The Pope knows?

Is it just me, or is there something distasteful about all those scientists falling over each other to applaud Pope Francis for his encyclical, Laudato Si?  Most of these folks doubtless think that the Papacy is a midden of medieval superstitions, but hey, if the Pontiff is prepared to endorse the consensus on global warming, he's our man. Behind his back, most of them are probably thinking of him in rather the same way that Lenin supposedly referred to communism's fellow-travelers and apologists in the West: a useful idiot.

We haven't yet seen anyone resort to misusing the concept of papal infallibility to bolster the case further, but I'm sure that's only a matter of time.

The prodigal son and the one percent

You don't read this blog for biblical exegesis, and nor should you.  But whether or not you have any religious affiliation, even if the only time you've crossed the portal of a house of worship was when your parents took you along for baptism or circumcision, you almost certainly know the parable of the Prodigal Son. (It's only in Luke's gospel; you can find it here).

If you've thought about that parable for more than a second, you've probably taken sides.  Are you with the father, who welcomes back his wastrel offspring, or with the prodigal's brother, who resents the treatment his "worthless" brother receives on his return to the family home?  Which side of that question you're on will largely correspond to whether you lean to the left or to the right politically.

All this is just to urge you to read a wonderful little essay by David Brooks of the New York Times, who riffs off the parable to draw some interesting and profound lessons about some of the key issues in modern politics, especially the inexorable increase in inequality.  If you're at all familiar with the NYT's politics, you won't need to read the article to know that Brooks sides with the father rather than the resentful son.

Whether or not you believe that the Bible is the word of God, Brooks offers up a useful reminder of its lingering historical resonance, at a time when a surprising number of evangelists have managed to convince themselves of the existence of something they call "the prosperity gospel". It's hard to read Luke that way. Did you notice that Brooks's title refers to the prodigal sons, plural?  That's not a typo.

Humpty Dumpty's physics lesson

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'

(Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass)

If you can get hold of the August issue of Scientific American, you really should take the time to read an extraordinary article by Meinard Kuhlmann, about sub-atomic physics.  (There's a link to a preview page here, but you have to subscribe to see the whole thing). Kuhlmann, who is clearly a Bear with a Very Large Brain, is a professor at the University of Bremen in Germany, and an expert in the philosophy of physics.  (Yeah, who knew, right?)

Kuhlmann effectively demonstrates that while the standard models of subatomic physics "work", nobody really understands them.  Indeed, even the sense in which they can be understood is difficult to grasp, because words are not used in the way we're used to.  For example, most laypeople's understanding of "particles" is,  Kuhlmann suggests, something like billiard balls caroming off each other.  But that's nothing like what the theorists now believe.  Equally, talking about "fields" makes most people think in terms of iron filings around a magnet, but the theory sees something quite different.  So when physicists talk about "particle fields", it's not at all clear what is meant, and it's certainly not what most laypeople assume.

If that's not enough for you, Kuhlmann then launches into a discussion of alternative ways of looking at reality.  At this point you may need a pot of strong coffee and a bottle of your favoured analgesic.  We learn about "primitive thisness", "state vectors" and "tropes", and we are told that although a vacuum contains an average of zero particles over time, at any given moment it's abuzz with activity.  We are also reminded that nobody ever sees particles -- they just observe their traces, and hope that those traces are where the model says they should be.  That casts a new light, at least for this ignoramus, on the recent "discovery" of the Higgs Boson.

Kuhlmann's underlying argument in all of this seems to be that as long as we don't understand our present theory, even if it "works", it's dangerous to press on into new fields such as string theory.  He wants the metaphysics, or the ontology, to catch up with the math.  And you can see his point -- as things stand, sub-atomic theory is almost as much a matter of faith as religion is. We may know much more than we used to, but we understand less.

I've written a few posts lately about physics, a subject of which I am largely ignorant, and I've started to wonder what it is that keeps getting me interested.  I think it comes back to this.  Decades ago a Cambridge economist, John Eatwell if memory serves, said something to the effect that "if the real world does not correspond with the economic models, so much the worse for the real world".  It was probably said tongue in cheek, but he was castigated for it anyway.  In modern physics, however, whether we're talking dark energy or primitive thisness, Eatwell would be a mainstream thinker.

Mr Yeats peruses the Rich List

A few weeks ago, the Sunday Times published one of those appalling "rich lists" that sends my blood pressure skyrocketing each year.  They chose to make it their main front page headline for the day, too: something to the effect that "UK's rich get even richer". Next to that was a political story under the headline "Tories fall to 8-year low in public support".  I was watching one of those "press preview" things on TV during the evening, and remarkably enough, neither of the two expert panellists sought to make any connection between the two stories, though that may have had something to do with the fact that one of them appeared to have indulged rather heavily in the "green room" before going on air.  Well, it was a Saturday evening after all.

There surely is some connection, though, isn't there?  We seem to be seeing a full-fledged shareholder revolt against "fat cat" pay in the UK.  Bob "shine on you crazy" Diamond at Barclays managed to trouser his bonus, at the cost of some embarrassment, but others, including Sly Bailey at TrinityMirror and the CEO at Aviva, have had to bow out in the face of shareholder wrath.  Bob and Sly and the Aviva guy may not be in the Abramovich/Mittal/Green stratosphere of wealth, but they're doing OK: newly-released data show that remuneration for FTSE-100 CEOs jumped more than 11% last year, while average earnings across the economy rose barely more than 1%.  "All in this together", is it?

It's not just in the UK that this is happening.  Even in the US, where greed is still mostly regarded as a virtue, eyebrows are starting to get raised by statistics showing a burgeoning wealth and income gap. Not so long ago, American CEOs used to earn about 40 times as much as their average employee; now it's closer to 400 times.  And there can be little doubt that the "throw the buggers out" trend in recent European elections, which has now claimed President "bling-bling" Sarkozy in France, has its roots in voters' sense that the wrong people are bearing the costs of fixing the financial crisis.

There are moral arguments to be made about all this, of course: it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to for a rich man enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and so on.  That sort of thing doesn't wash with most people in today's society,  sad to say,  but there are sound practical reasons to fret about the consequences of rising inequality.

Yesterday on CNBC's morning panel show, one gent (whose name I didn't catch) bravely argued the case that inequality in the US risks causing profound damage.  The regular hosts, who never met a plutocrat they didn't like, tried their best to talk him to a standstill, but he held his ground admirably.  His fundamental point was that if society becomes more and more polarised between rich and poor, then politics becomes more polarised too, until eventually you reach a point where it's almost impossible to agree on any moderate solutions.  You can see how that works in the results of the recent Greek elections.  Call it Yeatsian economics:

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity." 

(W. B. Yeats: The Second Coming, 1921)        

A further serious consequence of inequality is that it makes it ever harder to generate economic growth.  Putting "a chicken in every pot" will ultimately result in a much greater lift to GDP than building another yacht for Larry Ellison.  And growth is important.  When overall income and wealth are rising,  it's possible (though possibly ill-advised) for people to shrug wearily at the excesses of the plutocrats, but when ordinary people are feeling the squeeze, they get angry very quickly.  Then you get riots and looting, and you see headlines like  "Tories fall to 8-year low in public support".

Let's give the last word to Yeats and his wrist-slitting "Second Coming", with a question whose answer we can hope we never find out:

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" 

Dawkins invokes God, unsuccessfully

You'd need a heart of stone not to laugh. Richard Dawkins, the self-effacing scourge of believers everywhere, was on the radio this week arguing that, guess what,  religion no longer has a purpose.  Said he: “an astonishing number [of Christians] couldn’t identify the first book in the New Testament”.  For what it's worth, it's St Matthew's Gospel, but the interesting part is what came next. Dawkins's fellow-panellist was Giles Fraser, who was Canon of St Paul's Cathedral until he quit in a huff last year over the Occupy London protests. Here's a transcript, courtesy of Stephen Pollard in the Daily Telegraph:


Fraser: Richard, if I said to you what is the full title of The Origin Of Species, I’m sure you could tell me that.

Dawkins: Yes I could.

Fraser: Go on then.

Dawkins: On the Origin of Species…Uh…With, oh, God, On the Origin of Species. There is a sub-title with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, and the inadvertent invocation of the Almighty is a particularly pleasing touch. But without taking sides on the serious underlying issue here (I could, but I won't), just what was Dawkins trying to prove anyway?  I'd bet a tidy sum that most people think that Darwin's book is called "The Origin of the Species" (at least Dawkins got the first line of the title right).  I'd bet an even bigger sum that not one atheist in a hundred has read it, and a larger sum still that far fewer people have made it through any of the works of someone like Stephen Hawking than have read St Matthew's Gospel.  

Does Dawkins really mean to suggest that what's important and true should be decided on the basis of what people can easily recall?   If so,  St Matthew and the rest of the Bible (or the Torah, or the Koran) still have a pretty sizeable lead over string theory and the multiverse.

Doing God, in London and Beijing

Tony Blair's lacertilian* press secretary, Alastair Campbell, once remarked that the Labour government "didn't do God", even though Blair himself famously did, often giving the impression that his most controversial decisions had been taken after direct talks with the Almighty.

The problem with God, of course, is that whether you "do" him or not, he never seems to give up and go away.  Especially at the Christmas season,  He seems to bring confusion both to those who would rather not acknowledge even the possibility of his existence, and to those who aren't quite sure what to make of Him. Thus, in The Times for December 26, we saw a quite remarkable juxtaposition of stories.

The main headline on the front page of the paper was 'Archbishop under fire for "political" riot sermon'.  The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, had chosen to use his Christmas Day sermon to link last summer's riots in London and elsewhere with the activities of City speculators: "The most pressing question we now face, we might well say, is who and where we are as a society.  Bonds have been broken, trust has been lost....Whether it is an urban rioter mindlessly burning down a small shop that serves his community, or a speculator turning his back on the question of who bears the ultimate cost for his acquisitive adventures in the virtual reality of today's financial world, the picture is of atoms spinning apart in the dark".

Just a couple of weeks ago, PM David Cameron, who by his own admission "does God" a whole lot less than Tony Blair did, had taken it upon himself to call for a return to Christian values in Britain, calling on Archbishop Williams's Church of England in particular "to help shape the future of our communities".  Dr Williams may well have intended his Christmas sermon to take up that challenge; if so, he will have been disappointed by the reaction.  Though the government itself has refrained from commenting, a Tory MP, Gary Streeter -- who is, rather surprisingly in the circumstances, a Christian himself  -- pronounced that "The Archbishop of Canterbury is on safer ground when he sticks to moral and spiritual issues. He would be wiser to leave the politics to the politicians and focus on giving us much-needed spiritual leadership". Turn that on its head and it reads remarkably like an admission that there is no morality in politics, which rather proves the Archbishop's point.

The rest of the media paid little attention to this spat, preferring to focus on the Duke of Edinburgh's stent and the Downton Abbey Christmas special.  The fact that The Times made it the lead story for the day perhaps permits us to draw the inference that the paper agrees that Dr Williams and his ilk should butt out of politics.  This makes the editorial that appeared on the very next page of the paper all the more surprising.        

The editorial was titled "Darkness at Christmas: China's communists appear intent on snuffing out the growth of Christianity."  This is, as you would surmise, a robust criticism of the Chinese government's attitude to the rapid growth in  religious practice in the country.   A couple of extracts will give the flavour: "The party sees religion, and Christianity in particular, as a threat because it worries about the existence of a rival organisation whose members have a different loyalty and are guided by priorities set by others".  And "The real problem for China, as it was for the Soviet Union, is the growing cynicism and spiritual vacuum in public life.  This makes it increasingly difficult to underpin standards of ethics or to enforce respect for social norms".

Substitute Britain for China in that last quote, and it would have slotted seamlessly into Dr Williams's speech, whereupon The Times would presumably have seen fit to refute it on the front page!  There is, of course, an explanation for this glaring inconsistency:  The Times is now by far the most pro-Cameron newspaper in the UK, and seems increasingly unwilling to brook any criticism of him,  even from the head of the established church.      

* You can probably guess, but if you can't....look it up!

God let down by Tony Blair

A few weeks back there was a public debate in Toronto about the role of religion in public life. Speaking on behalf of God was former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair; opposing him was the writer (and sadly, current cancer victim) Christopher Hitchens. The BBC News channel chose to show the debate, with virtually no advance billing, early in the evening of New Year's Day. Shame, because it was well worth watching.

The participants offered an interesting contrast. One was an important political thinker, a former leftist yet a supporter of the Iraq invasion of 2003, and the author this year of a well-received autobiography with a slightly naff title*. The other was Tony Blair.

A vote taken among the invited audience after the debate showed Hitchens as the clear winner. Watching the broadcast, it was impossible to disagree. Blair's argument in favour of religion basically boiled down to a repeated assertion that religious people do good things for other people. Since nobody could deny that atheists and agnostics also do good things, it was hard to see what this was supposed to prove. Even the behaviour of the two participants worked in Hitchens's favour. When Blair was speaking, Hitchens took copious notes in order to frame his rebuttals, whereas when Hitchens had the floor, Blair sat smirking and gurning in his usual style.

A better debater might well have scored more heavily at Hitchens's expense, because his bog-standard modern atheism prompts many questions. For example:

- If it's laughably primitive to believe in heaven because nobody has ever seen it, how come it's at the cutting edge of science to believe in billions of parallel universes, or in dark matter and dark energy, all of which are equally unseen?

- How did consciousness evolve?

- Given that nature is driven by the survival of the fittest, where do human moral attitudes come from?

You, good reader, no doubt have your own ideas about these things, as do I. The sad part of the Hitchens-Blair debate is that because of Blair's inept performance, such questions were never aired.

* "Hitch-22". Blair's doorstopper was called "A Journey".

Hawking up the wrong tree

So Stephen Hawking has apparently convinced himself that something called "M-theory" explains the origins of the universe, without any need for intervention by God. It's a pity he didn't tell us this before all that money was wasted on the Large Hadron Collider. Who would have thought that all we needed was a pencil and paper, a very large brain, and the brass balls to peddle an embryonic collection of untestable ideas as a "theory of everything"?

Hawking's thesis has not exactly attracted widespread support -- and I'm not just referring to the inevitable rebuttals from religious leaders (of which Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's is, predictably, the best). Some of Hawking's theoretical physicist peers are fairly scathing too, with one speculating that the M in M-theory stands for "myth".

Some years ago, it was reported that one of Hawking's Cambridge colleagues was asked how it felt to work with the best physicist in the world. The response: "Best in the world? He's not even the best physicist in the college". I'm in no position to judge the truth of that, but it might be worth keeping it in mind as the hype, not unrelated to the publication of Hawking's new book next week, swirls on.

Casual infanticide

This week the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists published a report in which it asserted that foetuses in the womb are incapable of feeling pain until at least 24 weeks into the gestation period. On this basis, the College could see no reason to lower the UK's current 24 week limit for termination of a pregnancy (the highest such limit in Europe, incidentally).

Reaction from the anti-abortion side has (so far) reflected sorrow rather than anger, but the "right to choose" crowd has reacted with something close to triumphalism. I saw one "expert" on the BBC News saying that the possibility that pain might be felt by the foetus was irrelevant in all cases, since it would be perfectly simple to administer an anaesthetic before carrying out the termination! I didn't catch this gent's name, but I assume he has no problems with the truly loathsome practice of "partial birth abortion". (Do NOT open the link if you are squeamish).

Then it got worse. The Times saw fit to publish an article by one of its business writers, Antonia Senior, in which she argued that for sure, abortion is murder, but it's still OK to do it. Ms Senior states that women's rights are the only cause for which she'd be prepared to die. Although having a baby of her own has given her pause for thought, she still thinks that those rights trump all (and she means ALL) other considerations.

The Times has its paywall up now, but here's the final, shameful paragraph:

As ever, when an issue we thought was black and white becomes more nuanced, the answer lies in choosing the lesser evil. The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.

I assume the last sentence was lifted from an al-Qaeda brochure that Ms Senior just happened to be leafing through when she was thinking about abortion. Aside from helpless foetuses, just who else would Ms Senior think it was acceptable to kill in defence of her "rights"? The online respondents to the article, most of whom think that Ms Senior is wrong, and some of whom think she's off her trolley? The Pope? Me??

It's an appalling article, and I'm not sure how it got past the editors at The Times. It will be interesting to see what kind of response the paper allows onto its letters page in the next day or two.

The Hitchens Guide to the Galaxy

It's boom time for atheist polemics. Last year we had the implacable Richard Dawkins with "The God Delusion". Almost (and deservedly) unnoticed, the lightweight AC Grayling followed with "Against all Gods" (how can you take someone seriously if he lifts his title from Phil Collins??). Now Christopher Hitchens is weighing in with "God is not Great". There are three long extracts from the book on Slate.

I don't always agree with Hitchens's politics -- and judging from the fact that he has mutated from a leftie to something of a neocon, neither does he. But he is a good writer, and clearly a man of integrity. His anti-religious views are strongly held, and he is at his best when describing, in fascinating historic detail, how the message of the main religions may have been muddied by the intervention of man (though it's not clear why that's God's fault). But the main thing that emerges from this book, and from Dawkins', is that on the biggest question of all -- is there a God? -- any answer you choose can be no more than a matter of faith.

Others can and no doubt will carry out a complete exegesis of Hitchens' book. For myself, I was brought up short by the very first paragraph of the first extract on Slate. Hitchens outlines his four "irreducible objections to religious faith", of which the first is "that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos".

Whoa there big boy!! What exactly is the truth that you choose to believe instead? The latest version of the "Big Bang" theory that I recall reading suggested that the universe expanded from a blob of matter smaller than a tennis ball to its current size in less than a trillionth of a second, which certainly makes God look like a bit of a slacker for spreading the job out over six days, then taking a rest. Or maybe Hitchens is a fan of string theory, which is the current favoured way of unifying the laws of physics. The math of string theory only works if you postulate the existence of at least eleven dimensions, or large numbers of parallel universes. One practitioner denied that it was a completely untestable hypothesis, saying that it could be put to the test if one had a particle accelerator as big as the Milky Way! It's hard to see how choosing to believe this kind of stuff is any different from believing that God created the whole thing.

The simplest formulation I have ever seen for the most basic of metaphysical questions is "why is there something, rather than nothing?" Your answer to that, and mine, and Dawkins' and Hitchens', will never be susceptible to scientific proof. While you wait to find out the answer, whether you seek wisdom and solace in string theory or the Sermon on the Mount is entirely up to you.