Laws of Nature

Where do the laws of physics come from? And why those laws rather than some other set?. Most especially, why a set of laws that drives the searing featureless gases coughed out of the Big Bang towards life and consciousness and intelligence and cultural activities such as religion, art, mathematics and science.

You might be tempted to suppose that any old rag-bag of laws would produce a complex universe of some sort, with attendant inhabitants convinced of their own specialness. Not so. It turns out that randomly selected laws almost invariably lead to unrelieved chaos or boring and uneventful simplicity. Our own universe is poised exquisitely between these un-palatable alternatives, offering a potent mix of freedom and discipline, a sort of restrained creativity. Instead they encourage matter and energy to develop along pathways of evolution that lead to novel variety...I can’t prove to you that it is design, but whatever it is, it is certainly very clever’

Paul Davies

To my mind, the most remarkable feature of the universe is that it appears to conform to mathematical laws. That no-one these days seems particularly phased by this astonishing fact is testimony to the human capacity to take things for granted. In most accounts, the laws of nature capture a kind of natural necessity; in other words, they are not mere descriptions but depict the way things must be. Furthermore they appear to be presuppositions of science rather than simply the product of investigation. Not only that but the incredible precision of our particular set of ‘laws of nature’ has been capable of persuading something unimaginably smaller than a subatomic particle to evolve into an unimaginably large universe with 100 billion galaxies, lay down the chemistry for the emergence of carbon based life and channel a process of evolution into conscious beings that are capable of pondering their circumstances. In recognition of this we are entitled to ask the questions, why are there laws?, what makes them mathematical?, what makes them exceptionless and why do they take the special form they do?.

From the very beginning the idea of ‘laws of nature’ was theological in character. When Aristotle’s work was re-introduced to the Latin West in the 11th century, the orderliness of nature was held to be derived from the immanent properties of natural objects; or ‘the order that God has implanted in nature’ as Aquinas described it. Mathematical reasoning was sidelined because of the division of labour in Aristotelian sciences and because Aristotle had thought, going against the mathematical realism of Plato, that mathematics dealt with human constructions. Thus it was that natural philosophy focused on the causes of the motions of the planets and mathematical astronomy considered mathematical descriptions which would be ‘saving the phenomena’, making predictions, but not really giving a causal explanation of the motions. During the Middle Ages, a vocabulary of ‘natural laws’ arose, but these were all confined to the area of morality and the participation of rational creatures in the eternal law of ‘God the ruler of the universe’.

Two movements would combine to challenge these perspectives. The first was a growing emphasis on the omnipotence of God and the divine Will which proved incompatible with the autonomy of the Aristotelian world. The second was a Christian Platonism which promoted mathematical realism in natural philosophy. As the Protestant Reformation gathered force questions were raised about how appropriate it was to adopt the thought of the unchristian Aristotle. Two Greek movements contained ideas that seemed promising for his overthrow, the atomism of Democritus and Epicurus; and the thought of the ancient sceptics.

Atomism suggested that matter was inert and not autonomous as it had been in the Aristotelian view of nature where natural objects contained causal efficacy. God had created the world and ruled it directly; and so, it was argued, he must have issued physical laws similar to the moral edicts in the bible and the ‘natural laws’ discussed in the Middle Ages. And what of mathematics, could it not be that this was the product of the divine mind and therefore manifested in the created order?. If the world is a product of the divine, isn’t the distinction between natural and artificial irrelevant?.

It was this radical re-conception which led to the discovery of the laws of the so called ‘scientific revolution; Descartes Laws of Motion, Hooke’s Law, Pascal’s Law, Boyle’s Law, Galileo’s laws of fall and inertia and Kepler’s Planetary Laws. Kepler referred to the divine Will and the creator as the foundation for his realist mathematical astronomy when he wrote:

'I shall have the physicists against me in these chapters because I have deduced the natural properties of the planets from immaterial things and mathematical figures...I wish to respond briefly as follows: that God the creator, since he is a mind, and does what he wants, is not prohibited, in attributing powers and appointing circles, from having regard to things which are wither immaterial or based on imagination. And since he wills nothing except with absolute reason, and nothing exists except by his will, then let my adversaries say what other reasons God had for attributing powers, etc. Since there was nothing except for qualities’.

Kepler then criticised Aristotle’s inability to conceptualise a world founded on mathematical principles. He had been unable to do so, Kepler said, because he had not believed the world had been created. By contrast Kepler and many of his contemporaries believed that mathematical relations in the universe is assured because God has manifested these in the created order; hence mathematical laws can describe the real relations between physical objects. Keplar wrote that this:

‘is acceptable to me and to all Christians since our faith holds that the World, which had no previous existence, was created by God in weight, measure and number, that is in accordance with ideas co-eternal with him’

Galileo, who took the un-Aristotelian step of introducing mathematics into physics, insisted that mathematical relations are real and God relied upon them when designing the cosmos:

‘the human intellect does understand some of them [mathematical truths] perfectly, and thus in these it has as much absolute certainty as nature has itself. Of such as the mathematical sciences alone, that is, geometry and arithmetic, in which the divine intellect indeed knows infinitely more proposition, since it knows all. But with regard to those few which the human intellect does understand, I believe that it’s knowledge equals the divine in objective certainty, for here it succeeds in understanding necessity, beyond which there can be no greater certainty’.

In both these claims, Kepler and Galileo show the influence of renaissance Platonism. Kepler also conceived of the cosmos as a divinely created machine on the model of a clock. Hence the findings of the mechanical sciences could now be applied to nature.

Following this view, Descartes wrote ‘the laws of mechanics are identical to the laws of nature’ and should be regarded as eternal and immutable features of the natural world rather than human constructs. According to Descartes, these laws originate in the divine will and are underwritten by the immutability of God; something he emphasised most famously in his principle of conservation of motion.

According to Dennis Des Chene:

‘The Aristotelian philosophy takes natural change to be the work of active powers in nature itself, in which God concurs. The Cartesian interprets it as the work of God alone, subject to natural laws, appeal to which will help demonstrate the observed regularities which by the Aristotelian are referred to the intrinsic powers of material things and to the ends toward which they act.

This is demonstrated in a letter Descartes wrote to his friend Mersenne in which he said:

‘the mathematical truths which you call eternal were established by God and totally depend on him just like all the other creatures’

Malebranche echoed this sentiment, maintaining that God directly imposed his will on brute matter in systematic ways that could be described as ‘laws’.

In contrast to Descartes who believed that the laws could be derived from the divine nature by intuition, Newton believed that the laws must be discovered by experimentation in order to reach a high level of certainty, yet here also he spoke of ‘ an infinite and omnipresent spirit in which matter is moved according to mathematical laws’; although in the Principia he more modestly said that:

‘gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers’.

The early modern idea of laws of nature was grounded in a particular conception of divine activity, one specific to the west; although there are hints of it in Islamic theology. Lawfulness is not something which was a self-evident feature of the universe but was an implication of specific conceptions of God. Later the laws would become simply laws intrinsic to nature and become reflections of human ingenuity rather than reflections of the divine. Shorn of its theological underpinnings, we are now left with a system that ‘just happens’ to be the way it is.

As John Barrow concludes:

We see now how it is possible for a Universe that displays unending complexity and exquisite structure to be governed by a few simple laws - perhaps just one law - that are symmetrical and intelligible, laws that govern the most remarkable things in our Universe - populations of elementary "particles" that are everywhere perfectly identical. There are some who say that because we use our minds to appreciate the order and complexity of the Universe around us, there is nothing more to that order than what is imposed by the human mind. That is a serious misjudgment.

Were it true, then we would expect to find our greatest and most reliable understanding of the world in the everyday events for which millions of years of natural selection have sharpened our wits and prepared our senses. And when we look towards the outer space of galaxies and black holes, or into the inner space of quarks and electrons, we should expect to find few resonances between our minds and the ways of these worlds. Natural selection requires no understanding of quarks and black holes for our survival and multiplication.

And yet, we find these expectations turned upon their heads. The most precise and reliable knowledge we have about anything in the Universe is of events in a binary star system more than 3,000 light years from our planet and in the sub-atomic world of electrons and light rays, where we are accurate to better than nine decimal places. And curiously, our greatest uncertainties all relate to the local problems of understanding ourselves - human societies, human behaviour, and human minds - all the things that really matter for human survival. … . Our first attempts to grasp the laws of nature are often incomplete. So, in our religious conceptions of the Universe, we also use approximations and analogies to have some grasp of ultimate things. They are not the whole truth but this does not stop them being a part of the truth: a shadow that is cast in a limiting situation of some simplicity.

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Arthur Balfour's Dangerous Idea

Arthur James Balfour was the British Prime Minister from 1902-05 and the namesake of the Balfour Declaration. However, this isn't the dangerous idea I'm referring to. He was also a philosopher who wrote several books which all contain, to some extent, the argument that influenced C. S. Lewis's Argument from Reason (AFR). This is the idea that physicalism, materialism, naturalism are all self-defeating because when applied to the mind they remove any claim for our beliefs and belief-forming capabilities to be veridical -- and this would obviously include beliefs in physicalism, materialism, and naturalism. Lewis's version of the argument has recently been defended by Victor Reppert in C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea, and has been given a more rigorously analytical form in Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism.

I just finished Balfour's first book A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, published in 1879. It's interesting because it contains the earliest version of the AFR that I've been able to discover, namely, chapter 13, "The Evolution of Belief." In fact, this chapter is a re-working of an essay he published in the Fortnightly Review in 1877. I think future accounts of this argument will need to delve into Balfour's version to see how it influenced C. S. Lewis and others.

Balfour's other books spend more time on the AFR and, like Defence, they're all in the public domain. There's The Foundations of Belief, Theism and Humanism, and Theism and Thought, the latter two being two series of Gifford Lectures (which I wrote about here). There's also a critique of Balfour's philosophy in the public domain, Mr. Balfour's Apologetics Critically Examined by W. B. Columbine. At any rate, while Balfour's writings are very dry, I think they have some value and need to be taken seriously.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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What You Can't Read

Not much blogging this week as I try to finish checking the first proof of God's Philosophers. It is quite something to see it all typeset.

In the meantime, this article in New Scientist is on the sort of subject that gets me excited. If I could have my time again, I can think of nothing better to do than deciphering a lost language.

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God and the Philosophers

Ashgate, an academic publisher, has the beginnings of what looks to be a very interesting series. Called Ashgate Studies in the History of Philosophical Theology, it has an expert on a particular philosopher analyze said philosopher's view on the concept of God. So far they've published analyses of Aquinas, Scotus, Kant, Hegel (the only one I've actually read), and John Stuart Mill.


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Not Even Marxists Like Richard Dawkins

Terry Eagleton is not everyone’s cup of tea. The April issue of Standpoint carried a short but highly critical article of the Marxist literary critic, best known as one of the last remaining diehard communists in academia. For many, he occupies a similar position to Naomi Klein or Noam Chomsky, left wing agitators who have been massively influential among their fellow travellers, but a turn-off for everyone else.

So, it would be an understatement to say that I don’t see the world with the same eyes that Eagleton does. But like many others who are not his fans, I found myself enormously enjoying his evisceration of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion in the London Review of Books. (It would be true to say I don’t usually have much time for the LRB either and I simply don’t understand why it is given a £20,000 annual public subsidy. But that’s another story.)

Anyway, Eagleton was invited to deliver the Terry lectures at Yale and decided to continue his attack on Dawkins, with a few broadsides at Christopher Hitchens thrown in. These lectures have now been released as a book, Reason, Faith and Revolution which has received some positive notices and no little publicity. I read the book with interest, not least because Marxist agitprop rarely makes it onto my bedside table.

On the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, I suppose I should be a fan of Eagleton’s witty and well-written assault on the new atheists. I’ll even admit that I often did enjoy it. As a literary critic, Eagleton has spent his life claiming that fiction is tremendously important. So the argument that religion is irrelevant because it is not true would not wash with him anyway. And while he is not explicit about his own beliefs, I think he probably is a man of faith himself. I see him as the heir to medieval radicals like John Langland and the spiritual Franciscans.

But at base, his beef with Dawkins is political, not religious. Eagleton really is a unrepentant Marxist. He is against the market economy, against globalisation and against free trade. In other words, he takes the three factors that have lifted more people out of poverty than any other ideas in history, including Christian charity, and trashes them. His alternatives are an incoherent mishmash of socialism and wishful thinking.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his analysis of Islamic terrorism. Like many of the left, Eagleton sees the origin of 9/11, 3/11 and 7/7 (not to mention Bali and Nairobi) in poverty and injustice. He imagines that terrorism springs from politico-economic circumstances and not from ideology. Islamic countries, he claims, have been exploited and victimised by the West, particularly America. This ignores that reality that the terrorists themselves are rarely poor and that the 7/7 bombers were home-grown. I do not believe that Islam leads inexorably to terror, but there is no doubt that the motivation of many fundamentalists is primarily religious.

Eagleton is angry about injustice, and justifiably so. But his own philosophy would make things far worse than they are, worse even than if Dawkins and Hitchins were in charge. I can just about recommend Eagleton’s book, but I can’t say anything much positive about his philosophy.

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Hitler and Christianity

Hitler’s religious beliefs continue to provoke plenty of sterile argument on the internet. Ignorant Christians claim he was an atheist while foolish atheists claim he was a Christian. A very quick look at the relevant scholarship reveals he was neither – he believed in a higher power but he was aggressively anti-Christian.

Joe Keysor has researched the topic of the Nazi’s religious policy in-depth for his book Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Bible: A Scriptural Analysis of Anti-Semitism, National Socialism, and the Churches in Nazi Germany. The book is clearly intended for a Christian audience and is published by a small press that specialises in apologetics. In some senses, this is unfortunate because Keysor’s research would reach a wider audience if it had not been written from a clear confessional stance. The apologetics probably plays well with his intended target audience, especially given that the publisher seems to specialise in such literature. But it would have been a good scholarly book if he had toned it down a bit. He does admit the Church in Germany could have done more against Nazism (p7). But remarks such as "all atheists will inevitably lose" (p347) and "when Christ returns in great power and glory as God to reign" (p377) are a bit much if he is hoping to reach a non-Christian readership.

I’m no specialist on the Nazis but luckily I know a man who is. My friend Edward Bartlett-Jones, while certainly no Nazi himself, does appear to know far more about them than might be considered healthy. Some say he has the score of Wagner’s Die Walküre embroidered into his bathrobe, others claim that he leaves copies of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra in dentists’ waiting rooms. Needless to say, he lives in Berlin. He is also an agnostic and so I thought I should send him Keysor’s Hitler, the Holocaust and the Bible for an expert opinion. He replied,

Overall I think it's a good book but it has a strong Christian bias. The research is commendably thorough and without going back through the original sources, I didn't see anything that struck me as being taken out of context. There is a good summary of Hitler's philosophy (p48-49) and anyone who still thinks Hitler was a Catholic should be persuaded otherwise by page 87. There is also a good explanation of what Hitler meant by "God" on pages 93 to 94.

One possible shortcoming: he missed a good opportunity to discuss Wagner's Parsifal. He mentions it twice in passing, but considering he devotes a whole chapter to Wagner he could have gone further. Parsifal was Wagner's last opera and was the only one actually to be banned in the Third Reich (I didn't see him mention that either). I believe it was banned for its overt Christian imagery so in a book as thorough as this, it merits a slightly longer look.

I liked the Nietzsche chapter but again, he flits between scholarship and partisan polemic. He doesn't seem to find any inconsistency between berating atheists for having invented their moral code while lauding Christians for accepting theirs without question from a presumed supernatural authority. He also mistakenly and repeatedly conflates Darwinism with its supposed Nazi implications if taken to extremes. Darwinism is a descriptive biological theory and does not prescribe any sort of ethical system.

Overall, then, I recommend this book which accurately describes the religious beliefs of the Nazis and their policy towards Christianity. Had it been written as straight-forward scholarship rather than as apologetics, it would have been even better.

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Science and Religion – The Movie

Sam Harris's new 'Reason Project' has announced a competition for films that 'promote critical thinking' and 'erode the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry'. Accordingly, and inspired by the release of Agora, I have written a script for a new film, 'Science and Religion' the movie. Like most Hollywood historical dramas, this is based entirely on fact and no liberties have been taken.

Science and Religion - The Movie

Opening scene – Bertrand Russell is sitting in his study writing his History of Western Philosophy, as the camera pans into the room he looks up expectantly and begins to speak.

Bertrand Russell – The tale I am about to relate is the story of science and reason, an epic of discovery, ingenuity and man’s attempts to probe the secrets of the world around him. It is also a tale of barbarism, arrogance, stupidity and superstition and the way these dark forces have set themselves against the fragile progress of enlightenment. Our account begins in the Greek era, a golden age of philosophy and scientific endeavour’.

The scene dissolves into an amphitheatre in Athens in the fourth century BC. All around are men in togas exchanging philosophical ideas. In one corner a man is demonstrating the principles of Geometry. In another Eratosthenesis is pointing to a picture of the earth drawn in the sand and is demonstrating it’s size. Plato enters the scene and greets Aristotle.

Plato – ‘My pupil, what new and exciting activities of rational enquiry have you been engaged in these past few days?’

Aristotle – ‘Ah, my old teacher, I have been busy laying out an approach for the investigation of all natural phenomena and penned a treatise on virtue and its relationship to well being and happiness.

Plato – ‘Impressive!. With the application of mathematics and deliberate empirical research we will soon unlock the very secrets of the universe. What a glorious future awaits us’.

A Montage shows the Great Library of Alexandria with its 800,000 scrolls. Men and women in Togas walk around in the sunlight reading from papyri and exchanging rational ideas with one another.

Bertrand Russell (voiceover) – And yet, the progress of Hellenic civilisation would prove to be fragile. The minds of the populace would soon be seized by a new and pernicious superstition.

The dark outline of a cross falls across the scene and the music for the Imperial March from Star Wars begins. Jesus is showing leaping manically around in front of a crowd of onlookers in Judea and telling them they are going to hell if they don’t worship him. He is then dragged off kicking and screaming by the Roman authorities. The scene cuts to the apostles who are seen making up the gospels and inserting lurid details into the text. Children are then seen being brainwashed by their parents and forced to memorise the New Testament. Hooded figures stream out of churches and begin to burn temples and kill Pagans.

The scene cuts to the interior of the Great Library of Alexandria. Hypatia is sitting with a group of her pupils and teaching them about ancient learning. She is a slim voluptuous woman in her early twenties and wears a loose fitting toga. She seems oblivious to the flames and the shouting coming from the outside.

Hypatia - ..and so, having built on and significantly improved the treatise of Aristarchus I have proved that the earth and the rest of the planets are in orbit around the sun

Her students clap politely

Suddenly the door bursts in and faith-crazed Christians rush into the library. They begin setting light to scrolls and destroying everything they find. Any philosopher unlucky enough to get in the way is stabbed to death. One hooded Christian comes forward, grabs a pile of papyri from next to Hypatia and beings to tear them to pieces.

Hypatia – ‘Noooo, you cannot destroy these scrolls, on this one is written the works of Archimedes

Crazed Christian – Did you hear that?, that sounded like science and reason to me. Let’s kill her lads!.’

The mob attacks Hypatia and deals a death blow. As this happens the scene suddenly turns black.

Bertrand Russell – With Hypatia’s death, Christianity sapped the intellect of the people and all Pagan learning vanished for a thousand years. This period became known by historians as ‘The Dark Ages’. Only a few candles of reason burned in a world lit by the fire of superstition.

The Dark Ages – The scene is a field outside a monastery. Groups of filthy peasants are shown wearing hoods and slapping themselves in the face with bibles. A hairy man sits in the foreground scratching himself and attempting to copulate with a chicken. To the right, a group of plague infested men and women are busily worshipping the dismembered toe of a saint. This is an age of darkness.

In the monastery two monks are sitting next to each other. One, James of Hannam is shown laboriously copying out the Gospel of Mark. The other, Roger Bacon, is busily reading an ancient text.

Brother James – What is that you are reading Brother Bacon?. That does not look like any book of the bible I am familiar with.

Roger Bacon – Nay Brother James, this is ancient learning, the works of Aristotle.

Brother James – Lord in heaven, what kind of heresy is this!. Did not the great Tertullian say that Jerusalem had nothing to learn from Athens, did not Augustine himself urge caution when dealing with the writings of Pagan Infidels. Why, the Bishop of Paris himself warns that reason cannot be used, all we need to know is contained in the Holy Bible

Roger Bacon – Ah but Brother James, perhaps they were too hasty. Look what wondrous things are contained within this text. Here, look it says that the world is a sphere.

Brother James – A sphere!, heresy!. Does it not say in the Bible that the world is flat. Did not the great Cosmas Indicopleustes demonstrate this without doubt through reference to scripture and did not his treatise win much favour within the church.

Roger Bacon – But I

Brother James – Silence heretic. Brothers, cast him into the dankest cell.

The scene returns to Bertrand Russell’s study.

Bertrand Russell - ‘And yet science and reason could not be held back forever, it lived on it the hearts of those men who were not afraid to challenge the revealed wisdom of their time. One of them, the great Copernicus was about to challenge scripture and shake society to its very foundations.

Dissolve to Copernicus’s observatory. Copernicus is shown making observations of the heavens. As he works on his treatise ‘De Revolutionibus’ he looks over at his opened bible. For a while he seems torn, then he closes the bible abruptly and returns to work on his treatise.

Copernicus (voiceover) - I knew that the treatise I had prepared would destroy the authority of the bible forever and so I asked my assistants to postpone publication until my death. Had I not done so the church would have had me burned for my impudence, and yet I could not let the truth die with me.

Giordiano Bruno is then shown teaching heliocentrism and claiming that there are other planets with life on them. Hearing this a group of inquisitors grab him and burn him in the public square. Galileo watches on in disgust and returns to his house. To his horror a group of the Inquisition are there waiting for him.

Inquisitor – Going somewhere Galileo?. The Pope wants a word with you about your recent dialogue concerning the two world systems.

Galileo – I will present myself to the holy father, I feel sure he will see the light of reason in this matter.

Galileo is led into the chamber of the inquisition. A series of demonic looking inquisitors sit behind a bench. On the table in front of them are a series of grisly looking torture devices including thumbscrews and rusty nails. An Iron Maiden is located in the corner of the room which creaks open as Galileo enters.

Galileo – What is this?, I come to debate matters of science with the Pope

Head Inquisitor – Silence heretic, there will be no such debating here. You will must bow before the authority of scripture or be tortured to death for your impudence.

For a while Galileo puts up a fight and is thrown in jail, but after a while he recants.

Galileo - ‘I submit to your will, the earth is located at the centre of the universe and does not move’

The inquisitors look pleased with themselves and leave

Galileo – (whispered) ‘And yet it still moves!’

Cue heroic music and scenes of the enlightenment and the scientific revolution. The Philisophes are shown debating in coffee houses and Hume is shown writing his ‘dialogues concerning natural religion’. Columbus is shown completely anachronistically, proving that the earth is round to the horror of the Church.

Bertrand Russell – And with those words the enlightenment began, the power of religious dogma would be broken and science and reason were finally allowed to flourish. There was but one final act remaining.

The scene shifts to Darwin’s study. Darwin is sketching in a book, he draws a monkey and a human being and then a line between them with a note saying ‘I think’.

Charles Darwin (Voiceover) - ‘My poor wife. I knew my discoveries had shattered Paley’s design argument and removed all rational basis for belief in God. I decided to delay publication but finally I could contain myself no longer

Cue scenes of Church of England minsters denouncing Darwin from pulpits. The wife of an aristocrat is shown saying:

‘Descended from apes!. My dear, let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it may not become widely known.’

The scene shifts to Oxford university Museum and the Wilberforce Huxley debate

Wilberforce – Mr Huxley, may I enquire whether is through your grandfather or your grandmother that you claim your descent from a monkey.

Huxley, slowly rises to his feet

Huxley – ‘Sir, I would rather be related to an ape than a bishop!’

For a while, there is a stunned silence, suddenly the room breaks out into laugher. Mayhem ensures. Robert Fitzroy rises in a frenzy shouting "The book! The book!" while holding a bible aloft. Women faint around him. Huxley is carried out in triumph and Wilberforce is defeated.

Bertrand Russell – And so Darwinism had triumphed. All basis for belief in God had been vanquished, and yet the virus of religion remains with us today. Reason and science must continue to thwart the efforts of the faithful to plunge us back into ignorance. To save the world will requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.’

The end

Historical Consultants

A.C Grayling

Andrew Dickson White (deceased)

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Soft-centred or hard-core?

Following the discussion below my post of A.J. Ayer’s book Language, Truth and Logic, I’ve been thinking a bit about the differences between soft and hard atheists. Conventionally, a ‘hard atheist’ is someone who believes that there is no God. A ‘soft atheist’ has no belief in God. Essentially, then, the hard atheist makes a factual claim about reality when they assert God does not exist, while the soft atheist only makes an assertion about the contents of their own heads when they claim that they have no belief in God.

The distinction is important because atheists in argument will very often assert that they are soft atheists and consequently do not need to present any positive arguments for the non-existence of God. To his credit, Richard Dawkins does not do this. In chapter four of The God Delusion, he presents an argument for why he thinks, in reality, there almost certainly is no God. Since his argument is about the real world rather than the inside of his head, he is undoubtedly a hard atheist (whatever he says elsewhere).

The soft atheist cannot assert that there is no God, probably or otherwise. Their beliefs clearly have no bearing on reality because they are not making a factual proposition about it. To claim as a soft atheist, “I have no belief in God and therefore God probably does not exist” is not a valid argument. But to claim as a hard atheist, "I have good reasons for believing that God does not exist and therefore he probably does not exist." is valid.

This makes being a soft atheist quite hard work. Because even if they are really careful and never let themselves think that God does not exist, they almost invariably reach other conclusions on the back of this.

For example, let’s assume I claim that God made a statue of Mary wave at me. The hard atheist can scoff because he has asserted there is no God. The soft atheist has a problem. He has no belief in God, but must admit that his lack of belief has no bearing on whether or not God made the statue wave. So he must simply say, he has no belief in the statue waving. He can’t say it didn’t (or at least, he can’t say it didn’t because God could not have done it).

So, in many cases soft atheists are actually hard atheists who have not come out. Soft atheism is often a rhetorical trick rather than a practical position to take.

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Hypatia - Martyr for Science and Reason

Forced to flee the city's library, a storehouse of ancient knowledge and manuscripts, Hypatia rescues a handful of irreplaceable texts from a Christian ransacking and continues her theorising on the nature of the universe. Christian leaders eventually label her a witch and make her a martyr to scientific reason.

Plot Synopsis for Agora

As usual, bigots and anti-theistic zealots will ignore the evidence, the sources and rational analysis and believe Hollywood's appeal to their prejudices. It makes you wonder who the real enemies of reason actually are.

'Agora' and Hypatia - Hollywood Strikes Again - Tim O' Neil

According to tradition, Hypatia, who lived in the city of Alexandria from 355 – 415AD, was a brilliant, beautiful woman who wrote and compiled books on mathematics, lectured on a variety of subjects and invented mechanical devices. According to the most recent biography by Maria Dzielska, she became the victim of politically motivated street violence by Christians at the age of around 60-65.

A movie called Agora is due to be released based on her life and you can get all the historical analysis of it from Tim O’Neil’s article ‘Agora and Hypatia - Hollywood Strikes Again’ over at the Armarium Magnum blog. In the film Hypatia is depicted as one of the last lights of science and reason, doomed to be extinguished by the forces of dogma and superstition. Tim concludes that:

Unlike Giordano Bruno, Hypatia was a genuine scientist and, as a woman, was certainly remarkable for her time. But she was no martyr for science and science had zero to do with her murder. Exactly how much of the genuine, purely political background to her death Amenabar puts in his movie remains to be seen. It's hoped that, unlike Sagan and many others, the whole political background to the murder won't simply be ignored and her killing won't be painted as an act of ignorant rage against her science and scholarship. But what is clear from his interviews and the film's pre-publicity is that he has chosen to frame the story in Gibbonian terms straight from the "conflict thesis" textbook - the destruction of the "Great Library", Hypatia victimised for her learning and her death as a grim harbinger of the beginning of the "Dark Ages".

The movie is therefore only the latest incarnation of the Hypatia myth which has been evolving since her murder in the fifth century. Some of the first people to appropriate the life of Hypatia were the Christians in the Middle Ages who recast the tale with St Catherine, a fourth-century Christian murdered by pagans. This St. Catherine was fixed to a wheel and tortured because she cleverly confounded the pagan wise men sent to argue her out of her faith.

With the arrival of the Reformation and the later Enlightenment, the protestant/deist John Toland, wrote a historical essay entitled Hypatia, or the History of a Most Beautiful, Most Virtuous, Most Learned and in Every Way Accomplished Lady; Who was Torn to Pieces by the Clergy of Alexandria, to Gratify the Pride, Emulation and Cruelty of the Archbishop, Commonly but Undeservedly Titled St. Cyril. The Church fought back by publishing The History of Hypatia, a Most Impudent School-Mistress. In Defense of Saint Cyril and the Alexandrian Clergy from the Aspersions of Mr. Toland. Thanks to Toland’s tract, Hypatia was to become a favourite of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Figures such as Voltaire, Fielding, and Gibbon rushed to the defence of the ‘young lady of greatest beauty and merit’ and drew attention to her murder as a way of lambasting the Catholic Church. Voltaire portrayed her as a victim of superstition and ignorance who had been killed because she believed in rational thinking and trusted the capacities of the human mind over imposed dogma.

In the 19th century and with the rise of the Romantics the emphasis shifted to Hypatia's death as a symbol of the passing of a golden age of Greek civility, culture, and learning . Italian writers, French poets and English historians lined up to extol her beauty, intelligence, and the pureness of spirit she exemplified. They depicted her as a voluptuous pagan priestess, much younger than the ageing beauty of 60 she really was. The culmination of this movement was the famous and wildly popular version of her story written by Charles Kingsley in 1853. His romantic tale of the pagan, who converted to Christianity at the end, was contrasted with the world of deceit in which she lived. Meanwhile, the positivist movement found that Hypatia satisfied their needs for elevating science over superstitious religion.

In the 20th century feminist writers saw Hypatia’s murder as a misogynist act, she had been murdered because she was an intelligent, independent woman. Journals and institutions were founded and named after her. Bertrand Russell commented wryly after quoting Gibbon’s description of the murder of Hypatia that Alexandria was ‘ no longer troubled by philosophers’. This is the kind of bogus remark Russell was fond of making. In fact, philosophy flourished in Alexandria a full century after her death (most notably in the person of John Philoponus). Carl Sagan provided a vivid account of her death and an anachronistic account of the burning of the Library of Alexandria in his book Cosmos.

Now in the 21st century and the release of Agora, Hypatia has become the goddess of science and reason fighting to preserve learning against the forces of fundamentalist religion. Once again the present is recasting the past in its own image.

See Also

'Agora" and Hypatia' - Hollywood Strikes Again

Giordano Bruno - Martyr for Science and Reason

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Did Science Kill God?

'They make propitiatory sacrifices, slaughter black cattle and despatch offerings to the departed spirits... As children in blank darkness tremble and start at everything, so we in broad daylight are oppressed at times by fears baseless as those horrors which children imagine coming upon them in the dark. This dread and darkness of the mind cannot be dispelled by the sunbeams, the shinning shafts of day, but only by an understanding of the outward form and inner workings of nature’

Lucretius, Book II, Lines 50-62

With these words Lucretius launched the idea of scientific knowledge as some kind of weedkiller to get rid of religion, a rhetoric which would be taken up in more modern times by figures such as Bertrand Russell, Peter Atkins and Richard Dawkins. In 1966, for example, Anthony F. C. Wallace wrote that:

‘Belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge’

(For future reference, it is unwise to make predictions like this in case you are proved wrong and thereby doomed to be quoted in future essays as some kind of false prophet).

To many it is considered a truism to say that science has prompted the secularisation of society, ushering in scepticism and laying the foundations for intellectually respectable unbelief. History reveals a more complex picture than this. A study by Susan Budd entitled ‘Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Unbelievers in English Society 1850-1960’ revealed that the reasons given by those who had lost their faith in Victorian England hardly ever included ‘advances in science’.

Budd’s research drew on the direct testimony of one hundred and fifty unbelievers and evidence from two hundred additional biographies. She found that conversions to unbelief were most commonly associated with changes from conservative to radical politics (religion being rejected as part of privileged society)and the reading of radical texts such as Thomas Paine’s ‘Age of Reason’.

Another commonly cited reason was the reading of the bible itself, in particular the Old Testament with it’s vengeful and anthropomorphic conception of the deity. In a recent essay in the book ‘Galileo Goes to Jail’, John Hedley Brooke cites a speech by the President of the National Secular Society given in 1912 where he insisted that the biblical stories of ‘lust, adultery, incest and unnatural vice’ were ‘enough to raise blushes in a brothel’. In ‘The God Delusion’, Richard Dawkins refers to an incident where Winston Churchill’s son Randolph was provided with a bible by Evelyn Waugh in an attempt to shut him up when they were posted together. Waugh later wrote:

‘Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud “I say I bet you didn’t know this came in the Bible..” or merely slapping his side and chortling “God, isn’t God a s**t’

Judging by Budd’s study other readers of the Old Testament had performed a similar exegesis.

Other difficulties for believers emerged because of the gradual emergence of a historical understanding of the bible and Christianity as a whole. This began to undermine Christianity, one major blow occurring with the publication of Essays and Review in 1860. The authors, a group of liberal Anglican clergymen, argued that an inspiration reading of the bible should be replaced by a historical one. Essays sold 22,000 copies in two years, more than 'On the Origin of Species' sold in its first twenty years. It sparked five years of increasingly polarized debate with books and pamphlets furiously contesting the issues.Biblical criticism and history therefore emerged as the chief challengers to religious authority. The writers of the Old and New testaments became seen, not as timeless authorities but as unreliable products of a distant culture. As Owen Chadwick remarks in ‘Evolution and the Churches’:

‘[In the 1860s] theologians were busier with the consequences of Biblical criticism than with the consequences of the natural sciences...their new historical knowledge made them shrink away from basing the revelation of God upon documents which without doubt contained historical truth, but no-one could say how much truth.’

Truth, more specifically the exclusive access to the truth claimed by every Christian sect began to take it’s toll as did the perceived immorality of certain tenets such as the doctrine of Hell (Charles Darwin, horrified at the preaching of evangelicals on the afterlife referred to this as a ‘damnable doctrine’). The idea that atheist could be as morally upright as believers also began to gain credibility.

Hedley Brooke also draws attention to the sociologist Mary Douglas who argues that ‘religion is principally grounded in social relations, not concepts of nature’. In the 19th century secular reactions were provoked by movements from within Protestantism and Catholicism; claims for the inerrancy of scripture and vulgar bibliolatry; claims for papal infallibility and the provocative Syllabus of Errors published by the Catholic Church in 1864. These were the activities that prompted John William Draper to write ‘History of the Conflict between Religion and Science’ in 1874, popularising the thesis that Catholic Christianity and science were at war.

With regard to the modern era, Hedley Brooke writes:

‘In modern times, the expansion of secularism can be correlated with social, political and economic transformations having little direct connection with science. Historians point to increases in social and geographical mobility that have fractured communities once bound by common religious values. The growth of capitalism, commerce and consumerism has fostered a pervasive hedonism that threatens commitment to religious institutions and long term goals...secular values have been heavily promoted in the sphere of education and in the media. In some countries religious solidarity has been replaced by national solidarity or by the ideology of political parties. That such transformations have taken place at different rates and to different degrees in different cultures means there is “no consistent relation between the degree of scientific advance and a reduced profile of religious influence, belief and practice”.

There is however, the distinct possibility that all this post mortem analysis is a trifle premature. In Europe religion is in decline, but in the U.S and the rest of the world, as John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge claim in a newly published book, ‘God is Back’, religion is actually experiencing a surge. Many countries that tried to stamp religion out are now run by religious leaders. China is now estimated to have between 77 and 100 million Christians in house church movements. In Russia, 86 per cent of the population now identify themselves as Christians. In Guatemala there is now a 12,000-seat church with a heliport and giant swimming pool for baptisms (this complex has been built at the end of a road called Burger King Drive). In South Korea there is now an 830,000-member church (growing “by 3,000 a month”) with 12 choirs, 3 orchestras and “huge television screens supplying the words” to hymns ‘karaoke-style’. There is even some kind of bizarre miniature golf course in Kentucky which starts with the creation at the first hole and ends with a hole based on the resurrection. According to historian of science Ronald Numbers, creationism is booming around the world despite having been thwarted in court cases in the U.S

The statistics show that despite the hopes of rationalists the vast majority of humanity continues to believe whole heartedly in supernatural entities and despite the hopes of liberal believers it’s the fire and brimstone and biblical inerrancy which seems to be taking off the most. The world isn’t going to become a ‘clear thinking oasis’ any time soon.

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