There are others just as good, though I'd question whether the Chewbacca one still technically counts as a pony.
Thursday, 19 February 2009
Eats D6 Sugar-Lumps A Round
They're so cute, and yet so disturbing.
There are others just as good, though I'd question whether the Chewbacca one still technically counts as a pony.
There are others just as good, though I'd question whether the Chewbacca one still technically counts as a pony.
Commanding The Kingfisher (Part 6)
18th March
The trial was to be at dawn. Not that there was a dawn out here. Not in the endless chasm between stars, where the Kingfisher currently lay whilst Keigh’s loyalists sorted out the mess Geiss had made of the hull plating.
Technically, then, the trial wouldn’t start at dawn, just at 5 am.
It didn’t make any difference to Jessa. She’d be just as dead either way.
She had spent the night in the brig, pacing up and down in her filthy jumpsuit. Harlan was in here somewhere, but she had denied them any contact. A field of shimmering amber light enveloped her cramped cell, cutting out all light and sound.
There was nothing to do but wait, try to block out the knowledge of what was to follow, and hope that somehow a workable plan of action would stumble into her thoughts. All three had gone pretty badly. Jessa had never felt so scared; the R’Dokken attack a fortnight ago had been nothing compared to waiting for your own execution. She had watched in horror as Jaime had been murdered, the memory of his screams as Flopsy pulled him in two kept bludgeoning its way into her thoughts. As a doctor, she could explain in great detail exactly which of his body parts had stretched and snapped and fallen out, and in what order. There were definite disadvantages to understanding the human body.
At least Harlan wouldn’t die alone, she thought.
It was cold comfort.
Oh God, she suddenly thought. What if they kill him first?
How much longer would she have to suffer this? The guards that had gently, guiltily led her to her cell had taken her watch from her, so she had no way to gauge time. It seemed like she had been waiting forever when the cut-off field dispersed, to revealing two guards standing outside her cell.
Her heart leaped when she recognised Vaber and Kittrich.
“Morning Doctor,” Vaber said flatly, “We are to escort you to the bridge now. The captain,” he almost spat the word, “Would like to begin proceedings.”
“Already?” Jessa said, determined not to show how close she was to collapsing under the pressure, “How time flies in sealed prison cages.” She looked around at the surrounding cells; all were empty. Harlan must already be on his way to the bridge.
Both guards smiled humorlessly.
“Yeah, I can’t imagine it was much of a fucking picnic,” Kittrich said. “Those fields really put out some heat, don’t they?” She wiped her brow with the back of her hand, and unzipped the front of her jumpsuit. “Sometimes when we’re off duty we come down here and use them to toast marshmallows.”
“Anyway, you ready? Or we could weight a few minutes, let you, you know, screw up your courage?”
As Kittrich spoke she stripped off her jumpsuit to the waist. On the grimy white t-shirt beneath she had written the words “Do u want us 2 break u out?” in black marker.
Jessa was amazed.. Kittrich and Vaber were running a huge risk giving her that message, the brig was studded with cameras. And if she was to take them up on their offer, and their plan went wrong, then hers would not be the only body that would lie on the deck of the bridge by the end of the day. She was a little touched by their bravery on her behalf. But there was no way she could justify risking their lives for her. Her role was to save people, not endanger them. And if she was going to find some way, somehow, to get out of this with skin intact, it wouldn’t be by exchanging her imperilment for somebody else’s.
“No, thank you, Ms Kittrich. I think it’s time I faced this thing.”
There was a long pause as the guards considered this. Their faces flashed with disappointment and relief in equal measure.
Eventually, Kittrich shrugged and pulled her jumpsuit back on. Vaber stepped forward, pressed his palm against the lock to Jessa’s cell, and stood back as the door swung open.
“If you’d care to accompany us, Doctor Lambert?”
She did. Forwards through the labyrinth of corridors that made up the Kingfisher’s innards, up in faintly malodorous lifts; all the time screwing down a barrier over her churning thoughts, and trying to her ignore her equally turbulent stomach.
All too soon, the hatch to the bridge arrived to meet her. Taking the deepest breath of her life, and smiling grimly at her two companions, she stepped in to face her fate.
The bridge had been laid out just as it had been for Jaime’s kangaroo court.
A rickety wooden frame stood in the middle of the room, a few metres in front of the currently vacant captain’s chair. The few crew members unlucky enough to be on duty right now were doing their best to ignore it, but on either side stood Flopsy and Mopsy, each facing its only current occupant.
“Harlan!” she called.
“Jessa!” he replied, looking towards her, and flashing her a confident grin. It was obviously fake, but it was still good to see. She fired back a smile of her own; not entirely counterfeit, and hurried over to join him.
“Silence, prisoners,” Flopsy warned. They both ignored it. Upon reaching her husband, Jessa sprang forward, throwing her arms around him and almost bowling him over. Shem tightened her grip around him, and pressed her hair against his temple
“Not so bad,” he said, “Although the way things are going it’s looking like you wasted your time fixing my leg.”
“Silence!” Flopsy repeated. “I am authorised to exercise punishment if you fail to comply.”
By mutual consent they stopped talking, but they continued to hold each other. Jessa felt his breath on her neck, her brown hair swaying slightly each time he exhaled. For her part, she simply held on as tightly as her strength would allow.
Suddenly Mopsy broke the moment.
“All rise for her honour, Judge Cottontail.”
The bedraggled bridge crew stood to a ragged attention. It was only then that Jessa noticed Hennis as he rose from Jaime’s chair. It was brutally unsubtle message. Once you two are dead, I’ll be First Officer. Hennis activated a knowing, rodent-like grin. Jessa turned from him in disgust.
Moments later the door beside the viewscreen opened, and Judge Cottontail rumbled from her chambers. Keigh followed close behind, wearing a pale summer dress, and clumsily plaits that had presumably been ham-fistedly built up by a navbot.
At first glance the child captain seemed in good spirits, she always seemed to enjoy her trials. Beneath the young grin and short, skipping steps, however, Jessa could tell something was wrong. Once again Keigh was terrified, either of what she was about to do, or the consequences of refusing to do it. None of this was the kid’s fault, Jessa reminded herself, she was just a little girl horribly out of her depth.
It bothered her that that argument did not inspire an ounce of sympathy from her.
Keigh clambered up into her father’s chair.
“You can all sit down now,” she told the crew, who did so.
“The court is now in session,” Cottontail announced. “The defendants are charged with mutiny and conspiracy to commit mutiny. The penalty for these charges is death. How do the defendants plead?”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Shouldn’t we have a defence council?” Jessa whispered.
“We did,” Harlan replied, “Hails. I told her not to waste her time.”
Jessa raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Do you think that’s wise?” she hissed.”Silence!” the judge boomed. “Silence or you shall be held in contempt of court, for which the penalty is death.”
Harlan looked coldly at the judge.
“I didn’t want Hails defending us because I wanted to represent myself. That makes me my own council, and my wife’s council. So how can I not be allowed to speak to my client?”
Another pause.
“You have no need for conversation,” Keigh said eventually, her tone betraying the fact that she couldn’t understand what she was saying, “Since it is obvious that you are utterly guilty of the charges brought against you.”
“Objection!” Harlan called out.
“Overruled,” responded Cottontail.
“You can’t just-“
“Overruled!” Cottontail repeated, louder this time. “There will be no more interruptions from the defendants. Any further objections, and you will be held in contempt of court.”
This is going well, Jessa thought.
“Prosecution?” Cottontail asked, swivelling on its tracks to face Flopsy.
Flopsy rolled slightly forward.
“I call my first witness: Lieutenant-Commander Hennis.”
Hennis stood and, smoothing his jumpsuit with his hands, stepped in front of the defendant’s stand.
“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” Flopsy asked.
“I do,” Hennis replied with mock seriousness.
Where was Keigh getting this crap from, Jessa wondered distantly? Was this how she thought trials were supposed to be run, or was she being fed it by her father? It was probably a mixture of both. Part of her just wanted this over and done with, whatever the verdict.
“Please explain to the court what you witnessed yesterday.”
Jessa felt Harlan stiffen with that, but he kept his mouth closed.
Hennis directed his reply to the captain’s chair.
“Whilst on what we believed at the time to be a routine maintenance EVA, I watched Flopsy float right off the hull of the ship. Took us three hours to recover it. I mean her,” he said, smiling at Keigh.
“And what caused this to occur?”
“Her logs showed she received a request for a jump calculation. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t matter, but with her safety routines shut down, she had no reason not to devote her full processing power to the calculation. She had nothing left to keep herself on the hull.”
“Who ordered the jump calculation?” the prosecution asked.
Hennis turned round to face the accused.”Doctor Lambert.”
“You treacherous shit!” Harlan shouted.
“Shut up!” Keigh screamed, her face contorted by a fury beyond anything a five-year old should be able to express. Her eyes bulged from their sockets, and her breathing came in harsh gasps. Her knuckles shone white as she squeezed at the arms of her chair.
Abruptly she seemed to calm down. A look of exhaustion flashed across her face.
Mood swings on top of everything, Jessa’s instincts flashed up. Keigh’s mind was slipping. Or breaking up. Either way, Gabe was pushing harder and harder against his prison walls inside his daughter’s brain. It was only a matter of time before he took full control, breaking Keigh’s consciousness in two in the process. And given his obvious insanity, that was going to be disastrous for the Kingfisher.
That just might be their way out.
“If you continue to interrupt, Mr Summers,” she said icily, “I will decide it isn’t worth waiting for the end of the trial to have you executed.”
“Prosecutor, please continue.”
There was a faint whine as Flopsy’s mechanical eyes refocused.
“I call my second witness, Lieutenant Gallagher.”
Gallagher shuffled over from comms. His face was crestfallen, and he took great pains to avoid eye contact.
You’d think he was the one about to die, Jessa thought uncharitably.
“Lieutenant Gallagher,” Flopsy said once the unwilling officer reached his destination, “Could you explain why Lieutenant-Commander Summers is also on trial today?”
“Mr Hennis searched Harlan when he got back on board,” Gallagher said. “He said they found a device on him.”
“What kind of device?”
There was a long pause. Gallagher glanced round at Harlan, who stared back without sympathy.
“Mr Gallagher?” Keigh prompted, a hint of a threat in her voice.
“We couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to be a transmitter,” Gallagher eventually offered. “I checked recent traffic, and I managed to sniff out a signal, broadcast from the Kingfisher at the exact same time Flopsy lost her grip.”
“Your honour?” said Flopsy, turning to face its fellow, “The prosecution rests.”
“Thank you,” replied Cottontail. “The jury will now pronounce sentence.”
“What?” Harlan murmured, “Don’t I get to ride this kangaroo?”
Justice was rapidly served.
“We find the defendants guilty” Mopsy pronounced.
“You have been found guilty of mutiny and conspiracy to commit mutiny,” Keigh said, rising from her chair. “The sentence is death. Mopsy, Flopsy?”
The two robots started forward.
“Just a second!” Jessa exclaimed.
The navbots ignored her.
“Hey; bitch!” Jessica bellowed, “Listen the fuck up!”
The executioners paused.
“How dare you?” Keigh spat, her small face contorted by rage.
“You can’t kill me,” Jessa said desperately, trying not to look at the deadly robots on either side of her, “I was the one you roped into performing your mind-dump. If you kill me, and then something goes wrong, what are you going to do about it?”
Keigh paused for a second to consider.”Doctor Mtenga can aid me just as well as you.” The captain turned back to her robots.
“Are you sure, Keigh? Really, absolutely sure? If anything happens to you, who’s going to finish off this little jihad of yours?”
The young captain said nothing for a moment, her father’s desire for bloodshed fighting against his fear of death. Or perhaps it was her own instinct for self-preservation. If indeed there was still any point in making a distinction between them.
Finally, the decision was made.
“Very well, Doctor. We will spare you for now. Flopsy, Mopsy; just kill Summers.”
“Shit!” Harlan leaped from the stand, retreating from the advancing killers.
“You kill him, Keigh, and we’re finished. Doctor or not, I won’t help you. I’ll sit back and smile as I watch you rot.”
Keigh ignored her. Harlan backed against the viewscreen. The starfield framed his terrified face as the robots bore down on him.
Desperately, Jessa kept trying.
“You can feel it, can’t you, captain? The pressure building in your skull. The headaches. The mind-dump is disintegrating. And I’m the only one who can glues it back together.” There was a cry from behind her as the robots grabbed their prey. Jessa could not bear to turn round, could not bear to see her husband killed. She closed her eyes and waited for the scream.
It never came.
Opening her eyes again, Jessa turned. The robots held Harlan by the arms, and clearly he was still terrified, but he was still alive; the navbots stood unmoving.
She returned her gaze to Keigh.
“Agreed, Doctor. You and your husband will be spared, in exchange for ensuring my condition does not deteriorate.”
Jessa breathed out. It had all been a bluff, for all she knew the headaches were a perfectly natural side-effect of the procedure, but apparently it had saved them.
With her head swimming, she stood down from her wooden cage.
“However,” Keigh continued, “I would hardly be fit to be called captain if I let mutiny go entirely unpunished.”
“Mopsy? Tear off his arm.”
“What?” Jessa exclaimed in disbelief.
Harlan screamed behind her. She span round. Blood spattered her face, got in her eyes; but she could still see Harlan on the floor, blood pouring from the ruined stump of his left upper arm. Mopsy stood beside him, flecked with red, its massive fists wrapped around her husband’s severed limb. Casually it let the arm drop onto its former owner.
Harlan should have passed out; but something kept him awake. His face was white from shock, but he kept trying to get to his feet, using his remaining arm in an attempt to push himself up.
Jessa ran to her stricken spouse.
“Stay down,” she told him urgently; “I’ll try to stop the bleeding.” She looked over her shoulder. “Gallagher, get Mtenga up here with a trauma team.”
“It’s…OK,” Harlan replied through gritted teeth. “Geiss’ toy worked like…like a charm. I got the message off. Help’s on the way.”
Jessa tore away the sleeve of her jumpsuit, began tying round the stump, hoping to staunch the endless flow of blood. The liquid made her grip sticky, her hands warm.
“Where the hell is my trauma team?” she shouted.
“On its way,” Gallagher assured her.
“Christ, its cold,” Harlan murmured, abandoning his attempts to stand, and relaxing against the floor.
“Just hold on, baby, you’re gonna be fine,” she assured him.
Harlan responded by lapsing into unconsciousness. The pool of blood beneath him continued to grow, more slowly perhaps, but it was still growing.
Jessa wiped blood and saltwater from her face with the back of her fist. The blood already on her hands and the new influx of tears made the motion pointless. Her work on her tourniquet done, she lay beside her husband, holding him. He hadn’t been wrong, he was quite terrifyingly cold.
Help was on the way, but how could it possibly arrive in time?
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
Musings On Galactica: One Year On
S. Spielbergo mentioned his hope (well, expectation) earlier today that I would slap together a post at some point regarding last night's Galactica episode, as I did with the last two. The problem is, The Oath and Blood On The Scales were both very, very heavily built around the classic idea of taking well-defined characters, placing them on opposite sides of a question without an obvious answer, and charting the tragedy that then inevitably unfolds.
No Exit, in contrast, was about sitting the fans down and starting to fill in the quite staggering number of blanks the show has accumulated. If the last fortnight has played out as a Greek tragedy, last night took the form of a historical lecture. Which isn't to say I didn't have my share of OMG!!1! moments as the revelations began pouring into my head, it just means that ruminating on the various characters' reactions would essentially boil down to whether each individual seemed too shocked, insufficiently shocked, or just shocked enough.
That's not something that interests me. What I thought I'd do instead is return to the two posts I wrote a little under a year ago, before Season 4 had started, and consider a) how close I came, and b) how much more (or less) impressive the various aspects to the "truth" are than what I managed to put together. I've been pretty vague up to this point, but spoilers will follow, and even by the usual standards, they're pretty massive ones.
.
.
.
Question: How can Tigh be a Cylon?
SS says: Possibly a sleeper agent, but alternatively deliberately had their memories wiped and inserted themselves into Colonial society as an objection to the planned war.
RDM says: Had his memory wiped by Cavil in order to plan a war without his interference, was then inserted into colonial society.
Verdict: Small victory in predicting the split was over the war (and the Five may not have known about the second war, but they did in fact stop the first), but the idea that Cavil betrayed them is a lot more fun than my idea.
Question: Why are the final four different ages?
SS says: Perhaps they entered colonial society at different times.
RDM says: They entered colonial society at different times.
Verdict: Score! Not really a tough one, though.
Question: How did the Final Five escape death in the attack?
SS says: Perhaps they have access to resurrection technology, and/or inserted themselves after the attack. Perhaps all four were replaced by the Cylons at various points during the show, since all four are in important positions.
RDM says: It's still not clear, but Ellen's resurrection certainly demonstrates that both Tori and Anders could well have died in the attack, have been resurrected, and then re-wiped. Tori could then have been placed on the fleet (much as Ellen apparently was), and Anders put on Caprica (along with a Cavil, as we know). Using this theory, only Tigh was actually lucky enough to survive, and had he not, he would likely simply have been resurrected and placed on a colony just as Anders was.
Verdict: Unknown for now, though the fact all four ended up in important positions at least seems like it might well be coincidence.
Question: Who is the Final Cylon?
SS says: Possibly Baltar, but more likely someone we have yet to see, pulling the strings
RDM says: Ellen Tigh, alive and well aboard a base ship, and totally unable to pull the strings anymore.
Verdict: Sort of right in a very oblique way, but I was way off base in pretty much all the specifics, particularly the idea that the Final One had planned to activate the other four so that they could take over the fleet. I actually prefer that idea to it being Ellen, in a lot of ways, but I'll confess that the overall arc is better served by the Five being benevolent, even if the short term WOW factor is somewhat reduced.
All told, I feel I got close over the objections to war with humanity, and the subsequent memory wiping (even if those responsible was something I got wrong). I was a little further off with how they survived (there may be more on this to come of course), and totally struck out on the Final Cylon question. And, as said, having One/Cavil/John as the vile betrayer, quite apart from fitting well into the Biblical themes of the show, adds far more to the show than the suggestion that Tigh and Co. did all this to themselves.
We still have some way to go, of course. There's still someone out there stealing pilots, sending them to nuked worlds, killing them, and then recreating them along with their Viper. There's also the matter of the Sevens, and Starbuck's father. You know, the artist...
No Exit, in contrast, was about sitting the fans down and starting to fill in the quite staggering number of blanks the show has accumulated. If the last fortnight has played out as a Greek tragedy, last night took the form of a historical lecture. Which isn't to say I didn't have my share of OMG!!1! moments as the revelations began pouring into my head, it just means that ruminating on the various characters' reactions would essentially boil down to whether each individual seemed too shocked, insufficiently shocked, or just shocked enough.
That's not something that interests me. What I thought I'd do instead is return to the two posts I wrote a little under a year ago, before Season 4 had started, and consider a) how close I came, and b) how much more (or less) impressive the various aspects to the "truth" are than what I managed to put together. I've been pretty vague up to this point, but spoilers will follow, and even by the usual standards, they're pretty massive ones.
.
.
.
Question: How can Tigh be a Cylon?
SS says: Possibly a sleeper agent, but alternatively deliberately had their memories wiped and inserted themselves into Colonial society as an objection to the planned war.
RDM says: Had his memory wiped by Cavil in order to plan a war without his interference, was then inserted into colonial society.
Verdict: Small victory in predicting the split was over the war (and the Five may not have known about the second war, but they did in fact stop the first), but the idea that Cavil betrayed them is a lot more fun than my idea.
Question: Why are the final four different ages?
SS says: Perhaps they entered colonial society at different times.
RDM says: They entered colonial society at different times.
Verdict: Score! Not really a tough one, though.
Question: How did the Final Five escape death in the attack?
SS says: Perhaps they have access to resurrection technology, and/or inserted themselves after the attack. Perhaps all four were replaced by the Cylons at various points during the show, since all four are in important positions.
RDM says: It's still not clear, but Ellen's resurrection certainly demonstrates that both Tori and Anders could well have died in the attack, have been resurrected, and then re-wiped. Tori could then have been placed on the fleet (much as Ellen apparently was), and Anders put on Caprica (along with a Cavil, as we know). Using this theory, only Tigh was actually lucky enough to survive, and had he not, he would likely simply have been resurrected and placed on a colony just as Anders was.
Verdict: Unknown for now, though the fact all four ended up in important positions at least seems like it might well be coincidence.
Question: Who is the Final Cylon?
SS says: Possibly Baltar, but more likely someone we have yet to see, pulling the strings
RDM says: Ellen Tigh, alive and well aboard a base ship, and totally unable to pull the strings anymore.
Verdict: Sort of right in a very oblique way, but I was way off base in pretty much all the specifics, particularly the idea that the Final One had planned to activate the other four so that they could take over the fleet. I actually prefer that idea to it being Ellen, in a lot of ways, but I'll confess that the overall arc is better served by the Five being benevolent, even if the short term WOW factor is somewhat reduced.
All told, I feel I got close over the objections to war with humanity, and the subsequent memory wiping (even if those responsible was something I got wrong). I was a little further off with how they survived (there may be more on this to come of course), and totally struck out on the Final Cylon question. And, as said, having One/Cavil/John as the vile betrayer, quite apart from fitting well into the Biblical themes of the show, adds far more to the show than the suggestion that Tigh and Co. did all this to themselves.
We still have some way to go, of course. There's still someone out there stealing pilots, sending them to nuked worlds, killing them, and then recreating them along with their Viper. There's also the matter of the Sevens, and Starbuck's father. You know, the artist...
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.
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.
In Lighter News
If people are getting sick of me pulling apart Christian thought, here's something a little less heavy:
Holy shit, we might run out of chocolate.
This is, without doubt, the worst news I have ever heard. I will not even attempt to contain my tears. And we'd only just got Whispas back, as well.
h/t to MGK, though at this point it's less "Thanks for the link" and more "Damn you, Chris, you've taken away 33% of all I still had to live for".
If they take cider and coffee, of course, then I may have to just give up completely.
Holy shit, we might run out of chocolate.
This is, without doubt, the worst news I have ever heard. I will not even attempt to contain my tears. And we'd only just got Whispas back, as well.
h/t to MGK, though at this point it's less "Thanks for the link" and more "Damn you, Chris, you've taken away 33% of all I still had to live for".
If they take cider and coffee, of course, then I may have to just give up completely.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009
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:
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.
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.
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.
Monday, 16 February 2009
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:
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.
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:
- The current English translation of the Bible can be relied upon as being faithful to earlier texts;
- Those texts can be relied upon as faithful to the original copies now lost;
- The original copies are faithful transcriptions of eyewitness testimony;
- The eyewitness testimony itself was an accurate description of what was seen;
- What was seen was actually what occurred;
- Demonstrating power also demonstrates truth.
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.
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