Quote of the Day

Our glittering age of technologism is also a glittering age of scientism. Scientism is not the same thing as science. Science is a blessing, but scientism is a curse. Science, I mean what practicing scientists actually do, is acutely and admirably aware of its limits, and humbly admits to the provisional character of its conclusions; but scientism is dogmatic, and peddles certainties. It is always at the ready with the solution to every problem, because it believes that the solution to every problem is a scientific one, and so it gives scientific answers to non-scientific questions. But even the question of the place of science in human existence is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical, which is to say, a humanistic, one.

Owing to its preference for totalistic explanation, scientism transforms science into an ideology, which is of course a betrayal of the experimental and empirical spirit. There is no perplexity of human emotion or human behavior that these days is not accounted for genetically or in the cocksure terms of evolutionary biology. It is true that the selfish gene has lately been replaced by the altruistic gene, which is lovelier, but it is still the gene that tyrannically rules. Liberal scientism should be no more philosophically attractive to us than conservative scientism, insofar as it, too, arrogantly reduces all the realms that we inhabit to a single realm, and tempts us into the belief that the epistemological eschaton has finally arrived, and at last we know what we need to know to manipulate human affairs wisely. This belief is invariably false and occasionally disastrous. We are becoming ignorant of ignorance.

Leon Wieseltier
"Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture: A Defense of the Humanities"

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General Revelation and Science

One of the most frequent and consistent themes throughout the Bible is that creation and its elements reveal God's existence and nature. Numerous passages say that some of God's characteristics, such as his righteousness and faithfulness, are expressed in creation. Some say that virtually everyone has some knowledge of God, because nature overwhelmingly testifies to his existence and action. Long passages on this include Job 38-40, Psalm 104, and Acts 17:23-31. Shorter examples include Job 12:7-10; Psalm 19:1-4; Psalm 85:10-11; Psalm 97:4-6; Habakkuk 3:3; Acts 14:16-17; Romans 1:18-20; and many others. According to the entry for "Creation" in The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery:

The same view of creation that empties nature of divinity also makes it a revelation of God and leaves it filled with pointers to God. The fact that all things find their origin in the creative work of God means that everything, in some way, bears witness to the creation and is revelatory of the Creator. According to the Bible every rock and tree and creature can be said to testify of God, declare his glory and show forth his handiwork (Ps 8:1; 19:1; 104; 148). We might accurately speak of the creation as divine messenger (cf. Ps 104:3-4). (Italics added; cf. C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, pp. 69-71)

Or as the Belgic Confession, one of the first Protestant confessions written (in 1561), puts it:

We know him by two means: First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20. All these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse. Second, he makes himself known to us more openly by his holy and divine Word, as much as we need in this life, for his glory and for the salvation of his own.

This is one aspect of what is called "general revelation", that is, revelation that is available to all people in all times (another aspect being the human conscience). This contrasts with "special revelation" which is only revealed to some people in specific times (this would include the Bible and the life of Jesus). While a handful of theologians have tried to deny the doctrine of general revelation, such as Barth and some Dutch Reformed theologians, they did not do so because of the biblical evidence, but rather because their theological systems did not allow for any knowledge of God that does not come through special revelation. Their attempts to get around the numerous biblical statements that creation does reveal the truth about God to everyone who has ever lived are extremely forced, and represent a primary weakness of their otherwise brilliant theologies.

Here are the logical steps by which creation reveals God:

1. Creation reliably testifies about itself.
2. Therefore, creation reliably testifies about itself when it shows itself to be created and ordered.
3. Therefore, we can know from creation that there is a Creator and Orderer.

Point 1 must be true in order for point 2 to be true; or conversely, if point 1 were false, then point 2 would be false as well. Creation could not reliably testify about itself when it shows itself to be created if it didn't reliably testify about itself. The former (point 2) is a sub-category of the latter (point 1). Similarly, point 2 must be true in order for point 3 to be true. If creation did not reliably show itself to be created and ordered, then our belief derived from our experience with creation that there must be a Creator and Orderer would not be valid, since it would be based on unreliable grounds.

Now, Scripture only explicitly states point 3. But point 3 presupposes point 2, and point 2 presupposes point 1. Therefore, the idea that the interaction of everything in the universe points to God presupposes that every individual element of creation can be trusted to display the truth about itself. This extends to every level of creation, and thus is true of recent scientific discoveries unknown in previous times. For example, the incredible degree of fine-tuning that the universe must have in order for life to be possible was unknown for most of human history; the space-time density, for example, must be fine-tuned to within one part in 10¹²⁰ in order for any kind of physical life to exist. But the fact that this property wasn't even discovered until the 20th century doesn't mean that it doesn't show itself to come from God's hand and display his glory. In fact, the degree of complexity necessary for the occurrence of life is one of the most commonly cited evidences that the universe was made by an intelligent agent.

I should point out that this doesn't necessarily mean that we infer the existence of a Creator and Orderer from the order we find in nature. It can mean that, but it can also refer to the fact, as Alvin Plantinga points out in Warranted Christian Belief, that when we see a beautiful landscape we immediately and spontaneously form beliefs about God. Nature, then, doesn't have to function as a premise for an inference, but merely as the grounds for a belief, where "grounds" is understood simply to refer to the experience that produces the belief. In a similar way, when I see a tree in front of me, I spontaneously (i.e., non-inferentially) form the belief "There's a tree in front of me". The experience of the tree is the ground for the belief, but it does not function as the premise of an argument -- I don't infer the existence of the tree from the fact that I am experiencing it.

Part of the reason the doctrine of general revelation is interesting is because it seems to sanction physical science. Physics, chemistry, biology, and similar sciences are the systematic analysis of nature. Since nature is a revelation from God, these sciences are the systematic analysis of God's general revelation; in a similar way, theology is the systematic analysis of God's special revelation. Of course, the analyses may be flawed for any number of reasons, for both the scientist and the theologian. But this doesn't give us room to just reject them out of hand. It seems that the Christian is obligated, from the Bible itself, to accept the findings of science -- although not uncritically, of course. That's an important point: there is space for the believer to disagree with the prevailing interpretation of God's revelation, whether the interpreters are theologians or scientists. But this is an exceptional situation; it can't be appealed to in order to reject a source of revelation in its entirety.

One issue that general revelation raises is whether general revelation functions as an independent source of revelation, or whether it must be interpreted or filtered through the lens of special revelation before its testimony can be trusted. Some Christians, such as young-earth creationists, claim that the testimony of general revelation only holds when it is understood from within a biblical perspective. This is an attempt to avoid having to take contemporary science seriously by claiming that it is misinterpreting the testimony of nature.

I'll go over one of the primary texts for general revelation in order to respond to this charge: Romans 1:18-20. This passage begins with the following statement: "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness..." Some understand this last phrase to essentially overturn the doctrine of general revelation. While creation testifies to God, this knowledge is suppressed; and so whatever witness creation displays is ignored.

But what exactly is being suppressed here? Go back to the three steps by which creation bears witness: 1, it reliably testifies about itself; 2, therefore it reliably testifies about itself when it reveals itself to be created and ordered; 3, we believe in the existence and action of God because of this order. Do those who deny God's existence deny that the universe reliably presents itself to us (point 1)? Well, apart from a few philosophers and some insane people -- and yes, there is some overlap between those categories -- the answer is obviously no. Do they deny that the universe is ordered (point 2)? Well, again, apart from lunatics, philosophers, and lunatic philosophers, the answer is of course not. What they deny is that we can validly know God's existence from this order (point 3). In other words, the suppression that Romans 1:18 speaks of is not a suppression of the facts of nature, it is a suppression of the move from the facts of nature to the existence of a Creator: it is a suppression of the recognition that there must be a God. There is nothing in this passage, or any other passage in the Bible, to suggest that our observations of the universe can't be trusted to reveal the truth about the universe. Nor is there anything to suggest that most of our inferences from these observations can't be trusted. It's only when it points to God that it becomes suppressed.

The passage continues in verses 19 and 20 by stating "...since what may be known about God is plain to them [men], because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."

This passage makes several claims. Since I've already used numbers, here I'll use letters:

a. The testimony of creation is available to all people at all periods of human history. This is evident from the statement that this testimony has been present “since the creation of the world.” Therefore, this witness was available to people who lived in times prior to the Bible's composition, and who had no special revelation from God; as such, it was and is available to those in post-biblical times who lived in places where they did not have access to special revelation, as well as those who live in such places today.

b. The testimony of creation is a reliable revelation of God; or, in other words, creation reveals the truth about God. This is evident from the statements that creation's testimony reveals "what may be known about God", and that it reveals "God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature".

c. The testimony of creation is clear and understandable. This is evident from the statements that it has "been clearly seen", "understood", and "is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them".

d. God holds people responsible for their response to the testimony of creation. This is evident from the statement that they "are without excuse".

Thus, people who have never heard the gospel message and never read a Bible verse (point a) still have some true knowledge of God through his creation (point b) which communicates to them clearly and understandably (point c), and they are held accountable for their response to it (point d).

So, if people who have never received any special revelation from God are still given clear and true communication of who God is from creation and are held accountable for their response to this communication, what does it mean? It means that creation is an autonomous witness to God, and its testimony is valid independently of the Bible. It does not have to be interpreted through the lens of the Bible before it can be considered to be a valid and reliable revelation from God. The only alternative to this is simply unsound: if we deny this it could be claimed that, by not having access to special revelation, those who have not heard the gospel simply didn't have access to the right filter or lens or interpretative framework from which they could accurately interpret creation's testimony. But this contradicts the claim that creation's testimony is understandable (point c) to those who do not have special revelation (point a). Moreover, even if we ignore this for the moment, we have to remember that God is just. He would not hold people accountable for their response to something (point d) that he never gave them access to. In order for creation to be a true and trustworthy revelation to those who don't have any other revelation -- as the Bible says it is -- its validity must hold independently of the Bible.

So I think the Bible requires the believer to accept the testimony of creation, even when that testimony is a very specific article of knowledge or something only recently discovered. Since science is the systematic analysis of God's general revelation, the believer should accept the findings of science -- again, not uncritically. The believer can't say "I accept the Bible, but not science", since the requirement to accept the testimony of creation comes from the Bible.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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Lovejoy on Behaviorism

Arthur Lovejoy was an important philosopher in the early 20th century, and he presented something like Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, Lucas's Gödelian argument against physical determinism, and C.S. Lewis's argument from reason. Lovejoy's target was behaviorism, a view which reduces all human existence to responses to stimuli. Lovejoy presented his argument briefly in two essays, the first entitled "The Existence of Ideas" published in The Johns Hopkins University Circular 3 (1914): 42-99 (alternate pagination 178-235), which you can download here. He addresses the argument on pages 71-73 (207-209). The second was the essay "Pragmatism as Interactionism" (which you can read or download here) published for some reason in two parts in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 17 (1920): 589-96 and 622-32 (this journal later became The Journal of Philosophy). "Interactionism" is the claim that mind and body interact -- mental events causing physical events and vice-versa. The argument comes on pages 630-32 of part 2, where Lovejoy concludes,

Pragmatism insists that, whatever philosophical propositions be true, one class of propositions must certainly be false -- all those, namely, which either assert or imply that human intelligence has no part, or no distinctive part, in the control of physical events and bodily movements, in the modification of environment, or in the actual determination, from moment to moment, of any of the content of reality. That man is a real agent -- and that the distinctive quality of his agency consists in the part played therein by the imaginative recovery and analysis of a physically non-existent past and the imaginative prevision of a physically non-existent future -- these are the first articles of any consistently pragmatic creed. Such a creed is simply a return to sanity; for these two theses are the common and constant presuppositions of the entire business of life. Never, surely, did a sillier or more self-stultifying idea enter the human mind, than the idea that thinking as such -- that is to say, remembering, planning, reasoning, forecasting -- is a vast irrelevancy, having no part in the causation of man's behavior or in the shaping of his fortunes-a mysterious redundancy in a cosmos which would follow precisely the same course without it. Nobody at a moment of reflective action, it may be suspected, ever believed this to be true; and even the composing and publishing of arguments for parallelism is a kind of reflective action.

But Lovejoy finally wrote a full-length essay on his argument in response to an essay "Is Thinking Merely the Action of Language Mechanisms?" by the behaviorist John B. Watson published in The British Journal of Psychology 11 (1920): 87-104. You can read it online here. Watson's presentation is eerily similar to more recent defenses of eliminative materialism. For example, at one point (page 94) he contrasts the "introspectionist," that is, someone who believes that we can learn something about our thoughts by thinking, with the behaviorist who believes everything we can learn about our thoughts comes from the observation of the external effects -- the responses to stimuli, the external behavior.

The introspectionist hopes for a solution of the metaphysical problem through some mystic self knowledge. The behaviourist believes in no such transcendental human power. He himself is only a complex of reacting systems and must be content to carry out his analysis with the same tools which he observes his subject using. I cannot, therefore, agree with Mr Thomson that there is a mind-body problem in behaviourism. It is a serious misunderstanding of the behaviouristic position to say, as Mr Thomson does -- "And of course a behaviourist does not deny that mental states exist. He merely prefers to ignore them." He 'ignores' them in the same sense that chemistry ignores alchemy, astronomy horoscopy, and psychology telepathy and psychic manifestations. The behaviourist does not concern himself with them because as the stream of his science broadens and deepens such older concepts are sucked under, never to reappear.

Eliminativists say much the same: they claim their position is just the result of taking science seriously, and any denial of their position is because people don't want to give up some sacred aspect of life. Just like Watson, they compare their position with astronomy and chemistry and the denial of their position with astrology and alchemy. For an example, see here.

Lovejoy responded in "The Paradox of the Thinking Behaviorist" published in The Philosophical Review 31 (1922): 135-47, which you can read online here, although you'll have to scroll down to page 135. To summarize: the behaviorist claims that unvocalized thought is incoherent: laryngeal movements are all that occur. "Perceiving a thing, in short, is identical with the motion of the muscles involved in uttering its name." All "thoughts," therefore, can be completely explained in terms of the physical motions involved in speaking, without any reference to their contents, what the thoughts are about. And this would obviously include the behaviorist's thoughts about behaviorism. In this case, the behaviorist (along with everyone else) hasn't actually said anything, he's just made sounds with no meaning. In which case, the behaviorist thesis has not actually been put forward. We can only affirm behaviorism by tacitly presupposing that behaviorism is false, since it is only if it is false that the behaviorist thesis can have any meaning.

One objection raised against Lovejoy's argument, in that same issue of Philosophical Review is "Awareness and Behaviorism: Apropos of Professor Lovejoy's Critique" by Howard Warren (pp. 601-605). He suggests that Lovejoy begs the question by presupposing that the only way to make sense of the behaviorist's claims is if behaviorism is false. But of course, the behaviorist claims that there is another way to make sense of his thoughts, a way that is consonant with behaviorism. Again, this is very similar to one of the main objections that eliminativists give to the claim that eliminativism is self-defeating. The counter-objection is, as Nagel puts it in The Last Word,

the appeal to reason is implicitly authorized by the challenge itself, so this is really a way of showing that the challenge is unintelligible. The charge of begging the question implies that there is an alternative -- namely, to examine the reasons for and against the claim being challenged while suspending judgment about it. For the case of reasoning itself, however, no such alternative is available, since any considerations against the objective validity of a type of reasoning are inevitably attempts to offer reasons against it, and these must be rationally assessed. The use of reason in the response is not a gratuitous importation by the defender: It is demanded by the character of the objections offered by the challenger.

So I think Lovejoy's argument that behaviorism is self-defeating is sound. One can only accept behaviorism is true if one ultimately presupposes that behaviorism is false. As such, behaviorism defeats itself.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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A couple of things to listen to

Audible have brought out an audiobook version of the Genesis of Science.  This is very much a personal project of the narrator Rich Germaine, so I am very grateful to him for producing it.  Unfortunately, for licensing reasons, this version isn't available outside the US.

Also, I've recorded the Faith and Life Lecture that I was privileged to give at St Philip the Deacon Lutheran Church in Minneapolis last November (this was my first attempt at recording straight to tape, so I hope it sounds OK).  You can listen to it and all the other Faith and Life Lectures at their website.

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Birkbeck College, University of London

Very sorry to spam our own blog, but if any readers are graduates of Birkbeck College, please could they get in touch.  For those unhappy enough not to have studied there, Birkbeck is a constituent college of the University of London and specialises in part time courses and evening classes.  I took my MA in Historical Research there before moving to Cambridge for my PhD.

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Martyred in the USSR

Like many conservatives, I get annoyed at the free pass that the Soviet Union often gets in the history of 20th century tyranny.  Students think nothing of having a poster of Stalin on their walls.  And as I have blogged before, Stalinist academics somehow become national treasures.  A decade ago, a woman who delivered our nuclear secrets to the Kremlin was let off on the grounds she was getting on a bit.

So, it is good to note that people are still trying to put the record straight.  In particular, work is ongoing on a new film about the persecution of people of faith in the USSR.  The atheism of the communist system is an embarrassment for modern secularists which they deal with in various ways.  But most commonly, they just ignore it.  It is unlikely that atheism per se made the USSR even more murderous than it would have been anyway.  But there is little doubt that it did lead the communists to persecute believers simple because they were believers in a way that is little appreciated today.  

The film is called Martyred in the USSR and if you think it is a worthwhile project, you can find more details here (note the film sampler is pretty gruesome).

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Fair to Middlin'

I was feeling a little left out at the recent flurry of activity here, so allow me to point all Quodlibeteers to a recent article on Cracked: 6 Ridiculous Myths About the Middle Ages Everyone Believes. The comments are pretty good in general, but I encourage you good folk to further educate the masses.

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A Brown Land of Beauty and Terror

We British are obsessed with the weather.  If it rains in the summer (which happens a lot) we get depressed.  If it snows (which happens occasionally) the country grinds to a halt.  And it only takes a day of sunny weather for crack teams of photojournalists to start hunting for nubile young ladies cavorting in public fountains.

So imagine what life would be like if you transported a few million Brits to a country where they get some real extreme weather.  Or if that is too painful, you only have to look at Australia.

The bush fires raging across the southeast of Australia are a tragedy for all those involved, especially people who have lost their homes and livelihoods.  But conflagrations are not an unusual feature of Australian summers.  Every January, as I shiver is rural Kent, my in-laws in Perth report sweltering temperatures of 40 degrees.  Leave an Australian city and you’ll see a plethora of road signs warning of the risk of fire.  Of course, current technology, especially air-conditioning, makes extreme heat more bearable than it used to be.  But modern life has also made Australians forget how hostile the environment in which they live really is.

Australia is a vast desert island.  Its north coast is swamp, the east and southwest scrubland.  The area which is both reasonably temperate and fertile is a small proportion of the whole.  Admittedly, a thin veneer of Englishness overlays the desert (and it’s getting thinner as the country’s population gets more diverse).  Bondi Beach looks surprisingly like Bournemouth and some of the older buildings in Australian cities can seem jarringly familiar to a visiting Englishman. But they didn’t ship convicts to Botany Bay because it was a holiday camp. 

In the olden days, Australians faced the intimidating climate with a frontier spirit.  They knew that carving a life out of the unforgiving environment was tough.  The national character still reflects that. And, until recently, every Australian schoolchild used to learn Dorothea Mackellar’s poem My Country by heart.  

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains,

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel-sea,

Her beauty and her terror,

The wide brown land for me.

As so often, the poet gives us truth less varnished than any prose, despite being constrained by metre and rhythm.   During the Queensland floods on 2011, Clive James, an elderly Australian exile and no mean poet himself, wrote a beautiful article for Standpoint about this poem.  Those flooding rains, like today’s fires, were a terror for all concerned.  But, contrary to the media narrative, they were not a surprise or a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe.  They were the inevitable consequence of living somewhere as inhospitable as Australia, even if modern comforts had made people forget where they were.

Today, Australia is fabulously wealthy.  That means that floods, droughts and fires cause enormous monetary loss, even while the cost in human lives is mercifully low.  And with a population of 22 million, there are now many more people living in marginal areas where these three apocalyptic horsemen like to gallop.  Their wealth and healthy economy will allow Australia to recover quickly and perhaps, once again, forget what a miracle it is that they have been able to turn their country into the wonderful place it is today. 

By the way, this blog post isn’t about climate change.  But if it was, it would say much the same as this excellent piece from the Tom Chivers in the Telegraph.  

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The Magic of Reality

I expect many young people will have received a copy of Richard Dawkins's book The Magic of Reality for Christmas.  I even saw someone reading a copy on the tube this week.  This was the paperback which lacks the illustrations by David McKean.  This is a shame since the pictures were the best feature of the original hardback edition of the book.

The Magic of Reality is intended to provide a general introduction to science for teenagers.  They can learn a great deal about the state of modern science from reading the precise prose.  Unfortunately, the book also gives a very misleading impression of how science works and why it is so successful. Dawkins is especially inaccurate about the relationship between science and religion.

Each chapter begins with an account of some of the myths with which humans once explained different aspects of nature.  These myths are admirably wide ranging.  We learn of the Tasmanian legend in which the god Moinee crafted the first men with kangaroo's tails. The African sky god, Bumba, is invoked for vomiting up the sun.  Dawkins lavishes careful attention on the gory Aztec practices of human sacrifice.  He includes tales from the Bible, such as Adam and Eve, or Noah's flood, in this picturesque gallery of pagan mythology to make his unsubtle point that these stories are all alike.

Dawkins then asserts that a scientific view of the universe has displaced all the myths.  Humanity, he implies, has grown out of the fairy tales that gave comfort to its youth.  As a mature species, we have now learnt how to discover the truth - a truth that is just as exciting as the legendary tales it replaced.  Of course, we no longer directly blame angry deities for earthquakes and plagues.  But Dawkins is peddling a naive myth himself to explain the rise of science.  He imagines that the only requirement for a scientific worldview to take root was for man to look upon the world with eyes unclouded by religion.  This is not only patronising to just about every culture that has existed on Earth. Propagating his own myth means that Dawkins distorts the story of science even if he accurately describes scientific theories.  And more dangerously, he explicitly states that science is the only road to truth and that alternative modes of thought have no value.

The story of how modern science really arose shows the danger of uncompromising rationality and the importance of other ways of looking at the world.  In particular, religion had an essential role in scientific advance.  Even by the standards of their day, many great scientists were especially devout, if not always orthodox, Christians.  Johannes Kepler, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell were all unusually religious men.  And this ignores the host of Jesuit scientists, like Roger Boscovich, who have been written out of English-language histories of science. 

This should alert us to the risk that Dawkins's vision of science is overly simplistic.  Today, it is commonly believed that science was invented by pagan Greeks and held back by Christianity.  But Dawkins denigrates even the scientific achievements of ancient Greece.  For instance, he files the theories of the physician Hippocrates, which were the keystone of medicine until the nineteenth century, under mythology.  It is true that Greek science, Hippocratic medicine included, was very often mistaken.  But it had almost nothing to do with the legends with which we are all so familiar.  You don't find many mentions of Zeus or Apollo in the works of Aristotle.  Hippocrates specifically denied that the "sacred disease" of epilepsy had a divine cause at all. 

Aristotle's careful demonstrations, derived by a method of observation and logical analysis, meant that his science stood on a foundation of pure reason.  Dawkins should have been proud.  The trouble is, as Dawkins is well aware, Aristotle's science was almost completely wrong: wrong to say the sun and other planets orbit the earth; wrong to say that moving objects must be moved by something else; wrong to say heavier objects must fall faster than lighter ones; wrong to say vacuums are impossible; wrong to say the universe was eternal; and wrong to say animal species are fixed and unchanging.

All these mistakes are forgivable.  Aristotle did not fail to discover the workings of nature because he was careless or foolish.  His problem, like that of his fellow Greek philosophers, was too much reason and not too little.  He lacked the scientific method of experimentation and the radically irrational idea that we must test theories even if we already think they are right.  It is no good blaming religion or superstition for the Greeks' scientific errors.  And the central message of Dawkins's book, that modern science arose when faith was rejected for reason, is clearly wrong too.

Contrary to Richard Dawkins, Christianity has a central place in the rise of science.  And he is wrong to imply that modern science was something that happened when clever men and women started to investigate nature with their blinkers removed.  It was not the triumph of reason over faith.  Scientific advance requires us to look at the world in a very special way, and Christianity provided a reason to start doing it.  

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Creation according to the Greeks and Babylonians

In around 700BC, a shepherd left his flocks on the slopes of Mount Helicon in central Greece and travelled east.  When he reached the coast, he took passage to Chalcis on the island of Euboea, just off the mainland.  It was the first time the shepherd had been at sea.  At Chalcis, the funeral of a local king was taking place and, as part of the mourning rituals, athletes were competing in honour of the dead. As usual, alongside the sporting events, there was a poetry competition.  A later legend even pretended that Homer himself had entered the lists.  The shepherd from Helicon did take part in the contest and performed his poem about the origins of the gods.  His name was Hesiod and he won a bronze tripod.

The poem that Hesiod sang at the competition is today called Theogony.   Together with Homer’s epics, The Odyssey and The Iliad, it is among the earliest surviving Greek verse.  Theogony recounts how the gods were born, how they fought each other and how Zeus ended up as the leading deity.  The story is a Freudian nightmare of fathers eating their sons and sons mutilating their fathers. 

After a hymn of praise to the Muses, Hesiod began,

First came the Chasm, and then broad breasted Earth... Earth bore first of all one equal to herself, starry Heaven, so that he should cover her all about, to be a secure seat forever for the blessed gods.

Thus, for Hesiod the world just existed.  It was not created and had no creator.  The Earth simply sprang spontaneously into being from the emptiness of the Chasm (the Greek word is more usually translated 'chaos').  Here the gods, even the oldest, are of the world and exist only within it.  Zeus himself is among the third generation of the gods.  Despite being immortal and enjoying marvelous powers, he cannot claim any credit for making the world.  He is as much part of it as the humblest insect.  This must mean that the gods are comprised of the same stuff that the universe is ultimately made of.  As to what stuff that is, or where it came from, Hesiod provides no answer.  It is doubtful he ever thought to ask the question.

In the first episode of Theogony, the god Kronos castrated his father, Heaven, with a sharp-toothed sickle on the advice his mother, the Earth.  Admittedly, Heaven deserved it.  He had imprisoned all his previous children in a cavern deep within the Earth, which she found mightily uncomfortable.  

Kronos himself, now ruler of the gods, knew he was destined to be overthrown by one of his children.  He attempted to curtail this fate by swallowing them all at birth.  His wife, the goddess Rhea, grew angry with this behaviour, and substituted a large rock for her youngest son Zeus.  Kronos gulped down the boulder without even noticing the subterfuge.  Zeus was brought up in secret on the island of Crete.  On reaching maturity, he castrated Kronos and became king of the gods himself.  Zeus learnt that a son of his first wife, Metis, would replace him.  To avoid the fate of his father he swallowed his wife before she could give birth.  So far, this desperate measure seems to have worked.  Or at least, when Zeus was finally deposed, it was by the God of the Hebrews and not by the son of Metis.

All this raises very difficult questions about Greek religion.  If Hesiod and his fellow countrymen really did believe that the gods, and Zeus in particular, were fornicating patricides with a sideline in cannibalism, why did they worship them?  And if they didn’t believe this, how dare they say such things about the gods?  Because, with the exception of a few intellectuals, almost all Greeks did believe in the gods and worshipped them sincerely.  The amount of wealth that went into building temples and idols tells us that this was a genuinely religious society.  Hesiod was fully aware that Zeus had deposed his father and eaten his wife.  But he still expected that the king of the gods should be the guarantor of justice.

Classicists continue to argue over these issues.  Perhaps the answer can be found in the way that a monarch is regarded by his subjects.  They can distinguish between the sacred office of the king and the pathetic individual who might occupy the throne at a given time.  Kings demanded loyalty not because they were good, but because they were royal.  Maybe Hesiod worshipped Zeus because he was divine, not because he was Zeus.  And if he had been deposed by his son, as was foretold, Hesiod would have had no qualms in transferring his reverence.

Much of Hesiod's material for Theogony came from the mythology of other Middle Eastern civilisations such as the Babylonians.  But it is only since the original texts have been found in archaeological digs that scholars have realised the extent to which Greek myths have their roots in the East. 

The Babylonian creation myth preserved in these tablets is usually known as the Enuma Elish after its first two words.  For a long time, scholars assumed it must date from the early second millennium BC, making it far older than the Greek equivalent.  However, nowadays many prefer a date of about 1100BC. 

The Enuma Elish was primarily intended to celebrate Marduk, the chief deity of the Babylonians.  Nonetheless, it has some key similarities to the Greek story told by Hesiod.  Both the Babylonians and the Greeks imagined that creation sprang from pre-existing chaos or emptiness.  In the Babylonian cycle, the chaos was called Apsu and had some sort of evil personality.  His wife was a great monster called Tiamat.   

The initial creation is described as follows:

When the skies above were not yet named

Nor earth below pronounced by name,

Apsu, the first one, their begetter

And maker Tiamat, who bore them all,

Had mixed their waters together…

Then gods were born within them.

The reference to a mingling of waters sounds like some sort of sexual reproduction.  In any case, as a result, Tiamat had several children who resided inside her.  They started to make a racket and this led Apsu into a plot to murder the child-gods.  Tiamat helped their leader Ea to kill him.  The resemblance to the story of Kronos as told by Hesiod is obvious.  However, the motif of god slicing off his father’s genitals is found in a Hittite rather than Babylonian source.  These tales must have been carried westward by traders or settlers, perhaps, as Robin Lane Fox suggests, the Euboeans who hosted the poetry competition where Hesiod had triumphed.  As texts produced by the Hittites and other near eastern civilisations are translated and published, it has become clear that Hesiod, Homer and their fellow poets had a rich stock of traditions to draw upon.

Ea himself had a son called Marduk, like Zeus a third-generation god.  And like Zeus, Marduk did battle with the old gods, led by Tiamat.  After the battle, Marduk celebrated his victory by creating the earth and heavens from her carcass.  He then created plants, animals and mankind.  The Greeks would have instantly recognised the Babylonian legends as resembling theirs.  Both feature a plethora of gods engaged in an orgy of sex and violence.  But neither the Greeks nor the Babylonians claimed their gods created the universe.  Creation just doesn't seem to be a religious question.  No wonder the philosophers of Melitus stepped in.

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