The Tragedy Of The Commons

Since Tomsk was kind enough to expand upon his earlier point, and since it's been a while since I've stuck up a "Voices of Authority" article, I thought I'd hand the keyboard over to him so he can explain in his own unique style. I've been toying with allowing others to guest-star on the Musings, and Tomsk is an ideal first contributer.

Treat him gently.

After the Labour party lost the 1979 general election, it took them another 18 years to get back into power. During this time a right-wing government remoulded Britain in its own image. One of their many achievements was to destroy the country's manufacturing base, leaving us heavily reliant on a deregulated financial sector to generate economic growth. Luckily for them, it took until 2007 for their banking "reforms" to go pear-shaped, and we are only now starting to pay for their toxic legacy in the form of a huge budget deficit.

Unfortunately for us, the Conservatives don't get the blame.

Instead we have another legacy of that era: New Labour. On the one hand committed to improving public services, reducing poverty, and other wholesome left-wing goals, but on the other a feeling that they had to embrace the Tory economic agenda in order to get elected, and later to stay in power.

For a while this strategy seemed to work. An unprecedented period of economic growth meant that we really could have both historically low taxes and a well-funded public sector. But when the recession struck, the New Labour method for running the country fell apart.

If nothing else, the financial crisis has demonstrated once again that limited government kowtowing to unregulated free markets inevitably leads to boom and bust. In an ideal world, public opinion would turn leftwards as a result. This is exactly what's happened in America,where the economic crisis destroyed any chance of McCain becoming president, and has given the Obama administration a once-in-a-generation opportunity to remake their government.

But what happens when the supposed party of the left is already in power? There was a fleeting moment when the financial crisis first hit when it looked like the progressive agenda in Britain was about to be firmly cemented in place. Gordon Brown, previously a lame duck, was getting plaudits for his swift action to shore up the banking system, and the poll gap with the Conservatives was beginning to close. All he had to do was hang on for an economic recovery before the general election deadline arrived. A hung parliament would be enough (and would open the door for PR, but that's a whole other post...).

The House of Commons expenses scandal has turned all this upside down. Even though all parties are equally to blame for the rotten system,the public have directed most of their anger at Labour simply because they are the party in government. The Conservatives have barely suffered, despite their MPs being among the worst abusers of the system. The opportunity offered by the financial crisis has disappeared, replaced by a lurch to the right that is entirely undeserved (anyone who thinks otherwise should look at the expenses of UKIP MEPs). The prospect of a majority Tory government, perhaps even a landslide, is more likely than ever.

This might not have mattered so much before the recession, when Cameron was positioning himself as a clone of Blair. But now we are faced with tax rises and/or spending cuts to fill in that hole in the budget, and the Conservatives have reverted to type, already indicating that they will choose savage spending cuts wherever they can. It'll be just like the 1980s, only without the craze for synth-pop. Oh wait...

Long Answers To Difficult Questions

Courtesy of Dr L, Vince Cable explains why everyone everywhere is so totally screwed with regard to ever having money ever again. It's a nice summary (and I don't have any time today to be even remotely creative), so I thought I'd pass it on.

Adventures With Jesus #5: Axioms And Extrapolations

Having reached the conclusions I've been searching for all week last night, I hadn't intended to post anything about today's talk. Partially because doing so seemed surplus to requirements, but also because the title today was "Is Being "Good" Good Enough For God?" and it seemed pretty likely that much of what would be covered had already been addressed in the talk on Hell.

That pretty much turned out to be the case. We can do good without it being good enough for God, and "not a bad person" is hardly a particularly impressive status when being judged by the Lord of Creation. The one thing I did want to mention in regards to today was axioms.

I spent the walk down to the talk trying to explain my own personal position on the meaning of life to Anonymous McNoname. Specifically, my rejection of the idea that good and evil, or at least right and wrong, cannot exist independently of God. It's true that there can no longer be one true definition of such ideas, but contra to popular opinion, this does not reduce them to concepts definable by popular vote. What it does mean is that the best we can do is formulate the most reasonable axioms possible, and logically follow through on them. Is it perfect? Not at all. One man's axiom is another man's fallacy, after all. Since axioms can be challenged and altered, however, that isn't indicative of a process that is broken, but one which is evolving. What's important is to constantly question your preconceptions, to ensure you are evolving too. It's also critical to have others question your axioms, too, which is one of the reasons I've spent so much time this week listening to people tell me I'm going to Hell.

I mention all this because the Q&A today made it quite clear that there are similar issues in Christianity. Whereas the principal axiom that God is real and always right is pretty much unassailable, it is still the case, unsurprisingly, that different Christians will interpret the Bible in very different ways. What is axiomatic to some is simply allegory to others. Absent outside stimulus, inaccuracies and mistakes are very likely. Thus, believing in the Bible and following the word of Jesus requires self-questioning, and also communal questioning in the form of the Church. Obviously this then leads to the question: who is writing their axioms? Are they doing it themselves? Are their ministers, or reverends, or bishops, or archbishops doing it for them? How is that different from what an atheist would do, or at least an atheist interested in trying to be more than an animal reacting to external stimuli?

Today's answer was that Jesus' spirit infuses those who read the Bible, and from that the truth will be revealed. I'd say that if this is true it arguably isn't going tremendously well given the massive number of different churches with their own approach to doctrine, but I'll grant that it does at least provide an answer to the problem that I cannot easily refute. Suggestions, of course, are welcome.

Anyway, that's Main Event Week over for another year. I can now look forward to 51 weeks of meaningless debauchery. And possibly a doctorate.

Adventures With Jesus #4: Crime And Punishment

I think today I finally reached some form of meaningful conclusion regarding the activities of this week. An argument can only ever end in three ways. One side realises they were in error, both sides agree to disagree and go off and do something else, or the layers of conflict and disagreement are peeled away one by one until the exact point of conflict is identified, classified, and then returned to the box.

Naturally, given that it isn't easy to change my mind and all but impossible to get me to let something out of my teeth, that third option is by far the most satisfactory conclusion to any discussion I have, and today I finally reached it. Obviously, on a simple level it was always going to come down to faith vs no faith, but specifics are important.

As usual, though, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Today's talk essentially attempted to answer the question: why does a just God send people to Hell? The speaker suggested that this is almost impossible to answer without a sufficient understanding of God. I'm not sure that's true (though I can see why a Christian would think such a thing). What we need to make sure we understand is not the nature of God, but the nature of justice.

There are a number of theories on what does or doesn't constitute justice. My personal favourite was always utilitarianism, which punishes criminals from the perspective of maximising the benefit to society. We throw people in jail to prevent society from being harmed, to warn others of the consequences of similar transgressions, and to allow time for prisoners to learn how to be more beneficial members of society. It's probably not all that surprising that this is an attractive theory to a liberal atheist.

None of the above, of course, applies to God's punishment. To throw someone into Hell once they have already died saves no-one, nor does it allow for rehabilitation. Yes, the threat of Hell can be used to cajole people into doing the right thing, but since we have no way of knowing whether sinners do end up in the lake of fire or not, there seems no reason to carry through on the threat.
What banishing those who reject God can be described as is retributive justice, which states that justice is served by ensuring one receives punishment commensurate with the crime (we'll leave aside the fact that Jesus himself spoke out against retributive justice). If God is infinitely powerful and loving, then rejecting him is infinitely odious, and thus infinite punishment is called for. Thus, "infinite justice" actually turns out to be a single question: "have you turned from God?" So long as the answer to that is "No", it seems that there is literally nothing that can't be forgiven.

Lacking the ability to question God in person, I can't be sure that this isn't in fact the case. What's interesting to me, though, is that the justification for this position given in the talk seemed so at odds with that conclusion. The idea that a loving God might punish in the same way as a loving mother might punish her child, for example [1], immediately falls apart because a mother punishes (hopefully) because she wants her child to become better. It's utilitarianism in microcosm. You could throw "Being cruel to be kind" in there too, if you want; the point is that the focus is on the long game (the long game we were told 48 hours ago was so vital). Locking someone away and throwing away the key isn't to anyone's benefit.

Likewise, appealing to our sense of outrage over such atrocities as Rwanda is somewhat self-defeating. I'm sure the victims of such indescribable, incomprehensible horrors were screaming out for God's justice. The problem is that we're being told that justice won't take place until it's entirely too late for it to be of any benefit. More than that, if you're entire family get hacked to pieces and you lose faith, andthe vicious, blood-stained murderer ultimately seeks forgiveness, then you're the one who'll end up in Hell for all eternity.

That isn't justice, by any human understanding. And yes, the whole point is that God's justice and ours isn't going to match up. But that's a hard, uncomfortable position, and you have to own that. You can't try to justify it by listing all the things we wished we could fix. God is going to leave it broken, and from where I'm sitting, is more likely to punish those that were shattered into glass and blood along the way.

So much for the contents of the talk, then. None of that was what I was referring to earlier regarding my minor revelation (revelette?). That came during the brief conversation I got to have with the speaker (who if nothing else demonstrated endless patience with questions that must seem very silly from a Christian perspective) following the second Q&A session. During that session the old question came up regarding what happens to people who live and die without ever meeting a Christian (even now we're coming across new tribes in the Amazon Rainforest, for example). That never struck me as the right question, though. To me the right question is this: exactly how long after the first Christian missionary stumbles into the village of a new tribe does everyone there get earmarked for Hell unless they convert?

The answer we got back to that question when I posed (probably somewhat incoherently) was tremendously obvious, and yet somehow I'd never really considered it. "I don't know, but given that God is fair, whatever happens will be right".

This, in a nutshell, is the exact point of conflict. For a Christian, the most basic tenant is that God must be right. For me, the fundamental truth is that God must make sense. We can't negotiate this stuff, it's axiomatic. Every time we're confronted with baffling and seemingly contradictory truths, I take it as evidence that God can't exist. A Christian takes it as evidence that we don't understand God well enough.

In some ways that's the problem with Main Event Week. It's an attempt to persuade people of a truth that cannot be understood, merely trusted. It's also why my preferred talk so far has been on the subject of the Bible's historical accuracy, and why that lecture was preceded by a warning that it would be unwise to make such academic discussions the focus of the week. You can't understand your way to God.

Of course, the only way I can get to anything is through understanding, and I'm happy with that. Even if somehow Free week had penetrated my barricades and I'd ended up in church on Sunday morning, I'd give it a week at the outside before I was wanting to know the exact age at which a child goes to Hell unless they're a Christian. It's in my DNA to ask questions: I guess that's why I've ended up where I have.

Still, it's nice to spend some time every now and again reminding yourself of who you are, and where you're going. Or, in this case, where you choose to stay.

[1] In fairness, the speaker was happy to admit there were flaws in the analogy, but I'm not sure the analogy itself was the problem so much as a terribly nebulous and changeable concept of what justice entails.

Adventures With Jesus #3: False Prophets

Nine years ago, probably almost to the day, I attended a lecture with the stated goal of discussing whether or not science and religion could exist side by side. I don't remember the specifics, but I do recall that it wasn't nearly as objectionable and wrong-headed as I had been fearing (the one line from it that has stayed with me is "Science is how, God is why"). So, when a very similar talk title sprang up for today, I thought it would be interesting to go along and see what, if anything, has changed in the last decade.

What has changed, apparently, is that Richard Dawkins has personally murdered the entire family of every Christian alive, and they are pissed.

I didn't think to start a tally, but I'm relatively sure Dawkins' name came up in the talk more times than Jesus did, which must be pretty unusual for a DICCU-sponsored event. I don't want to turn this into an extended rant on the man (especially given my problems with the lecture, as I'll get to in a moment), but it continues to be a source of almost endless irritation that Dawkins has put himself in a position to become Christianity's poster boy for unreasonableness and seems perfectly happy with it. It allows too many corners to be cut, and too many straw men to be easily assembled (the speaker was happy to acknowledge that Dawkins was a particularly easy target). The sooner he gives up trying to shout the faithful down, the better.

I guess it's probably not surprising so much of the talk revolved around Dawkins, though. Even if he were mild-mannered and inoffensive, he still wrote The Blind Watchmaker (which is a truly wonderful book) and The God Delusion (which I haven't read, partially because of the man's increasingly shrill TV appearances, but mainly because an evolutionary biologist's thoughts on evolutionary biology are of somewhat more interest to me than his thoughts on religion are), and both of those are bestselling books with the common argument that science and religion cannot coexist because science disproves God.

The discussion as to the veracity of that conclusion is a bit out of the way of the topic at hand. My real objection to today's talk isn't that it overused Dawkins as a symbol of arrogant atheistic thought, it's that it did so whilst simultaneously ignoring his arguments.

A very common objection to the idea of natural selection is the point that it is easy to think of examples for which a gradual evolution of tiny improvements just doesn't seem to cut it as an explanation. Eyes, for example, would have just been nothing more than pains in the arse (not literally the arse, obviously) for millenia before anyone got to see out of them. How then could they have evolved? The analogy given today, which is quite common, is that of a mousetrap. Unless you have the cheese and the spring and the blade, what you have is essentially worthless, and certainly not something you want stuck to the side of your face until random mutations finish it off so you can have decapitated rodent for dinner.

Of course, anyone who has studied the basics of evolution will know that these examples exhibit what is termed "irreducible complexity". More specifically, anyone who has read The Blind Watchmaker, in order to quote it to serve one's own purpose, will already know that the problem can be solved by the consideration of "scaffolding"; biological systems that hold early mutations in place like the structures that stop a half-built bridge from falling into the river.

I mention this because our speaker was perfectly happy to quote from The Blind Watchmaker, quite happy to portray Dawkins as insufferably arrogant and wilfully blinkered, but somehow was also happy to point to irreducible complexity as a reason to doubt the absence of a Creator without going on to mention scaffolding.

I've said already that Monday's talk wasn't particularly persuasive, and that yesterday's wasn't particularly good. Today we hit a new low, in that apparently the speakers can no longer even rustle up the ability to be particularly honest. At best it could be argued that the speaker had simply failed to read that particular passage, but that simply means that he is decrying a work as inocorrect and biased despite not having read it, which hardly helps matters.

There is a temptation sometimes upon reaching this point to simply declare victory. Once you expose one instance of such shenanigans, there is no reason to assume any other point made was put forward in good faith, and discourse becomes very difficult. On the other hand, it occurs to me that just tossing away the rest of the talk because the speaker pissed me off wouldn’t be too far away from those who refuse to listen to Dawkins (how lucky Christians are that they’ve never had to separate message from messenger), though of course being arrogant and being disingenuous are hardly equal sins.

Having said all that, though, even if everything else suggested was honestly meant, it is still breathtaking to see a talk on the interaction between science and faith that manages to misrepresent both terms.

We’ll start with the universe, I guess. These days it’s a pretty well-known fact that as far as we can tell, the universe displays a truly suspicious degree of fine-tuning. One explanation for this is that there is a Creator. Believing this is faith, in that the idea is held to be true without sufficient evidence. Another explanation is that our universe is just one of a multitude (either because many exist simultaneously or because there is in some sense a chain of universes, one after the other, to the extent that such concepts can be considered relevant when we’re talking about the nature of reality), and that sooner or later one of them was bound to hit the jackpot (or draw the short straw, depending on how you look at it). Contra to today’s speaker, suggesting this idea as an alternative to God is not faith. Faith requires belief. This is a hypothesis, which simply requires there not be enough evidence to make it a theory, and not enough counter-evidence to make it a fallacy. Moreover, the multiverse may not (for now) be any more observable than God, but the former at least forms a complete explanation. As anyone with any experience with these types of discussion will well be aware, once you say “The universe is so finely-tuned God must have designed it”, you then immediately need to explain where God came from (this is another one of Dawkins points carefully sidestepped in favour of mocking the man for proposing theories no more provable than those he seeks to ridicule). I’m not for a moment suggesting that the only reason anyone believes in God is because it offers an explanation for reality, but if you want to use God as an explanation, you need to be aware that it’s a pretty crappy one.

So, let’s be careful about how we use the word “faith”, yes? While we’re on the subject, can we get on the same page about what “science” means, too? Science takes a combination of observed events and logical progression and uses them to make sense of the world. If God exists beyond logic, and beyond observation (and that would certainly seem to be the case from the perspective of most religions), then science cannot reach him. It does not follow that refusing to accept “God did it” as a scientific argument means we are deliberately hobbling science, or introducing bias, or what have you. Science cannot function if we are allowed to pin anything we don’t immediately understand on God. If you really want to, you can list everything we can‘t yet fully understand as “God‘s work“ until we get round to solving the problem, but as I‘ve argued before the God of the Gaps is a sad and lonely deity, definable only by those things we can’t prove He didn’t do. I’m not sure any Supreme Being capable of shaping reality itself would be particularly flattered by the comparison.

In fairness, there was one part of the lecture that I found very interesting, namely the suggestion that without a creator science might be entirely meaningless. There were two reasons given in support of this argument. The first, and least plausible, is that scientists originally studied nature in an attempt to uncover God’s laws, and thus without God there would be no reason to have made the attempt. The counters to this, of course, are many and varied [1]. The second point is much more interesting, and goes like this: if we are simply the products of natural selection, designed by nothing and no-one, then how can we now anything we observe is the truth? What if everything we believe about science is wrong, and we just can’t tell because of some perceptual flaw inside our brains.

This reminds me of the (surely apocryphal) tale of the philosophy student who found her final exam consisted of a single question: “Prove the universe is not contained within a giant chair leg,” and who received an A by writing down “I can’t”. It almost certainly is impossible to demonstrate that the things we see with our puny squish-balls are even remotely close to how the universe actually is. The immediate counter, though, is so what?

If atheists are right, and we really are just grubbing around in a dark and uncaring universe, the possibility that everything we experience isn’t the truth isn’t something that should particularly concern us. Within what we see as the world, we have determined rules that this far have worked perfectly well. I can drive myself home to see my parents. I can eat an apple and not worry about it poisoning me. A dear friend of mine can have an operation to remove a mass in her throat that was pressing against her trachea. If all of these are based on faulty perceptions, I don’t see why I should care. You’d be hard pressed to find someone deaf from birth who will tell you they are particularly bothered about not being able to hear. I don’t lay awake at night wishing I could hear rainbows. Asking “What if we’re misunderstanding everything?” would be a poor reason to abandon the search for a cure to cancer.

Plus, it’s worth noting that if there is a God, he may have deliberately inserted our brains in backwards so every aspect of science as we understand it is bullshit on toast. One would hope that’s not the sort of thing a divine creator would do, but since He apparently came up with worms that eat their way through children’s eyeballs, it doesn’t appear our hopes are worth that much.

[1] My own personal favourite would be that history has repeatedly demonstrated that many cultures used God or Gods to explain natural phenomena, which suggests the need to explain and understand is actually earlier in the chain of human thought than the need to believe in a deity. If you want you could throw in the point that quite a lot of science revolved around, or that plenty of scientists are atheists and don‘t seem to have any problem dealing with the fact that chance rules the cosmos, nor make the obvious mistake that a random universe is an unpredictable one. Feel free to come up with your own. It’s like shooting fish in a gun barrel.

Adventures With Jesus #2: Non-Binding Resolutions

Today on Adventures With Jesus we consider the age-old question: why does God allow earthquakes?

The suggestion given in this afternoon's talk was that this is one of the toughest theological questions to answer. I actually disagree; I think it's pretty easy. If we assume God exists and wants us to have free will (not that I believe free will either, really, but that's another story) then he can't control our lives. And once you realise that, then it becomes at least arguable that there is no sensible line to draw between which problems He won't intercede and which He will. "This earthquake; yes, this hurricane; no" doesn't really make much sense, and part of my own understanding of God is that he's probably pretty good at logical progression. Another way to look at it would be to note that there are things that are much, much worse than tsunamis from which God does protect us, but that doesn't really get us anywhere, so I prefer the former idea.

Naturally, given that that's a five-second argument that even an atheist can be entirely happy with, today's talk didn't come even remotely close to making it. What it did come close to was forcing me to gnaw out my own tongue (yes, I know that would be an up-side, shut up). I didn't agree with much of yesterday's talk, obviously, but I at least it had a reasonable structure. This one, though, I thought was pretty poor.

The advantage to this is that it should take me far less time to deconstruct the talk, seeing as how it was already a smoking wreck of an argument to begin with. The basic points, to the extent they are worthy of the label, are as follows:

• If you don't believe in God suffering can no longer be described as wrong;
• At least if God is real we can hope things will get better;
• Suffering may be for the greater good;
• Much of our suffering is at the hands of our fellow man;
• God may make us suffer, but he does not abandon us during our suffering;
• Jesus Christ suffered too;
• Mankind deserves to suffer.

Even without going into detail several problems here are obvious. Whether or not we can label a given situation as right or wrong without God has nothing to do with why suffering exists, nor does the idea that eventually everything will work out. Both of those arguments fall into the depressingly common trap of assuming a preferable alternative is the more likely one (the latter explicitly, the former more subtly by assuming people in general prefer to think of cancer or cyclones as wrong, rather than simply bad). Not so much Occam's Razor as Occam's Bedtime Story. It also brushes up against the old (and tremendously aggravating) argument that right and wrong can only exist when some supreme being defines them, when it should be fairly obvious that a society can draw its own conclusions on the subject without too much difficulty in most cases. Murder, for example, is something we can safely label as wrong without the input of a higher power.

It's also odd to point to humanity and say "You're doing most of it". No-one would doubt that there is far too much truth to that. But since a) we're operating with the design we were given and b) it doesn't seem unreasonable we get an explanation for the shit that isn't our fault, I'm struggling to see the relevance.

While we're on easy counters, we can also pretty quickly dispatch the argument regarding Jesus' own suffering. It was nice that he put his money where his mouth was, sure, but that (at best) is evidence that God isn't a hypocrite, and has no bearing on whether or not the reasons behind suffering are justified.

Much like yesterday, I'll cover the remaining points one by one.

Suffering may be for the greater good

I hate this argument for two reasons. The first is arguably a philosophical disagreement. The common line taken by those trying to justify this position is that we can't possibly expect to understand the plan God is working to. "Before the laws of God we are as swine", as Reverend Hale would have it. My problem with this is twofold. Firstly (and this is maybe as much a matter of belief as Christianity, I accept that), I subscribe to the theory of universal logic. In other words, I believe that the axioms of rationality are not human constructs, but exist beyond us, even if at this point there is no reason to believe that there exists any other beings in the universe aware of them. This sits uneasily with the idea that God's thinking is totally inexplicable.

Even if that isn't true, there are other issues. Piaget argued that it is possible to teach a child of any age old enough to understand language any topic whatsoever in a way that was "intellectually honest". It may be necessary to simplify considerably, and one may question whether teaching given topics is actually wise, but it can be done. Proponents of the "Great Plan" idea have to believe that the best way for God to deal with us on our level is to tell us it'll all be fine, and to leave him alone. I'd argue that this is hardly compelling. Galileo would agree with me, I think: "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

The other problem here strikes me as such a serious one, philosophically speaking, that I pulled the speaker up on it during the Q&A session because I felt he had fumbled it so badly [1]. One of the standards objections to the idea that the universe is being run according to some unfathomably long-term plan is that it's spectacularly unfair. Which is obviously true, but it's so obvious that Christianity has had a counter for quite some time: it does no good to compare children killed in earthquakes with Pol Pot, because there will be a reckoning after death which will make up for the injustices in this life.

This, though, isn't what bothers me. My issue doesn't arise from the difference between a good person suffering and a bad person living well, it's springs from the difference between a Christian suffering and a Christian living well. If the object of this life is indeed to accept God and try to do His will, then why make that process harder for some than others? Especially given the potentially unspeakably high price of failure (hello pitchforks!). Our decision to be responsible individuals exists independently of our circumstances, to some extent. Our ability to hang on to our faith does not.

Now, since God is omniscient you might be able to live with the idea that he is capable of judging your actions conditional upon your circumstances and your degree of faith conditional upon your circumstances. There are problems here too, however. Firstly, the only choices offered by Christianity to my knowledge are Heaven and Hell (plus possibly Purgatory), and such an infinitely complex decision-making process would sit pretty uneasily with such a limited choice of fates (q.v. Ashcroft Fallacy). Secondly, there's the problem of the casting of God as being just, someone who refuses to compromise his principles, and forgiving all at the same time (obviously this is an issue beyond this narrow point), a combination which I cannot reconcile.

God Does Not Abandon Us During Our Suffering

This was the point that gave me the title for this entire post. As far as I can see, God doesn't abandon us when we suffer in the exact way the United States Congress doesn't abandon Africans when they're being hacked to death with machetes. That is to say, it is very clear that the victims have the moral support of the US Government, but that comes as no comfort when your family has been butchered, and claiming otherwise while trying to justify that suffering is pretty messed up. It's particularly bad when it appears during a talk in which you've already listed Rwanda as a horror humanity visited upon itself. If you want to say "We brought this on ourselves", fine, but don't try to add in "But I feel really bad about it, if it helps".

Mankind Deserves To Suffer

It's always interested me that there are people out there who can simultaneously argue that punishing us in this life according to our crimes isn't something God is prepared to do, but slapping us around as a race is totally OK. It just fails to compute on every level. It all comes back to original sin, I guess. Punish Dave for murdering ten people wouldn't be cricket. Punish Dave for sharing his DNA with the guy who pissed God off millenia ago, well, that makes much more sense.

Of course, the entire idea of original sin is so bat's arse crazy it's hard to know where to begin with it. The most obvious layer to this particular onion-of-madness is how a loving God can punish humanity en masse for a mistake made so long ago, or how rejecting Him was really worse than executing eleven million people in the Holocaust whilst trying to rule the world and wipe out an entire race. That then peels off to reveal the deeper bizarreness of suggesting the events in the garden of Eden involved mankind rejecting God, when it would be much more reasonable to say that Adam disobeyed God which resulted in God rejecting us. Thousands of years (even if we pretend we don't know how geology works) of misery for one guy eating one fruit that should never have been there in the first place (planting that tree may not be the legal definition of entrapment, but it must be close) and which he probably wouldn't have touched if God had chosen to explain rather than simply command. If nothing else, the whole thing makes one wonder if the problem isn't that God can't justify to us why we suffer, but that he would rather just order us to suck it up.

In summary, then. One atheist's response: God doesn't want to make all our decisions for us. The summation of Christian thinking on the subject: God only kills babies because it'll make things better thousands of years later, and they had it coming anyway, though he does feel bad about all the pointless, miserable, horrific pain and heartbreak and death that's going on, and he'd like to make that clear, because if you forget that and give up on him then you'll be in a world of trouble.

Like I said, it wasn't really the best of talks.

[1] His direct response to my question was pretty feeble, too, though in his defence I don't think he understood the point I was making, and there wasn't time to go into it in more detail.

Adventures With Jesus #1

February is rubbish. A pointless place-holder between the gluttony of Christmas, New Year and Saint Squiderins (15th Jan) and the arrival of Spring, with its new blooms and its hares punching each other in the face, and what have you.

How fortunate then that there is at least one thing to keep me occupied while I wait for the temperature to return to a level at which I can once more doss around in my t-shirt. It's Christian Recruitment Drive up here in Durham once again, this time under the name "Free". A week-long opportunity to seek out people comfortable with their religious beliefs, and then argue the shit out of them.

Today's lunchtime talk was entitled "The Bible -Unreliable and Irrelevant?". The main thrust of the argument was that just because something old doesn't make everything it says total crap, which I've got to say I'm entirely on board with.

In truth, whether or not the Bible is relevant to contemporary life is something I couldn't possibly care less about. Either there is a deity or deities, or there isn't. Either Jesus was the Son of God, or he wasn't. In that sense, it's the reliability of the Bible that's important, though the speaker took pains to point out that there are far more important questions in Christianity than that.

In essence, the talk attempted to justify treating the Bible, not as allegory or metaphor, but as reliable and rigorous eye-witness reports of the life of Jesus, and that said testimony did in fact demonstrate that Jesus was the Son of God.

This could probably be fairly described as a tough sell. As far as I can see, and since I wrote this list after the talk I'm pretty sure this was the thinking being employed (at least roughly) by the speaker himself, one needs to justify the following progression:

1. The current English translation of the Bible can be relied upon as being faithful to earlier texts;
2. Those texts can be relied upon as faithful to the original copies now lost;
3. The original copies are faithful transcriptions of eyewitness testimony;
4. The eyewitness testimony itself was an accurate description of what was seen;
5. What was seen was actually what occurred;
6. Demonstrating power also demonstrates truth.

Like I said, it's a tough sell. That sixth point, especially, was pretty much entirely glossed over, though if Anonymous McNoname (who has been kind enough to give me a few warm-up arguments to prepare me for the main event) were here she would almost certainly want to know why anyone who saw a man claim "I am the Son of God" before turning water into wine would think "Well, that dudes magic, but is he honest?" Maybe I am just too cynical, though if so I blame Uri Gellar.

The other five points were all covered, in various levels of detail. I figured I'd summarise the arguments put forth, along them with my own thoughts.

Points 1 and 2 pretty much overlap. The degree to which you trust the current iteration of the Bible really depends on your faith on the translation skills of various academics through the years. There are already reasons to question the veracity of such translations, partially because of the open question as to how much one culture can ever possibly understand the language of another even if it has been properly transliterated (I'm not just talking about Sapir-Whorf, but that would likely be part of it), but also because a very real possibility that overturning traditional doctrinal thinking is likely an extraordinarily difficult thing to achieve. Religion is almost by definition extremely conservative when it comes to its own structure and theology, and trying to point out that a given word may not have quite the meaning ascribed to it by generations of scholars may not necessarily get you very far.

Much of that is parenthetical to my main point, however, which is that even the speaker himself admitted that the texts from which our contemporary translate do differ in around 2% of the verses. We were assured that none of them were particularly important, but I think I'd like to take a look at some of them to judge that for myself. 98% accuracy is a good figure for a pregnancy test. The Word of God, maybe not so much.

Points three and four were the most thoroughly covered. Thorough isn't necessarily convincing, though. Some of the arguments were comparative. It was noted that the earliest copies of the gospels date back to sooner after the originals were written than do any surviving texts originally written by Plato, and that there are more copies. "It's odd that no-one questions Plato," was the comment made at the time, I believe (I may have paraphrased slightly).

The trouble is, of course that plenty of people question Plato. That's what academics do. We take people smarter than we are and call them dicks. It's absurd in the extreme to suggest that
this is only true when the claims made include the clearly supernatural [1]. I'm also not at all sure why the number of copies of a book is supposed to testify to its truth (the idea that Jeffrey Archer has been slowly warping reality to his own design is one that will give you nightmares).

Other points were more direct, though still not particularly persuasive. Arguing, for example, that were eye-witnesses to have been lying they would have chosen more grandiose lies, amnd ones that cast them in a more positive light, fails because without understanding the motivation behind such hypothetical lies, it is impossible to judge their construction as being strange or counter-productive. Arguing that the Bible contains no counters to the testimony offered is also hardly compelling (it's also worth noting that the argument that there was little to be gained by lying in such a way was presented almost simultaneously with the idea that such large crowds gathered to hear them telling of Jesus that the Bible must be accurate and that many must have seen Jesus' wonder; either a story brings no glory, or it brings so much devotion to it that it must be true, it is unclear as to how you could have both at once).

All that leaves us is the most compelling part of the discussion of these two points, and not coincidentally (at least, I don't believe it was coincidence) the one driven furthest home this afternoon: the sheer number of witnesses referenced in the Bible and elsewhere. To some extent the difficulty here probably lies in how much weight each of us gives to eyewitness testimony in general [2]. Speaking for myself, I'm acutely aware that witnesses are often very unreliable, and that such testimony doesn't carry the weight that many people ascribe to it. Then we need to start considering crowd mentality, folie à plusieurs, and so on. Ultimately, though, you're either convinced or you're not. Unsurprisingly, I take the latter view, mainly because I think that crowd of hundreds (or even thousands) experiencing something inexplicable to them but not inexplicable full stop is vastly more plausible than the idea that there is a God, and he had a Son, and that Son came to Earth, and he turned water into wine but didn't think of rustling up any long-term proof he was who he claimed to be.

In some ways I think point five is the most interesting. Is it arrogant to assume that the people surrounding Jesus in the early years AD were more gullible than we were? Absolutely. But that isn't the point. Gullibility isn't the issue, frames of reference are.

I've seen David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty vanish. I've seen Penn Jillette run a man over in an articulated lorry. I've seen a man asked just the right questions in just the right order to make him forget his own name [2]. I know that these are illusions and mind-tricks because in the two thousand years between me seeing those things and people watching as water turned into wine humanity has cobbled together a fairly comprehensive idea of how shit works (also: Mr Jillette was kind enough to explain his trick to his viewers, in case we were dense). It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that complaining that water can't become wine is an objection that carries somewhat more weight when you can point out the requisite re-ordering of subatomic particles that would be necessary. I don't want to suggest the people of circa 20 AD were gibbering idiots, but four hundred years later people were still terrified of werewolves [3]. Science and culture and perception all grow up together. The more precisely we draw the line between possible and impossible, the more seeing something apparently over that line makes us impressed at the lie, rather than swallowing it as truth.

Anyway, that's day one of my intrepid journey into the mists of existential confusion. I'll let you know how day two goes tomorrow.

(Also, in theory you should be able to see more here, but when I tried it crashed my computer. This is continuing proof that if God does exist, he has a fairly odd sense of humour).

[1] Not that that would be odd in any case; the level of proof required to satisfactorily verify an event is a function of not just the number of accounts but also the plausibility of that event. The more unlikely a phenomenon, the more people need to experience it until it becomes recognised.

[2] It was pointed out that I have a vested interest in not believing these testimonies since it will mean I can't do whatever the hell I want anymore. This is entirely true, though since the talk concluded by reminding us that Jesus can free us from guilt and fear and death, it seems disingenuous to suggest it is only the atheists who are coming at this without total objectivity.

[3] That is a lie; I didn't see it. Someone told me it happened, though, so I'm already as much an authority as the gospels are.

[4] If we turn to our Being Human, of course, we know that the contemporary analog to the werewolf is apparently the paedophile, but that's a somewhat different conversation.

Can You Murder A Cylon?

So, our American cousins are doubtlessly revelling in last night's Big Reveal in Battlestar Galactica, smug in the knowledge that their British cousins have to wait until Tuesday to finally get the answers we've been waiting for for so long.

Well nuts to them, that's what I say. If I can't be a part of their amazing revelations, I'll just obsess over something else instead. Jacob over at Television Without Pity seems to have a bee in his bonnet about the willingness of the Colonials to just execute every Cylon they come across. Yes, he argues, the Cylons did wipe out the Colonies, so a certain degree of rabid hatred is to be expected, but treating the Cylons as just machines instead of sentient entities in their own right is what got us here in the first place.

It's an excellent point, one of many excellent points Jacob includes in his re-caps (though re-cap might not be the right term, since many of them take longer to read than it would to re-watch the episode which they describe). On the other hand, though, there's a danger in assuming that the skin-jobs are exactly like us. I don't want to give too much away (some of my readers are still way behind on Galactica), but his reference to the unsanctioned shooting of a Cylon prisoner as "murder" seems to miss the point somewhat. How can it be murder if the victim is alive and unharmed hours later?

In fact, what exactly is it? If we take the assumption (which I think is what Jacob means) that we should consider a skin-job as having the right to be treated the same as any human under Colonial law, then what exactly is the specific crime committed by someone who shoots them in the chest?

Obviously, Colonial law is unlikely to be identical to British law, but one can imagine they would share many similarities. With that in mind, I decided to phone SpaceSquid Senior, expert in all things legal, and demand to know how we should prosecute. Since I can't tape a conversation over the phone, I instead wrote questions out in advance, put them to him, and then summarise the responses.

Q. What's the difference between assault, battery, actual bodily harm (ABH) and grievous bodily harm (GBH)?

A. Assault simply requires the victim is placed in fear of imminent attack (though you can get away with including a conditional: "I'd kill you if it wasn't a Sunday"). Battery goes into actual physical contact. ABH and GBH are gradations on that. ABH is getting into the realm of bruising and that sort of thing. By GBH you're into "malicious wounding", or "life-threatening".

Q. Do any of them have a requirement that the damage be lasting, or even that it takes a given amount of time for healing to take place?

A. Absolutely not. You can be entirely healed by the time someone is brought to trial, or even arrested, for the crime of damaging you.

Q. How would you prosecute or defend a trial in which someone had been killed, only to be reborn in an identical body 24 hours later?

A. Obviously were such a thing to be possible the law would be very quickly re-written, but in the first instance, as prosecutor I would argue that the crime was complete from the moment the victim died. Later events are irrelevant. I'd defend by questioning whether the victim could be considered to have died, any more than someone on life-support for twenty-four hours without the ability to beat their own heart can be considered dead. [1]

Based on this, then, it seems at least plausible that the prosecution would be leery of attempting to pin a murder charge on the perpetrator (my own opinion would be that it was very likely, but then this isn't my territory). On the other hand, GBH would definitely stick, since there's no requirement that the wounds be permanent, only that they reach a given level of seriousness. It is presumably unquestionable that a wound that ends up killing you is ipso facto life-threatening. SSS gave me five years as a ball-park figure for the punishment for GBH, maybe out in two and a half with good behaviour. This, then, would seem a reasonable punishment, under our current law, for killing a Cylon (meaning Jacob is entirely right that the character in question got off very lightly, but not so likely as he believes).

An important caveat to all that is that killing a Cylon outside of range of a resurrection facility would still be murder. Crucially, though, the law measures action, not intent, so whether or not the crime is described as murder depends on whether the victim is within range, not whether either victim or perpetrator believed themselves to be within range.

SSS did point out that a new law would be required for killing a Cylon whilst within resurrection range, something that lies between GBH and killing a person. I'm not so sure about the latter part. Certainly, shooting a Cylon in the back of the head seems less of a crime than, say, beating them to a pulp and leaving them to die only for them to be found and healed. A thorough examination of that point, though, would have to consider the difference between damage and suffering, and maybe some thought into the psychological after-effects of the various different hypothetical scenarios.

[1] Dad doesn't follow Galactica, but I suspect if he did he'd also point out that suicide is a mortal sin amongst the Cylons, and thus the fact that they are known to kill their current bodies to save themselves suffering means they cannot consider downloading to involve death at any stage.

Voices Of Authority #1: Dark Energy

When, a few weeks ago, I was ruminating on Big Bang Theory and considering (in my own cackhanded, amateurish way) to what degree it was a more satisfying answer to why we exist than "God did it", it occurred to me that others would be far better at tackling that sort of question than I. Specifically Pause, who is constantly willing to correct my feeble understanding of astrophysics when prompted (and I appreciate that he waits for said prompting, otherwise I'd probably be in tears every other day).

In fact, not long after that post appeared on the intertubes, S. Spielbergo e-mailed me, wanting to know if the all-powerful Pause could enlighten him as to why the universe is apparently not only expanding, but accelerating in its expansion.

Because I care about my readers (at last count, and being generous, you might just be in double figures by now), I asked Pause this very question, and he was good enough to explain it to me: dark energy.

That makes sense, I thought, dark energy. Trouble is, I was thinking of dark matter, and I'm not entirely sure what that is either, but apparently it's very different to dark energy, and I was a crazy, wide-eyed fool for believing differently.

Anyway, this rather rambling introduction is a preamble to introducing a new (and almost certainly tremendously irregular) feature: Voices Of Authority. Within these posts you will find the smartest minds that can be found (read: that can be found in my address book) explaining various complex topics in a way that even I can understand.

We begin with Pause, ably assisted by fellow space-obsessive Cocklick, trying to hammer the basic properties of dark energy into my puny cranium. Jamie was there too, but since we weren't talking about whether Nero ever actually played a fiddle, his turn will have to wait.

SS: Welcome ladies and gentlemen, to the first episode of Voices of Authority. Thanks to Pause and Cocklick for joining us, and to our studio audience for being so well-behaved.
Jamie: You mean me?
SS: Quiet, Jamie. Anyway, since I apparently can't tell the difference between dark matter and dark energy, purely because they both start with the same word, maybe you guys could tell me what the difference is between them?
Pause: Dark matter is still a form of matter, which we can't see, but has gravitational attraction like all other matter.
SS: So how come we can't see it?
P: We don't know: we just can't. Well, we can't detect it. It appears to interact only via gravity, which is the weakest of the four fundamental forces.
SS: The other three being?
P: Weak nuclear, strong nuclear, and electromagnetism.
SS: All right. So we don't know it exists; we haven't detected it.
Cocklick: That's not quite true. We can't observe it in EM radiation, but we can test it by galactic collision. Basically, two galaxies collided, and there was a big explosion in the middle, but the dark matter went straight through.
SS: But you couldn't detect that, surely? Isn't there a problem with inferring its existence in that way having already assumed its existence? Isn't that a bit circular?
C: Not really. The idea was "If we assume dark matter exists, what natural phenomenon would demonstrate its existence?" What would split normal matter and dark matter? And the collision of galaxies is one thing that would do that, so they went out looking for it. And they found... something, by using gravitational lensing.
SS: So there's more to dark matter than just "we need this thing to balance everything out".
C: Well that's how it started, but now we're at the next step.
SS: Proving that it actually exists?
C: Yes.
SS: Right, that'll have to do, since I've already wandered way off what it was I actually wanted to ask. So, dark matter is matter that interacts by gravity but is unobservable. What's dark energy?
P: Dark energy is something completely different. It's a repulsive force which is responsible for the universe expanding. In the loosest possible sense, it's "anti-gravity".
SS: And the universe isn't just expanding, but expanding faster as time goes on, right?
P: Yeah, the expansion is accelerating.
SS: Which confused everyone, since we'd always assumed that the universe would either contract, reach an equilibrium, or just drift apart.
P: And none of those seem to be the case.
SS: I've got to ask the same question I did about dark matter. Is there any reason to believe that dark energy exists, beyond us needing something to explain accelerating expansion? In which case, couldn't I just say "it was God?"
C: Well, not really. Science is about generating models. We have a standard model that explains most things. Now we've found something that it doesn't explain. So we ask ourselves what we can add to model to explain it.
SS: But my point is what makes "dark energy did it" any more compelling than "God did it?"
P: Well, dark energy is just a name for at least two or three different theories. It's more of a label.
SS: So it has nothing to do with actual energy?
C: Maybe not.
SS: So I could call it "space fairies" and be no less accurate?
P: You might find it harder to get your papers published.
SS: Isn't that a little homophobic?
J: You're the one trying to blame universal expansion on gays.
SS: Quiet, Jamie; this is a serious article. Anyway, I could argue that dark energy is actually a racist term.
C: Back to the question at hand, you could call it Unexplained Phenomenon A, if you really wanted. I guess the "dark energy" label came about from attempting to balance Einstein's equation. They didn't want to call it "negative energy."
SS: Because that describes the Mexicans?
P: No comment.
C: The University of St Andrews does not endorse bigotry of any kind.
SS: Yeah, MotCC would like to make clear that the Mexicans are an industrious race, and a wonderful people.
P: We salute our Mesoamerican brothers.
SS: OK, next question. Obviously as the universe expands, the galaxies get further apart and thus exert less gravitational force upon each other. So why isn't this dark energy getting weaker in the same way?
P: Because dark energy, unlike matter, isn't concentrated in galaxies. In fact, maybe it's better to move away from the "anti-gravity" idea. Dark energy actually expands space-time itself. So rather than the "big crunch" idea, where everything collapses back into itself, you get the possibility of a "big rip", in which space-time becomes stretched so far that it just basically snaps. Electrons end up too far from nuclei, and everything stops working. It's one more potential "end of the universe" scenario.
SS: So the expansion of space-time doesn't mean subatomic particles get bigger, they just get further apart?
P: Right. And if this dark energy effect isn't homogeneous, then it's pretty close to it.
SS: OK, well I think that's probably enough for our first session. My thanks to Pause and Cocklick for their co-operation and enlightening answers, and to Jamie for not slowing us down with retarded art-student questions like "What colour is an atom?" See you next time.

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(Edited for clarity).