Posts Tagged atheist
Epigenetics and the Guardian, or what happens when science becomes religion?
There was a fascinating piece in the Guardian today by Oliver Burkeman entitled “Why everything you’ve been told about evolution is wrong“. Essentially a review of the ideas in a book by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini “What Darwin got wrong” and another “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong” by David Shenk (although the immediate riposte by Adam Rutherford said Burkeman had not been tough enough in critiquing the books), the article asked what if – 150 years after the theory of evolution was published – what we think we know about it actually inaccurate?
Burkeman stresses that while what’s being talked about in terms of epigenetics is not new, and is not a filip to creationists, but that it is likely to drive evolutionary biologists mad. And when you read the comments below his article on the Guardian online, how right he was. What vitriol! What scathing nastiness – at one point a G2 subeditor intervened to point out that the article had in fact been read by two scientists with phDs prior to publication – and even this was attacked.
Rutherford attacks him for the Darwin Was Wrong type headline.
But Burkeman’s article basically says that – Darwin knew he was starting the process of understanding the world in a new way, not delivering a complete package that would remain untouched.
Reading the article, it seems to me that the point Burkeman is making is not primarily that Darwin Was Wrong, but that a simplistic understanding of popular science means that the general public’s understanding of genetics affects means that something like learning more about epigenetics means that thinking about its implications feels revolutionary (probably doesn’t if you are a geneticist scientist, but most of us are not). In that way, he is not, as Rutherford suggests, saying that evolutionary biological science cannot already encompass the idea that modifications to the structure of DNA changes its behaviour. He is saying that the public understanding of evolutionary biology is unlikely to be able to cope with such an idea in its simplistic understanding of genetics.
Burkeman’s carefully balanced article is quick to point out that it only the simplistic understanding that is overthrown. He points out that we are taught to believe that genes are permanent and unalterable other than by random mutation.
We’re further taught that natural selection is from a random selection of these potentially randomly mutated genes and cannot be affected by environmental factors. And we’re told that it is simply not the case that certain genes are more likely to be naturally selected to give the next generation a survival advantage, but actually that those genes that are passed on to offspring may or may not confer advantage to an individual offspring, randomly, and that offspring is more likely to have a “better” set of genes for the environment in which the offspring later finds itself and from which their offspring in turn will be produced (the less well adapted for the environment offspring die out).
He uses incredibly derisory language about pro-creationist author Ann Coulter but noted that her comment that treating survival as the only measure of fitness in “survival of the fittest” was effectively a tenet of faith in the American scientific community ”perhaps uniquely among all arguments ever made by Coulter, feels persuasive” (you’d think he’d endoresed her as a champion of evolutionary biology if you only read the comments…)
He admits that it’s possible that Fodor’s thesis (essentially that not every trait a creature possesses is necessarily adaptive, that pop-Darwinists separate traits into those that are selected randomly and those that are selected for their usefulness, but that this can’t be the case because selecting for implies some sort of consciousness in the process) might be nonsense, and even points out that natural selection is
probably not a bankrupt concept, as Fodor claims. But nor should laypeople assume that it’s self-evidently simple and exhaustively true.
And basically, I’m with Burkeman in not being sure that everyone understands that it’s not about “selecting for” i.e. that there is something wrong with the idea that “science proves that polar bears that have white fur because they live in a place where passing on the white fur gene is advantageous”. (NB that’s white meaning colourless, in the sense that the horrible “grey” hairs I have are not really grey but colourless and only appear grey against the lovely brown ones that remain, really weird that the commetns board went wild on that one…)
But even if I underestimate the great British public’s depth of understanding of genetics, it seems that, guess what? It may all be a bit more complicated than that.
How do those that believe we simply pass on our genes and that the circumstances are pitiless, blind and indifferent explain the bred-for-generations scatterbrained mice put in a stimulating environment and producing later generations of offspring with superior memory skills even though the offspring are not kept in the stimulating environment? Surely that shows that how the grandparent mice were nurtured affects the nature of the later generations (or were those grandparent and parent mice demonstrating nurturing behaviour learned from their environment in raising the younger generations? Some how I can’t think that the experiment included giving the chance to the mice to practice their parenting skills and to encourage the baby mice to do braintraining exercises…)
Take the issue of viruses. Viruses seem to play a role in affecting organisms at a genetic level too, not just genes. We may all be a bit more interconnected with other species and other organisms than we perhaps thought.
Rutherford says that knowing this enhances evolutionary theory, rather than contradicting it. It probably does, if you have a deep enough understanding of it.
But this in itself raises a question about whether we are simply the product of our genes which are unconsciously fulfilling their purpose (selfishly, to be replicated) and morality is therefore something that we invent for ourselves and therefore timebound and relative. If viruses affect our genes and their likelihood of being passed on, then restricting the likelihood of viruses that could impact negatively on future generations might be important.
And more widely, if environmental factors affecting the genes that our offspring inherit could include the learning that we undertake as well as our diet, our stress levels and more, then the political and social case for combatting poverty, educating to the very highest standard possible and a whole range of policies need real reconsideration.
Nurture could be affecting nature.
Or is this a case of a little knowledge being dangerously over interpreted?
So it’s the common misuse of the genetic evolutionary story to make pronouncements on moral behaviours (ach, well, men are more prone to sleeping around because you can’t overturn milennia of evolution) and, similarly, the apparent eagerness of some of the high priests of the Darwinian scientific atheistic faith group to treat each of these pronouncements as another nail in the coffin of any theist worldview that Burkeman was criticising.
But Rutherford’s response is worth considering a bit more too.
He seems basically to be saying that by even daring to talk about Fodor’s book as containing interesting ideas that – to the general public with a superficial understanding of genes and evolution rather than deeply knowledgable evolutionary biologists – might seem “mindblowing”, that Burkeman is boosting the case of creationists.
Utter rubbish.
I’ve heard that sort of argument before.
Usually from fundamentalist creationists themselves, to whom the sort of stripped back New Testament matters more than Leviticus, no death penalty, gay life partnerships are a good thing Christianity that Protestants in Europe increasingly tend to believe in is anathema.
Or from believers or clergy that say that that women priests are against women’s nature and that Jesus would not have wanted them.
It’s basically saying that unless discussions on issues that you may be feel are already settled are headlined “Why the people raising about this are credulous fools and don’t understand why we’ve proved that our view is right” then they are implicitly condoning the subject of the discussion. You’re either completely with us, or you’re against us.
Well, ok. Actually a little bit of me has some sympathy.
If you accept that for some people evolutionary biology is in fact a belief system, and that belief systems are both simple on the surface and quite complex, and that they matter to believers because they are true and the basis on which you build your life, then you can begin to understand the somewhat agressive approach that believers can sometimes take when someone misunderstands the more difficult concepts.
As a Christian, it worries me that people profess Christianity, but don’t actually seem to understand it.
If my faith is just about a sky god, and that if you live a good life you’ll go and live with him forever and see everyone that’s died before you again, then a huge number of people are Christian.
But that’s a simplified version that makes no attempt to understand Jesus’s death and ressurection and why it happened, and what it means for us in terms of how we get to spend eternity with God and what being good actually means. People don’t often really know about the age of the gospels, the reality of crucifixtion on a human body, the fulfillment of the Jewish law… and without all that stuff, you either have a weak or a bad God not worth worshipping.
It worries me, because it’s important that people know so that they have the chance to accept Jesus’s gift to us, but it doesn’t anger me as it often does really dogmatic Christians (and yes there’s a fair few out there).
I think it is important to discuss, to debate, exegesis or midrash has long been part of the religious tradition of the Abrahamic faiths (I may have mentioned this before…). It means engaging with believers to sort out what you believe, discussing new ways of looking at it, new ideas and evidence.
But these days it probably also means engaging with non-believers, people of other faiths, some of whom you may find common cause with on some points but accepting that on some you probably won’t. But usually you can try to end up in a place where you can have a discussion and not just hurl insults at each other – call it interfaith dialogue if you must.
Science also has a way of doing this – when a new discovery is made that challenges the old, it is examined (in journals, in the press, in debate, in books) and eventually, if robust enough the old goes, or is adapted to accept the new and so the new becomes the norm. In that old John Maynard Keynes quote that I love you can sum it up as:
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
But Rutherford concludes:
Unfortunately though, to the knowledgeable, it is a disappointing combination of at best misleading distortion, and at worst plain wrongheadedness. Now we have to clean up the mess.
Believe me, people of other faiths know this too. It’s how most Christians feel about the God Delusion which presented not only a distortion of our beliefs but old discussions as if they were new and knock down arguments.
But then we also know that Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship with God.
And evolutionary biological atheism is in the eyes of its believers not a religion either, it’s science.
But it’s funny how the language is so similar, don’t you think?
Chaos, meaning and patterns in the randomness
(image c/o www.coolmath.com)
I don’t know if you have managed to catch the BBC4 programme the Secret Life of Chaos, fronted by Jim Al-Khalili, a lecturer from my alma mater…if you didn’t you missed a treat. A truly thought provoking piece of TV and one that makes you question everything you know.
For me, this programme had the appeal that sci fi had as a teenager. And when you get down to how to find order in chaos and fractals, then it’s pushing all the right buttons to get your mind buzzing. Al-Khalili makes great use of Mandelbrot pictures to explain chaos and self-replication. And the pictures are truly incredible – he noted that Mandelbrot’s fractals had been called the “thumbprint of God” because of their infinite complexity, but zooming into each piece of the Mandelbrot patterns to find yet more tiny versions is amazing. You can make you own with the www.coolmath.com fractal generator, of course…
And that chaos, far from being random, is a pattern repeated again and again throughout nature. The programme illustrated this with examples of all sizes, from coastal erosion to bird flight to the construction of our own lungs.
Al-Khalili said that can use chaos theory therefore to show that complex can be the result of simple – branching over many generations leads to greater and greater complexity.
This was presented as though it was thought to be a revolutionary idea.
Actually anyone in a bureaucratic office environment knows that must be the case – a simple instruction from on high to do X results in a number of people needing to talk to other people , making arrangements, using different pieces of technology, attempting to balance different things that are affected by that simple command to “make it so”. Of course it is just possible that our brains have evoled in such a way as to make the simple complicated…
To illustrate that evolution is the tool that best demonstrates this repetitive pattern and branching, the programme used the model of computers that evolve their own programming. The computer was programmed to get some virtual robot legs to get up and walk and then move a body. If the effort succeeded that model was allowed to “breed” giving birth to the next generation of model and within 5 generations there was a notable improvement in getting the robot walking, but then left to run the programme enabled many amazing things to happen, illustrated with beautifully programmed robot bodies wrestling and slamming into walls etc.
The interesting thing here was that the computer itself programmed amazing things that no human programmer would have done. But to me that was not the only interesting thing. The analogy made was that this is evolution in action, the random mutations that give advantage leading to improved versions (with no value judgement of what improvement means). But that’s not the case, is it?
The programme was set up with a purpose (to see what a computer could do with self-evolving programming), the computer was given a set of simple but clear instructions by a human programmer (find which models are successful in achieving an aim and when you find them, breed them to create the next generation to model evolution). It was not, in the words of Bill Bryson “nothing, which exploded”, the programme was programmed into the computer like a message in its DNA. So basically it was all set in train by an intelligent designer. Oh.
Now you know I’m no creationist – I understand that the Bible is a document formed of the writings of many different individuals over a long span of history but with a common unifying theme and “God breathed” message.
I have no problem with God so loving the world that he set it to run and develop through evolution and on discovering that free will meant sometimes his creations deliberately choosing imperfectly, showing that although we’ve corrupted what he’s intended for us but that he loves us anyway and if we ask him wholeheartedly to, the price of our wrongdoing is paid and he forgives us. But I’ve no truck with the sort of creator Terry Pratchett sketches out, adjusting the wings of insects or giving elephants wheels.
Does chaos theory and fractal maths mean there’s no room for God the programmer?
More of this in a minute.
But before I get too complicated myself, there’s a few things that this truly interesting programme raised for me that I’d like to put out for further thought and discussion:
1) ultimately the question of where we come from has one of two answers: something must either come from something (God made it, ex deus), or from nothing (it just happened, ex nihilo). Knowing the tools by which the changes happen doesn’t affect the need to know and understand this;
2) I’m still not clear, no matter what the level of complexity that can arise from the very simple, how life can come from this self-replicating process. Despite Frankenstein being so incorporated into our outlook that some forget it’s fiction, and despite the attempts to create life in a test tube (though not with the gases that were around at the time that life is thought to have started) we still have not managed to create life from scratch and nothing in this programme showed how inanimate dust from an explosion went from inanimate to self-replicating. To me, know that complexity comes from simplicity does not change this question of how life comes to exist;
3) As a knockdown “proof” of evolution as the only answer to the “how” question, as set out above I’m not sure what the “evolving computer programme” actually shows… something that’s come from the evolutionary process uses it’s mind to create a computer that responds to programming by evolving it?
4) then there’s the problem, as always, of Jesus.
And it comes down to this – either he did what we think he did (and I’ve gone into this at length in other posts), or he didn’t.
If he didn’t, then fair enough, let’s go with the fractal mathematics and the science of patterns explains chaos and the purpose of life is to self-replicate with meaningless mutation occasionally lending advantage. I personally find this bleak, depressing and unconvincing. It means the only answer to “why” is “it doesn’t matter, it’s just because”, that the genes are in control and that our brains have evolved to ask “why” without even a genetic advantage through learning. And I know bleak doesn’t mean wrong just because it’s not a nice thing – I just wonder how people that seriously believe that this is thecase get out of bed in the morning…
But if Jesus did what Christians think he did, then we’ve a responsibility to look at what he said and did, to understand that there is a personal and loving God who responds to prayer but nevertheless is unwilling to catch every sparrow or aeroplane.
This is not a comfortable concept for some people – for example Eddie Izzard contends that God can’t exist because otherwise he’d just flicked off Hitler’s head. But Christians say that God loves us and gives us choices - we say that he relies on human agents to challenge evil because otherwise we’d be puppets so the God that we worship expects us to come up with ways of overcoming evil without him intervening as directly as he had to in the past. I like the threading a needle analogy that Lee Strobel tells to explain this point (the daughter of an interviewee wanted to learn to sew, but she keep stabbing herself in the finger while trying to thread a needle, but he resists the urge to just take over and do it for her – she needs to learn to do it herself and when she does the triumph and pride in her newfound ability is worth so much more, and of course equips her with a new life skill).
It’s the mad, bad or God dilemma. Again.
But while fractals help us explain chaos (and also look pretty) this reductionist approach to the complex world around us doesn’t help us think about this so well documented, so hugely interpreted event, and what is pretty much THE decision that needs to be come to in life.
I guess what it’s saying is that ressurection is not the norm, doesn’t fit the pattern and therefore didn’t happen (so mad for saying what he said and everyone after bad for perpetuating it?)
But with the best investigation of the evidence that I can do separated by 2000 and a language divide, I can only conclude that it did happen.
So if chaos is not really random but following the patterns of fractal mathematics, and patterns are self-replicating, and Jesus rose from the dead, then there’s hope. We’re promised that by Jesus paying the price for our sin, we’ll also be raised from the dead.
One further thought. If you look at church history, from church formation, pinning down and developing beliefs, schisming, debate and interpretation you have to accept that branching and complexity from simplicity can be seen even there – fractal patterns in an organisational structures context.
Finally, there’s a joke that tickles me…
In the future a scientist says to God, “we don’t need you. We can now create the spark of life, and create computers that evolve by themselves. We’re so confident that we challenge you to produce a new being, from scratch. If you’re really omnipotent, you’ll accept the challenge”
And God forms a being from the dust, a beautiful creature into which he breathes life, gives it a loving kiss on the forehead and lets it go off to live its life.
The scientist bends down and takes a handful of dust, but God shakes his head: “uhuh – you get your own dust”…
Advent thoughts: if it’s good enough for Africa…
Posted by rose22joh in Uncategorized, faith on 08/12/2009
Image from http://www.lightalantern.co.za/about-candle-lanterns.asp
While searching the web for something this morning I was really surprised to find this thought-provoking article by Matthew Parris on the importance of faith in liberating Africa (especially surpised as I was looking for a Giles Coren piece on an obesity tax…). I know it’s a year old and probably done to death in commentaries last year, but reading it I really wanted a chance to talk about it.
Here’s an extract:
But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.
In many ways this article is beautiful: while the activities of aid workers and NGOs are important, only the actions of the missionaries bring a change in the heart, standing tall, liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world, a directness in their dealings with others. Parris puts this down to:
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I’ve just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.
In other words, Christianity as practised by the missionaries (and indeed the non-proselytizing aid workers) gives a sense of self to the believer, enabling and empowering rather than enslaving and cowing. This is culturally at odds with many of the community actions and tribal religions that are in place and the difference in attitude of new Christians is amazing and, Parris seems to imply, better this way of encouraging self-belief and modernisation than the alternatives that are out there.
This is interesting from two perspectives, which make the article a bit less beautiful…
1) As an atheist, is it patronising for Parris to suggest that Christianity is a good for Africans for getting beyond tribal beliefs in Africa, given that he doesn’t actually think it’s true?
Or is truth only of concern once you are modernised?
2) If Christianity has such amazing uplifting properties that are good for the people of Africa, giving a sense of self-worth built on a direct relationship between God and man, could it not be that those are exactly the things that we are missing and in need of here in the western world too?
Or does it not matter for us because we’ve already modernised and grown beyond such superstitions?
I don’t have any answers. I suspect only Matthew Parris really knows what he was getting at, and he admits that what he sees is incompatible with or inexplicable by his new world view.
For me, the idea that Christianity is a helpful stepping stone but not ultimately true is close to the Marx/ Engels “religion is the opiate of the masses“ approach to life – an illusory happiness which can be set aside in order that they find “real” happiness.
According to the rather fabulous Marx exhibition at the Karl Marx Haus in Trier, Marx had an exceptionally unhappy life, had a child with his housekeeper and two of his children commited suicide – so I’d be pretty clear that whatever this alternative source of happiness he was seeking, he didn’t find it.
I wonder why this element of Marxist thought is not as discredited in the popular mind as the rest of communism? (Incidentally, I maintain that we’ve not actually seen a real Marxist communist society yet – except perhaps early Christian communities:
“And all that believed were together, and had all things common; 45 And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. 46 And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, 47 Praising God, and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.” (Acts 2:44-47) )
But there is another perspective. Perhaps Christianity lifts and inspires because it is true.
Christianity is undergoing a real boom in Africa not just because of the sense of self that a direct relationship with Jesus inspires but because what Jesus did, the society that he lived in, these things speak directly to many people in Africa in a way that we in the developed world have forgotten.
Perhaps the liberation that comes from being an individual known to and knowing God personally is that missing element in life?
When you look at society today, the things that are prized (fame, money, advantage over others, being important, slick argument, “being yourself” in the Big Brother sense of saying exactly what you think without thought of the consequences for others in so doing, having the best of everything, doing exactly what you want to do) are about power and exerting that sense of self.
Few people that get sucked into this belief system think about the consequences for their self, but the sense that something’s missing (the God-shaped hole) is often there in the statements that the “successful” people give to the press (being a reasonable person I’m compelled to point out this comments thread from the Daylight Atheism website that points out that confident atheists are also happy and that the posters seem to see it as a security-hole based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - but I see it as the Self-actualisation stage of Maslow rather than the Safety stage) . And as is being seen in Africa, if embraced, that freedom can change worlds.
So how have we got ourselves to a stage where we are rejecting that freedom and regarding it as something that’s ok for others (even for liberating an enire continent) but just not for us?
Stephan Joubert, on the blog at www.echurch.co.za writes:
One of my favorite quotes is that of Ernst Kaesemann, a well-known German theologian of the previous century. Just listen to what he writes as he’s thinking about Jesus: “People and institutions do not like to be kept continually on the alert, and they have constantly devised screens to protect themselves from too much heat. In fact, they have even managed to reduce Jesus’ red-hot message, which promised to kindle a fire throughout the world, to room temperature.”
If you look at church history through the centuries, that is just what has happened: sects appeared trying to rationalise what had happened (Jesus can’t have been human, he could only have been human, bodily ressurection wasn’t expected and therefore may be only spiritual ressurection took place, secret knowledge or good works required in addition to faith in Jesus in order to be saved… and so on). Evidence if any were needed that the oldest message of the ressurection was hard to understand even then…
(Another aside – that ressurection was the key focus of faith in Jesus is clear from Paul’s letter here 1 Cor. 15:3-4: “ For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and that he was buried and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.”)
People in the UK tend to think Christianity’s about a bunch of old men in dresses with unworldly eyes or fuzzy beards, debating the morality of homosexuality and, dressed up smartly looking down on or turning away those who need access to that message of unconditional love. Of course the church is not just its clergy (and in any case many clergy these days are younger, and/ or women) but the people that believe, and we need to be out there, spreading the word and helping people to be spiritually as well as physically whole.
And that’s an aspiration that’s not old fashioned, or unneeded where I am.
And in looking forward, it’s the perfect thought for advent.
Making up my son’s mind on God…
I’m feeling a bit insulted.
As you will know if you are a regular reader of this blog, I’m a parent.
I have an adorable toddler. He’s very clever, resourceful, ingenious. I love him more than anything else in the world.
Both my husband and I have admitted to each other that if it came to it, we’d save him over each other in a life or death situation. Ultimately, love to the point of self-sacrifice is part of being a parent.
And that’s a theme we’ll come back to.
But what he’s not is either:
a) a toy to be manipulated by his parents; or
b) capable of abstract reasoning in the absence of evidence.
Children learn through the example of others, through practice, through observation.
So I’ve just seen this report in the Belfast Telegraph about the new atheist poster from the Bristish Humanist Association for Christmas. If you want to see an intellectual atheist’s view of it, I’m sure you’ll be able to access that via my friend Jon Worth’s blog soon.
(picture is by Kate Foster, age 11, kidstalkaboutgod.org – I’ll put one of my son’s on as soon as he can draw something that isn’t a train!)
But here’s my view as a parent, and Christian.
1) As a parent, it is my responsibility to raise my child to be the best that he can be.
Most parents want the best for their child.
They will differ in their views on what “the best” means – in educational terms for example it could mean the most expensive fee-paying school, a multi-cultural, multi-ability school that everyone from the local area attends, or one that specialises in developing a specialist skill that their child may have (or indeed their intellectual ability overall). Elsewhere it could mean a daughter getting the chance to go to a school at all, a son getting to stay on rather than leave to work to keep the family fed… the point is that most parents are driven to get the best that they can for their children.
While there are bad parents who care nothing for the offspring they bring into this world, If you are a devout Darwinist I guess you’ll say that the genes that want the best chance of survival condition me to believe and act in ways that should enable him to do so.
Being the best you can be means instilling values, right from the very beginning - for example small children are naturally selfish (“mine!”) as their sense of self develops, and they need to be taught to share. How do you start to decide what values you will be teaching your child?
Asking people what’s important in terms of values is inevitably subjective, and the values of some won’t fit all – but are there some clear, inherent values: fairness, tolerance, liberty, justice, the pursuit of happiness that are self-evidently “a good thing”?
Um, no. Self-evident is a problem because things that become self-evident are the result of generations of conditionment: our values in the Western world are likely to have been derived from principles followed in ancient Greece, the Roman empire, revolutionary France, empirial Britain as well as from great thinkers and philosophers and, like it or not, from the dominance of the Christian religion over the majority of the public and the decision-makers for the last nearly 2000 years.
Nietzsche believed that christian “values” had corrupted the natural state of humanity and did not believe that society should address the needs of the poor and weak but that the strong had a right to be dominant – a position recognised in the mediaeval world (outside the frontline parts of the church) and increasingly in the deprived inner cities (where the voluntary sector – primarily still from religious motivation – steps in). I don’t believe that looking out for those in need can be evolutionarily advantageous (unless someone cares to explain to me how?) and in a Nietzschian world could only really be seen to be of use in bringing about a sense of weakness and dependency rather than a wish to take up arms, become strong and assert their rights to more. So why do it? Because, somewhere inside we have a feeling that it’s the “right” thing to do.
But it’s a judgement call, right? It’s a question of relativity – you can choose one path or another, but there’s no ulitmate right and wrong, just what you can do to satisfy yourself and your view of making the world a better place.
But of course religions take a different view. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, values are derived from what God wants us to be like to be the best we can be – i.e. like him, the ultimate source of goodness. God the father, who sees us as his children loves us and wants us to love him back – a feeling every parent knows. But equally, being a parent means correcting and chastising, with love. So there is right, and there is wrong, it’s not relative and God is the judge.
I don’t think I can raise my child properly without instilling values in him one way or another – an if I am a Christian, act as a Christian, attend church, pray etc. then he will learn through observation and wanting to join in, i.e. practice. Should I be caveating my actions with there’s no obligation on you to join in, son of mine, and what I’m doing and saying may be incorrect, irrelevant and is something for you to think about only when you are older? What nonsense.
2) Do parents or others have the responsibility for my child?
A small but valid digression.
A friend used to worked in children’s policy. She has no children of her own, but because I do, was telling me about something she was working on, a scheme to extend the Red Book (in the UK this is a book that the NHS gives parents to record a child’s development and vaccinations in their early years) through to age 7. My husband and I reacted with horror.
As recorded in my old blog www.thoughts.com/rose22/blog, I’ve had more contact with organs of the state in the first two years of my son’s life than practically ever before, and as a loving, responsible parent I’ve not always welcomed the tone of some of the encounters. Here’s a couple of short extracts:
My son had a tough start in life: he was tiny, arrived earlier than expected if not actually premature, although he could latch on I produced no colostrum, and he got an infection in hospital that weakened him to the extent that he then couldn’t feed and ended up tubefed in special care.
Before special care, we fought and fought to be “allowed” to give him a formula top up. A midwife told us that giving him formula was “the equivalent of giving him a MacDonalds” but he was genuinely starving and starting to get dangerously underweight so the paediatricians asked if we’d mind doing so.
The first formula, SMA gold, made him vomit – we’ve since found out that it’s the one most commonly used in postnatal wards despite the fact that the babies that need formula most also tend to be most sensitive to it. When a baby is already underweight and thr vomiting also brings up any breastmilk they’ve managed to take in, then it’s downright dangerous.
…
I was already feeling policed (the Red Book of early childhood issues and vaccination records, the sheer volume of paperwork involved in his life at nursery etc.) but now I know that just having given birth to him does not make him mine.
The idea of closer scrutiny of my son by “experts” from outside the family, ever tightening frameworks that attempt to track and measure his physical, mental, social, and many other types of development against some identified standards, the idea of that progress being recorded and potentially required to be provided for oversight by someone representing the state in some capacity from birth to seven is frankly a bit scary. And I say that as someone with a large number of family members engaged in those sort of state roles.
Others have written, and rather better than I would about the changed relationship between adult and child in recent years - the recent case where adoption was ruled to be more valid that the right of the birth family to live together when an allegation was found to be untrue, the apparent assumption that adults have malign intent when spending time with children that must be disproved that has resulted in the need for all adults spending time with children (including authors visiting schools) to be subject to a criminal record check.
To bring us back to the theme of the Humanist/ Atheist poster, the demand to bring up children in a secular way feels like an intrusion into my private sphere in much the same way.
Breastfeeding or bottlefeeding my child was about sustaining him in his early physical life and people tried to tell me how to do that (even manhandling my breasts – shudder…). Hugging and kissing him, talking to him, playing with him was part of his social and emotional development - and I can get government guidance on good ways of doing these things. I’m told he needs a certain number of portions of vegetables (5 a day), an amount of physical exercise (change 4 life) and so on. There’s not one area of his life where there isn’t someone trying to advise me, tell me how to do what I’m doing even better, and even how not to worry about it (“good enough” parenting).
It’s all feeling a bit like “there’s an app for that!”
Well, child development, learning of values, culture, tradition, citizenship etc. are not apps that can be plugged into a child when the basic unit has been assembled and the intial software installed.
Children are more than just organic computers and the stories, the fairies and wizards, the magic potions and tales of bravery and terrible decisions are part of the way in which they learn how to cope with the real world.
I realise it is dangerous to juxtapose a sentence on fairies and wizards with one on religion (I know about the unicorn hunting task in the atheist children’s camp) but I don’t believe you are being fair to a child to not raise them with religion. Not only with they not understand the culture and tradition of their family and society and their motivations and values, nor will they learn about and respect the cultures, traditions and beliefs of others and their motivations and values, nor have exposure to the stories, histories and themes that help shape them in their values and outlook on life and in deciding what is important. I think it’s my choice to make.
Besides, English literature teachers are already reporting that students are increasingly unable to understand the literary classics because they don’t understand the religious references within them and the consequent character motivations…
3) Raising a child deliberately to believe in nothing is not a neutral position
I mentioned above how children learn. Children observe the world and ask questions.
Perhaps he is too young at present, but I would fully expect a child like mine to ask some day “why do we go to church?”
After all, his father and I have both asked that ourselves in the past, stopped going (valuing sleep over singing on Sunday mornings) and then, after our individual feelings of being drawn back, challenged, a love beyond ourselves, started going again, praying more regularly and more.
I have no fear of this – just as I have no fear of him learning about other religions, and indeed what it means to believe that there’s nothing more to it all than this. Ultimately I hope he’ll believe in Jesus as his saviour, but personal belief can’t be forced when its about a relationship with God, only nurtured. In the end, for all believers, it’s a personal choice and decision as well as truth they know in their hearts.
But please, let’s stop this rubbish that raising a child within a faith is tantamount to child abuse. I realise that shock value and, yes, insult are probably the intention of such statements.
Such statements are offensive to the billions of people across the world trying to raise their children in what they believe to be a way of truth that will help their children both make this world a better place, and to be in the best situation possible in the next life, wherever and whatever that may be.
It’s also deeply insulting to those who have suffered real abuse, physical or psychological, for some of whom hope and salvation have come from religious faith.
The contention seems to be that children should be free to learn about good, solid science (would this include selfish genes and memes? What about multiple world theories? Was the big bag ex nihilo or was there something before that exploded, and if so what was it and how did that come to be?) while they are growing up, but not be introduced religious thought until they’re old enough to make up their own minds.
However, atheism, the belief that we can live without God and that he doesn’t exist, and to explain the world in terms that do not include him is a faith position.
So telling parents to raise their children without God is actually imposition of a faith position, the position that there is no God and that a life can be lived fully without mention of one.
4) Filling the vaccuum
The trouble is, every time idealistic atheists start on about how the world would be a better place without religion, I start hearing ringing cash tills in the background.
John Lennon’s “Imagine” is both depressing and unrealistic. Depressing because he is singing the old atheist line that the world would be a better place withough religion because everyone would instead focus on making this world a bettter place and would live in peace, and hopelessly unrealistic because the evidence we have from secular states (not just the communist USSR or China but also those with enforced secular constitutions like France or the USA) is that they are no more peaceful, just, equal and genuinely happy than those where religion is practiced (or part of the constitutional settlement).
The funny thing is, it seems to me that it is not the presence of religion in whatever form that poses the biggest threat to happy, fulfilled humanity in the western world. It’s the lie that to be happy, fulfilled people we need more and better of whatever is available.
A few months ago I think it seemed that we’d got a lid on it – the avarice, the spend-to-feel-good, the fake-tan-bleached-hair-nails-done-designer-clothes school of self-esteem could be replaced by a quieter, greener life, with organic veg boxes and community allotment schemes. This was at the height of the credit crunch where we seemed to think that the role of the bankers in economic meltdown and the corruption of politicians and those that serve them in the Fees office at Westminster might mean that everything was really about to change. But it rarely ever does.
The lack of organised religion does not automatically bring about a happy, caring-sharing community, it reasserts the pursuit of self-interest, the Nietzschian values that I mentioned above. It also seems to mean that more people believe in luck, fate, cosmic ordering, clairvoyancy and other bits of assorted quackery or the words of snake oil salesman… exactly the sorts of things that rational atheists such as Ben Goldacre fight the good fight against. These things fill the vaccuum. And I think that’s worse.
5) Self-sacrificial love
I mentioned that the role of a parent is essentially one of unconditional love, but that love means not just allowing a child to do whatever they want but helping them to learn, grow and be the best that they can be. And that can mean giving them the chance to grown up knowing the love of God, the comfort, the security, but also the challenge and responsbility that that love engenders.
At the risk of incurring more wrath, I’d also point out that my faith is not about earning points and following rules to get into heaven.
It’s about belief that God is my father who knows me and loves me (I’m lucky enough to be able to say as much as my Dad here on earth does) but who also expects the best of me and has the highest standards ever. God set the rules that determine what all this is about and will decide on what happens next when all this ends and has been clear that this will include holding everyone to account. Jesus has already paid the price for me for the bad things that I’ve done that I would inevitably have to answer for when meeting God at the end of time, somethig that could happen at any time.
To deny my child the information about this love, and to withold the chance to embrace it, would be perverse given that I love him.
As a parent I put my son’s live above my own – I brought him into the world and he deserves that. Parents do this in small ways all the time (accepting that their careers get held back becuase they cannot work all hours any longer, doing endless taxi driving for after school activities and play dates) and as I set out at the top of this article, they would (usually without hesitateion) place their child’s life above their own in a life-or-death situation and usually above their partner’s too.
This self-sacrificial love may certainly be the result of selfish genes looking to ensure the latest version survives.
But it also reflects the love of God for us, the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus as God paying the price to set us free from the cost of the justice that we deserve. Some might argue that a God of love would just forgive us all whatever we’ve done. But if he did not uphold the principle of justice, we’d not have the concept and he would not be worth worshipping as no one would bother. That would be the actions of a neglectful and simultaneously indulgent parent, and certainly not one I’d want to be like.
I’m sure this all sounds bizarre and it’s easier just to think that the bad go unpunished and there will be no judgement or if there is that we can answer for ourselves, thanks.
But I’ve never wanted to disappoint my Dad. If Jesus did what I think he did and rose from the dead, then what he said matters and is an amazing thing to offer to someone, anyone, and indeed everyone throughout all time.
So Jesus’s offer is a payment that I choose to accept, open to all and from which I’m equally free to walk away.
True freedom isn’t doing whatever we like, but doing what we know to be right, for the good of all and in love.
As a conclusion, I’m going to borrow the words Iused in my previous blog:
I know that in the long term a parent-child relationship is something that has to be developed, worked at, and ultimately it is a process of loss and separation for the parent and growth and self-discovery for the child.
The child ultimately belongs to his or herself. But I had always thought that, unless a crime was being committed, the pace of that process was a journey that my child and I were free to take at our own pace.
So, thanks for the cute poster. But I intend to offer my child the chance to grown up as a Christian, in a loving relationship with God, and to exercise my judgement as his parent to make the decisions that enable him to be the best he can be until he has enough information and independent thought to make up his own mind.
Because you can present the science, you can hand over a copy of the bible or any religious text of your choosing but if you don’t talk about it, don’t explain it, don’t live it then how can you expect understanding.
As the Etheopian Eunuch said to Philip when he was asked (in Acts Chapter 8 ) whether he understood the Jewish bible he was reading “How can I, unless someone explains it to me?” A chance at that understanding, early in life, is probably the best gift a parent can give their child.
Update: not the only blogger to have noticed this poster, and the debate continues on www.joelitobarski.eu and www.sarabedford.com/blog where I posted the following:
I blogged on this too – I like your analysis.
Of course atheists have the right to prosthelytize – amazing though that they feel the need to unless atheism is becoming a belief system more than just a worldview.
For me, this campaign was about trying to force an unreasonable contention onto the private sphere of the family.
I understood the purpose of this campaign to be to normalise the message that raising a child outside the religion that their parents practice should be the social norm, because God doesn’t need to feature in children’s lives and religion is a lifestyle option to add on later if it’s wanted.
After all, when Dawkins has contended that raising a child within their parents’ religion is tantamount to child abuse, and talks about society stepping in, what other way is there to take a poster such as this?
However I’m glad to hear that the BHA acknowledge that in practice this is not practicable. But then what are they asking for? Just that parents don’t ostracize children that make an informed decision not to practice a religion? That’s not what the poster says!
I also concluded that no one can force someone to believe, that is not how belief works. That’s just culture, not faith.
But it would be unnatural for parents that practice a faith not to encourage their children to follow it too if they genuinely believe that it is true and leads to salvation.
So I’ll do so with my son – and if he decides its not for him, I’ll just have to accept it.
NB I rebelled and returned after much questioning and reading once I realised that the resurrection had actually happened. Why wouldn’t I want to share that with people I love?
my original weblog- Was I lied to and bullied over breastfeeding?
- The most moral way to give birth?
- Why hedging your bets is not good in the EU...
- Torchwood: the future and (re)birth...
- Questioning is not the same as scepticism
- Testing our commitment to Voltaire...
- Dealing with 5 new EU realities
- 'Political Shock' and making it better
- voting YES in a referendum
- When your child bites mine
- Why voting matters even when the system is complic
- European elections - what are we voting for?
- Power without responsibility, in all senses
- Back to Brussels...
- Who exactly are the EU blogging geeks talking to?
- Useless European Parliament Committees?
- Doctor Who geek in pilgrimage...
- So much Atheism? It must be a slow news day!
- Technocrat to head government of Czech Republic
- On being British...
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