Religious Relativism

Kevin never reads my blog. He may never do so because his computer was stolen by a burglar who gained entrance through a window.

He is a thoroughly decent human being – perhaps too decent; his decency inclines him to think the best of everybody and to respect every point of view. He is a Catholic and has been since he was a baby. He once studied for the priesthood but it didn’t work out. His teachers at Ushaw Seminary regarded some of his opinions as being ‘esoteric’.

We have just had an animated conversation on the phone. I confess that I brought it to an end, saying, ‘I can’t take any more of this.’ This has happened more than once.

As my myriad readers will be aware, I am somewhat preoccupied with Islam. I believe it is false, pernicious and essentially violent; it reflects the character of its founder. My beliefs occasionally creep into my conversation, for which I make no apology. Whenever I advert to deficiencies in Islamic faith, culture and practice, Kevin is very quick to point out that Catholics have done bad things, a point I always concede. I could not be a Catholic, however, if I thought that Catholics doing bad things could justify those bad things by reference to Catholic teaching. The Inquisition and clerical abuse cannot be justified by Catholic teaching – any attempt to do so violates Catholic teaching. When I speak of the Inquisition I am thinking of the violence and terror of that institution, not of the laudable intention of identifying and condemning falsehood. The Church has every right to identify and condemn heresy. When it behaves in a theocratic way and burns heretics, it exceeds its mandate. And when it comes to clerical abuse of children, I applaud the state punishment of guilty priests.

Kevin believes, and I don’t think I am distorting his views, that Jesus of Nazareth was a great religious teacher – so was the Buddha. I dare say he would go further and say, ‘so was Mohammed.’ He is respectful of Hinduism.

Now I, on the other hand, can be respectful of the Buddha and of Hinduism, though not (any longer) of Mohammed and the Koran. I find it difficult to declare that Jesus was a great teacher. The teachings of Our Lord (some of them) are indeed reflected in other religions. The central dogma of Christianity is that Jesus is God, that, in Jesus, God became man and redeemed us from sin by his death and resurrection. No other religion makes such an outrageous claim.

The Gospel of St John is all about the identity of Jesus. St Paul bangs on about it incessantly. It would be wrong to dismiss the teachings of Our Lord as unimportant – what God says cannot be unimportant. But Christianity is a story (not fiction but a story nonetheless): God created the universe and everything in it, including us; we fell; because we are fallen we cannot redeem ourselves; God, in the person of Jesus, redeemed us by dying and by His resurrection. All we have to do is to say,’ Yes, please.’

Christianity is uniquely historical: Creation – Fall – Incarnation – Crucifixion – Resurrection – Redemption. When we say the Creeds, we are telling this story: CFICRR! That’s it! Non-Christians do not buy the story. Some non-Christians have good advice about how to behave.

For Christians the Story is IT. Kevin is embarrassed by my privileging of this story over the teachings of other religions. He thinks it is arrogant. I just think it is TRUE. If it is true then only Christianity is the truth.

Islam is a grotesque mish-mash of Judaism, Christianity, Mohammed’s self-esteem and some other pre-islamic stuff about Djin and what-not. It has been largely catastrophic in its consequences, though I do not deny that some Muslims have sometimes behaved better than they otherwise would have because of their belief in God.

We Have Islam to Blame for More than You Think

Getting to this position has taken me a long time. It has taken the activities of IS, The Islamic Republic of Iran, Boko Haram and Anjem Choudary. When I was a teenager, I was cross when my girlfriend was groped in Cairo; I thought then that Muslims qua Muslims had a bad attitude to women – particularly non-Muslim women. I progressed to the attitude that Muslim attitudes are fundamentally flawed. As you will see, I have gone farther than that.

Let’s start with the obligatory admission that Catholics have done bad things and that Catholics do do bad things. Oh, and the other obligatory admission that not all Muslims are bad people.

I think that the Inquisition was worse than the Crusades, even though far fewer died. I hate theocracy (whether Christian or Muslim).  To repeat myself, the promises are false and the consequences are diabolical – a word I do not use lightly. Catholics believe in the Devil. We listen to the news. Original Sin is apparent in every item.

Christian Theocracy would create Hell on Earth. Muslim Theocracy is creating Hell on Earth wherever it is being tried.

Our Lord famously said, ‘Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s’. In my view this is equivalent to, ‘My Kingdom is not of this world.’ God’s Kingdom is not a huge all-encompassing state – it exists in each and every Christian heart. Islam always and everywhere aspires to be an all-encompassing state. Islam is not so much a religion as a socio-political system with a dollop of religious teaching mixed in. It has resisted all reform for centuries.

The Crusaders did bad things. On the way to the Holy Land, they killed Jews and Christians and Muslims. But, they believed that they were waging a defensive war – and they were! The Middle East was Christian in the seventh century. It was conquered by Islam. The Crusaders were fighting back. Would that they had succeeded.

Islam’s victories made Islam stronger, politically and economically. Jiziya, the tax paid only by non-Muslims was, unsurprisingly, effective. With every conquest, the Jiziya made the conquerors richer and more militarily triumphant.

Some historians would have us reflect on the so-called Dark Ages. Some of them (the dim ones) would blame Christianity for the darkness. Christian Monasticism preserved much of Classical learning. Christian Monasticism has much for which to be thankful – in technology, in agriculture and in education. Henry VIII destroyed so much of what the monks had created.

Meanwhile, the Muslims were busy creating the Caliphate. Yes, the Muslims had a sort of theology. But compare their theology with that of Augustine and Aquinas. The Caliphate was all about establishing Sharia. In England our forefathers were establishing common law. We were rejecting the idea that law was the King’s law – it was the Law of the Land. Islam clings to the idea that Sharia is God’s law. We Christians do not deny that God tells us how to behave. We do deny that God tells us how to organise society. The conflict is more Christianity versus Sharia than Jesus versus Mohammed. At the same time, we believe that Mohammed is a false prophet and that Jesus is The Logos.

Also meanwhile, Christendom was threatened by Islam. The current threat is not new. Ferdinand and Isabella drove the Muslims out of Spain. Imagine the history of the last five hundred years if we had had a large and threatening Islamic state on Europe’s southern border. There might not have been an Enlightenment (a mixed blessing); there might not have been a Scientific Revolution. Muslim theologians have explicitly denied causality. Nothing happens, according to Islam, without the Creator willing it (inshallah). Perhaps this is why muslim scientists in muslim lands do not get Nobel Prizes for Physics and Chemistry. Aquinas tells us that The Almighty grants to creatures ‘the dignity of causality’. The Islamic position is confused and contradictory.

The Scholastics in Salamanca, sneered at for debating angels and pinheads, preached against the conquistadors for trampling the rights of non-Catholic South Americans. Mohammed ordered the decapitation of 800 people in one day for denying his status as ‘God’s Messenger’. He is exalted as the perfect example of conduct.

All the things that we deplore about Islam are explicitly sanctioned in the islamic texts. Atheists and Muslims pretend that Jewish violence in the Old Testament similarly sanctions violence. This is a gross misreading.

Causality & Consciousness

Causality

Oh dear, I seem to have developed a penchant for rabbiting on about really, really tough subjects.

Aristotle was big on causality – the answer to the question ‘Why?’ He defined four different types of cause. Back to Aristotle in a bit.

Why does water boil when it is heated? A reasonably sophisticated approach would start with what water is. When heat energy is applied to a volume of water, the molecules become ‘excited’ and bounce off one another until the water changes state – from a liquid to a gas. Why do water molecules behave in this way? I’m getting out of my depth; but I’m sure scientists have an answer to this and to questions I have not thought to ask.

Why do apples fall from trees? All material bodies are attracted to each other by the force of what we have called, since Newton’s day, Gravity. The earth and the apple attract each other. What else do we know about Gravity? We know that the force of attraction is proportional to the masses of the bodies and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Anything else? Well, the force of gravity is defined as: F = mg, where m is the mass of the body and g is a constant vector with an average magnitude of 9.81 m/s2. Why not a nice round 10.00 m/s2? Science has no answer to this question. Don’t blame Science. It is scientists themselves who tell us that Science has no way of knowing. It’s not a scientific question.  And yet Dawkins declares that the existence of God is a scientific question.  Is this Dawkins being silly? God is a scientific question – Gravity is not? Gravity is simply one of the givens Science has to work with (the speed of light is another). We revere scientists for their discoveries. When they go beyond Science they become less reverend (less deserving of reverence).

The Why of Gravity is one of the whys to which there is only one type of answer: What is Gravity for?

Thinking about Consciousness

It makes your head ache, doesn't it? Defining it is a nightmare. It’s one of those things that we think understand, like ‘time’; but when asked what it is, we are stumped.

It seems to me, and I’m about to reveal depths of naivety here, that consciousness is always about something. I am conscious of a sound or a smell. Sometimes I even become conscious of being conscious of something. I can become conscious of my own existence. (Cogito ergo sum). There is a deal of ‘intentionality’ about consciousness. Intentionality is ‘the quality of mental states (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes) which consists in their being directed towards some object or state of affairs.’

I'm going to do more work on Aristotle. I promise.

The Argument from Personal Incredulity
and
The Infinite Improbability Drive

Two intellectual Titans to thank for the inspiration for this blog: Richard Dawkins and Douglas Adams. Dawkins doesn’t like the API but he must be credited with naming it. Adams invented the IID. As Will Smith says in Independence Day, “I’ve gotta get me one of these!” Another useful bit of kit is Bill Occam’s famous razor.

Imagine a ruler 19 billion light years in length, marked at one inch intervals. That’s a long ruler. Somewhere between 0 and the other end of the ruler is a number which describes the strength of Gravity. It has got to be where it is (not an inch each either way): otherwise Gravity will be too weak or too strong to permit a star forming universe to come into being. Physicists tell us that nothing in Science requires Gravity to have this value. It is the factory setting. Prof Dawkins and his ilk don’t believe that this setting was chosen intentionally. I apply the API: You have got to be kidding, right?

I understand that there are quite a lot more factory settings that precisely meet the requirements of a life-producing universe and would forbid a life-producing universe if they were greater or smaller by a hair’s breadth. Gravity alone will do. The Universe was designed.

The cell is the irreducible unit of life. It is packed with nano-machines and encyclopaedias’ worth of instructions on how to build them and operate them. The API tells me that cells didn't construct themselves without a deliberate plan. Materialists tell me that they did. Cells were designed.

I have kept this deliberately simple. For much more detail, I refer you to Michael Denton’s Nature’s Destiny and The Privileged Planet by Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez. Both books rely on the accumulation of data (much as The Origin of Species did).  My challenge is to those who would call me unscientific or antiscientific simply for applying the API. Plenty would. But their objection to my position is not scientific: it is metaphysical. All explanations, they say, must rely on physical causes only. Where they dredged up this rule is a mystery.

The IID, featured in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is a wondrous device. When Improbability is set to MAX, anything can happen. Dawkins must have one.

There may not be any way to resolve the conflict between the Infinite Improbability Drive and the Argument from Personal Incredulity. Unless it is this: one comes from a novel; the other comes from common sense.

Sam Harris Walks on Water

I’m tired of saying that I like this man. I do. He and I think the same(ish) about Israel and guns. He believes in absolute moral standards, which he thinks can be derived from observation (Science). I believe in absolute moral standards but I don’t believe they can be derived from Science.

I have just ordered his latest book (having been promised a superior frisson); I look forward to reading it.

While waiting for the delivery of the book I searched for him on YouTube.  He spoke about Free Will. He says there is no such thing.

By denying Free Will you have to re-define English. You have to be a part of the Ingsoc project (1984, George Orwell). You have to extirpate whole categories of English words. The following words (and many others) are now meaningless:

Responsibility
Blame
Approval
Indignation
Resentment
Approbation
Praise
Admiration
Wickedness
Virtue
Admirability
Sin

I would have to stop thinking altogether. I’d have to stop deploring Jihadi John and the decapitation of Western journalists and aid workers. But if you think there is no such thing as Free Will, JJ is no more to blame than bacteria – and I don’t think we can blame them.

I do have opinions about Scottish Independence. But if I bought Harris’s view, I would have no way of distinguishing between ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. Well, perhaps I would; but I would be left with one group of Scots who have no choice but to vote ‘Yes’ and another group who have no choice but to vote ‘No’.

Deny Free Will if you must. But then continue living your life. Everyone who denies Free Will always behaves as if they have Free Will. If you act, you affirm (if not Free Will) but your belief in Free Will.

Fr Robert Barron on Scientism

I have alluded to this guy more than once. He is very good indeed.

Scientism is the view that Science is the only valid way of understanding the world. It falls apart as soon you realise that this view is not scientifically defensible.

Fr Robert Barron on Scientism

Depressing Stuff

I have, at Sam’s suggestion, been checking out Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation. He does seem to be a ‘good guy’. He has abandoned the radical Islam of his youth but this has drawn down the wrath of other Muslims.

If all British Muslims were of his kidney, we would have little, if anything, to fear from them. Alas, this is not the case.

Here is a clip of a ‘conversation’ on Newsnight between Nawaz, Paxman and Anjem Choudary.

Choudary has an extraordinary ability to say his thing without ever answering questions. This is an impressive technique but it quickly becomes counterproductive. It’s difficult to imagine him ever persuading anyone who doesn’t already agree with him. Quite boring, really. What do you think?

Nawaz and Choudary on Newsnight