with fantasy and Dungeons and Dragons back in the 1980s will be pleased to find that Icon also own the imprint that publishes Warlock of Firetop Mountain and the other Fighting Fantasy books. I got a shock of nostalgia when I found that they were still available.

God’s Philosophers will be available in hardback next August at all good bookshops in the UK as well as from the usual on-line sources. I think it may also be available in South Africa and Australia. However, as yet, there is no publisher for the US. Hopefully the book will be successful enough in the UK to persuade an American house to come on board. Do please continue to sign up as interested in the book at my website so I can let you know when the book is out and how to get hold of it.



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Nine Million Bicycles

It is said in certain circles that we should endeavour to scientifically examine every facet of our lives, although in practice it is hard to find anyone who actually tries to live up to this principle. You don’t for example, find many people who would use Bayesian probability theory in order to decide whether to go down to the shops to pick up groceries; with the possible exception of some of the inhabitants of the internet infidels discussion board. Back in 2005 the popular science writer Simon Singh, author of 'Big Bang: The Origin Of The Universe', decided that singer-songwriter Katie Melua's work required critical examination and wrote a tongue in cheek article in the Guardian addressing her new hit ‘Nine Million Bicycles in Beijing’. The opening lyrics of this rather soporific ditty are:

There are nine million bicycles in Beijing,
That's a fact,
It's a thing we can't deny,
Like the fact that I will love you till I die.

We are 12 billion light-years from the edge,
That's a guess,
No one can ever say it's true,
But I know that I will always be with you.

Singh wrote:

‘I have found her ballads to be enchanting, but Katie's latest little ditty is deeply annoying, because she demonstrates a deep ignorance of cosmology and no understanding of the scientific method. When Katie sings "We are 12 billion light-years from the edge", she is suggesting that this is the distance to the edge of the observable universe, which in turn implies that the universe is only 12 billion years old. This is incredibly frustrating, because there are thousands of astronomers working day and (of course) night to measure the age of the universe, and the latest observations imply a universe that is almost 14 billion years old, not 12 billion....To say that the age of the universe is "a guess" is an insult to a century of astronomical progress. The age of the universe is not just "a guess", but rather it is a carefully measured number that is now known to a high degree of accuracy.

Unfortunately, Singh's correction is not accurate and demonstrates 'a deep ignorance of cosmology and no understanding of the scientific method'. While the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, the distance to the "edge" of the observable universe is much larger (about 46 billion light years) because of the fast expansion of the universe. The number of bicycles in Beijing in 2002 was slightly larger than depicted in the song at around 10 million, but according to reports the number has dropped dramatically with the availability of cheap cars and an increase in public transport. Beijing is no longer ‘the kingdom of the bicycle’ and is fast becoming a gas guzzling Gehenna.

This kind of pedantry by the scientific establishment has a historical precedent. The inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage once contacted the poet Alfred Tennyson in response to his poem “The Vision of Sin". Babbage wrote:

"In your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads,

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born

.... If this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest [that the next version of your poem should read]:

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment 1 1/16 is born.

Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry."


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Blackburn on Pinker

Looking at Simon Blackburn’s webpage linked to by Humphrey in his post below, I came across this review of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. Regular readers will know that I am a fan of this book and it regularly gets me into trouble. I am pleased to report that Simon Blackburn doesn’t like it at all.

In the review, Blackburn attacks Pinker from several directions. The first is to accuse him of rhetorical trickery. There is no doubt that Pinker’s prose is quite punchy but he also provides plenty of evidence for what he says. The evidence must be the basis of any assault on his ideas. Blackburn also complains that Pinker’s three targets in the book (dualism, the noble savage and the blank slate) are mutually incompatible. This may be true but it is no reason not to attack all three. Besides, holding mutually incompatible ideas in our heads is a typical human trait that Blackburn himself excels at.

But it is with his attacks on behavioural genetics that Blackburn goes well off the rails. He simply doesn’t seem to understand the subject. We get the usual explanation of exactly what heritability means (which you can copy and paste of thousands of internet sites). Yes, having two legs is 100% inherited and 0% heritable, but that is not the traits that we are talking about. Heritability is only meaningful for traits that vary across populations and to point out it is useless in other cases is simply point scoring. If intelligence is 50% heritable (which is almost certainly in the right ballpark), then that means 50% in the variation in intelligence is due to genes. No amount of muddying the waters is going to change this. The bizarre thing is that if Blackburn does not think human intelligence has a sizable heritable portion, then presumably, he also believes that it could not have evolved. If it did not evolve then it must be a miracle, which would make Simon Blackburn a creationist, together with several other stalwarts of the secular left like Johann Hari and David Aaronovitch.

Blackburn then goes on to prove he simply doesn’t understand behavioural genetics at all. In a discussion on the findings by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson that step-fathers are more likely to abuse their partner’s existing offspring than natural fathers are to abuse theirs, he makes a daft comment. Mothers, he says, don’t scowl at their children’s classmates because they are genetic rivals. Well no, because unless the classmates are living with the mother and are someone else’s child, they are not genetic rivals of her own children. And Blackburn makes the wholly irrelevant point that we might also not be so attached to our partner’s existing dogs and sofas. I think he is trying to say that Daly and Wilson’s result might not depend on genes but he provides no evidence for this at all. It’s just an assertion based on intuition which is all the counterarguments to behavioural genetics ever seem to amount to.

Overall, Blackburn’s review, dressed up in his typical too-smug-by-half prose, is a typical example of how wilful misunderstanding of behavioural genetics is an intellectually respectable position. But just because a scientific discovery conflicts with your politics or intuition (or religion for that matter) does not make it false. Blackburn’s distortions of Pinker’s conclusions bear more than a passing similarity to accusations of distortion he migth level at creationists.



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The Anthropic Principle for Misanthropes, part 2

In part 1 I explained what the Anthropic Principle is and gave some examples to illustrate it. Basically, the idea is that certain conditions must be met in order for life to be possible anywhere in the universe at any time in its history. These conditions are so numerous and so unlikely that, when added together, they make it virtually impossible for there to be a planet capable of supporting life -- at least advanced life -- anywhere in the universe if left to chance. Since there is a planet capable of supporting life (Earth in case you were wondering) it suggests that it wasn't left to chance, that someone intended that the universe would be hospitable to life.

However, while the basic facts are not disputed by scientists in the relevant disciplines, the theistic conclusion is a matter of controversy; some scientists accept it, others don't (here's an interesting sample). In this post I'll go over some of the most common objections made against this inference. I'm saving two objections that require lengthier responses for the next post.

1. "We would not be here to observe the universe unless the very unlikely did happen, so of course we're going to notice how the universe 'just happens' to have the necessary conditions for life." This was my first thought when I heard about the Anthropic Principle for the first time. However, it really doesn't hold any water if you think about it for more than a few seconds. The fact that we are here of course proves that the necessary conditions for life's existence have been met, regardless of how unlikely it is; but the question is not whether these conditions have been met but how they've been met. And the fact that they are unlikely to the point of being impossible shows that they were not met by chance.

The common analogy I've seen in the philosophical literature is the firing squad. If a man were sent to be executed by a hundred sharpshooters and he survives the experience, he could draw two conclusions: they all missed by chance, or they intended him to live (by missing on purpose or filling the guns with blanks for instance). But he would not take the fact that he was alive as evidence that it happened by chance. He would not say, "I wouldn't be here to observe the fact that I'm alive unless I survived -- therefore they must have missed accidentally." In fact the more unlikely his "being alive" was, the more rational it would be for him to conclude that someone decided he should live. In the same way the rational conclusion to draw from the incredible degree of fine-tuning we find in the universe is that someone decided we should live.

2. "We don't have enough information to warrant drawing any conclusions, much less theistic ones." There is certainly some truth to this; the Anthropic Principle is a relatively young field of study, and we should bear this in mind. However, it should also be borne in mind that all of the research has consistently pointed in the same direction: that the prerequisites for life's existence are very specific. Perhaps future scientific discoveries will overturn this evidence, but this could be said of virtually any scientific claim (although it's less implausible for younger fields of study than older ones). At any rate, this isn't really an objection to the theistic conclusion, but to the data itself, and virtually all scientists in the relevant disciplines acknowledge the data.

I also have to say I find it interesting that when scientific discoveries can be seen as going against belief in God, this objection is rarely given. It's only when science seems to point to God that people start suggesting that we can't really draw any conclusions.

3. "We don't have any other universes to compare this one with, so we can't say how likely or unlikely it is for these conditions to be what they are." In the first post I stated that there are two levels to the Anthropic Principle: the conditions that have to be met within the universe, and the conditions that have to be met in the universe as a whole. The conditions that fall into the latter category are initial conditions that are simply given in the Big Bang itself. Since they are initial conditions, there are no prior physical conditions that force them to be the way they are, by definition. There are only two possible conclusions from this: first, that these initial conditions could have been different. Or second, that there were non-physical conditions forcing the universe's physical conditions to be what they are. The first leads to the problem the Anthropic Principle poses: that the universe simply shouldn't be able to support life if left to its own resources, and yet it does. The second leads to the conclusion that there is some non-physical reality, external to the universe, that is able to exert some degree of power over the universe. Thus, both of these conclusions have theistic repercussions.

As for the the conditions that have to be met within the universe, some of them are indeed speculative. For example, while we have no reason to think that planets inherently form with exactly the same surface gravity or axial tilt as Earth, we have not discovered enough extra-solar planets to test it directly. However, many of these conditions are not speculative, but are easily calculable. For example, in order for a planet to be able to support life it must be in a certain type of galaxy, in a certain part of the galaxy, orbiting a certain type of star, etc. It is easily observable and demonstrable how common these conditions are.

Moreover, the fact that we have a sample size of one actually supports the theistic conclusion. This will be demonstrated in the response to one of the objections in the next post.

4. "Chance and intent are not the only two explanations possible. There's also natural law. If there's a law which makes the universe and planets capable of supporting life, the odds of there being other possible life-sites in the universe would be very likely." Well, as pointed out above, the conditions necessary for the universe as a whole are initial conditions. As such, there is no preceding natural law forcing them to be they way they are by definition. The necessary conditions within the universe could, theoretically, be shown to be the result of as-yet-undiscovered natural laws. But in the absence of any evidence for such laws, this suggestion is completely ad hoc, since virtually anything could be explained as the result of some natural law we just haven't discovered yet. Besides, this would only push the problem back to the level of the universe as a whole: any law that makes the universe hospitable to life would have to be exactly what it is in order to ensure that the specific properties necessary for the existence of life are met. The universe would still be fine-tuned for the existence of life, and we'd still need an explanation for why this is the case.

5. "If you change one physical constant it may throw everything off-kilter, but then you can change the other physical constants to compensate for it, and bring it back to being a universe hospitable to life." Incredibly enough, scientists already thought of that. The obvious problem is that changing the other constants does not merely compensate for changing the first one; it would also have dramatic effects which would require us to change more constants, which would have their own effects requiring further changes, etc. There are a few cases where you could do this and end up with a life-permitting universe, but they would be extremely rare. It's like taking a medication that has significant side effects. You then have to take other medications to regulate these side effects, but then these medications also have side effects, so you need to take more medications...

Of course, this analogy only goes so far: taking more medications may actually bring some degree of health to the body. With the universe's physical constants, however, it is almost impossible to alter them and still end up with a life-permitting universe.

6. "Someone wins the lottery, and it would be irrational for that person to think that the extreme improbabilities involved in her winning would demonstrate that someone set it up for her to win. Similarly, life is the result of this universe. This doesn't allow us to think it was set up intentionally to be this way." To illustrate this objection, say you had, for some ungodly reason, billions of ping pong balls and inscribed each one with someone's name until you had one for every person in the world. Also say you had a big enough basket to hold all of them. You then mix them all up and pull one out while blindfolded. Obviously someone's name will be drawn, even though the odds were one in several billion that you would select that particular ball. Similarly, the fact that we have a universe with the specific properties it has may have been improbable, but that does not allow us to draw any conclusions about whether it was "arranged."

But this is a bad analogy. A better one would be if, every time you tweak the universe's properties, you paint a ping pong ball black if it permits the existence of life, and just leave it white if it does not. What you would end up with is an ocean of white ping pong balls with only a handful of black ones scattered throughout. Now of course the odds that you would pull any particular ping pong ball out is equally improbable; but the odds that you would pull out a white ping pong ball is enormously more probable than the odds that you would pull out a black one. Similarly, the odds that the universe would be life-prohibiting is vastly more probable than for it to be life-permitting -- unless someone decided to make it hospitable to life.

This objection seems to be suggesting that life -- the result of this universe -- is arbitrary. Any other universe would have had results too. The problem with this is that all the other possible universes would have had essentially the same result: just matter and energy in motion, and often not even the motion. Ours has something on a whole different level, and the universe must be balanced on a razor's edge in order for it to be that way.

Update (13 Feb): See also part 1, part 3, and part 4.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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How Soon is Now?

I have recently finished Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos. Greene is one of the leading cheerleaders for string theory and much of the second half of this book is made up of an explanation of how it works. I’ll leave off commenting on this aspect of the book until I’ve read Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics which criticises string theory and complains it gets way too much attention. Smolin himself is a supporter of another and equally unproven theory called quantum gravity.

For the record, I thought The Fabric of the Cosmos was quite good although I couldn’t get as carried away as some of the reviewers quoted on the cover. In particular, I found the frequent references to characters from the Simpsons to be rather grating. (This finally persuaded me that I would have to take the passage about Wile E. Coyote out of my discussion of Aristotelian dynamics in God’s Philosophers.)

In this post, I wanted to share with you one idea of Greene’s that derives from good old relativity theory. An old philosophical saw is the question “Does the past (or the future) exist?” Greene says yes, definitely, and relativity proves it. The argument goes like this:

If two people are standing still relative to one another then they both occupy the same time. For both of them, ‘now’ is at the same instant. But suppose that one of them, who we’ll call Albert, starts to walk away from the other, who we’ll call Bertie. Relativity tells us that Albert’s personal clock no longer runs in synchrony with Bertie’s. In fact, Albert’s clock gets slightly ahead of Bertie’s so that, in effect, Albert has travelled back in time relative to Bertie by a tiny amount.

However, if Albert and Bertie are now on opposite sides of the universe from each other, 10 billion light years apart, the divergence of their personal clocks becomes quite marked. Albert moving away from Bertie at a walking pace means that his personal ‘now’ becomes the same moment as a hundred and fifty years before Bertie’s. This doesn’t cause a problem because there is no way that Albert could get to Bertie’s area of space before Bertie’s now had had a chance to catch up with Albert’s. Because nothing can exceed the speed of light, travel back in time in a particular place is not possible.

But that does not alter the fact that we each carry a personal clock and its relationship with the rest of space-time can alter both backwards and forwards. Since we cannot claim that any clock is privileged, the future and past must exist because we can become contemporaneous with them simply by going for a walk. I’m open to thoughts about what this means for creation, divine intervention and freewill. I’ll be posting my own thinking soon.



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The birth of human rights – part one

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’

The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies - In Congress, July 4, 1776

‘the very principle of inalienable human rights, conferred on many by the Creator, grew out of the typically modern notion that man, as a being capable of knowing nature and the world, was the pinnacle of creation and lord of the world. This modern anthropocentricism inevitably meant that He who allegedly endowed man with his inalienable rights began to disappear from the world....The existence of a higher authority than man himself simply began to get in the way of human aspirations.’

Vaclav Havel – The search for Universal Laws

The idea of human rights is one which many in the West feel should have universal significance for all peoples; and yet throughout its history, the concept has been precarious and its future far from secure. Despite attempts by some scholars to retrospectively universalise human rights - two examples being the depiction of Genghis Khan, and various Chinese emperors by Nikolas Gvosdev as ‘early champions of human rights’, and the dubious baptism of the Cyrus cylinder by the Shah of Iran as the ‘the first human rights charter in history’ – most historians recognise that the story of human rights is the history of a western construct. All civilized societies have cherished ideals of justice and right order, but they have not normally expressed those ideals in terms of individual rights. It would be hard to imagine a Hobbes or Locke emerging in a Confucian culture where the individual is one who is born into relational obligations and responsibilities; and the societal emphasis is on the readier suppression of individual differences and aspirations. Yet the emergence of natural rights in the west was certainly not inevitable. Plato’s ideal society contained no reference to such an idea. Despite the moral high point of Seneca’s stoic philosophy, Roman society remained a military despotism with scant regard for universal human dignity. Thomas Aquinus seems to have been more concerned with the duties of rulers. Instead, as Brian Tierney has documented in ‘The Idea of Natural Rights’ the concept found its unlikely birth from the development of Church canon law from ancient jurisprudence.

By the 12th century, Medieval Europe was experiencing a new vitality. Great networks of commerce were forged, Universities and great Gothic cathedrals were being erected and the towns and cities enjoyed a fresh and vigorous life. This period ushered in a social, political and economic transformation, and an intellectual revitalization of Europe with strong philosophical and scientific roots. In religious life there was a new emphasis on the individual person, upon such matters as individual intention in assessing guilt, individual consent in marriage and individual scrutiny in conscience. Accompanying this was a preoccupation with rights. Monarchs began to assert their rights against the papacy. Other figures such as Thomas a Becket defended the rights of the church against the monarchs. Within the interlocking rights of feudal society the communes and guilds emerged which began to claim specific rights and freedoms for their members. This was to culminate in the 1215 Magna Carta which forced King John to recognise the rights of Lords, Vassals, Merchants, all free Englishmen and the church which was to be ‘free, and shall have all its rights entire’ . These rights mentioned in these examples were those of particular persons and classes. Natural rights themselves would emerge from an unlikely source, the canon law of the medieval church.

The evolution of rights in European thought began with the "Renaissance of Law" in the late-eleventh and early twelfth century. During the 12th century there was a great revival of legal studies, centred around the city of Bologna in Italy. Europe was emerging from centuries of near anarchy and there was a perceived need for more adequate systems of law. In 1100AD the whole corpus of Roman Law was recovered and in 1140 Gratian’s Decretum was produced. This was an immensely influential codification of church law, an attempt to create a new structure of universal jurisprudence for the Christian church. The work included rules and regulations but also documented the judicial life of the church over the previous 1,000 years. Gratian's sources were Roman law, the Bible, the writings of (or attributed to) the Church Fathers, papal bulls, the acts of church councils and synods. These two branches of law, Roman and canon, quickly merged into a curriculum in which students studied both and received the degree of "Doctor utriusque iuris," Doctor of both laws.

The Decretum proved to be highly influential and many different commentaries were written on the work; these are known as ‘glosses’. The first chapters of the Decretum contained several different and inconsistent uses of the term ius naturale, ‘the law common to all beings’. Gratian wrote for example that by natural law, all property was common. But he subsequently wrote that human law contrary to natural law was vain and void; so how could the existence of property held under human law be justified?. It was clear the term natural law was being used in different contexts with different meanings, so commentators began to explain the differences. Hugaccio, for instance, wrote that

"Not all the examples of ius naturale given below refer to the same meaning of ius naturale . . . But, lest the mind of some idiot be confused, I will diligently explain them all."

In developing a number of senses of natural law, the jurists were creating a meaning which was not apparent in the ancient text. Their society was a more personalist, rights base culture and consequently they added some radical definitions. The language of the 12th century canonists is in some ways reminiscent of the Stoic doctrine of a natural law in man, but a decisive shift had occurred. For some of the Stoics and Cicero there was a force in man that allowed him to discern the objective natural law which pervaded the universe, a sort of cosmic determinism. The canonists reformulated this objective natural law as as a power, force or faculty somehow inherent in human beings, an ability rooted in human reason and free will to discern what was right and to act rightly. The canonists succeeded in formulating a foundation for the doctrine of natural rights where Stoic reflection had failed.

Natural right was defined for example, when the canonist Rufinus commented on Gratian's "ius naturale," he made the observation that "Natural 'ius' is a certain force instilled in every human creature by nature to do good and avoid the opposite. This Christianized definition of "ius naturale" became commonplace. The greatest canonist of the century, Huguccio, clearly perceived the idea of "natural right" in Gratian's texts. As Tierney explains:

In his more lenient moods, Huguccio did acknowledge that ius naturale could mean a rule of conduct, a "judgment of reason"; but his was a secondary, derivative meaning. For Huguccio, ius naturale in its primary sense was always an attribute of individual persons, "a force of the soul," associated with human rationality.

Once this definition was introduced the concept could be developed from rightful rules of conduct under ius naturale to licit claims and powers residing in individuals. Among the most radical devised by the medieval canonists was a right of the destitute poor to the necessities of life, even if this meant appropriating for themselves the surplus property of the rich. Huguccio was, again, a key figure. He declared that by natural law we should keep what is necessary and distribute what is left to the needy. This is particularly true in times of famine and great need. Later jurists expanded Huguccio's thought and formulated a "right" of the poor to steal or to take food in times of need. As the foremost jurist of the thirteenth century, Hostiensis, put it:

"One who suffers the need of hunger seems to use his right rather than to plan a theft"

As Tierney points out, the natural rights of the poor to subsistence became a commonplace of medieval and early modern thought. At the end of the seventeenth century, John Locke could express this idea as follows "He has given his Brother a Right to the Surplusage of his Goods; so that it cannot justly be denyed him when his pressing Want calls for it". Locke could also write that "Charity gives every man a Title to so much out of another's plenty, as will keep him from extream want."

In presenting subjective definitions of ius naturale, the canonists had come to see that an adequate concept of natural justice had to include a concept of individual rights. By the year 1300, the jurists of the Ius commune had developed a sturdy language of rights and created a number of rights derived from natural law. During the period from 1150 to 1300, they defined the rights of property, self-defense, non-Christians, marriage, and procedure as being rooted in natural, not positive, law. The jurists also began to argue that the right to appear and defend oneself before a court of law—what we should call a right to due process—was not just a part of the civil law of particular nations but rather was grounded in the universal natural law. They argued that, just as there was a natural right of self-defense against physical assault, so too there should be a right to defend oneself against legal charges.By placing these rights squarely within the framework of natural law, the jurists could and did argue that these rights could not be taken away by the human prince. The prince had no jurisdiction over rights based on natural law; consequently these rights were inalienable.

The middle of the 13th century saw a new context for rights language, one which would have far reaching consequences. Pope Innocent IV, a great student of the Canon law faced the issue of whether rights to property and the creation of licit governments belonged to only Christians, or the whole world including infidels. Following some debate Innocent wrote that:

"God makes his sun to rise on the good and the wicked and he feeds the birds of the air….ownership, possession and jurisdiction can belong to infidels licitly . . . for these things were made not only for the faithful but for every rational creature."

This text was to be repeated in canonistic commentaries and was eventually adopted by theologians to defend the rights of non Christians in an unexpected context.

The achievement of the Decretists was to create a language within which a doctrine of natural rights could be expressed by generations of later thinkers. Their definitions of ius as "faculty" or "power" were to be frequently expressed by jurists and political theorists down to the time of Grotius. Already 1300 a number of natural rights were coming to be recognized, such as the rights of the destitute poor, the right of self-defense against physical assault or in a court of law, rights in marriage. Even the rights of infidels. But this was only a beginning and did not represent a fully coherent doctrine. New situations were soon to arise in which rights language would be developed and brought to the fore.


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Inside the Medieval Television Show

When I heard that Professor Robert Bartlett was presenting a series of shows on Inside the Medieval Mind for BBC4, I was quite exciting. Bartlett, of St Andrew’s University, is our leading historian of the Middle Ages and his books are both well-written and carefully argued. This made the series a bitter disappointment because, despite including some titbits that would have interested a viewer who was unfamiliar with them, it dumbed down the subject matter and did little to dispel the commonplace illusions about the Middle Ages.

When I heard that Professor Robert Bartlett’s lectures on The Natural and Supernatural in the Middle Ages were to be published by Cambridge University Press, I was quite exciting. The result did not disappoint. The four essays, originally delivered at as Wiles Lectures at the Queen’s University, Belfast are fascinating, witty and informative. They brim with careful analysis and fascinating anecdotes that dispose of many common myths about the Middle Ages.

So how did Professor Bartlett manage to fail on TV and succeed in print? I’ve no idea. The plot becomes even more convoluted when you compare how the same events are discussed in both the shows and the lectures. Let me give a couple of examples.

In the show, we hear that people reacted to an eclipse of the moon by leaping around and shouting to help the moon because it was being consumed by monsters. Oh, how foolish these medieval folk were! But in the lectures, we find Bartlett has omitted from his TV presentation the all-important point that the Church condemned such superstition. In fact, the early-medieval sermon by Hrabanus Maurus from which we glean the story of the eclipse goes on to accurately explain the physical cause of the phenomenon and explain that it is nothing to be concerned about. Given Bartlett spent the relevant scene of the TV show creeping around a churchyard, the implication was clearly that the Church was somehow involved in the foolish panic.

Later, Barlett mentioned the alleged imprisonment of Roger Bacon. In the lectures he suggests that this might have been due to Bacon’s liberal views on magic. As it happens, the lectures also make a rather better case that Bacon’s troubles (if they happened at all) were linked to his apocalyptic views about the end of the world. But in the TV show, if I recall, the implication was that Bacon’s imprisonment was for his materialist views on Aristotle’s On the Soul. That is one I’d never heard before and does not feature in the lectures (where, presumably, it would have had to have been documented).

I suppose the moral of the story is that academics should avoid the television no matter how distinguished they are. But I can’t see many of them would be able to resist the lure of the goggle box. I certainly wouldn’t.



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