Very interesting

Here's an audio recording of Hilary Putnam and Alvin Plantinga, two of the greatest living philosophers, discussing the existence of God. I didn't realize that Putnam is Jewish. It's from ten years ago, but it was just put on YouTube a couple of days ago.



(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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The Song of Roland

It appears 'Blogger' crashed yesterday and deleted my latest post. I have therefore delved into my internet history and resurrected it below......

While trawling through various publications I came across a curious work entitled 'On farting - language and laughter in the Middle Ages' by Valerie Allen. This book devotes a section to one Berthold le Fartere (Roland the Farter) who held Hemingstone manor in Suffolk and 30 acres of land in return for his services as a jester for king Henry II. The 'Liber feodorum' or 'Book of fees' records that:

Seriantia que quondam fuit Rollandi le Pettour in Hemingeston in comitatu Suff ’, pro qua debuit facere die natali Domini singulis annis coram domino rege unum saltum et siffletum et unum bumbulum, que alienata fuit per particulas subscriptas.

'The serjeanty, which formerly was held by Roland the Farter in Hemingston in the county of Suffolk, for which he was obliged to perform every year on the birthday of our Lord before his master the king, one jump, and a whistle, and one fart, was alienated in accordance with these specific requirements.'

For me this historical curiosity pretty much speaks for itself; however Valerie Allen can't resist a bit of waffely post-modern analysis. She writes:

How then does the humble fart illuminate identity and social relation? If Roland’s caper seems only to vindicate the common myth that medievals farted without regulation, we should keep in mind that the singularity of his tenure attests to an awareness of the unseemliness of farting in public, not to mention in front of your sovereign. Medieval farts bear the same burden of anxiety, low humor, and indifferent necessity that they do today, yet they also open up the gap of cultural consciousness that yawns across seven centuries and more.

Er...right. Perhaps this is just overanalysing the issue and the story of Roland the Farter merely shows that toilet humor is one of the great continuities of human history. Take an early modern tract by the fictional Jack of Dover who, embarking on a “Privy Search for the veriest foole in England,” tells of a humorous knight in Cornwall who called together a great assembly of knights, squires, and gentlemen to hear his public speech. However:

He in a foolish manner (not without laughter) began to use a thousand jestures, turning his eyes this way, then that way, seeming alwayes as though he would have presently begun to speake: and at last, fetching a deepe sigh, with a grunt like hogge, he let a beastly loude fart, and tould them that the occasion of this calling of them together was to no other ende, but that so noble a fart might be honoured with so worthy a company as there was.

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God and Gaia in Academia

This is an interesting essay at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Apparently it's fairly common in academic circles to believe that humanity was matriarchal in prehistoric times, complete with goddess worship. Feminist Cynthia Eller countered this trend in her book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why An Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future. It reminds me of the claims that witches were proto-feminist midwives and healers who were persecuted by the patriarchy.

By itself, that's pretty interesting and makes the essay well worth reading. But then comes this quote:

Why bring this up now? Because higher education’s relaxed attitude about appointing faculty members who not only believe but who actually teach this moonshine demonstrates the hypocrisy of those who say that faculty members are acting out of the need to protect the university from anti-scientific nonsense when they discriminate against conservative Christian candidates for academic appointment. The possibility that a candidate for a position in biology, anthropology, or, say, English literature might secretly harbor the idea that God created the universe or that the Bible is true, is a danger not to be brooked. But apparently, the possibility that a candidate believes that human society was “matriarchal” until about 5,000 years ago is perfectly within the range of respectable opinion appropriate for campus life.

And then it gets really interesting.

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Quote of the Day

It is difficult to undo our own damage and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it. We are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind used to cry and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of the earth, and living things say very little to very few... And yet it could be that wherever there is motion there is noise, as when a whale breaches and smacks the water, and wherever there is stillness there is the small, still voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song and dance, the show we drove from town... What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are they not both saying: Hello?

Annie Dillard
Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

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And the Templeton Prize goes to....

.....Sir Martin Rees, astrophysicist and former head of the British Royal Society. This follows a Templeton tradition of honoring people like Freeman Dyson and Paul Davies whose work in Cosmology and Astrophysics touches on the big questions but who don't have much in the way of religious beliefs.

An interview with the winner is here (in which he is pretty guarded) and you can read his acceptance speech here.

The next thing to look forward to is the pissed off reaction from the nu atheist blog-o-sphere. Nothing has showed up as yet but while you are waiting you can - thanks to the wonders of flash - watch the new president of the British Humanist association pull off a selection of disco moves to Scandinavian electro-pop

EDIT - On cue here's a bit of backlash from P Z 'Pharingula' Meyers who describes Rees as mediocre and sticks him in the 'kooks' category. I guess being the author of over 500 research papers isn't enough these days.

More of the usual suspects - Jerry Coyne in the Guardian and on his blog who really reserves his venom for Templeton and is fairly respectful of Rees (The Guardian tried to stir things up by renaming his article 'Prize mug Martin Rees and the Templeton travesty'). Harry Kroto has been quoted as saying 'Shocking. Bad for science. Bad for the Royal Society. Bad for the UK and very bad for Martin'.

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What Happened When? Ancient Near East Chronology

I have always been interested in chronology, perhaps because it promises to apply some numerical rigour to ancient history. Sadly, things are rarely that simple. I thoroughly enjoyed Peter Jones' Centuries of Darkness, but ultimately found its proposal of a radical reform of ancient chronology to be unconvincing. But from time to time, I like to see how the chronological debates in ancient near eastern history (“ANE”) have progressed. The answer is usually, not by very much.

The problem with chronology is the need to pin an absolute date to relative dates. For example, if we have a list of kings of Assyria and how long they all reigned, we have a relative chronology for the Assyrians. If we also have references to the Assyrians sacking an Israelite city in the biblical records, we can pin the Assyrian chronology to the Hebrew one. And if an Egyptian pharaoh marched around Judea and this is recorded both in Egypt and the Bible, then we can attach the chronology of Egypt to our scheme as well. But we also need an absolute date so we can say exactly when a specified event happened. We can then extrapolate all our relative dates from this single absolute date to get an absolute chronology.

And herein lies the problem. Carbon 14 dates are nothing like accurate enough to provide absolute dates. The best that we can hope for is plus or minus thirty years, but there are serious doubts that the technique provides even this level of accuracy. Dendrochronology, dating from tree rings, can give you an absolute date for the year in which a tree was felled, but you cannot easily tie this to a historical event.

In fact, there is only one absolute date that everyone agrees with before the classical period. This is a total eclipse of the sun that took place on 14 June 763BC. NASA helpfully provides a map showing the path of the eclipse moving right across the Middle East (as well as a catalogue of all eclipses). Assyrian records note this eclipse in the 9th year of the reign of King Ashur-dan III. This ties all the ANE chronologies together, at least for the first half of the first millennium BC.

For chronology before 1000BC, things get complicated. Absolute dates have to be derived from observations about the rise of the star Sirius (Sothic dating used in Egypt) or the visibility of Venus (used in Babylon). But neither of these provides a single accurate date. For instance, the observations of Venus that tie to the reign of Hammurabi of Babylon occur every 60 years or so, which means that high, middle and low chronologies (with about 120 years between them) can all be argued for.

These problems could largely be solved if it was possible to date the Thera volcanic eruption that devastated large parts of the Mediterranean basin. Traditionally, this was believed to have happened shortly after 1500BC, but carbon dating and dendrochronology suggested a date of 1627BC. Evidence for the ash and pumice that the volcano ejected is laminated all over Asia Minor but, remarkably, the eruption is not recorded in any surviving records. Worse, it doesn’t even show up in the Greenland ice cores, where it should be very obvious. A likely candidate in 1642BC turns out to have been an eruption in Alaska. Quite why traces of the 60 cubic kilometres of rock ejected from Santorini do not stick out like a sore thumb or feature in any Egyptian records is odd to say the least.

So it seems by dreams of mathematical precision in the field of ancient chronology have been dashed. This probably won’t change until someone figures out how to precisely date the Thera eruption or new eclipse records turn up.

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Cool

Instapundit just received his copy of The Genesis of Science. You can't buy that kind of publicity. You're finally famous James!

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Here we go again...

In the wake of austerity, councils across the U.K are having to make stringent budget cuts and this is prompting the closure of around 450 libraries around the country. Philip Pullman, author of the Dark Materials trilogy, is outraged and has penned a piece for OpenDemocracy.net on the subject. Seeking to anchor his polemic with a precedent from history he writes:

You don’t need me to give you the facts. Everyone here is aware of the situation. The government, in the Dickensian person of Mr Eric Pickles, has cut the money it gives to local government, and passed on the responsibility for making the savings to local authorities. Some of them have responded enthusiastically, some less so; some have decided to protect their library service, others have hacked into theirs like the fanatical Bishop Theophilus in the year 391 laying waste to the Library of Alexandria and its hundreds of thousands of books of learning and scholarship......

I love the public library service for what it did for me as a child and as a student and as an adult. I love it because its presence in a town or a city reminds us that there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about, things that have the power to baffle the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism, things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight.

I love it for that, and so do the citizens of Summertown, Headington, Littlemore, Old Marston, Blackbird Leys, Neithrop, Adderbury, Bampton, Benson, Berinsfield, Botley, Charlbury, Chinnor, Deddington, Grove, Kennington, North Leigh, Sonning Common, Stonesfield, Woodcote.

And Battersea.

And Alexandria.

Leave the libraries alone. You don’t know the value of what you’re looking after. It is too precious to destroy.

Edward Gibbon would be overjoyed to know that even the most speculative and unsupported of his historical insights are still alive and well hundreds of years after he authored them (although maybe Pullman just got the idea from the movie Agora). However upon closer examination this Library of Alexandria turns out to be the Serapeum temple whose colonnades seem to have contained a library at some stage (although this structure was left standing after the destruction and the sources for the event - both Pagan and Christian - do not mention any such libricide). Of course you can't rule out the destruction of sacred texts - something mentioned following similar events in Gaza in the 5th century - but Pullman appears to have conjured up 'hundreds of thousands of books of learning and scholarship'; the most plausible estimate for the original library (not the Serapeum library) according to Dr Serafina Cuomo is 40,000 scrolls. Perhaps there are several kilometers of undiscovered book shelving lurking at the Serapeum's archeological site but more likely Pullman is talking out of his proverbial posterior. I am sympathetic with his article but it's hardly a good advert for the value of public learning when you can't be bothered to do the basic research.

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The Bible's Buried Secrets

Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou is a lecturer on religious studies at the University of Exeter and now has her own TV series on the BBC. In her shows, she claims to unearth the buried secrets of the Bible. Actually, what she is doing is communicating to the general public ideas which have been discussed in the academy for ages. And no worries there. It’s exactly what I do in the field of science and religion.

Dr Stavrakopoulou is a “minimalist” who denies the existence of King David and the United Kingdom of Israel. That’s a respectable, if minority, opinion among archaeologists. I happen to disagree, following Robin Lane Fox from The Unauthorised Version. Of course, Lane Fox and I are historians. This means we tend to give texts more weight than archaeologists do, at least when it comes to specific events and people.

Anyway, this week, Dr Stavrakopoulou’s buried secret was that God had a wife who was later edited out of the Bible. Now, once again, this is spun as something new. But again, it isn’t.

A quick reminder of the theme in the history books of the Bible: 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. The story these books tell is that the Israelites were a bunch of independent tribes who gather together under a leader in times of war. Eventually, they chose a king and briefly enjoy some success. However, the kingdom fragmented as they often did. In general, the Israelite kings worshipped the same gods as their neighbours. However, there was always a strand of opinion in Israelite society that insisted that they should worship only the one God Yahweh. With a few exceptions, most notably Josiah, the kings either continued in their polytheistic ways or hedged their bets by worshiping Yahweh, but not exclusively. That almost certainly involved marrying him up to a neighbouring fertility goddess. Only when the Israelite kingdoms were swept away by eastern invaders did the people, now rootless and kingless, become pure monotheists.

Now, this story simply comes from historians reading the Bible like any other ancient text. It seems quite plausible and isn’t that controversial among scholars. It is also nicely consistent with the archaeological record. A few of the characters named, including King David, King Omri and Baruch ben Neriah, have even turned up on inscriptions. The main argument is over the extent to which United Israel was anything like as impressive as the Bible says. Probably not.

So what is the buried secret? It seems to me that Dr Stavrakopoulou is an Old Testament Bart Ehrman trying to turn mainstream scholarship into something radical that is a serious problem for the Christian (and Jewish) faith. It’s neither and anyone who bothers read their Bibles would know this.

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Parish Notices

Five years after its inception, I have finally joined Twitter as DrJamesHannam. The reason for the "Dr" is that plain old JamesHannam had already joined. I've already been tweeting for the last few days.

Also, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution is published in the United States tomorrow. If you live elsewhere in the world (and know that you spell analyse with an "s" and not a "z"), then God's Philosophers was the original UK edition of this book.

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