Month: November 2006

Tony’s been teasing Chuck. Excellent.

Tony Blair attacked the “anti-science brigade” yesterday for threatening Britain’s path to the future. He condemned the “outrageous distortion” of campaigners against pioneering technologies, insisting that they had to be defeated. His remarks at the King’s Centre, Oxford, will be taken as a thinly-veiled swipe at the Prince of Wales. Prince Charles has dismissed GM-food trials as unethical…Scientists would have a role in all the “big questions of our time – climate change, the spread of infectious diseases, water supply, biodiversity, terrorism,” said Mr Blair who confessed that he was a science “refusenik” at school. But he stressed the need to win the “irrational public debate” often surrounding scientific research. Without referring to Prince Charles or other campaigners by name, Mr Blair condemned the “powerful and vocal lobby, with access to all the media channels” that opposed technological breakthrough.

Exactly – with access to all the media channels. That’s the part about P. Charles that is so annoying. (Applies to P. Bush, too, as a matter of fact.) He has, because of an accident of birth, access to media channels that scientists (and architects and other assorted victims of P.C.’s whims) can only dream of. If he had any sense, it would occur to him that therefore he ought to take massive care not to abuse the privilege, instead of which he abuses it up one side and down the other. He makes the world a present of his uninformed opinions on technical subjects, instead of realizing that his influence and ability to mouth off are out of all proportion to his merit, his knowledge, his expertise, his insight, his ability to judge – and he does it on subjects with life and death consequences. It’s really quite revolting (as it is in the case of P. Bush, who also has every reason to be modest and careful).

Charming.

In a startling warning to the Government, senior church and political figures have backed a report advocating force to protest against policies that are “unbiblical” and “inimical to the Christian faith”.

The Telegraph cites the ‘menacing language’ of the report and says ‘Lord Mawhinney, the Tory peer, Andy Reed, the Labour MP, and the Rt Rev Peter Forster, the Bishop of Chester, helped to produce’ it.

The report from the Evangelical Alliance says “violent revolution” should be regarded as a viable response if government legislation encroaches further on basic religious rights. The church is urged to come to a consensus that “at some point there is not only the right but the duty to disobey the state”…Proposals to ban proselytising in publicly-funded Christian projects could ultimately lead to Christians being prevented from teaching others about the Bible. This would “be unambiguously recognised by Christians as perpetrating evil that has to be resisted by deliberate acts of defiance”, the report says.

Interesting, the idea that a ban on proselytizing in publicly-funded Christian projects would be unambiguously recognized by Christians as perpetrating evil. Christians unambiguously recognize it as evil for governments to refuse to fund Christian proselytizing? So Christians think governments are absolutely obliged to fund Christian proselytizing? That’s intriguing, isn’t it? It’s almost American in its presumptuous aggressiveness.

Significantly, it comes from the Evangelical Alliance – a mainstream organisation representing 1.2 million Christians…”If, as most Christians accept, they should be politically involved in democratic processes, many believe this may, where necessary, take the form of active resistance to the state. This may encompass disobedience to law, civil disobedience, involving selective, non-violent resistance or, ultimately, violent revolution.” Mike Morris, the executive director of the Evangelical Alliance, said that the report reflected the breadth of submissions they had received. “It is not as if Christians are going to take to the streets, but we need to be able to stand up to things that are challenging the Christian conscience, regardless of the consequences.”

And the things that are challenging ‘the Christian conscience’ are things like…oh, civil rights for gays, and legal abortion, and female equality. So if people who want those things don’t submit to people in the Evangelical Alliance, well, maybe they’ll start to kill us. Jolly good; something to look forward to. And then people wonder why some of us think secularism is a good idea!

More pondering on this question of what is good and for whom. Compassion is an important human virtue, but would it be an important virtue, or a virtue at all, if humans were different kinds of entities? If we were conscious but immortal and perfect, if we never suffered, if we had no vulnerability of any kind (and didn’t know of any entities that did), would compassion be a virtue? Would we see it as a good thing? I tend to doubt it.

I had similar doubts and questions about some things Keith Ward said in a discussion with Anthony Grayling in Prospect last year.

The scientific perception of the cosmos is that it is an intelligible, law-like, mathematically complex structure, which produces intelligent moral agents by a process of increasingly integrated complexity from an initial state of extreme simplicity (the big bang).

Um – is it? I don’t think so, I think Ward stacked the deck a little there, sneaking in that ‘intelligent moral agents’ – I don’t think that is a particularly scientific perception. It’s not a terribly precise description, frankly, and it’s certainly not a complete one. Bipedal language-using primates would be a more precise description – which is not to disagree with Ward that our (inadequate) intelligence and (frighteningly inadequate) moral agency are much the most interesting (at least to us) things about us, but it is to say that’s more a moral perception than a scientific one.

Contemporary religious thought sees the purpose of creating such a cosmos as the production of finite minds that can enter into loving relationships with one another, take partial responsibility for the world and be fulfilled by knowing the supreme mind of the creator…Is this the best of possible worlds? It is the only one that could have us in it, and while we are not the best of possible beings, we are perhaps – each one of us – of great intrinsic worth.

Well, perhaps, but perhaps not. But I have to say that it strikes me as unpersuasive. Why would the purpose of creating the cosmos be the production of finite minds that can enter into loving relationships with one another? If it were, why would it take a cosmos like this to do that? Wouldn’t something smaller, simpler, and less expensive have done the job? And also if it were, are we the best, or a very good, example of minds that can enter into loving relationships with one another? If it is, why do we do so much entering into hating relationships with one another?

But the ‘why would that be the purpose of the cosmos’ question is the most basic one, because why would that be anyone or anything’s purpose? Suppose a world (a pre-cosmos world, which is tricky) without any finite minds that can enter into loving relationships with one another, and a creating entity of some kind (of what kind, we don’t know). Why would it want them? Why would it think they ought to exist, and so have the purpose of creating them when it decided to create the cosmos? That’s not clear, to say the least. So isn’t this kind of thing just more of the same? Just more of the starting from human assumptions and wants and needs and likes, and trying to make them cosmic absolutes? We think compassion is good because we suffer so we need it; we think beings like us are good because we are us and we think we are (sort of, more or less) good. It’s all local, it’s all particular, it’s all about us. It’s intuitively appealing, of course, and it may all be true, but there doesn’t really seem to be any compelling reason to think it’s true. The localism is kind of a giveaway of that.