Tag Archives: science

Re-Hawking an old idea

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Did the universe as we know it merely come into being by itself from a quantum-level change in an existing one?

I’ve been putting off blogging about Stephen Hawking and God.  Mainly this is because I feel that the latest pronouncements splashed across the front page of the Times last week (no link as I don’t want you to have to pay News Corp a pound to read it) were more about stirring controversy to increase book sales than any new ideas on where and how God “fits in” with the universe.

Of course, by ignoring the story for a while I’ve been able to read a lot of the excellent and not so excellent commentary.  The Church Mouse blog was among the best of the religious responses, pointing out that:

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn’t prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary. [Stephen W. Hawking, Der Spiegel, 1989]

Compare the quote from 1989 with the one which has caused the headlines today:

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

If anyone can spot a difference, please let Mouse know.

To those of us that are sci fi fans, the multiworlds model which Hawking cited alongside laws such as gravity as making God “unnecessary” is familiar.  Basically the idea is that for every “decision” at a quantum level, a parallel universe is created in which the other “decision” was taken.

It features in Doctor Who – not just in the obvious case of “Pete’s World” where the cybermen come from, but also in multiple explanations of things going on (Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant’s doctors both use it as an explanation – the tenth doctor refers to it in the episode “School Reunion”).  Terry Pratchett’s famous “trousers of time” is another example this theory being used in a really understandable manner.

I’m not going to take on Hawking on the physics.  As the Church Mouse says: “if you try to claim you know more about the science of creation and the big bang you will instantly make yourself a laughing stock.  And nothing that Hawking has said rules out the possibility of God“.
It is that latter part that I think merits a bit more thought.

Of course, if it is taking the decision (consciously or quantum-ly) that creates the new world, then Hawking has a point – it does indicate that a creator god would not be needed to make each parallel world just pop into existence – infinite, multiple worlds spinning off through all time and space of a multiverse.  And getting your head around this is not easy. It slightly makes me think of another Terry Pratchett quote: “Nothing good ever follows the word multiple” (Guards! Guards!)

The responses from the religious community, at least the less fundamentalist parts of it, has been relatively measured.  Most follow the Church Mouse’s rule.  Most also pointed out that while theories of how the universe came into being were interesting, they did nothing to answer the fundamental question of “why” it came into being.
The Daily Mail (I know, rare for me to comment on their more sober reporting) quoted:

Dr Williams said: ‘Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the universe.’

He told The Times: ‘It is the belief that there is an intelligent, living agent on whose activity everything ultimately depends for its existence. Physics on its own will not settle the question of why there is something rather than nothing.’

Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales and one of Britain’s top imams also joined the condemnation. Lord Sacks said: ‘Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation… The Bible simply isn’t interested in how the universe came into being.’

And the apparent head of the religion of atheism, Richard Dawkins, was quick to embrace Hawking as one of his kind of people.  Many comments abounded in the blogosphere, probably not direct from the man himself, saying that just as evolution left no space for God in biology, Hawking left no space for God in physics.

Dawkins did say in the Times that asking “why?” was nonsensical and that “stupid questions” did not deserve to get answers.

Interesting – the entire spirit of scientific inquiry is on the basis of asking “why” such-and-such is and trying to find the mechanics behind it.
Ah, but then this is metaphysics, not physics, and because it is unprovable and therefore cannot be tested by scientific means, the question is outside the self-defined belief system that says that science is all, and therefore not a valid one…
Um, am I alone in thinking that Dawkins’ atheism is not just about following Darwin’s principles but fast becoming a science-based faith in its own right…

“God is a delusion. … Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain. An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles – except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand.” (Introduction to “The God Delusion”).

(another tenet of this belief: knowledge at present is ok until a better theory is available and a theory to explain each thing and everything will eventually be found)?

But I digress.
If what you believe in is a “God of the Gaps“, that God is the explanation until each gap is filled in with a plausible scientific explanation, then perhaps Hawking’s bid to increase his book sales is problematic.But it seems to me that the answer “it can and inevitably does create itself” is unsatisfactory.  From what?  Where did those things come from?

By answering the question of where did everything come from with what seems to be “it has always been something”, we are essentially opening ourselves up to a broader question: yes, the universe as we know it may be the inevitable result from a decision taken somewhere in a parallel universe probably at a quantum level and therefore may have been spontaneously created but how did it all get going in the first place?
After all our observations are that there are patterns of apparently infinite complexity (such as never-ending fractals) but is it reasonable to conclude that they have just “always been” or “just are”?
We’re trying to answer the idea that “something came from nothing” (ex nihilo creation) by saying that what we have always thought of as the beginning point isn’t.  So where did what spontaneously created itself come from?
God is of course the Occam’s Razor explanation for all of this…
But now I’m in danger of straying into the territory that the Church Mouse wisely recommended steering clear of…

So where do we go from here?As I’ve said in previous posts where we go from here comes back to the person of Jesus – if he was who he said he was, and did what we think he did, then all of this discussion is so much ephemera, an interesting diversion on God’s tools when we should be living better, supporting the poor and needy and building our relationship with God through prayer, praise and celebration.
The bible does not use scientific language or mathematics to describe how God made everything, and does not take a view on cosmology, life on other planets (all God’s children too?) etc. etc.
We shouldn’t expected it to- it is after all primarily the story and user’s manual for God’s relationship with his chosen people that turns out to be all of us – and Jesus seems to have had more personal, pressing priorities to communicate concerning something that Richard Dawkins does not actually believe exists: our souls.

A final thought: in other scientific spheres, the ideas of science fiction have so captured the imagination that we have Star Trek communicators in our pockets, and I look forward to the pain-free instant surgical laser of Star Trek: The Next Generation or any of the time travel or teleportation devices we see (but note the warnings on these technologies that sci fi also holds…).
Ideas of good science fiction always inspire, helping us to find the room to adapt for usefulness and become science-fact.
But I’m afraid most of us will have no idea what Professor Hawking’s maths equations that show the possibility of the multiverse that leaves no space for God actually mean and whether he’s right, and I’m struggling to see how they can be adapted for the good of everything except for further development of scientific atheism’s faith position.  But perhaps that’s not the point.
But then, to paraphrase the Times editorial, if we were to know “how God did it”, Stephen Hawking is one of the very few people on earth that would understand how it was done.

Good night, and God bless

The latest thing… the right thing?

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brilliant image of a glass of water from www.freefoto.com

Just been listening to a fascinating programme on Radio 4 which, although primarily focused on teaching children, has implications for trainers everywhere.  You can pick it up on BBC iplayer for the next few days here.

Like many trainers, I’m fascinated by what enables us to learn, and in particular the science behind it.  The programme said that the general public has a huge curiosity for understanding more about how the brain works and, to digress for a moment, looking quickly at the BBC iplayer science list reveals a programme on what science tells us about our need for religion, on the Guardian website there’s a whole section on neuroscience, and type “how we learn” into Google and you’ll get at least 194,000,000 results! 

The programme warned of the dangers of pseudoscience, ideas seeping into the public consciousness that are not fully tested and pursuing an idea too far.  

One of the best examples used was the six to eight glasses of water a day thing.  We all know (always a dangerous phrase!) that drinking 2 litres of water a day is good for us, don’t we?  Depending on what we read it can give us clear skin, healthy looking hair and nails, keep us bright and alert and better able to concentrate… yes, 2 litres of water a day is indeed miraculous.
And it is also untrue.  We need about 2 litres of fluid a day, yes, but it can come from fruit, veg, in fact any food, and from other drinks (another myth that accompanied this was that “bad for you” drinks like coffee, tea etc. didn’t count as they were diuretics… well yes, but surely you’re not meant to retain the water?  Water retention is also bad!)  The programme pointed out that while being a tiny bit dehydrated makes you less able to concentrate, being overhydrated is, according to research from the University of Bristol, just as bad! 
The reality is that you should drink when you are thirsty – in children this means having water dispensers or water bottles at school that they can help themselves to – for training adults, having some water in a dispenser in the classroom is a pretty good idea. 

Another was the visual/ audiatory/ kinesthetic learning split.  While trainers who have done the CIPD Certificate in Training Practice know that while learners have preferences, to fully learn you need to take a learner right through Kolb’s cycle of experiential learning, it seems some people are seriously taking things to extremes if you have classes tailored via session planning at at individual level to just one learning style to suit that individual’s preference.  The programme maker also stressed that the most memorable learning experiences can be those that are outside the familiar.  Hear hear.

And overextrapolation can be potentially more widely problematic at a societal level.  There’s a learning theory for small children that has been translated to older children, and indeed adults, that exercise increases memory.  That’s how it’s come across in the press in any case.  But actually the theory was related to infants and toddlers. 
We know (see, that phrase again?) that in infants, every learning experience makes synaptic connections and that these are confirmed or overwritten based on life experience.  The theory is that, for boys in particular, cross lateral movement such as crawling strengthens their abilities to make these connections because there’s a connection between physical and neural development and left-brain right-brain interconnection (NB this is not the same as saying that there’s some people that use their left-brain more than their right-brain). 
Now, if this is being used to mean that a bit of running around is necessary for children who have had bad experiences and overwrite them, then that seems to be serious overextrapolation. 
If it’s about making sure that a rounded learning experience means some activities involve some moving around, and that this might reinforce learning overall, then actually that’s just good training practice appealing to those with any Honey and Mumford Activist preference… 

But the Active Movement theory is a theory, and  even if it is wrong, it’s good for small children to crawl, be upside down a little bit, practice the muscle movements that strengthen them and enable their physical development.  And if there’s no real evidence that exercise  increases memory, whether child or adult, at least it’s physically good for you. 

So is following the latest information about things that can help students learn always the right thing to do?
Well, it depends.  As with all things science, we have to remember that neuroscientific theories of learning are just that – scientific theories. 
And the point about a theory is that it is not “true”, it’s the best idea that we can come up with based on the evidence that we have. And if we have new evidence we change the theory that we apply.  Public understanding can lag behind the movement in theories in academia. So what we think is the latest thing might not always be the right thing.

What do you think?  Have you referred to or made use of any of these types of theories in planning your training?  Let’s talk!

Epigenetics and the Guardian, or what happens when science becomes religion?

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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

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fractal21(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”…

How sure are you? Pascal and “Bad Conscience”

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clouds sun(image from http://www.freeimages.co.uk/)

I was just playing on Twitter, retweeting the occasional thing I found interesting, typing in bad French with no accents on my letters in response to some, the usual. I found a Tweet that caught my interest and followed the link through to a blog.
It was called “Bad Conscience“, and linked on the sidebar to “Bad Science”, the Ben Goldacre site that picks apart the media’s lazy approach to science reporting. So that’s good. Presumably inspired the name.
It’s the 201st most read political blog in the UK, apparently.
The first article looked like it might be worth reading, so I was about to add it to my RSS feed to read every so often at my leisure.
Then I spotted the strapline.
Straplines are important. I know mine’s not perfect yet: “Politics, Europe, Parenting, Faith, Life… because the most interesting things need deep thought and high heels“… I’m working on it still – after all I’ve only had this site a month.

So what’s the big deal? Well, the Bad Conscience website strapline was that old punk slogan “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine“. That’s fairly definite. Can’t get clearer rejection of the Christian faith than that.

For me, there’s a key point in history on which everything rests.
If Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead then that is the most important thing that has ever, ever happened. If he was who he said he was, did what I think – based on all the available evidence – that he did, then it matters.
Everything else – exactly which creation myth you believe in, what your priorities need to be in life, all that sort of thing suddenly becomes clear, and you are free.

If you’re unsure that Jesus was who Christians think he is, then fine.
You could always try an Alpha course if you don’t know enough to make a decision, but if courses are not your thing, I’d urge you to do some reading. Particularly if you are someone that thrives on intellectual persuasion. Try Tim Keller’s “The Reason for God” as a much better starting point than the perhaps over-simplistic Alpha course.

If you think Christians have got it wrong because you if you think Jesus was just a historical figure, or a myth that never existed, that’s ok, it’s your choice… well, that’s ok if you’ve bothered to look at the evidence and you’ve found nothing to convince you that he was more than he was just another rabbinical teacher.
I personally find it hard to come to that conclusion based on what the gospels say that he said (as CS Lewis put it “either he was mad or he was God”) but if you approached the history with an open mind, knew that there were some non-gospel sources too (not just Jospehus whose work may have been amended later) recognising the limitations of first and second century historical records and the purposes of writings at that time and the way that rabbinical teaching worked, then there’s little more that I can say.

If you think he was the prophet that Islam identifies, or the not-quite-what-a-Messiah-should-be-error of Judaism, then I guess you’ve done the kind of thinking that I’ve done and come to a different conclusion.

But to put a line up in public that says in effect that you know that Jesus died for someone’s sins, but that you reject the idea that it was for you? Why would you do that?
i) you’ve reviewed the evidence that’s available and you’ve come to the conclusion that Jesus was real and believed that he was dying for people’s sins, but of course he didn’t rise from the dead;
ii) you don’t really know much about any of this and just think it’s a witty thing to write;
iii) you don’t like the idea that God holds people to account and would rather be held responsible for the consequences of your sins than have anyone pay that debt for you, or for those who sin against you;
iv) you really don’t care whether Jesus was real, a myth, what he said or didn’t say. It’s all a long time ago and we’re very sophisticated now and have digital watches and the internet. Pretty good for fish that grew legs, huh?
v) You really do think that Jesus died for someone’s sins, but this simply doesn’t and won’t apply to you…

But how sure are you?
Probably the most sensible comment that can be made- if you can even conceive that once, in the whole of history, a man died and came back to life having said he would do so and why- was by Blaise Pascal. 

“ Endeavour then to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, bless yourself with holy water, have Masses said, and so on; by a simple and natural process this will make you believe, and will dull you—will quiet your proudly critical intellect…Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing. ”

Essentially, if you’re not sure, you’ve less to lose by choosing to believe (Mother theresa is clear in her letters that that’s a choice she made when she could no longer feel God talking to her so I don’t feel that’s living a lie or in any way to be sneered at). 
But Pascal explains it much better and you can read the key paragraphs on Wikipedia. 
(NB every so often people try to come up with a “knock down” argument against Pascal’s wager.  sometimes they misunderstand: he’s not trying to “prove” God. Dawkins argument is overcome by Pascal himself and Richard Carrier’s argument assumes it’s the doing good and seeking out truth elements that would bring pleasure to the god he mentions – which is not the justification by faith salvation that Christians believe in and so I wouldn’t be making his wager!)

According to Wikipedia:

“Historically, Pascal’s Wager was groundbreaking as it had charted new territory in probability theory, was one of the first attempts to make use of the concept of infinity, marked the first formal use of decision theory, and anticipated the future philosophies of pragmatism and voluntarism”

but if you are finding all that a bit heavy going, Terry Pratchett does a brilliant comic version in his book “Hogfather” (ISBN 0-552-14542-4 please do buy it!)…

“This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, “Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it’s all true you’ll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn’t then you’ve lost nothing, right?” When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, “We’re going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts…”

The key point is that, as Pascal points out, there is no “I’m not playing” option.  In deciding our position on faith, and on Jesus, we are all in effect placing a wager on who he was and what he did. 
If God demands perfection, is the source of all that it good and pleasurable and sin separates us from him, and if Jesus was God paying the price of that sin for us then it’s the most important decision you’ll ever make. 
And it’s not just a case of betting your life.  
Choosing that separation will never make you happy and filfilled.
I don’t think that having a faith automatically makes you a credulous fool.  Sometimes, if you’ve reviewed the evidence, thought freely and come to the conclusion that the evidence shows X to be fact as far as it is possible to accertain, then to disbelieve would be the position that was not that of a freethinker.
So if Jesus died for someone’s sins, why not yours? 
If you’re aware now that there is a wager that is part of this life, how sure are you?