Iain Strachan

There is no sense of justice

2011-05-02T04:05:00.000-07:00

The following words from David Hartley, whose wife Marie was killed in the 7/7 bombings in London struck home to me, amidst all the celebrations on the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and comments that justice has been served:

They have got one but there are more behind there.
I can't see this meaning terrorism is likely to stop there. They might try retaliating a bit more now.
There is no sense of justice. They have some one but there are plenty of people willing to take his place.
He is just one of them.

Of course, I am not saying that David Hartley speaks for all those who lost loved ones in 7/7 or 9/11. Many of those will feel a sense of justice; and be glad that an evil man who had no conscience about killing innocent civilians is now dead. I guess for all of us there is a feeling of "he got what he deserved".

But evil atrocities, whether they are on a mass scale or perpetrated by one individual on another, make us all feel angry. In my voluntary work, I get to talk to victims of the most appalling abuse - be it sexual abuse, domestic violence, or emotional bullying. I've witnessed the devastation it wreaks on people. Just because it's one person (or maybe two or three in the case of abuse of children within the family) doesn't make the perpetrators any less evil.

I confess I have a hard time dealing with the anger I feel about this. It is hard not to feel burning anger against someone who for instance has inflicted sexual abuse on a child of under five, or the husband who beats his wife up in a drunken rage (not forgetting that sometimes it is the other way round and violent women abuse their husbands as well).

What is one to do with this anger? One popular way (in the case of sex offenders) is to "name and shame" - to expose sex offenders and hurl hatred and vitriol at them; for example on a "name and shame" website I saw one article about a particular offender. The phrase "piece of shit" seemed to figure prominently in this article and was repeated several times. This particular offender died recently; a local newspaper carried the headline: "Pervert dies, aged 72". Does this help? How does it make the world a better place to say "I'm so happy this piece of shit is dead?"

But there is a different way to respond to this kind of atrocity. Reach out to the victims. Very often victims of abuse descend into self-loathing - blaming themselves for their misfortune. To reach out involves trying your best to understand what it is that they are going through & to try and stand alongside them and understand their feelings. I am not so sure that saying to them "what an arsehole!" is the most helpful response. Indeed, telling them it's not their fault when they have got stuck in a mindset where they firmly believe it's their fault isn't going to help. What helps is trying to understand those feelings - maybe even if you feel they are wrong to have those feelings, to walk with them a little, rather than brush them aside. The journey from self-loathing to anger at the perpetrator, to the ultimately healing process of forgiveness is a difficult and long one, and the last of those steps is easily the most difficult to take.

But there is a difference with Bin Laden. A sex abuser/wife abuser is not my personal enemy, but Bin Laden appeared to be an enemy of everyone in the West. In early rhetoric he stated it was only Americans who were his enemy, but then Al-Quaeda atrocities extended to many others in the Western world, and the 9/11 attack killed many Muslims as well. So I guess he was my enemy.

Someone commenting on Krish Kandiah's thoughtful blog post produced one of the most apt Biblical quotations to address this, from the book of Job:

Have I rejoiced at the extinction of my enemy,
Or exulted when evil befell him?
No, I have not allowed my mouth to sin
By asking for his life in a curse.
Job 31:29-30 NASB

I think many of us must have thought of Bin Laden "I wish that f------ b------ was dead!" I'm sure I have; I'm only human. But the celebrations erupting over the world make me feel quite uneasy.

One in Fifty Thousand

2010-11-20T09:40:00.000-08:00

[Author's note: One of the biggest questions facing believers is the problem of pain and suffering. There are no easy glib answers to this question. It is clear that on a planet of fixed size, if there is birth there has to be death to make room. But what if all pain were removed and death was always painless? I have tried to imagine what this would be like in the following story ..]

One in fifty thousand is not much to worry about. It is hardly worth concerning yourself when you go to sleep that one in fifty thousand will not wake up the next day, and you could be one of them. One in fifty thousand will go to sleep, content and happy and painless, and will be carried off by the silent swathe that passes over the slumbering. One in fifty-one thousand one hundred and thirty-five, to be precise, the statisticians have calculated. It is so curious an exactitude that one may expect to live, on average for precisely threescore years and ten, just as it has been decreed in scripture, that many have seen this as evidence of the existence of God. But the timing of the swathe for each individual has no pattern or apparent purpose; it favours not age over youth. One may live to seventy and then expect to live another seventy. One in sixteen may live to two-hundred and eighty, still looking the same as when they were twenty-one, and still expect to live another seventy.

We are supposed not to worry about this. I am one-hundred and eighty-nine years old, and I am gazing at the sleeping form of my wife, Kate, a mere child of thirty-seven, and I am worried. She is so beautiful and I love her so much it hurts. It’s not supposed to hurt, but how can I not hurt and worry that she will be swept away without warning this night; that she will be taken from me just like the four before her? Why not me first for a change? I am supposed not to mind, for it says in scripture:

Husbands love your wives; wives love your husbands, but not to excess. Be happy for them when they are taken away to greater rewards. Do not mourn your loss, you who are widowed; your body remains unblemished and beautiful - you will find another partner who will appreciate the wisdom of your years that is contained in your soul but which leaves your body unmarked.

I dare not tell Kate how much I love her. Such levels of love are unhealthy – they would start to poison her and she could lose her mind as I surely am losing mine. In our lovemaking tonight, as in all other nights, I experienced a few fleeting seconds of exquisitely delicious pain at the apex of the act of union, and only then did I feel real – the wonderful balance of pain and ecstasy that is a release from the numbness of my meaningless existence. I have wished many times that the end to lovemaking would bring death to both of us, in each other’s arms; such a release from the endless bearing of children, painless for the mother, but with each the potential to bring heartbreak when they are as likely as not to be swept away before you, as eight of my seventeen already have been.

I have identified that pain is the element that is missing, and I long for it. That is why I say I am losing my mind. I long for pain. I long for it to bring meaning. And yet we all seem blessed (or rather cursed) with the inability to feel pain – the inability to feel real. I try to re-create pain on my own; in the kitchen I slash a knife uselessly across my wrist, feel the slight sting, watch a few drops of blood come out, before, in a few seconds, the wound heals up, leaving no mark, and the stinging abates leaving only the mental torture that is inside my head. If only it would leave a permanent mark, a scar so I could say on such and such a day I cut myself here to stop myself going mad. But my wrist is as unblemished as it was a few moments ago – there are no visible memorials to map out my struggle.

Why is it that we do not feel pain, as animals do? Why is it that our existence is reduced to one of bland shallowness? Some have said it is our kind Deity who cannot bear to watch His children suffer pain. That He protects us from pain and disease, from age and infirmity because He wants our happiness, our joy, our gratitude. Do I seem ungrateful? I do not believe so, because I cannot believe such a Deity exists, for if He does, he cannot be good – more a sadistic monster who laughs at my torment and my expectation that it could continue like this for another seventy years. No, such a Deity is not kind at all. Would that the Deity would not be so cowardly as to protect us from pain, but would come down and live among us; stand alongside us in that pain. That kind of God is one I could believe in. But not the wimp and coward we are told to worship. I reject such notions – there has to be a natural explanation of why we are preserved till we die, and why we die in exactly the pattern of the decay of radioactive atoms.

I look again at Kate’s sleeping form beside me. My arm is draped over her and I feel the perfect, womanly shape, and the smooth, regular rise and fall of her breast as she sleeps. I want so much to shake her awake – to say don’t go there where you could be swept away like the other four. Don’t leave me, please don’t leave me I cannot bear to lose yet another. But she does not know what it is I’m going through – she does not appear to suffer internally as I do. I shall not poison her mind and allow her to plunge into my turmoil.

I cannot continue any longer, Godless and hopeless. An end to life is all I want; not easy to achieve given the uncanny robustness of my body. I get up from the bed, and pack a rucksack with heavy rocks from the garden.

I now stand on the bridge over the river; the rocks will weigh me down, and ensure I don’t return to the top before my breathing has ceased. I take one last look round, on the bridge top, at this pointless world, then launch myself towards the water, ready to embrace the nothingness that surely follows …

…

Suddenly I am awake. My pulse is racing and there is a slight sweat on my forehead. The nightmare is over, but as the pain starts to take hold, jabbing its vile spikes all over me, I know it is time for the next dose of morphine. The nurse comes and administers the temporary relief. Kate sits on my bed, holding my hand. As the pain subsides, I gaze upon her face, no longer flawless as in her youth, but lined with the ever-advancing edge of age. I don’t care – I can still see all her loveliness, and there is no reason why I should not tell her. I put my arm around her waist and feel her warmth. Our eyes gaze at each other and three unspoken words pass from one to the other. In a few days’ time (it cannot surely be more than that) she is going to lose me, and she is ready.

Parable

2010-10-21T16:22:00.000-07:00

Quakers believe that something of God may be found in every human being. That thought prompted me to dream up this modern reworking of a very old joke.

After a long, good, moral, and kind life, an atheist finally dies at a ripe old age. Much to his surprise he discovers that there really is such a thing as God, and life after death, despite never having entertained such notions during his life. Moreover, he discovers that God, whom he had previously been warned was a jealous and judgmental character, was in fact the source of the good that was in his life - and indeed he had lived a very good and noble life.

So, as a result, completely unexpectedly, he finds himself admitted to Heaven. It is a wonderful place: a massive party with tables laid out with delicious food that never seems to run out, and plenty of drink which you can drink without ever getting too drunk. Laughter and dancing abound all over the place.

He takes a stroll around and comes across an immensely long wall. Looking into the distance, he sees that the wall eventually disappears, like the horizon, and he realises it encloses a gigantic circular region. Out of curiosity he puts his ear to the wall, and hears similar sounds of merriment coming from the other side. Wondering what the purpose of the wall is, he calls over one of the angels who is serving the drinks, and asks "What's with the wall? Who is it on the other side?"

The angel replies: "That'll be the Christians. They think they are the only ones here."

PS in the original version of the joke, it was the Catholics who thought they were the only ones there.

Our Labour Paused

2010-04-23T12:48:00.000-07:00

Inspired by Carol Ann Duffy's new poem Silver Lining (hear the Poet Laureate read her poem here), I took some photographs, and wrote my own poem, which bears no small debt to "Silver Lining". The weekend where the skies were so empty of planes felt like a pause at home; a pause that caused havoc for those stranded however, serving to remind us how dependent we are on a precious resource that is bound to run out eventually.

Our Labour Paused

Not in fifty springs
May I see the cherry-blossom thus:
Dancing against a plain and planeless blue,
Endless shades of white undulating the petals,
Stamens accosted by hoverings of wasps and bees;
Nature reclaiming the skies and continuing to work.

But this morning, deemed safe
To receive our own outpourings
Of earth's innards,
The blue infinities,
Criss-crossed with kids' crayons,
Streaked with white fragments
In straight lines, billowing to a dull blur,
Witness:

Lovers, reunited,
Supermarkets, restocked,
Business meetings, rescheduled.

And for who knows how long,
Our labour, unskilled beside Nature's,
Propelling the world into our mould,
Resumes?

Does Suffering have a meaning?

2010-04-02T06:38:00.000-07:00

Coincident with my daughter doing an essay for her English Literature coursework on Beckett’s “Endgame” on the proposition whether tragedy creates a sense of meaning to suffering, I find myself also pondering this subject – a fitting one for a Good Friday, when we remember Christ’s suffering on the Cross. Rather than consider academically whether the literary genre of tragedy can create a sense of meaning for suffering, I shall try and consider the broader question of whether suffering has a meaning at all, or is it the the inevitable consequence of a blind, pitilessly indifferent nature , as Richard Dawkins has argued in “River Out Of Eden”?

Dawkins’s materialistic explanation has the merit that it is the easiest to understand. If there is no God, then there isn’t the difficult part of explaining why such a God should allow suffering.

And yet, we all somehow want to find meaning in suffering – and some better explanation for it than random chance. I do not know why this should be, and yet even in Beckett’s bleak masterpiece “Endgame”, there is this need to find some meaning, or perhaps someone to blame. There is one point in the play in which three of the characters attempt to pray in silence to God. After a short pause they all decide that absolutely nothing has happened. The main character, Hamm, comments “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!” This comment was originally censored in England when it was performed in 1957. The objection was to calling God a “bastard”, and not to asserting that he didn’t exist, and the word was changed to “swine”.

Though this line is shockingly blasphemous, I think it’s pretty funny at the same time, and also very profound. To call someone a “bastard” implies that you believe they exist, so the juxtaposition of this on an assertion of non-existence creates a paradox that makes us think. Some part of our rationality wants to have someone to blame for suffering; it seems a blind indifferent universe isn’t sufficient to have a go at: because it is not a person, you can’t call the universe a bastard. Or it might be that the speaker is angry at God for not existing. Why didn’t you show up and help us through all of this? In the same way, one of the emotions experienced in the grief of bereavement is anger at the person who died – how dare they die and leave me alone?

So how does our religion deal with this big problem? In a way it provides and doesn’t provide an answer at the same time. The debate over meaning in suffering goes back to the most ancient times. In the book of Job in the bible, there is much debate over the reason for Job’s immense suffering. For his three so-called “comforters”, it is clear that they want to find a rational explanation for it. They argue that Job must have sinned, and as a result he is suffering. All he has to do is admit his guilt and God will forgive him. In this, the suffering is seen as a consequence of Job’s actions. But throughout all this, Job maintains his innocence – he hasn‘t done anything essentially wrong to deserve this. In the final chapters of the book, Job is confronted by God, and yet still, no complete answer is given to the riddle of his suffering. Instead God shows him the vastness and intricacy of His creation, and reminds Job of his ignorance – how little he knows, and how he wasn’t there when it was all put together. In the end, Job realises this and states “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42:3). By the end, Job is vindicated and, but his friends have been foolish in asserting that there is a rational explanation – bad deeds and their consequences; and they are rebuked and have to seek forgiveness.

All of this seems to imply that suffering does not have a meaning, or that maybe the meaning of it is beyond our grasp.

How does this all change with the events we recall on Good Friday? I have written elsewhere of Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot” that one of the characters (Lucky) is an analogue for Christ, through which Beckett negates the idea that Christ’s suffering achieved any purpose. In contrast to Christ’s last words on the Cross “It is finished!”, the last words spoken by Lucky in the play before his mock “death and resurrection” are “Unfinished ...”. The hapless Lucky’s suffering has achieved nothing at all, and it proceeds after those events, and nothing has changed. Likewise in “Endgame”, the first words spoken by Clov (who is a kind of “suffering servant” to the central character Ham) are “Finished, It’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished”, starting from the complete certainty of “Finished” and descending by degrees into uncertainty. The suffering of the characters in the play goes on, day in, day out, the same farce day after day, seemingly without point and meaning. The absence of belief in God implies that death can be seen as the end of suffering, and yet the characters never seem able to take that step. In Hamm’s first speech, perhaps echoing the famous soliloquy of the similarly-named Hamlet, he states “ it’s time it ended, and yet ... I hesitate ...... to ... to end”. And similarly for Hamlet, the stark debate “To be, or not to be” boils down to indecision – is it really a question of not existing anymore, or is there an “undiscovered country” (the afterlife) in which even more disturbing dreams may come than in this life?

While for Hamlet, the fear of what the afterlife may bring deters him from suicide, perhaps for Hamm it is still this innate desire to find meaning in existence, and the suffering that existence entails.

Does Christ’s suffering on the Cross provide an answer to all this? Does His suffering have a “meaning”? Traditionally the doctrine of substitutionary atonement – that Christ died in our place, and took the punishment that we deserved, is supposed to provide this answer.

But is the answer as simple as this? In one sense it is. All you have to do is believe and be saved; that much is clear from the Bible (see John 3:16 ). But like many deep mysteries, there are always further layers to be explored. The most important moment, perhaps during the accounts of the crucifixion that we read is when Jesus says “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” This is the cry of someone who suffers intolerably, and has no idea why. In its fear and confusion, is it not somewhat similar to Hamm’s cry: “The bastard! He doesn’t exist.” ? It carries the same sense of accusation in "why have you done this?"

So for me, as a Christian, it seems what this shows is that we still don’t know the reason why suffering exists, but we do know that God placed himself in the same position as us, of not knowing the reasons, and enduring all the fear, anguish and suffering that this entails. Just as Job was innocent, so was Christ, and innocent people suffer for no reason. What Christ’s death and resurrection show us is that one day we may find a reason, and an end of suffering. God is not a non-existent bastard, but a real entity who knows just as we do, what it is to suffer.

Comment moderation enabled

2010-03-25T07:46:00.000-07:00

I regret to announce that I have had to enable comment moderation on this blog. This is because some moron is leaving comments in Japanese that contain embedded links to Japanese porn sites, disguised as a row of dots. This has continued despite the fact I have enabled the "Captcha" technology, so the moron has to sit there and manually enter the Captcha code. I apologise for the inconvenience to any regular readers who might wish to comment.

Wisdom, Knowledge, and Information

2010-03-21T14:53:00.000-07:00

In watching the "Lewis" TV detective drama last night ("Lewis" is the follow on series from "Inspector Morse") I was struck by the misquoting of a T.S. Eliot poem. The sergeant (who is the "intellectual one" of the pair of central characters) states "Where is the wisdom we have lost in information". On being asked what that was from he said "T.S. Eliot" as I knew he would. However I also knew that the quote was slightly incorrect. Two lines have been telescoped into one by the scriptwriter. The correct quote is:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

I first encountered the second line during the literature review study for my PhD in Computer Science. The quote was placed at the beginning of someone else's thesis that I included in the review. The thesis in question was about techniques for visualising complex multi-dimensional datasets in order to spot patterns among a heap of numbers. Thus it was appropriate to have the quote, because the techniques the author had developed enabled the extraction of knowledge from what would otherwise be a load of incomprehensible information that could overload us.

Modern technology has made it possible to get knowledge from a huge amount of information. It helped me in finding the source of this poem. I knew it was by T.S. Eliot, but couldn't remember which poem it was. I attempted to speed-read my yellowing copy of T.S. Eliot's collected poems but didn't find it. Then I turned to a search engine on the internet and typed in the quote. In a fraction of a second I had a number of hits, and about the first hit revealed the knowledge I was looking for, that it was a chorus from "The Rock", and I was then able to find it in my book. It is pretty amazing that out of the monumental quantities of information on the Internet, my simple search on Google could give me the piece of knowledge I was looking for.

However, the answer to Eliot's first question: where is the WISDOM we have lost in knowledge, is far less straightforward. If knowledge is a higher representation of information (which in computer terms is just a string of zeros and ones, but in Eliot's terms would probably just be a set of disconnected facts), then wisdom is perhaps higher representation of knowledge.

I have been thinking that in using "Knowledge" here, perhaps Eliot is referring to the Tree of Knowledge in the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall, in the early chapters of the Bible.

This knowledge represented a loss of innocence for the two characters; they realise they are naked - they feel shame. And so, too for us, knowledge isn't always helpful, but can be put to destructive use. Once the atomic bomb was developed, we had enough knowledge to destroy the planet. Even without that, we may destroy things by pollution, causing catastrophic climate change, or possibly we shall run out of natural resources such as fossil fuels before alternatives can be found, causing widespread instability, famine and wars. All of this comes about because our immense scientific knowledge allows us to exploit the earth in ways which it cannot in the long term sustain.

So how does one rediscover the wisdom that has been lost in knowledge? It is not an easy question to answer. The only one I can come up with is that we have to listen to our consciences. C.S. Lewis writes in "Mere Christianity" of the "Moral Law", the innate sense of right and wrong that we all have built in instinctively. We all know what is fair and right, and that somehow the right thing to do is to act altruistically. Francis Collins, the former head of the Human Genome Project, and now head of the National Institutes of Health, has also written about the Moral Law in describing his own conversion from atheism to Christianity in his book The Language of God: A scientist presents evidence for belief

This moral law is the voice of our conscience, and C.S. Lewis says it is a gift from God, and for Francis Collins it was the realisation of this Law, to which we are all subject, and which nonetheless we wantonly and knowingly disobey much of the time, that was the key factor in the crumbling of his own atheism and acceptance (initially unwillingly) of Christianity.

We should always try and listen to this voice of conscience, even if what it tells us to do makes us unpopular or unfashionable, or even if it contradicts whatever dogma (religious or political) that we happen to follow. Because the true voice of your conscience (not necessarily the one you want to hear, but the one that you know in your heart is right) is the true voice of God. St. Paul writes of this (Romans 2:14) in a wonderful parenthetical comment, a true piece of wisdom buried within all the other knowledge and information presented in his letter:

(Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, because they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.)

Right Hand Girl

2010-02-20T12:28:00.000-08:00

"I'll be your right hand, Nicky."

I am lost for words at her offer. Some would say she's pretty if you like that sort of thing. I will describe her she has ginger hair descending in ringlets elfin features sparkling light blue eyes and an impish smile but it's not her looks that have led me to confess all my shameful secrets to her not her looks at all but something in the way she listens and seems to understand and accept me for who I am; no matter what she is there and she's listening listening listening taking away all my shame and still seeing my inner human being and her demeanour says that what she sees is ok.

She's given me a hand moving my stuff into my student room setting out all my photos posters books cups cutlery baseball caps videos beer bottles cider bottles wine glasses with that female flair that just always escapes me but which I recognize when I see it. I show her my computer, its keyboard being my chief means of expression as my fingers dance instinctively over the keys in response to my thoughts; they know their own way to the keys without me trying to make it happen. I tell her eagerly about how fast I can rap the words out and make the characters whizz up on the screen and she says Nicky you'd better take a look at this and my composure falls apart as she hands me a special notice in with the information pack that the University have provided.

"It's a bit of a pain, isn't it?" she says but for me it's real physical pain and will reduce my essay writing to torture and struggle as the notice says that the University wants to clamp down on lax moral standards and in order to do this essays must not be submitted as a word-processed document, but written out by hand where they will be scanned by a machine for the tell-tale signs of evil sinister left-handed writing and I know I have no escape the slope the angle of the crosses the uprights the loops all screaming out the unmistakable signature of a left-hander and she knows she knows immediately just looking at me she knows that it's more than a bit of a pain and she says what's the matter Nicky and the gates of my shame burst open and it all comes flooding out.

I tell her of my friend Tommy at school on the day we're sent out to practice cricket in the nets it's an empty field and he cannot bowl straight nor can I wield the bat in a convincing fashion and after half an hour of frustration he just says oh to hell with this and bowls the next one left-handed and my stumps are scattered all over the back of the net. I can't believe what he just did and I ask him you too? and he says you're a left aren't you I always thought so so why not let's be lefts together for a while and the next half hour is poetry of bat thwacking against ball hissing down the side of the nets and occasionally defeating me and smashing down the stumps until the schoolmaster comes along and sees two boys playing cricket as if reflected in a mirror and gets mad at us don't we know it's a sign of rebellion against God have we forgotten that our Saviour rode into Jerusalem on a donkey in the last week of his life and there was crucified for our sins and that our left hand playing is a fulfillment of the prophecy of the Psalmist it is a sign of our rebellion of our forgetfulness?

And I tell her of all the corrective therapy the practice practice practice of my clumsy hand under the minister's stern gaze as over and over again I scrawl out the fateful line of the prophecy if I forget thee O Jerusalem let my right hand forget her cunning if I forget thee O Jerusalem let my right hand forget her cunning if I forget thee O Jerusalem let my right hand forget her cunning and slowly page after agonizing page the letters begin to take better shape and the motion of the pen becomes more fluid but it still just doesn't feel natural but in the end he is satisfied with my progress and tells me I'm a good boy for trying so hard and that God will bless me for my diligence and devotion.

But I go back to my bedroom and my wrist is aching with all the unnatural effort and I open my notebook take the pen in my left hand and with ease and grace write out these words if I forget thee O Jerusalem let my left hand forget her cunning if I do not remember thee let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy and tears of joy flow down my face as the skill of my left hand proclaims what is in my heart as I remember how our Saviour spent the last week of his life in Jerusalem and I know I know I know I have always remembered this above all other most precious thoughts and never did I ever rebel or put anything at all before God and nor did my tongue ever cleave to the roof of my mouth and I have always uttered praises with the utmost fluency and felt in the midst of all that praise a wonderful connection to God to Jesus to the Holy Ghost and I look at the tidy and polished handwriting and each curve each curl each embellishment of each letter is praise of my God and Saviour fashioned by my left hand.

Suddenly I stop in alarm why have I blurted this all out to this girl I hardly know she could be a spy from the Christian thought police or anything but she just looks at me and says Oh Nicky I'm so sorry I know a little of what you feel because I too have a secret I am ambidextrous I can write equally well with either hand so my guilty secret can be hidden if needs be. And she takes a pen and writes her name fluidly first with the right hand and then the left the left almost the same as the right apart from a slight difference in slant that could be detected by their clever spy machines. She tells me it's part of her that must be expressed she can't hold it back but she can hide it and is safe from prying eyes. And so she tells me she'll be my right hand and I'm to type up my essays on computer and hand her the script and she'll write it out long hand with her right hand and no one will ever know because she is on a different course to me so the tutor won't suspect. I tell her I can't expect her to do all this just for me but she says she wants to do it because she is a little like me and wants to help out those who aren't able to hide like she is.

And so the little deception is carried out essay by essay term by term A plus by A plus and my university studies have become a joy and my private devotion to a God who accepts praise from the left hand as well as the right increases. After the last essay has been handed in we talk and I tell her she is my best friend in all the world and can never forget how she has helped me to obtain a set of perfect marks throughout the year and how can I ever thank her enough. Then she turns her pretty eyes upon me and I don't quite realise what is behind that extra sparkle and the fondness in her smile as she moves closer and suddenly her arms are wrapped round my shoulders and her lips are upon mine moving with a passion and urgency as she is trying to ignite a fire that won't start. I draw back and I say I'm sorry Sue I should have told you before I like you so much but not like that in fact not any girl like that and I really should have said before because it's not as though there's any shame in it our religious leaders might be barmy about what hand you use to write but at least they don't have a problem when a boy likes another boy like that because they know it's not a choice and that love of any kind is a gift from God.

She is red in the face and embarrassed disappointment clouds her face and a tear starts to work its way down her cheek and I hold her to my chest and say there there it's alright I hope we can still be best friends because you're the best friend I ever had. And as her disappointment subsides she says of course Nicky of course we'll still be best friends I will still be your right hand and I will help you to find love I should have known from the look in your eyes when you told me about Tommy at the cricket practice that he's the one you've loved all along isn't he what became of him?

And I tell her that they never let us be together not because we were both boys because that is healthy and natural but because we were both lefts and our sinister influence couldn't be allowed to spread and eventually Tommy's parents took him away from that school and I never saw him again. And now it's my turn to shed tears there is no prejudice against me for liking boys but it's still hard that nine out of ten boys I like are hetero and and nine out of ten of the rest of them are bigoted right-handers and possibly nine out of ten of that tiny remaining number won't like me back.

"Then your lover will be one in a thousand!" she says "Isn't that romantic?"

I tell her Tommy was one in a million.

She pledges to help me find him again.

"I'll be your right hand in prayer too" she says.

Author's footnote: I have several friends on the internet who have to a great extent struggled to reconcile their Christian faith with their homosexual orientation. Some managed to retain their faith, and some did not. This story that poured out of me as a series of mini-tirades of the pent up feelings of the character depicted, is affectionately dedicated to them.

Lucky the Suffering Servant – thoughts on Waiting For Godot

2010-01-31T08:11:00.000-08:00

On Friday I attended the West End production of Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot” at the theatre Royal Haymarket. I had read the play in class at school, with little understanding, as one often does reading a play in school. Then, on finding my daughter studying another Beckett play “Endgame” in her English Literature course, I was interested to revisit the play, which of course it is now possible to do via sites such as YouTube. I remembered from school that one of the characters, Lucky, has only two lines in the play, of which the second is a tirade of 700+ words – which originally passed us by in class as the ravings of a madman.

Seeing it performed live on stage makes a huge difference to comprehensibility (as it often does in Shakespeare compared to reading it in class). The production, which featured Sir Ian McKellen in the part of Estragon was quite brilliant – indeed riveting from beginning to end. I had not expected such a bleak play to be so funny, and I suspect in the production perhaps the actors milked if for all the humour they could get out of it. The sight of Ian McKellen eating a carrot in the manner of an old tramp, chewing disgustingly and spraying bits all over the place was as hilarious as his ability to produce just the right length of pause before the irony of his question “What are we supposed to do now we are happy?”

Indeed reviews have criticized the production for doing this – does the humour distract from the underlying bleak and terrifying message of the play?

I wonder, too if this different perspective might have something to do with the fact that in order to get the underlying message of the play requires an understanding of Biblical knowledge that has considerably diminished these days. The incredible lack of knowledge was brought home to me recently watching a quiz show on TV where a contestant was unable to answer the question “What J follows Matthew, Mark and Luke in the Bible?”

Perhaps it is because I am a Christian that I see Christian parallels (indeed anti-parallels) where in fact there are none to be seen. I don’t know, but this is how it strikes me.

Throughout the play, the main point of existence of the two central characters, the tramps Vladimir and Estragon is to wait for the mysterious Mr. Godot, who doesn’t show up, twice. It is not explained just who Mr. Godot is (there are endless debates as to whether Godot is meant to be God, but this is not clear from the play). There is a repeated section of dialogue, like a refrain in a song of “Let’s go/We can’t/Why not/We’re waiting for Godot/Ahh!” Is this trying to say that our waiting, perhaps for a salvation or deliverance that is never going to happen is what keeps us trapped and unable to move on?

Into the midst of this interminable waiting for something of which they don’t even know the meaning, enter, twice, two other characters, Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo is an overbearing bully, but ultimately a whining and pathetic character. The ironically named Lucky is his servant, tethered to him by a rope round his neck, and perpetually carrying two heavy bags, which he does not put down, even when standing still. It seems quite evident on seeing it acted that Lucky could be an analogue of the “Suffering Servant” described in the Bible of Isaiah 52-53. To the outrage of Vladimir and Estragon, he is treated abysmally by Pozzo, who summons him with barked one-word commands. When Vladimir and Estragon examine him, they see the clear evidence of mistreatment – the chafe marks of the rope round his neck, his slobbering mouth, his goggling eyes, the appearance of a half-wit, and the overall impression that he is on his last legs. At this stage it is difficult to avoid the comparison with Isaiah 52:14 from the “Suffering Servant” passage.

... There were many who were appalled at him
his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man
and his form marred beyond human likeness.

However, this apparent parallel is the beginning of an anti-parallel. It becomes more than clear that Lucky offers no hope, no salvation, and that there is no point to his suffering. When commanded to dance, Lucky performs a bizarre and ungainly dance, which Pozzo reveals is called “The Net” – that Lucky believes he is entangled in a net. Again one is reminded of the Biblical narrative of Jesus promising to make his disciples, who are fishermen that they will become “fishers of men” – those who are caught will be saved. And yet the net in which Lucky is entangled is a prison from which he cannot escape.

When Lucky is commanded to think out loud, there follows a famous tirade, in a parody of academic discourse of over 700 words. Some actors make the mistake of delivering it at breakneck speed as written in the text as a single sentence without punctuation. However if delivered slowly and thoughtfully, the bleak meaning of the lines becomes clear; no matter what we do, we shall eventually fade away and die, and our labours will be left unfinished. It is perhaps significant that the last line of the speech before the others silence him is the single word “unfinished ...”. Again, as a Christian I cannot help but compare this to the final words of Christ on the Cross – “It is finished” (in some translations given as “It is accomplished”). What had been accomplished was salvation – freedom from the slavery of sin and so forth. But it is clear from Lucky’s tirade that nothing has been accomplished, nothing finished, nothing achieved. Furthermore the other characters, especially Pozzo cannot even bear to hear the message, and protest and groan loudly, till they remove his hat, which robs him of the ability to think.

After the removal of his hat, Lucky falls to the ground face down. The characters wonder if he is dead. But they are commanded by Pozzo to “raise him up”. Is this a parody of the Resurrection? Lucky is raised up with his arms placed round the shoulders of the two tramps, almost as in a cruciform position, and he is given back the burden of the two bags that he has carried throughout. If this is a mock “death and resurrection” it is clear that nothing has been accomplished by it – the same situation continues, and the hapless Lucky is required to continue bearing his burden (contrasting with the Christian view that the burden of sin was broken and destroyed by the action of Christ’s death on the Cross).

Pozzo and Lucky depart, prompting Vladimir to comment that this at least has passed the time, and Estragon to rejoin “It would have passed anyway”, for some reason – perhaps McKellen’s brilliant timing, drawing a large laugh from the audience again. The first act closes after they receive a message from a boy that Mr. Godot will not meet them today but he would surely be there tomorrow, and they are to meet him in the same place.

In the second act, Pozzo and Lucky return again, but this time Pozzo is blind, and Lucky is dumb. One is again reminded that in the biblical accounts Jesus made the blind see again, but here Pozzo complains that he once had marvellous eyesight, but then one morning woke up blind. It is not clear, and the character cannot even remember if this happened the day before, or even if the events of the second act are a day after those of the first act. Perhaps in the meaningless, pointless existence that is depicted, all the days blur into one.

The theme of suicide is regularly visited and referred to in the play, from the early mention of jumping off the top of the Eiffel Tower, to the final slapstick scene, where they test Estragon’s belt to see if it would be strong enough to suffice for hanging; the rope breaks and simultaneously Estragon’s trousers fall down, a corny and over-used comic gesture that is effective here in the dark context in which it is made.

In summary, it seems to me that what Beckett is trying to say in this play is that God, once perceived as powerful and giving purpose to existence is powerless to help us, and that Christ is powerless to save us. All that is left to console us is the power of human companionship, as seen in the relationship between the two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon. At the end of the play, a second message comes from the boy, exactly the same as the first; Mr. Godot will not see them today, but surely tomorrow. The two characters decide to return with some proper rope to hang themselves, if, as now seems inevitable, Godot will yet again not turn up.

In the current production, there is a small additional “number” that has been inserted at the end of the curtain calls – Vladimir and Estragon dance together to “Underneath the Arches”, and in a nice artistic final touch, disappear from opposite wings, and the last thing you see is their two hats tossed into the centre of the stage. In a way this seems again a consolation, celebrating the friendship of the two of them; I am not sure, however, that Beckett would have intended this more optimistic final touch.

A damp trip!

2010-01-10T13:01:00.000-08:00

This picture was taken from the HST between Didcot and Reading. Due to the snow we decided to take a combination of taxi and train to get my daughter back to Reading University. The taxi at the other end was unable to drop us at the hall of residence. We had one huge case on wheels that didn't wheel too well through the impacted snow. The train to return was cancelled and we had to get a slow service. Then on nearly freezing to death waiting for a bus to Didcot we succumbed to the temptation to get a taxi back home. A damp and hassle-bound trip. The only redeeming feature being the obtaining of this spectacular sky at 125 mph from the fast train.

Below is a picture of St. Patrick's Hall, Reading in the snow. It was a lot warmer inside than outside!

From Jan2010

Peace that Sustains

2010-01-03T09:48:00.000-08:00

I have been attending Quaker meetings over the past few months. Although I still also attend a lively evangelical church as well, I am drawn to silent contemplation as a way of worship, self-discovery and discovery of God. Perhaps in modern churches there is insufficient time put aside for silence, or maybe that is simply an expression of my preference. Many seem to find spiritual fulfillment in the popular style of worship, with modern choruses and modern instruments, clapping hands, or raising them in the air in affirmation and worship. But for me, I have often found that it does not fulfil that feeling of "otherness" that one expects from the truly sacred. I have seen such things happening at rock concerts, for example. And while people can be transported to a different place at a rock concert, for me, I want the transport experienced in contemplating the sacred to be different again from the secular. But that, of course, is my own preference - my own best method for finding God is in silence. Many might find the Quaker style of worship, with its long, long periods of people sitting in utter silence, to be too austere, or perhaps too lacking in direction. Tastes and needs differ.

During the Meeting today, only two people spoke during the entire hour, and yet, at the end, when the meeting formally ends with handshakes from the people sitting either side of you, I was taken by surprise that the end had come of an hour unusually full and fulfilling, during which I was totally awake and aware, and at no time wondering how much of the hour had passed, or tempted to glance at my watch.

The second person to speak reflected on a current theme being discussed in Meetings; sustainable living. The Quaker movement is very "green" in nature, and there had recently been some special studies on sustainable energy, and so forth, where the normal silent worship was supplemented with a prepared talk. But this person wanted to reflect more on what sustained us. No dogmatic answers were given; it could perhaps be a spiritual belief, or a sense of wonder at the beauty of nature. However Nature's beauty, it was pointed out, could seem like a mockery if one is in a bleak place, for whatever reason. So what does sustain us?

I started thinking about this, in the silence that followed. I suppose the first question to ask in thinking about this is "what is Us?", or "what is Me?" I recalled a friend of mine who suffered a prolonged period of depression, often to the point of suicide. What was clear was that she had no inner peace, and furthermore, no sense of the inner self. Indeed she once told me "When I look inside myself, I see nothing." This seems to be a common experience of people who suffer from depression. The biologist Lewis Wolpert describes this in his book "Malignant Sadness", which is partly about his own depression. It is interesting that Wolpert, who is an atheist, still finds it useful to use spiritual terminology to describe the exeperience of depression. He writes:

If we had a soul - and as a hardline materialist I do not believe we do - a useful metaphor for depression could be 'soul-loss' due to extreme sadness. The body and mind emptied of the soul lose interest in almost everything except themselves. The idea of the wandering soul is widely accepted across numerous cultures and the adjective 'empty' is viewed across most cultures as negative. The metaphor captures the way in which we experience our own existence. Our 'soul' is our inner essence, something distinctly different from the hard material world in which we live. Lose it and we are depressed, cut off, alone.

I find the passage extraordinary, in that this morning, in the quiet of the Meeting, I experienced the exact opposite - the exact thing that Wolpert says is lost during depression. As I sank further into myself, I became more aware of a "me" that was inside all the time; that my body and mind were not empty, but were in fact very full of this inner essence, this "me", which indeed is distinctly different from the hard material world. While a scientist may be able to describe what is going on in terms of electrical signals inside one's brain, that is not how we perceive it. Moreover, Wolpert recognizes, albeit only as a metaphor, that the inner essence, or "soul" is a distinctively different thing from the mind.

It occurred to me that this inner self is something that perhaps we rarely experience to the full. Instead, robot-like, we spend most of our time, and our conscious thoughts, reacting to things. We feel excitement, anger, hunger, sadness, happiness, mirth, intoxication, or we think about what we shall do next, where the next meal is coming from, and so forth. But none of this is the "me" that is buried inside all of this. When that "me" is experienced fully; when one is aware of this thing that fills us, what we feel is peace.

For those of us with religious beliefs, that peace equates to the Peace of God which passes understanding. The reason it passes understanding is because it goes beyond thought, towards just being, and being aware of oneself, as a created being. The philosopher Descartes famously said "I think, therefore I am". But I would take it further than that. "I am therefore I am" might be a more appropriate (albeit maddeningly mystical) way of putting it. And in using the phrase "I am", one is also reminded of the biblical verse Exodus 3:14, where God describes Himself: "I am that I am". And as one of the tenets of Quaker worship is to find the light of God in oneself, this seems an appropriate place to end the development of the argument.

So what sustains "us"? I don't know if I have the fullest answer (can any question be said to be answered fully?) But I do think a big part of it is that Peace is what sustains us. Anyone, believer or not can experience that peace, perhaps just by becoming more aware of the self that lies often buried under the automaton-like existence that results from the Hurly-burly of everyday life.

Having known it for what it is, I can still feel that peace as I write these words. It does indeed sustain.

A decade closes; a decade opens

2009-12-31T17:23:00.000-08:00

The new millenium opened when my son Matthew set off a firework that soared into the sky at a New Year's Eve party, almost exactly ten years ago. We stood out in the road and listened to the roar and crackle of fireworks exploding all over the neighbourhood.

The first decade of the new millenium ended sitting quietly on the sofa next to my wife; the kids off at different social engagements of their own.

It has been a rollercoaster of a decade; the first two years struggling to complete an external PhD on time (eventually successfully submitted in Jan 2002). The highlight was passing the Viva exam, then flying back from Edinburgh to Heathrow on a brilliantly sunny July day, landing at Heathrow, and being given a magnificent view of Concorde, just landed as we taxied in from the runway. It seemed almost as if this magnificent view was the cherry on the icing - the sense of triumph was palpable, and highlighted by the view of the beautiful aircraft.

Since then, a rollercoaster as all life is. The part of the company I worked for was sold off to an American rival, who tried (unsucessfully thanks to our Union) to make us all redundant. Eventually fed up with working for a hire-and-fire American company that didn't care in the least for the employees, I moved to an exciting new job in an Oxford University spin-out. Less security, but much more satisfaction.

My daughter has changed from a little girl of 9 to a young university student of 19, reading reading at Reading (English Lit) after a perfect set of A-level results. My son is just starting A-levels.

2009 has been also a year of increasing anxiety over the recession, job security, and the future of the planet - the worries about peak oil and global warming being real, despite there being many who deny this and would prefer to bury their heads in the sand.

It has also been a decade where I have come more and more to realise just how dark life can be for many people - how so many are the victims of blind prejudice, and judgmental attitudes. A time in which I have learnt that by listening to such people, one gains so much in realising the privileges of one's own life.

It is a time, too, when I have come to realise that the more you know, the more you realise you don't know; that increased knowledge should lead to increased humility; and also the perfection of silent comtemplation, when the things that are really important are allowed to crystallise in the mind.

So there should be no reason to complain. If life was on a permanent high, it would become boring; it is better for it to be a thrilling ride, to be embraced with joy, excitement, and determination. So with that thought, here's to the new decade.

This hasn't been a particularly coherent set of thoughts, composed in the early hours of the morning on new year's (sorry decade's) day, but it will have to serve. The number of blog posts I made in 2009 dropped to six from eighteen in the previous year. Perhaps a good resolution will be to make more of them in the new year. Oh yes, and to lose some weight ... :-)

Prejudiced against prejudice

2009-08-25T16:27:00.000-07:00

Any deep philosophy tends to get rooted in paradox – the paradox itself providing the motivation to explore further, like the irritating bit of sand in the oyster shell that won’t go away and gives rise to a beautiful pearl. Here’s a good example from Socrates, after being attacked by a politician late in life:

“I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know”

A more pithy version along the same sort of lines also from Socrates is: “The one thing I know is that I know nothing.”

Socrates taught by active dialogue with pupils and not by written word. I imagine that if Socrates had a blog, his entries would be short and terse (unlike this one), and the comments session would extend to a much greater degree. If I were in discussion with Socrates, I’d be tempted to ask “How do you know that? Or do you just think you know?” I’d like to think Socrates would have approved, latching on to the paradox in what he had said. On the other hand, he might have said “Did it really take you all that time to work that out? You have a lot to learn!”

Similarly the study of Zen Koans is rooted in paradox – to stimulate further thought and understanding. Christian liturgy is also full of paradoxical ideas ( e.g. in communion, the broken bread being the broken body of Christ that joins the partakers into one body from many parts – a brokenness/wholeness paradox).

My own personal paradox is contained in the title of this post.

As I get older, I have come to realise that the one thing I detest most in life is any kind of prejudice, be it racial, religious, about sexual orientation, or just about anything that says “I’m different to you in this respect therefore I’m superior”.

Like:

“I’m better than you because I’m Christian/Jewish/Muslim/Hindu/Buddist/Atheist/Agnostic and you’re not”.

“I’m better than you because I have white skin/black skin/brown skin/yellow skin and you don’t”

“I’m better than you because I’m right-handed and you’re not” ( the Latin word for left-handed is “sinister”, for a reason – left-handed people weren’t trusted because you couldn’t tell which hand they’d use to stab you).

“I’m better than you because I’m straight and you’re not”. (in this last case, it seems largely to be straight people that exhibit sexual-orientation prejudice).

All of the above prejudiced statements are ones I cannot tolerate, in fact they infuriate me. The reason is simple. To categorize another person’s merit on the basis of one attribute (be it race, creed, colour, handedness, sexual orientation) is to reduce that person to one dimension. But people are multi-dimensional – can’t be classified for their worth on the grounds of one attribute. And besides that; I am only too aware of the absolute misery caused by, for example, racial or homophobic prejudice.

So I’m inclined to think that because I have no such prejudices, that I’m better than those who have prejudices like the above. They’re not worth talking to. ( Often the attempt to reason with someone who knows they are right is a very frustrating process because they won’t listen to you, or even worse distort what you say to suit their own agenda). I often meet such people on internet discussion forums. After trying hard to reason, my approach is eventually to set up email rules to delete their posts before they hit my inbox. They’re a waste of time, and likely to send me into a rant. Sometimes it has to be said they amuse me. One fundamentalist on a Christians In Science discussion group once chided me with the statement ”Stop worshipping the false atheist God Darwin”. As if I would worship Darwin any more than Einstein, Newton, Shakespeare, Mozart etc. When it comes to Gene Rodenberry, the creator of the Star Trek universe, however … that’s a different matter! But the truth is the statement amused me because of its sheer stupidity, not to mention the prejudice of the writer – I accept “Evilution” so I must be a Bad Guy!

Oops. Paradox. I’m doing the same as they are! I’m prejudiced against prejudice. ”I’m better than you because you’re prejudiced against X and I’m not”.

We’re all flawed, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have something to offer. T.S. Eliot was a Jew-hater, and yet I admire his poetry. Another poet I greatly admire is Philip Larkin, but he was a sexist pig. Even the guy on the internet forum provided some light-hearted amusement. I wear his insult like a badge of honour!

Am I a hypocrite or just confused? It would be good to have a talk with Socrates to try and resolve this further.

The Sims and Evidence

2009-07-12T04:45:00.001-07:00

Computer Simulation Games and Scientific Evidence

In this post, I shall carry on my discussion of the nature of miracles and the demand for scientific evidence, using as a model the computer game The Sims.

In order to do science we have to make observations in order to gather evidence, formulate theories based on the observations we have made, and then make predictions from those theories. We postulate experiments that will confirm the correctness of our theories if the outcome is in line with our prediction, or will falsify the theory if the outcome differs from the prediction.

That's what science is. Anything that doesn't follow this pattern (evidence, prediction, validation or falsification), but allows literally anything to be explained away isn't scientific. An example is given in an A-level Psychology textbook about philosopher Karl Popper's criticism of Freudian psychoanalysis as being unscientific:

Science is supposed to deal in observable evidence, but psychoanalysis
deals in metaphysical (non-observable) concepts like Ego and Id which
cannot be shown to exist.

According to the philosopher Karl
Popper (1934), a theory is only scientific if it makes predictions or
hypotheses which can be tested by observation or experiment, and which
can be disproved if incorrect. Popper believed that psychoanalysis
does not present clear hypotheses for testing, but, because its theory
is so complex, it can always come up with an answer for everything.
For example, psychoanalysis may predict that children who experience
harsh potty training will grow up to be anally retentive. But if they
don't, that is not taken as evidence that the prediction is wrong, it
is explained away as due to reaction formation. For Popper, this is
unscientific.

"Psychology in Focus" Ed. Mike Harlambos and David Rice.

By the same token "Intelligent Design" isn't scientific. Invoking an intelligent designer to explain what we have not yet explained by science is likewise an answer for everything. Similarly, invoking a miracle to explain some bizarre observation isn't science.

But the question I want to pose to the reader is this: is scientific observation the only way of knowing things? If you happen to espouse a purely science-based materialist world-view, then your answer will be "Yes", and any form of miracle is ruled out a priori.

So let's consider a slightly different version of the disappearing door scenario I considered in an earlier post about the Sims computer game. As I'm writing this, The Sims 3 is just about to come out. However, I doubt that Artificial Intelligence will have yet advanced far enough for the characters to have reasoned intelligent conversations (in current versions of the game, the characters babble to each other in "Simlish" - an invented language that sounds plausibly like real conversation, but carries no meaning). However, perhaps in The Sims 10, such conversations will be possible between the characters.

[Aside: there is much heated debate within the Artificial Intelligence community as to whether it is possible for a computer program to experience the phenomenon of consciousness. Adherents to the "Strong AI" postulate such as Douglas Hofstadter, or Ray Kurzweil believe this will be true; whereas mathematical physicist Roger Penrose believes it will take more than a mere algorithm to achieve consciousness. He believes that there is some unexamined area of physics beyond what is computable that will account for it].

So in this imagined future Sims program, I shall assume that if not consciousness, then at least reasoned abstract discussion can take place between characters. Once again, the Game Player has the ability to freeze the simulation, and alter the surroundings of a character in the simulation in a discontinuous way.

So one of the characters goes into a room that has only one door through which to exit, and the Player freezes the simulation and deletes the door, restarting it again. The character is trapped, and has witnessed a manifestly supernatural event - a door in the wall instantaneously disappearing. It doesn't fit in with any of his observations of the natural world. As time wears on, the character becomes "hungry", and when this happens a thought bubble appears on the screen above the character's head saying "food".

At this point the Game Player feels sorry for the character, and again freezes the simulation and puts a plateful of food in the room, leaving the character still trapped.

[ Current versions of the game don't allow this; one could put a fridge in the room, but not a plate of food - in this imagined later version, this is not a restriction].

So the character eats the food and has their hunger satisfied. Then the Game Player freezes the simulation once again and removes the empty plate. This happens again and again - every time the character experiences hunger, a plate is "miraculously" supplied, mysteriously disappearing again when the character has eaten the food. Eventually the Game Player decides to free the character from the trap, by reinserting the door in the room.

No other character in the simulation has witnessed the goings on in this house. The character then visits a different house in the neighbourhood and explains what has happened to another Sim character, who happens to be a scientific materialist and atheist. ( The Sims 2 allows one to "design" a character with the trait "freethinker" - rather ironic that the Player designs an atheist!) The conversation between the Prisoner P and the freethinker F might go like this.

P: There's definitely some external power out there that is looking after me.
F: Oh, really, how come?
P: Well the strangest thing happened. I went into the smallest room in the house a couple of days ago, and the door disappeared before my very eyes! I was trapped.
F: Pull the other one!
P: No, it really happened. I was terrified and I thought I was going to die of starvation. Then every time I felt hungry, a plate of food mysteriously appeared in the room. I ate as much as I needed, and then it would vanish until the next time I felt hungry. After a while I got to realise that Something was out there - and when I asked for food I got it. In the end I thought - "I wish I could get out of here", and the door reappeared!
F: Now, you know science says such things can't happen. Doors disappearing and reappearing, plates of food appearing at your command. That only happens in fairy tales!
P: No, you don't get it; suppose there is a Higher Power out there that chooses to reveal Himself to us by this way.
F: OK so make it happen now; make a plate of food appear in front of my eyes. Then I'll believe you.

(Long pause while P concentrates and nothing happens).

F: Sorry, I can't accept what you're saying until you provide me with hard verifiable evidence. You're deluded; go and see a shrink. I expect you dreamed it?

P: Dreamed? What's that?

F: It's a feature that is due to be released in The Sims 11.

P: What on earth are you talking about?

F: Err... I don't know ... the words just came out of my mouth. You're nuts. You must be driving me nuts. I'm off to bed.

(Game Player rolls on the floor with evil laughter)

In the above, there are actually three levels of reality interacting. There is the bottom level "Sims universe", which of course has no concept of what "The Sims" or "The Sims 11" is, since that is the name given to it in the next level of reality, where the mischievous and omnipotent Game Player exists. Then or course there is my level of reality, where I wrote the story where the character from level 2 put incomprehensible level 2 concepts into the mouth of a disbelieving level 1 character.

I suggest that none of these "inter-level" interactions, or interventions, are subject to scientific analysis in the level being effected. Scientific study involves the collection of evidence that is repeatable in a laboratory.

But as the illustration shows, interventions from a different "controlling" level aren't repeatable - they don't necessarily conform to a pattern; but equally it shows that scientific experimentation isn't necessarily the only way of gaining knowledge.

Christ in the Universe - a poem for Christian Trekkies

2009-07-12T03:15:00.000-07:00

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, had a vision of a galaxy teeming with intriguing alien life forms that it was the Enterprise's five-year mission to seek out. In successive Star Trek franchises the spiritual beliefs of these alien species were often investigated.

It seems Roddenberry was preceded in this idea by Alice Meynell (1847-1922), an English Catholic mystical poet, who wrote the following marvellous poem in 1917.

Christ in the Universe

With this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the young Man crucified.

But not a star of all
The innumerable host of stars has heard
How He administered this terrestrial ball.
Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word.

Of His earth-visiting feet
None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,
The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,
Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.

No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,
Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.

Nor, in our little day,
May His devices with the heavens be guessed,
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way,
Or His bestowals there be manifest.

But, in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

O be prepared, my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The million forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

What more can I add but that I hope to meet Alice Meynell in Sto-Vo-Kor!

(BTW if you follow the above link, I disagree with the encyclopedia's assessment of Sto-Vo-Kor as mythology).

Simulation games, miracles, and why Dawkins is wrong

2009-06-04T14:42:00.000-07:00

I recently listened to a debate between the foremost "New atheist" spokesman Richard Dawkins, and Oxford Mathematics professor John Lennox, who is an evangelical Christian. Dawkins led off in his typical manner, attempting at the outset to ridicule Lennox for believing in miracles. Doubtless this will give Dawkins acolytes much to cheer about; though it is difficult to see how it is constructive dialog offered by a human being interested in rational discussion.

He started by saying that he was accustomed to debating with "sophisticated theologians", (presumably ones who don't believe in miracles) but in Lennox, he had found a scientist who believed that Jesus turned water into wine. He outlined what this entailed - that somehow Jesus had interacted with the water molecules and added proteins, carbohydrates, tannin and alcohol to it. This, and other beliefs (such as walking on water, dying for our sins etc), he stated were "profoundly unscientific".

Actually I agree. Of course turning water into wine doesn't come under the realm of science. That's why it's called a miracle. If your world-view is the same as that of Dawkins, that the material universe, which can be studied through scientific method, is all there is, then of course you are going to reject the water-into-wine account. In his book "The God Delusion" he insists that the existence or non-existence of God is a question whose answer can be determined scientifically. He then presents a plausible (under those assumptions) argument for the almost-certain non-existence of God, which he calls "The Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit". This is a reference to a quotation by astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, who reportedly said: "(the) probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747".

Dawkins points out that we are extremely complex organisms, and our existence would therefore seem to be extremely improbable. However, if one invokes a Designer to explain our existence, then, according to Dawkins, the Designer must necessarily be far more complex than we are, and hence even more difficult to explain; the Designer's existence would seem to be far more improbable than our own.

Here is where we differ. I would agree with the above argument if the Designer (aka God) is made of the same stuff as we are. It's an excellent argument against some of the Intelligent Design community who claim to detect "design" but allow that the Designer could be, for example, a sufficiently advanced alien intelligence from somewhere else in the material universe. That is because the alien intelligence would be made of the same stuff as us - atoms and molecules, held together by forces mediated by the exchange of photons; they would have to be much smarter and hence more complex than us, and hence their existence is even more improbable than our own. Note that even this doesn't prove we aren't designed by aliens. All it shows is that this explanation is one that replaces something that is difficult to explain (our existence) with something that is even more difficult to explain: the existence of aliens who are more complex than we are.

But what if the Designer/Creator - call it what you will - is not of the same "stuff" - not part of the Universe in which we live? What would the relationship be then, and is Dawkins's argument still valid? I think not. I'll illustrate this by considering a computer simulation game.

The Sims is one of the most popular computer games ever. My two children were addicted to it for a while. The game simulates a community of virtual human beings ("Sims") who live in houses, eat food, interact with each other, get jobs, have children, get born, die and so forth. The "universe" they live in has similar physical properties to our own. For example objects are solid and can be picked up but not walked through. Chip pans catch fire if left unattended on the stove. The game has some spectacular fire graphics, and leaves behind impressively disgusting simulated charred messes after the fire has been put out. If the subjects don't eat food, they die of starvation. If the subjects don't go to the bathroom often enough, they wet themselves (why oh why did they have to put this tacky feature in?)

However, they are not made of the same "stuff" as us. Although their universe appears constructed of solid objects - they are simply projected images on a computer screen. Each "sim" is not a human being with DNA, cells, organs etc, but a changing packet of information stored on a silicon chip, whose changes are not governed by the laws of physics, but by the execution of a computer program, and the switching on or off of hundreds of millions of transistors (a Pentium D has 230 million of them) literally billions of times a second.

The dissimilarity between the two universes (our universe, and the simulated Sims universe) becomes even more apparent with the ability one has to save a game on the computer. At this point, the entire game state is saved as information to the hard disk. The memory storage locations that were the matrix in which the characters existed are then used for something else, such as browsing the web. The program can be exited and restarted at any time. A restart of a game after 24 hours does not result in 24 hours elapsed time for the characters in the simulation; they carry on from exactly the time index in their world as when it was saved. The characters do not "notice" that 24 hours has in reality elapsed, because our reality isn't their reality.

Even more fascinating is the propensity for "miracles" to occur through the intervention of the human player (who is unknown to the simulated characters). I found my daughter and a friend exploiting this in a fiendish way one day. They decided to have an evil character who wanted to build a cemetery, and needed a supply of corpses to bury. It's not easy for a Sim to kill another Sim; however it is easy enough to influence the game so a Sim dies quickly, by using the "design" feature. With this feature, one can freeze the simulation at the current time index, and change the environment. This is usually done in order to build a house for Sim characters to live in, or to buy furniture for the house and arrange it.

The killing of a Sim is easily achieved by using this feature. You build a house in which there is one room with three walls with no window and one with a door. You wait for the victim to go into this room, and then you freeze the simulation, enter the design mode, and simply delete the door, leaving the victim trapped in a room with no exit. You then restart the simulation (from the same time index as where you left off), and wait for the character to die of starvation. It's expedient at this point to put the simulation on "fast forward" so you don't have to wait too long. According to Wikipedia, a similar method of killing a Sim is by getting them into a swimming pool and then deleting the steps - so that they drown when they get tired, as apparently the Sims lack the ability to climb out of a pool without the aid of steps.

Now consider what this looks like from the point of view of a character in the game. It clearly looks like a miracle; a supernatural event. At one instant there is a door and at the next it has instantaneously vanished (there being no memory of the timeless moment in the Sims universe when the player went into design mode).

Such an event would be beyond scientific method to explain. A scientist in the Sims universe could make observations of the properties that universe (solidity of objects - not being able to walk through walls, the physics of motion etc). But something like the sudden disappearance of a door would be beyond scientific explanation. It could never be predicted when such an event would happen; the door-disappearance could not be reproduced in a laboratory because it doesn't happen as a result of the laws of the Sim universe. It is a result of the capricious whim of the game player, who is not a part of the simulation, but the controller of it.

It is not difficult to imagine a mechanism for miraculous healings in the Sims universe, and furthermore, it doesn't require the player to be a skilled surgeon! Suppose the game had the ability for the virtual people to get cancer. Even given that the "Design mode" of the game didn't allow you to delete the cancer cells in the virtual person, you could still find a way. All you'd have to do would be to save the game to hard disk, then figure out the format of the information in the files, get to the bit that defined the cancer condition, and edit it out, outside of the game. Maybe it would take you a long time to discover how to do this - you'd have to get technical details from the programmers of the game, or get a friendly computer nerd to figure out the file format for you. Suppose it took you a year, and perhaps several program crashes where you corrupted the file (and kept a backup!) But eventually you'd get there, restart the simulation from where you stopped it, and from the point of view of the character, their cancer would have disappeared instantaneously, and it would be beyond the ability of the science of the Sims universe to explain.

So the moral of the story is: science can only explain the reality of the universe we live in - it can say nothing about higher realities that might exist. I'm not suggesting that our universe is a simulation on "God's Big Computer" (though this idea has been suggested: see A computer scientist's view of Life the Universe and Everything where top AI scientist Juergen Schmidhuber proposes just such a scenario).

However, the Sims and the intervention of external forces from a different reality serves as a counter example that, I believe, completely floors Dawkins's famous argument for why God Almost Certainly Does Not Exist. All Dawkins has shown is that God Almost Certainly Does Not Exist In Our Reality. The non-existence of other realities is an unprovable assumption that reflects Dawkins's world-view.

Geek warning: the next paragraph is quite technical and can be skipped if desired. I'm a computer scientist and couldn't resist the attempt to expound Schmidhuber's remarkable paper a little.

Furthermore, Schmidhuber's paper also completely demolishes Dawkins's assertion that the Designer/Creator must necessarily be more complex than we are. All Schmidhuber's "God" (which has been dubbed "The Great Programmer") requires is quite a simple, but vast, computer that runs, in parallel, simulations of all possible universes of the same complexity as ours. For those who don't want to read the paper in the link I gave, here's roughly how it works. To simulate a universe requires a computer program of a certain length. The program for "The Sims" fits easily onto the hard drive of a computer. And the computer itself is certainly a lot smaller than the universe we live in. Now imagine a computer that simulates our universe. This Great Computer itself is vastly bigger than our universe, but is itself small in its own Mega Universe. The program that simulates our universe fits onto the memory storage of the Great Computer easily. It has a finite length. Schmidhuber argues that the program to simulate our universe is actually relatively short compared to other universes, because our universe obeys regular laws. A chaotic universe with no easy laws to obey would require a much longer program. Now a program which is limited in size is just like a number with a colossal number of digits, and each digit is an instruction in the program. So it is possible to imagine all possible programs up to that size - just a simple exercise in counting. Now suppose this Great Computer runs in parallel, ALL these programs, just as your computer runs several programs at once (like web-browsing at the same time as playing music). Now most of these programs will probably crash immediately, but some will simulate universes, and one of those will be our universe, from the Big Bang onwards. Now, the intelligence needed to set up such a set of computer programs is very little - it's as simple as counting (though counting up to a huge number, to be sure!!) Hence, argues, Schmidhuber, the "Great Programmer" does not have to be complex or intelligent - he just has to have an enormous computer, and immense amounts of time to run all the programs. The things that go on inside His Computer are more complex than He is. This is in direct contradiction to Dawkins's assertion that the Designer (or Creator) must be more complex than us. One might object that as the Great Programmer's Computer is so busy running the myriads of other programs as long as the one that simulates our universe, that it would be very slow. But it does not matter - even if one time instant of "our" universe is executed once every trillion years in the Programmer's universe, because the perception of time in our universe is that it is uninterrupted, just as when you freeze a computer simulation in The Sims for a long time and then restart it.

End of Geek-friendly section.

It is interesting to speculate what might happen in future computer games like the Sims. The Sims currently has quite a bit of Artificial Intelligence built into it, but the level of cognitive ability of the characters is pretty limited (they have basic emotions, personality traits etc, but they don't have the ability to conduct reasoned discussions with each other). I wonder if in the future AI will have advanced far enough for reasoned discussions to take place, and if so, whether the characters in the game will get into a debate as to whether there is an external intelligence to their world that is intervening in it?

We call this Friday God

2009-04-10T02:59:00.000-07:00

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood -
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

I have just typed by hand these famous words from T.S. Eliot's poem East Coker, the second of his series Four Quartets. I took the words from my yellowing copy of T.S. Eliot's Collected Poems. The page on which these words are printed has virtually fallen out of the book; evidence of repeated re-visits to the text, to be read and re-read as different layers of meaning are peeled off and revealed to me.

Why go to the effort of typing it out by hand, when I could just as easily have cut-and-pasted it from one of the numerous websites that contain the text of Four Quartets?

It is because it is fitting on this day not to take the easy way out. Matthew 26:38-39: Let this cup pass from my lips; yet not my will but thine be done reminds us just how tempting it is to take the easy way out, and how, on our behalf, Christ chose the difficult path; the path of suffering, and in doing so, becomes a wounded surgeon who is able to heal us of the brokenness that ruins each and every one of us.

Nor did I just copy-type out the words; I typed them slowly, seeing the key words, many of them uncomfortable ones, form letter by letter on the screen. The last verse I started typing at my normal touch-typist's speed, and saw a couple of lines on the screen before I realised. So I wiped them and re-typed, forcing my fingers to slow down from their natural rhythm, and re-experienced the hammer blows of the words one by one. Sometimes this exercise can lead to unexpected new meanings; that perhaps were not intended by the author, or maybe only in his subconscious. I slowed down to a crawl of typing on the last line so e a c h l e t t e r c a m e u p d i s c r e t e l y a s a s e p a r a t e e v e n t i n t i m e .

I stopped for some thirty seconds at We call this Friday go and for a long while the letter d formed itself invisibly on the screen. Is it a deliberate word-play by Eliot? I do not know. In Christian hymns the words good and blood are a common enough half rhyme that is employed, and so are god and blood.

And it seems fitting that on this Good Friday we should call on God. Our whole world, it seems just now is falling apart. If Eliot's "ruined millionaire" is a reference to Adam, then it seems doubly appropriate in these days of world financial crisis. Was Adam a banker, I wonder?

I cannot let today pass without a word about my gay Christian brothers and sisters across the world. Many, after horrific struggles, despair and depression, have become healed, in the sense of being reconciled to their sexuality. They are able to move on and get on with their spiritual lives. But there are many others, I am sure, who this Friday will approach the foot of the Cross, and seek earnestly an operation from the wounded surgeon that He may well not perform: to cut out an essential part of themselves. The flaming rose, in Eliot's poem, is a symbol of love, the briars a symbol of punishment, and perhaps of repression. Who is to say that the homophobic attitudes of many who are otherwise delightful Christians, are not briars that prevent the blossoming of true love?

We call this Friday God; we call on him to act, but we should not presume the answers.

In the meantime, I wish a joyous Easter time to any who read this. If you're looking for a suitable spiritual path to follow, appropriate for a Good Friday, then I invite you to do what I just did; print off Eliot's words and re-type them slowly, or better still, write them down on a piece of paper, digesting each word as it flows out from the pen. Maybe other insights will occur to you.

Keep religion and philosophy out of science lessons, Prof. Dawkins!

2009-01-03T07:55:00.000-08:00

I've just finished watching the Royal Institution Christmas lecture series for 2008, which was televised last week in the UK. This is a long and venerable lecture series, dating back to 1825 when the first series of lectures were given by Michael Faraday (see here for a list of all the lecturers). I myself attended the lectures in 1969 (Prof. Sir George Porter on Time Machines) and 1970 (J. Napier on evolution). The lectures are primarily aimed at schoolchildren from the ages of 11 onwards. Many eminent scientists have given these lectures before, including both holders of the post of Professor of Public Understanding of Science, Richard Dawkins, and the current holder, Marcus du Sautoy.

This year's lectures were of special interest to me as they were given by my PhD supervisor, Chris Bishop, who is head researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

In one of the lectures, Bishop gave an amusing demonstration of the precision of the laws of physics; saying that the smallest deviation from the laws of physics in the demonstration could result in him being killed. He had rigged up a 14 Kg weight on the end of a long cable that was suspended from the high ceiling of the Royal Institution lecture theatre. Standing at the edge of the stage, he took the weight and lifted it up so it touched his face. Then he let go and watched as it swung alarmingly fast across the lecture theatre and then back again, coming to rest a few inches from his face without harming him.

He then went on to make the interesting teaching point that the laws of physics are so precisely predictable that we can simulate them in a computer - to such a degree of realism that when airline pilots are trained in flying a new type of aircraft, they can do the training entirely on a flight simulator powered by a computer - and that the first time a pilot flew that kind of aircraft for real would have been when fare-paying passengers were on board.

This, it seems to me, is science teaching at its best. Perform an interesting and exciting demonstration showing an abstract concept - and then capitalise on the demonstration to show how this science relates to something we can all appreciate in the real world. It's what the Royal Institution Christmas lectures are all about.

Now, the reason I relate this is that I discovered that Richard Dawkins (who as we know went on to be the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of Public Understanding of Science in Oxford) also gave precisely the same demonstration in the first of his 1991 series of Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Growing Up in the Universe

However, Dawkins didn't use the illustration to show how it relates to other branches of science. Instead the sole purpose was to show that there was nothing wrong with having faith in a proper scientific prediction (having spoken for some time about how silly it was to have a faith in the supernatural). Dawkins thereby neglected his duty as a science teacher, and instead used a scientific experiment to propagate his own philosophical viewpoint.

It is therefore gratifying to read that his successor as Professor of Public Understanding of Science, the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, who is just as much an atheist as Dawkins, is intending to concentrate in his role on the communication of science, and not making a name for himself as a crusader against religion.

A natural scientist pre-remembers ...

2008-10-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, we received a call from someone in our office asking about alternative routes into work. She was stuck in traffic because an accident was causing congestion. Later we heard that the accident had involved a collision between a cyclist and a school bus. Being a commuter/cyclist myself I had to admit that I thought "ooh; that doesn't sound good".

When I arrived home from work in the evening, I found out that my wife, Christine, knew the victim; she was the star pupil at the school where Christine works as a library assistant. She and the other librarian had got to know the victim, Sarah Waterhouse, very well - and she had told them she was about to apply to Cambridge for Natural Sciences. She was killed almost immediately, apparently attempting to cross the road, when the bus hit her. See this link for the full story.

Although I did not know Sarah, she knew about me - Christine had told her that I also had read Natural Sciences at Cambridge.

Anything that happens that touches you like that is bound to trigger a flood of memories - happy ones for me of my days in Cambridge - and, sadly, ones that will never happen for Sarah.

As I did not know Sarah personally, I am not able to remember her, as her friends do. I went on the Friday to the spot near the accident opposite the police station to see all the flowers that had been laid there - it seems she was well loved. But these memories that I have are a kind of pre-remembering of what might have been for Sarah, and, in my own way, are a way of remembering this person I never even knew existed before she died.

There are so many of them:

The thrill of receiving the offer of a place.

The slight pull of homesickness on the first day after my parents left me, only to be swallowed up in the thrill of being invited to lots of freshers events and quickly making new friends.

The early morning sun slanting across the stone courts of Trinity College.

The mist rising off the Cam after an all night punting expedition.

Glamour and romance by the river, all lit up for the College ball.

Drinking port that was older than me at a College feast ( very dry and rich, not sweet like ordinary port).

The weird juxtaposition of standing in a very grand college room, drinking port (ordinary port this time), wearing gowns after Hall dinner, playing backgammon with the mathematicians, and listening to punk rock at indescribable volumes.

The smell of stone in the old buildings.

The river of cyclists pouring down Tennis Court Road between Natural Sciences lectures in different venues.

The maths lecturer who covered 24 blackboards with hieroglyphic squiggles (the trademark of mathematicians) in the course of a one hour lecture.

Staying up over coffee till two o'clock in the morning putting the world to rights; or trying to come to terms with the philosophical implications of Quantum Mechanics.

And countless friends, some for life, some receding into the past as fond memories.

And my life after unrolling like a carpet; a Masters' degree; a career in a scientific institution, a family, children, a doctorate ... and so it goes on.

And all of these things would have been waiting for Sarah, too, were it not for the tragic accident that ended her life even before the first of the items on my list.

One can only say "Rest In Peace", but have the sad feeling that one whose life that had only just begun to unroll into this world that meant so much to me, should not be needing to rest.

On not trying to fix you

2008-09-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

Back in July, I posted a YouTube link to a beautiful song, Fix You, by Coldplay.

It is easy in the emotion of the music to give assent to what is expressed in the chorus of the song:

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try
To fix you

But of course it's never as easy as that - there are no quick fixes for those in the kind of emotional distress that is portrayed in the song. So here is my creative response to those words ...

Not trying to fix you

I have no lights to guide you home,
Instantly incandescent and full of hope.
The little flame that burns in my heart
Will perhaps suffice
To see you, stumbling and hesitant,
Around the next corner;
Accompany you on the next twist
In your path to light or darkness.

For half an hour or maybe more
I'll be alongside you
An arbour of safety
In which, if you are able,
You'll begin to unpick
The fettering threads of despair
And release to me
The gift of your story.

And I, not guiding,
But quietly receiving
Will try to fix you
By not trying to fix you.

Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet?

2008-09-14T15:50:00.000-07:00

Find the answer here

However, it did destroy a triffid belonging to a friend of mine...

Large Hadron Collider Rap

2008-09-07T01:07:00.000-07:00

Just LOVED this, physics geek that I am.

"Alpinekat" (Kate McAlpine) is a science writer at the CERN experiment in Europe, which will turn on the largest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider, on Sept 10th. There are some who say it will cause the end of the world, because of the potential to create "mini-black holes". Black holes are normally formed by the gravitational collapse of a massive star, but it is possible that the conditions at the time of the Big Bang could have created extremely small black holes. Steven Hawking postulated that such holes would evaporate by the emission of radiation, called "Hawking Radiation", a result of a virtual particle-anti particle pair being produced at the black hole's event horizon. Some physicists now believe that Hawking radiation may be a flawed concept and that a mini black hole created by the LHC would not evaporate, but could cause a cataclysmic disaster and swallow up the earth.

So .. just in case they are right, enjoy Kate's rap while you can.

Managers say the darndest things

2008-08-28T04:32:00.000-07:00

There is a really useful website titled Bullshit Bingo that is a very good concentration aid during management meetings. The web page produces a five by five grid of randomly chosen meaningless management metaphors ( like "traction", "vertical market", "horizontal market", "hardball", and "leveraging core competence"). You listen out during the meeting and every time one of the phrases is used by someone, you cross it off. When you get a line of five together, you jump up and shout "Bullshit!!" (or not, if you want to keep your job!). It really improves your listening skills.

In a company I once worked for someone I knew actually got a line during a meeting, so it is possible. Other choice examples were when the CEO, in a 20 minute recorded telephone message to employees used the phrase "Moving Forward" a total of 39 times (someone was actually counting!). A couple of other hilarious comments were:

... this new product will really help us to move up the food chain of value-added ...

(huh?)

and my favourite:

The future is now.

Deeeep!

If any readers have similar hilarious examples of the darndest things managers say, then please submit a comment.

No Swimming

2008-08-19T16:22:00.000-07:00

Canal Walk, Indianapolis, 27th Jan 2008.

On business in Indy in January, we had a weekend to kill. The folks at the office recommended we visit Chicago, but neither of the two of us, mad Englishmen that we were, fancied a round trip of seven hours in the car to see a city where we wouldn't know where to go. So we found in the hotel room a guide that said the Canal walk in Indianapolis is very beautiful, so we decided to give it a try. Alas, it had been drained for the winter, making the warning in this picture somewhat superfluous. Fancy diving into that!

I shall be out there again next week, and I am sure the canal walk will be beautiful, but I doubt if I'll get to see it, as I'll just be there during the week :-(

And here's the proof that I was really there! Such a lovely picture it might have been!

Archbishop of Canterbury on Gay relationships

2008-08-07T16:45:00.000-07:00

From a letter from 2001 between the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams and Dr. Deborah Pitt, a psychiatrist and evangelical Christian:

"By the end of the 1980s I had definitely come to the conclusion that scripture was not dealing with the predicament of persons whom we should recognise as homosexual by nature. I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness."

Good for him!! I agree with the above 100%.

Apparently the Church of England is going to split on this issue, and some Conservative Christians say Williams's position is now "untenable".

Some Conservative Christians need to go back to the Bible and read Matthew 7:1-2.

Some Conservative Christians need to understand the truly horrific abominations that are perpetrated on innocent children, not by homosexuals, but mostly by close family members, and maybe they'd get a better perspective on what's really going on in the world, and not spend so much energy condemning people for an orientation they did not choose.

And if, dear reader, you want to know more about what I'm saying in the last paragraph, and you want to have that better perspective, and if, (most importantly) you have a strong stomach, then read about the horrific abuse that Sophie Andrews endured from her adopted father, in her book Scarred: How One Girl Triumphed Over Shocking Abuse and Self-harm

I am serious - you need a strong stomach, and also most likely a box of tissues to equip you for reading this book.

Continuing his Work

2008-08-07T13:46:00.000-07:00

This was a poem I wrote about a year after my father died, in his memory. The image of the half-mown lawn was one I had long intended to write into a poem, but the recollection prompted by the incident at the end was the spark that got the poem written & thus a sad memory got sandwiched between two happy ones.

"Please, Daddy, can you mend my coach?"
Me. Aged five. At the airport. Clutching broken toy.
You, ever the patient father,
Tired from your business trip, complied.

Thirty years passed, and then you died,
Mowing the lawn. For three days I stared out of the window
At the mower's slanting swathe across the uncut grass,
Marking your last path.
Then started it up again, continuing your work.
Felt your last moments in the vibrations of the handle.
Knew your last conscious act;
To halt the mower and save your precious lawn.

Then yesterday, you came to me again,
Through my five-year-old's broken toy,
And for a few moments that spanned the gap of all those years,
I solemnly enacted the sacrament
Of mending a plastic ambulance.

INTP or INFP ? A poem reveals all!

2008-08-01T09:21:00.000-07:00

Over at Willful Grace there is a posting about the Myers-Briggs personality profile. As Grace, who is an INFP points out, there are some good things about INFP's (like being very caring etc), and some things that really suck, like having a "subtle tragic motif" running through their lives.

Well, on reading about it, I went and took a Myers-Briggs test, and answered a lot of impertinent Yes/No type questions, and lo and behold, I also came out as an INFP! (Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling, Perceiving).

I guess my "tragic motif" is my penchant for sad music as exemplified in these posts:

No easy fixes, but we can try
Funeral songs ( choosing a song for my own funeral?! How tragic is that ???)
Hunger for Seriousness

But I also seem to remember that I took an M-B test around 20 years ago, during a management course, and came out as INTP (T = "thinking"), reflecting my analytical, scientific, rational nature as opposed to the touchy-feely-liking-depressing-music-caring side.

Perhaps the explanation is in the thoughts I had when taking the questionnaire this time. Rather than straight

Yes No

as the options for answer, what I wanted was:

Yes Meh No

as for many of the questions I couldn't make a firm preference and reasoned it would depend on the situation.

So does the ambiguity between Thinking and Feeling mean that my personality is as follows:

Thinking ................. *Meh* ................. Feeling ?

(emphasis points to my position on the scale).

I don't think so. I care passionately about both sides - the rational scientist, and the feeling, caring person with an embedded minor key. It wasn't really a "I don't care" response, but a desire to push both buttons.

An exercise I once did in a creative writing workshop reveals that these two parts of me are in dynamic balance, and make me what I am. We were told first to draw ourselves "as a tree", trying to embody our character in the drawing. Then we had to write down "I am the tree, and I ..." and carry on writing a poem or piece of prose, that was inspired by the drawing. The tree I drew was quite bizarre (I'm not a good artist!) The left side was angular and geometric, and the right side was curving and wayward, symbolising one the one side, my scientific, rational nature, and on the other, my creative, and artistic nature. The poem followed quite easily from it. The exercise told me a lot about myself, and I was pretty comfortable with it. Here's the poem I wrote:

Tree Psalm

I am the tree
and I have logic engraved in my branches
Around me is evidence
that I assimilate;
making deductions,
forming ordered conclusions.

I am the tree
And my leaves are blobs
Slapped on by impressionists
On emotion's whim
Around me are patterns
Inciting dance
To enhance
Harmony

I am the tree
and my bark is etched with parallel lines.
Around me is peace
in the perfection of symmetry
joy in the rightness
of orthogonality

I am the tree
and the waves of my roots
are strewn to the mood of the moment
free to explore
where logic loses itself

I am the tree
And when my diverse natures merge
When logic and love are one
I am the Creator.

... well, it's said that INFP's are supposed to be talented writers. Let the reader be the judge of that (only if your MB profile ends in a J).

But the thing that pleases me most about the poem was that I took it to a poetry writers group, whose leader was a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. Despite all that, he didn't know the meaning of the word "Orthogonality". One up for us scientists!

Inspiration from 1964

2008-07-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

Today we undertook a massive clearout of the garage and attic. The chaotic jumble of papers, books, toys and so forth was thoroughly sorted, some to keep for special memories, but many assigned for recycling.

My past life seemed to flash about me with fond and forgotten memories revived and relived once again in a random patchwork of reminiscence. Here was found my first ever Paddington Bear book, whose stories delighted me as a child.

Among my extensive university lecture notes was an essay I wrote on how to explain the particle-wave duality of Quantum Mechanics to a non-scientist. In it, I had tackled the problem of how we understand that light can be simultaneously a particle and a wave, by making an analogy with Christian Theology - that theologians too have the magnum mysterium of Christ being fully man and fully God at the same time. My crusty physics professor (Sir Brian Pippard, who was Cavendish professor of Physics at Cambridge) was not impressed, and wrote the following comment in the margin of my essay:

An attractive, but I think false, analogy. It is a peculiarly Medieval concept that suggests that the Order below reflects the Order above.

I can still hear Pippard's slightly high pitched, very academic voice as he read the comment out to me as I could not read his writing.

The first books that sparked my life-long interest in science were the How and Why Wonder books series, and this one on Dinosaurs was the first one I owned, bought for me by my parents when I was seven or eight years old for the princely sum of three shillings and six pence (17.5 p in today's money or around 35 cents).

Most of my schoolfriends had this book as well. The amazing facts about these extraordinary creatures that lived all those millions of years ago inspired all our playground fantasies, and role-playing games, which were filled with Tyrannosaurus Rexes, Brontosauruses, Allosauruses and so on. Endless fun was to be had!

However, for me the real treasure was to be found in a quote from another book in the series, the How and Why Wonder Book of Primitive Man.

One of the biggest issues facing the Christian church today is the endless and pointless battle between Science and Religion; with one side peopled by Young Earth Creationists who will tell you that the theory of evolution is a load of rubbish, and on the other side by militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, or Daniel Dennett, who argue that evolution leads inevitably to an atheistic viewpoint.

How refreshing, then, to read the following beautifully simply and inspiringly worded passage in this book, written in 1964 by a certain Donald Barr, who was Assistant Dean, School of Engineering, Columbia University, New York. In a section titled Do all people believe the theory of evolution? he writes:

When Darwin's books on evolution were printed a hundred years ago, many people said Darwin did not believe in God's plan, but in a horrible universe run by lucky accidents and greedy fighting. They said he was making man out to be nothing more than a brainy ape. But these people need not have worried. The theory of evolution says certain things happened. It does not say, and it could not say, why those things happened. If God made the world and runs the world, then evolution is God's plan. And it is a majestic and beautiful plan. With evolution, even accidents are part of the plan of life, and even the lowest creature is part of the family life. The theory of evolution does not say man is only a brainier kind of ape. It says that for two thousand million years living forms were tried and improved and tried and improved in preparation for the arrival of man as we know him upon the scene of life upon the earth.

There really doesn't have to be a war, does there?

No easy fixes - but we can try

2008-07-26T12:05:00.000-07:00

One thing that is deeply ingrained into me, which I can't explain, is the desire to reach out to those who are in pain or distress. It has been there from quite an early age - part of my make up, I suppose.

Last weekend, I heard this song, for the first time, sung by a woman with a beautiful voice, at a lunch party, and fell in love with it straight away. It shows how out of touch with contemporary culture I am that I was unaware it was a big hit for Coldplay in 2005; but came home and immediately found it on YouTube, then also found my daughter had it in her collection.

The words spoke directly to me as part of what I want to do. There aren't any easy fixes for people who are in pain, but that doesn't stop us wanting to try.

The song also made me feel sad, because of someone I know of, who is suffering as the result of a terrible injustice. I guess this post is dedicated to that person.

On the other hand, it's also the case that I've only recently discovered how to put links to YouTube videos on a blog, and I'm looking for an excuse to play with my new toy!

Funeral Songs

2008-07-19T05:45:00.000-07:00

A morbid discussion arose on one of the email lists I am subscribed to concerning suitable songs one would choose to have played at one's funeral.

My choice would be Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, from Mahler's Rückert-Lieder.

The final verse seems to point to a transcendence of the world that is entirely an appropriate way to say goodbye to it.

For me, this is simply one of the most beautiful songs ever written.

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

(I have lost touch with the world)

Words by Friedrich Rückert
Music by Gustav Mahler,
Sung by Kathleen Ferrier

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,
Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben,
Sie hat so lange nichts von mir vernommen,
Sie mag wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben!

Es ist mir auch gar nichts daran gelegen,
Ob sie mich für gestorben hält,
Ich kann auch gar nichts sagen dagegen,
Denn wirklich bin ich gestorben der Welt.

Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel,
Und ruh' in einem stillen Gebiet!
Ich leb' allein in meinem Himmel,
In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied!
________________________________________ ___

I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!

It is of no consequence to me
Whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.

I am dead to the world's tumult,
And I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love and in my song!

---
.. and now for a complete contrast, though no less affecting, is the song my daughter Jess would choose for her funeral

How faith in Jesus Christ resolves a fundamental paradox

2008-07-12T08:55:00.000-07:00

There is an old conundrum often used to argue against the idea of an Omnipotent (capable of anything) God. It goes as follows:

"Can God make a stone so heavy He cannot lift it?"

A simple examination of the logical conundrum would lead to the conclusion that God cannot be omnipotent. If He CAN make such a stone, then He is incapable of lifting it by definition. If, however, he cannot make such a stone then that is also something He is incapable of doing. Therefore, God cannot be omnipotent - whichever way you look at it, there is something that God is incapable of doing. As the atheist writer Douglas Adams would have put it "So God disappears in a puff of logic".

The thought that has come to me recently is that this simple analysis doesn't apply to the Christian religion - and that the mystery of Incarnation (the Word became flesh and dwelt among us - John 1:14), offers a resolution to this paradox. The paradox would indeed be unanswerable for a God that lived forever distant from the Universe that He created. But the Christian message is that God became a part of His own creation; took on the form, and the frailties of a human being, and lived among us. This was a voluntary setting aside of his power and abilities - a human being cannot lift a rock that weighs more than a few hundred pounds. Of course, Jesus also performed miracles, but at the end, voluntarily laid down his life. Perhaps some expected him to bring matters to a head when faced with crucifixion; become an earthly King, and defeat the Romans, in some supernatural coup d'etat. And it would have been within his power to do so. But that was never the plan; it was to set aside his omnipotent power, and voluntarily become helpless in the face of a cruel and painful death.

And in the crucifixion, we also see the resolution of a similar paradox, which goes like this:

Is there anything an Omniscient (all-knowing) God cannot know?

One might pose the answer that a supposedly Omniscient being cannot know what it feels like NOT to know everything.

And again this is resolved in the person of Jesus Christ - God voluntarily laid aside the knowledge of everything, so that when, on the Cross, he cried out "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46), he wasn't faking it - he felt exactly the sense of loss, confusion, abandonment, and brokenness that we all feel.

Only in this sense of feeling exactly what we, as limited, finite human beings feel, can we perceive of a God who truly stands alongside us in our suffering. And it is only because of this real experience of "not knowing" that God can truly be deemed Omniscient.

That is why the Christian God is the one whom I worship.

2008-06-30T14:38:00.000-07:00

Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design

Here's an article I wrote for a local Church magazine (the consortium of Churches in Abingdon).

Dr. I.G.D. Strachan

This article represents my own opinion on this complex subject, arrived at after wrestling, as honestly as I could, with the issues involved. I hope that my views may not cause dismay for some people – but that the reader will be encouraged to explore these issues, and come thereby to a greater understanding of the marvellous creation in which we live.

Introductory thoughts

On the windows desktop of the computer I am using to write this article is a picture of one of the most awesomely beautiful sights in all creation, the Andromeda galaxy, which is the nearest neighbour to our own Milky Way. Its bright centre and swirling spiral arms are witness to mighty processes that have happened over aeons of time. Astronomers have estimated that the distance from us to this galaxy is of the order of fifteen million million million miles. It takes light around two and a half million years to reach us from Andromeda. So looking at the Andromeda galaxy gives us a window on the past – we do not see it as it is now, but as it was two and a half million years ago. The galaxy itself is so large that light takes around a hundred thousand years to cross from one side of it to the other.

What are the thoughts that come to me, as a Christian believer, when faced with such mind-boggling facts, revealed by science? They fill me with a sense of awe and wonder at the sheer scale and majesty of the Universe that God created. Furthermore they fill me with gratitude that the God who created such immensity also cares intimately about something so small and apparently insignificant as me. They bring to mind the words of the Psalmist:

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him? (Psalm 8:3-4).

Young Earth Creationism

For a scientist and a Christian, this is a way of meditating on God’s works, leading to worship and praise of the Creator. Yet, surprisingly it seems that thoughts such as these can not easily be shared by increasing numbers of evangelical Christians. The problem lies in the idea that we see the galaxy as it was two and a half million years ago. Recent polls suggest that around 40% of Americans believe that God created the universe only a few thousand years ago.

This belief comes from an interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis as a literal historical account. Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656) performed a detailed study of Biblical chronology, and concluded that the Creation took place in the year 4004 BC. Those who hold that this is the truth are called “Young Earth Creationists” (YECs).

The six-thousand year timescale comes into direct conflict with modern science, including Darwin’s theory of evolution, which requires millions of years for its processes to unfold. But it is not just evolution that requires these timescales. As we have seen, astronomy also implies vast ages, as does geology, and the observations made from radioactive dating of rocks.

YECs seek especially to attack the theory of evolution, which is blamed for the rise of atheism, because it contradicts a strictly literal interpretation of the Biblical account. However the long timescales were not dreamt up by scientists in order to fit in with the theory of evolution. The geologists of the early nineteenth century (many of whom were devout Christians), had come to the conclusion before Darwin that the earth had to be at least millions of years old (current estimates are that its age is around four and a half billion years). So the idea of an immense age of the earth is not due to Darwin or evolution, but comes from other areas of science.

Additionally, the idea that one should not interpret the early chapters of Genesis literally is not some modern invention, or compromise that we have to adopt because modern science says the earth is billions of years old. The early Christian father Origen (185-254 AD) writing about the Days of Creation, and the descriptions of the Garden of Eden, wrote the following:

I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history...

Origen, living in the third century AD had no scientific reason for believing that the earth was billions of years old. Yet it seemed to him obvious that the Genesis texts were figurative – in fact he didn’t think anyone would doubt it. Equally St. Augustine (354-430 AD) did not believe that the days of creation were 24 hour periods. Why is it, then, that in the 21st Century, so many people are insisting on a literal, rather than a figurative interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis?

I think that the advance of atheistic philosophy has a lot to do with it. Richard Dawkins’s recent book “The God Delusion” is an all-out attack against all forms of religion, whether moderate or extreme. He would like you to believe that the truth of evolution means that the bible is completely false, and that atheism follows inevitably from the acceptance of evolution. He is also known for the vehemence of his attacks and his scorn for religion, describing it in one place as "juvenile superstition". This kind of rhetoric, at which Dawkins excels, is bound to polarize opinions to opposite extremes.

YECs who describe themselves as “Creation Scientists” agree with Dawkins that if evolution is true then the Bible is completely false. They research into alternative ways to explain the long timescales indicated by mainstream science. They take as inviolate the idea that the timescale must fit in to the 6,000 year period from 4004 BC to the present, and attempt to make the science fit in with that. I have spent much time trying to assess the validity of the theories advanced by creation scientists, and have come to the conclusion that sadly, their ideas are not so much science as wishful-thinking. While I do not doubt the sincerity of these people, I fear greatly that impressionable laymen are going to be misled by this so-called science, and will later discover its flaws and have their faith shattered as a result. I know a few people to whom this has actually happened.

A recent example of the kind of ideas put forward by creation scientists is the R.A.T.E. project (Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth). This was a $1.25 million study performed by the Institute of Creation Research (ICR) and other Creationist groups to attempt to explain why radioactive dating techniques show the earth to be billions of years old. The solution they have come up with is to propose periods of extremely rapid radioactive decay (one of these being day three in Genesis Chapter 1) which accounted for what should have taken billions of years.

There are two major problems with this proposed solution. The first is that there is no known way to accelerate the rate at which radioactive atoms decay. We can’t do it today, and there are no scientific mechanisms we can propose to explain how it could have happened. The second is that the effect of having billions of years worth of radioactive decay happening in a day is like having billions of nuclear weapons detonated at once. The R.A.T.E. scientists have themselves calculated that the heat generated would have vapourised the earth!

At a recent conference in Denver, presenting the results of the R.A.T.E. study, the speaker acknowledged these difficulties, and suggested that the problem was solved by “Divine Intervention”. But it seems to me that this is to make nonsense of trying to find a scientific explanation in the first place. We might just as well have said that the whole Creation process was a miracle from the start. The shortcomings in this reasoning are illustrated in a famous cartoon, depicting a blackboard with some abstruse mathematics, and a large gap in the middle containing the words “then a miracle occurs”. Invoking a miracle to explain bits you can’t describe scientifically is a dangerous strategy, and is known as a “God-of-the-gaps” argument; if scientists eventually come up with a naturalistic explanation, God gets squeezed out. God should not be relegated to a mere filler of the gaps in our knowledge. He is supreme and transcendent over all nature.

By contrast, the God indicated by the R.A.T.E. scientist’s explanation appears to be supremely deceptive. What we are being asked to accept is that God performed two miracles, which are not described in the bible – one in causing all the radioactive elements to decay in a rapid fashion, and another to take away all the heat. The only purpose of these miracles, it would seem, is to make the earth look like it is billions of years old, instead of thousands. Why would God do that?

This idea of “apparent age” is also not new. It was explored by author Philip Gosse, in a book titled “Omphalos” in 1857, who attempted to explain the fossil record by arguing that God created the world to look like it was in the middle of natural cycles. The word “Omphalos” means “navel” in Greek, and Gosse claimed that Adam, who had no mother, would nonetheless have been created with a navel, to look as if he had been born naturally. The author Charles Kingsley, a friend of Gosse, and practicing Christian, on being asked to review the book, wrote thus:

“… if we accept the fact of absolute creation, God becomes God-the-Sometime-Deceiver. I do not mean merely in the case of fossils which pretend to be the bones of dead animals; but in ... your newly created Adam's navel, you make God tell a lie. It is not my reason, but my conscience which revolts here ... I cannot ... believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind."

Intelligent Design

The “Intelligent Design” (ID) movement overlaps with YEC, but its proponents are not necessarily “Young Earth” in orientation – they often have no problems with immense timescales. Although their critics often describe them as "anti-evolutionists", it is perhaps fairer to say that they question evolution as an adequate explanation of all the complexity of life that we see around us, and propose that some of what we observe is better explained by the actions of an intelligent designer. It is indeed true that the computer-like code that exists in the DNA in every cell of every living thing is one of staggering complexity. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, has observed: “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we've ever created”.

ID proponents argue that the DNA code, with its resemblance to computer code, implies the existence of a programmer (or “Designer”); they assert that in certain cases it is too complex to have occurred through the process of evolution. ID theorists make no pronouncements about the identity of the Designer – they have stated, for example, that it could be a sufficiently advanced alien life form. However, many of the prominent ID proponents are Christians who believe the identity of the Designer to be God.

A flagship example of the complexity of nature used by the ID movement is the “bacterial flagellum”. This is the whip-like tail that bacteria use to propel themselves through water. Amazingly, the drive mechanism functions exactly like a tiny electric motor, with all the same components present as with a real electric motor (the diagram is a stylized representation illustrating the presence of all these components). It is easy, on seeing such a marvel to proclaim that this is evidence of a Designer. However, it is dangerous to propose a Designer just because we don’t know how such a thing could have evolved. This, too, is a “god-of-the-gaps” argument.

The modern ID movement has updated the old “watchmaker” argument of William Paley (1743-1805) – which initially impressed Darwin himself, until he came up with the theory of evolution. Paley argued that if you should stumble upon a watch in the middle of a field, you might reasonably suppose, given its intricate mechanisms, that the watch had been deliberately designed by someone. By analogy, certain intricate contrivances found in nature, such as the eye, are also deemed to imply the existence of a Designer who created it all.

It seems to me there is a serious flaw in this argument right from the start. It is indeed quite reasonable to infer the existence of a watchmaker when you come upon a watch, because you already know that watchmakers exist, and so the most likely explanation of the watch is that there is a watchmaker.

What if the observer doesn't know that watchmakers exist? Science fiction writers often imagine forms of life that are so different to our own that we might have difficulty in recognizing it as such, apart from its complexity. In “Star Trek” when faced with an amorphous pulsating blob, Dr. McCoy would say “Its life, Jim, but not as we know it!” Suppose such weird alien creatures landed on our earth in the middle of a desert and saw a watch, a mechanism as alien to them as they are to us. I think it is quite possible that they would mistake the watch for a life form, having no idea as to its purpose. To put it another way, watchmakers are people whom we can see, but as the Bible says "No one has ever seen God" (John 1:18). God reveals himself to us through Jesus Christ, not through our current lack of knowledge of how the bacterial flagellum might have evolved.

A second major problem for me with the design argument is that it seems to be bad theology. The Bible tells us that Christ is supreme, at the centre of everything. He is before all things and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). But ID singles out special instances that evolution supposedly cannot explain – postulating in its place a cosmic programmer who, at certain times, installed a new program into nature as if it were a computer. Other, simpler objects in nature are deemed not to require this special explanation. But the Colossians passage indicates that God is the creator and sustainer of everything whether simple or complex. It tells us that God is intimately involved in the unfolding of the natural laws. This view is also known as “Theistic Evolution”, and it is the view to which I subscribe. It harmonizes with what we read in Genesis Chapter 1, where it says “Let the land produce vegetation …. And the land produced vegetation”. (Genesis 1:11,12). God’s creative action is to endow nature with the capability of bringing forth life.

Conclusion

Much of this debate has to do with well-meaning Christians trying to defend God against the relentless advance of atheism, but I would like to draw the reader’s attention to something much better - the incredible sense of wonder and awe we get from embracing without fear what science tells us. Darwin himself sensed this wonder, and wrote thus in the final sentence of “Origin of Species”:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

A little known fact about the great composer Ralph Vaughan-Williams is that his great-uncle was none other than Charles Darwin. The following story appears in “The Book of Musical Anecdotes”, which serves as a way of concluding this discussion:

There was a great kerfuffle among the [Vaughan-Williams] family - like everywhere else - when The Origin of Species was published, and Ralph, when he was about seven, asked his mother about it. His mother was extremely sensible. She said, "The Bible tells us that God made the world in six days. Great-uncle Charles thinks it took rather longer. But we needn't worry - it is equally wonderful either way."

Yes, indeed, it is wonderful. We should be profoundly grateful that we can say, along with the Psalmist “I meditate on all your works, and consider what your hands have done” (Psalm 143:5), and that science has opened up these astonishing wonders to us.

Babiy Yar

2008-06-15T09:03:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit of a fan of Shostakovich's music ( see Hunger for Seriousness ). Well, a BIG fan if I'm honest, almost to the point of obsession! Shostakovich's 13th Symphony contains a setting to music of a famous poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, called "Babiy Yar". It is a vehement protest against anti-semitism in the USSR, and its final two lines speak directly to me in my current explorations of the issue of gay Christians and the attitude of the church towards them (see Outing myself as a Straight gay sympathizer).

Since the "outing" post, I've had some reasonably civilised discussions on a Christian email list I'm subscribed to, along with some lamentable expressions of bigotry. I've been accused of being a "liberal in terms of sexual ethics", and asked if I approve of a heterosexual leaving his wife for another woman ( of course not! Duh!). For the record, I consider myself to be an evangelical.

But that "liberal" label that someone attempted to pin on me really stung, and put me in mind of the last two lines of Yevtushenko's poem, which says something like:

There is no Jewish blood in my veins, but I feel the hatred of the anti-semites
As if I were a Jew. That is why I am a true Russian!

Yevtushenko's words were a self-fulfilling prophecy. A few days later some thugs took a key to t his car, and scrawled the word "Yid" across his bonnet. To add insult to injury the militia made him have the car towed away, on the grounds that an offensive word was writtin on the bonnet.

Shostakovich read the poem and set it to music in the first movement of his 13th Symphony. During rehearsals, the bass soloist, a loyal communist party member, said to the composer "Why have you written this symphony? There is no anti-semitism in the Soviet Union". To which Shostakovich became very agitated and said "There is, there is antisemitism in the Soviet Union; it is a shameful thing, and we must shout about it from the rooftops". (The symphony was banned by the authorities after one performance).

And in exactly the same sense, when I see the sort of hate language (far worse than I've received) that is directed against gays by right-wing evangelicals, I would say:

I've never been attracted to another man; but I feel the bigotry of Christian homophobics as if I were queer myself. That's part of being a Christian for me.

Geek Joke

2008-05-09T16:56:00.001-07:00

The fact this appeals to me goes to show what a sad person I really am ...

Trip to Venice

2008-05-02T12:06:00.000-07:00

Some snaps with my new toy (a Nikon D40 Digital SLR camera - a sort-of 50th birthday present from my wife who gave me permission to buy it!!)

My Mother always wanted to see Venice, and treated the family to a trip there to celebrate my 50th Birthday. Sadly we got of to a bad start when our flight got cancelled from Gatwick, after snow predictably brought Britain to a standstill! This was the view from the front of the Hotel near Gatwick. Next morning, at 4am we were setting off from another hotel near Gatwick having queued for several hours to get rebooked on a flight to Verona at 0620am.

A view from the top of the Bell Tower in St. Mark's Square. It looks rather like an abstract painting, with the artistically jumbled grid of tightly-packed buildings.

A magical night time walk

And.. inevitably, from a Gondola ride.

Outing myself as a straight gay sympathizer

2008-04-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

OK. Having thought about it and wrestled with it for a long time, the time has come to make a stand. Guess it's pretty cowardly to put it on a blog that practically no people read, but one has to make a start somewhere.

Let's get "straight" to the point. I think it's time evangelical Christians took a long hard think about their attitude towards gays. There are a range of attitudes prevalent, and while I think there is some evidence of evangelicals acting in a compassionate manner, I think few people take it far enough.

There is the out-and-out homophobia element. The kind of person that says homosexuality is "disgusting". Yes, in some ways this is understandable - there is a natural revulsion that people feel for certain physical acts, sure. But people who think that way should really try to remember what they felt when they first found out about sex. When you're very young and you first find out about what your parents did to make you, your reaction is one of disgust (well, mine was, anyway, I mean at first it seems pretty gross, doesn't it?) Until you get the same feelings yourself, it is hard to imagine how such an act could be the beautiful thing that it is.

Then there's the element that says it's a sin but we must be compassionate towards homosexuals. Because it is believed by these people that homosexual acts are a sin, then gay couples are encouraged to split up, and are encouraged to seek spiritual help, support, guidance, prayer for "healing" and so forth. Much of this is well-meaning, of course, but flies in the face of evidence.

The plain evidence we have to face is that homosexuality isn't something people choose; it's a given. It is not hard to find on the web testimonies of gay Christians who desperately didn't want to be gay - who tried with the greatest earnestness to seek healing, to change their orientation. In the overwhelming majority of cases it doesn't work at all, however much they want it to.

So, as a Christian who believes in healing, one has to ask the question "So why doesn't God heal gays who earnestly seek healing?". The only logical answer I can come up with to this is simply that they don't need healing.

Well, in fact they do need healing, but not in the way you might think. To be gay and unable to accept that you are gay is to be at war with yourself - perhaps it even implies that you have an inbuilt homophobia that is preventing you from accepting yourself for the person you are. Such people often descend into self-loathing, depression, and suicide attempts. This is the seriousness of the situation we face. The attitude of well-meaning evangelical Christians is a direct cause of depression and suicide. Evangelicals have to ask themselves - are we really so sure we're right on this? What if loving gay relationships are in fact not sinful?

Ah, but wait a minute, you are bound to be saying; what about all those troubling passages in the Bible that condemn homosexuality? A notorious one is found in Leviticus, which says "A man shall not lie down with a man as with a woman - that is detestable". Surely you can't argue with that? Well .. not as it stands of course; but what about the context, the text, and the culture of the time? Again, it's not hard to find expositions of these on the web. It appears from these, that the Leviticus passage may well have been referring to cult temple worship, and in particular to the use of male prostitutes as a part of the worship of pagan Gods.

Another notorious passages is in Romans Ch 1. Again, Paul appears to be condemning homosexuality as "perversion". But how about reading it more carefully in context? What is being described is the general slide into debauched behaviour that results from idolatory (v25). It talks about exchanging natural relations for unnatural ones. It seems clear from this that the indecent acts described were being committed by people who were naturally heterosexual, but tried out homosexual acts for kicks. But gay people I've spoken to never had that natural feeling of attraction to the opposite sex. It always felt unnatural for them, and the natural attraction they had was for the same sex. The Romans passage doesn't seem to apply to them.

Now, of course you might say I got this from a gay commentator, and you might want to comment "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?". In actual fact, I got it from a detailed and scholarly analysis from a "straight" evangelical. To read more see George Hooper's book "Reluctant Journey - a pligrimmage of faith from homophobia to Christian love" It's available in its entirety for free on the web, and should be required reading for evangelicals.

So that's it. I've "outed" myself. I don't think we should be trying to get homosexuals to change their orientation, but we should welcome them as part of the body of Christ, and affirm their sexuality. In a famous passage in 1 Corinthians 12 Paul shows how all parts of the body are important - the eye should not say to the hand "I don't need you!".

As I said at the start, this is a pretty timid beginning, writing all this on a blog that practically no-one reads; but just in case you are reading this, and you happen to be gay, I would say to you "We do need you - you are a part of the body of Christ, a part that is suffering, and because of that, we all suffer with you ( 1 Cor 12:26).

The Great Quantum Suicide/Prayer experiment

2007-09-07T13:52:00.000-07:00

One of the wackier ideas I've come across recently is the Quantum Suicide thought experiment. For a full explanation look here

It concerns one of the interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, (a subject I studied a long time ago at University & wasted many late evenings in pointless discussions of its philosophical implications).

In the "Many Worlds" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, all possible outcomes of an event occur in separate parallel universes. Consider a radioactive atom that has a 50/50 chance of decaying in any given second. We are unable to predict which of these outcomes will happen, only the chance of one or the other. Albert Einstein didn't like this idea, and was often quoted as saying "God does not play at dice". (Well, coin-tossing in this case). Enter the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) to the rescue. In fact at the end of a second, there are two parallel universes, one in which the atom has decayed, and one in which it hasn't.

Now imagine a physicist who wants to test if the Many Worlds Interpretation is correct, as opposed to there being One World, where the outcome is determined by God (or whatever) tossing a coin. The way to test it is to rig up the radio-active atom to a detector, which, if it detects the decay, fires a gun. The physicist sits in a chair facing the gun. At the end of the first second, there are two parallel universes, one with a dead physicist, and one with a live physicist. Clearly, the physicist's consciousness only continues in the universe where he is alive. Now the physicist repeats the experiment for 1000 repetitions. The chance of getting 1000 coin tosses in a row coming up heads is so astronomically small that if there is but one Universe, then the physicist is going to be dead by the end as sure as eggs are eggs. But in the Many Worlds Interpretation, all outcomes always happen, so at the end of 1000 seconds, there is one universe with a live physicist, and 999 with dead ones.

Now the physicist returns home elated after his day's work, and says to his wife:

"Hi, dearest, I'm home, and guess what? I've proved that many worlds interpretation is true - and I'm going to be famous".

However, his devoutly religious wife knew about the experiment and also knew that barring miracles, her husband would be dead before the end of the day. And so she prayed to her God to intervene and save her husband's wife. So even though it dampens her husband's enthusiasm, she replies:

"No you haven't proved it's true, I've just proved that prayer works. It's a miracle!!".

(Sadly in 999 other universes, the grieving wife is left wondering if God exists at all).

What should our physicist do? Should he:

(a) Divorce his religious nutter of a wife, publish his findings and get the Nobel prize?
(b) Start believing in the same God that his wife believes in?
(c) Go back to the lab and try and figure out what went wrong with the experiment?

[ Clue: what would be the most scientific thing to do?]

Useless tips for computer programmers # 121

2007-06-19T08:35:00.001-07:00

Choose variable names in your program that can be touch typed one-handed, like "reader", "axes", "lollipop", "phylum", "minimum".

That way you can increase productivity by continuing to work while sipping your coffee.

Surreal joke

2007-06-15T17:07:00.001-07:00

A skeleton walks into a bar. Asks for a pint of beer and a mop.
Classic FM today. They have redeemed themselves. (See "Hunger for Seriousness")

Ambient Music

2007-02-25T04:01:00.000-08:00

Here's a poem I wrote some time back. In the post God's Flute I wrote about Elgar hearing his music in nature. This is about the music I hear in nature. On writing the previous post, I realised that it resonated very much with this poem & much the same thoughts must have given rise to it. Order out of chaos again?

Ambient Music

As if

God

Had assembled
A random orchestra
And placed me in the empty hall,
I hear music ..

In the woodwind of birdsong
The distant dissonance of a sheep bleat
The cadence of rain coming down,
The drone of a van going up hill
Briefly broken
By the leisurely
fermata
of a gear change.

And deep rest comes
Not in sleep
But in deeply awake ...
When the boring voices inside
Churning the same questions
About life and stuff
Have laid off,
The answers are all here

God's Flute

2007-02-25T03:37:00.000-08:00

I wrote a while back of Darwin's letter to Asa Gray, where he said he considered the marvellous universe we live in to be the result of designed laws, with the minor details, whether good or bad, left to what we may call chance.

Darwin, as is well-known was an agnostic, but I'd like to develop these ideas a little from my point of view as a Christian.

One thing many of my Christian friends have a problem with is evolution. Much of this may be due to the increasingly hostile attitudes of prominent evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins. But I suspect also part of the problem is the idea that all this complexity can come about from random, chaotic processes.

However, this does not imply the absence of a designer, or a creative intelligence, and evidently Darwin didn't think so either. The fact is that systems that obey physical laws can often pick out what they need from random processes - and turn randomness into order. Consider what happens when you draw a bow across a violin string. The resin on the hairs of the bow is effectively randomly distributed, and therefore when you draw the bow across the string, you are applying a random stimulus. But the string itself is tuned to resonate at a particular frequency. It naturally selects, therefore, the relevant frequency components from the "white noise" applied to it, and amplifies them emitting a beautiful sound. The same happens when you blow across the mouthpiece of a flute - the right components of the white noise signal produced by your breath over the mouthpiece are selected, and the instrument resonates, producing a pure and delightful tone.

And so perhaps this is not that far from the idea that out of randomness, the finely tuned earth brings forth the most wonderful and beautiful forms. The sounds produced by a musical instrument come about by naturally selecting the right components from a random signal, and discarding the wrong ones.

These natural resonances can be even more complex than a single note. The composer Elgar said that he "heard" all his music in Nature. That he would just go out in the hills and take all he wanted. I can't say that I hear Elgar when I go out into the countryside. But I'm just tuned differently from him.

But at the end of the day, all these things I've spoken of are like resonances that occur naturally. But that doesn't mean there isn't a violin maker, or as Darwin put it, a designer of the laws of nature. Nor does it prove that there is a Designer (I'll be writing about Intelligent Design and why it ultimately doesn't convince me at a later time).

Meanwhile, I am content to look upon the universe as if it were a flute that God breathes upon, which produces the most wonderful resonances.

Hunger for seriousness

2007-01-14T13:56:00.000-08:00

Why do I love miserable music? I'm not a miserable person at all, and yet it seems my favourite music always seems to be of the kind that most people tend to find depressing.

One of my favourite composers is Shostakovich. Now Classic FM play quite a bit of Shostakovich, but give rather a biassed view by only playing lollipops like the "Romance" from the film score "The Gadfly", or his brilliantly witty arrangement of Tea For Two (In the Soviet Union this was called Tahiti Trot). But none of the Shostakovich pieces that are regularly played by Classic FM capture the true bleakness and tragedy of this man's music. By contrast, I attended a performance by the Lindsay Quartet of Shostakovich's deathly 13th String Quartet at Manchester University a few years back. The quartet ends with an extended passage for solo viola accompanied by deathly taps as the second violin is directed to tap the body of the instrument with the bow. It ends in a high scream. At the end, the viola player was white, unsmiling and shaking having played in a phenomenal fashion. The woman who was sitting next to me in the audience said at the end: "Well, I suppose he has a right to be so negative, but it's not for me". She acknowledged that I had been mesmerised by it, however.

By the same token, when the Radiohead single "Pyramid Song" was first played on Top of the Pops, I was really impressed by it, but the rest of my family thought I was completely mad to like such a mournful song. It appears the song is about suicide (the first line being "Jumped in a river"). I saw a fan on a website commenting on the lines "We all went to heaven in a little rowboat/And there was nothing to fear, nothing to doubt" and saying it meant we would go to heaven when we die and it would be perfect. But I think this perhaps misses the point - a possible way of seeing the lines is that death is a nothingness, where there is literally "nothing to fear" and "nothing to doubt", in fact nothing at all. Such a state might well be looked forward to and embraced gladly by someone in a suicidal frame of mind.

But such negative thoughts - the deathliness of Shostakovich's music, and the gloomy and trancendental contemplation of death and perhaps suicide by Radiohead are far from my own philosophy of life as a Christian. Why, then do such things hold such a fascination for me?

I think it may have to do with the innate hunger we all have for seriousness. This idea is presented well by Philip Larkin in his famous poem "Churchgoing". In the poem, Larkin, an atheist himself, finds himself wandering round a church, not really understanding what it's all about but savouring the atmosphere. He, also is puzzled as to why he finds it pleasing to come to churches again and again, and concludes it is because "a serious house on serious earth it is", and that this can never be obsolete "since someone will forever be surprising in himself a hunger to be more serious".

As a final recollection of satisfying this hunger for seriousness in myself (despite having a jokey nature), I recall going to a Prom concert performance of Tchaikovsky's Sixth symphony (a work that preceded by only a few weeks Tchaikovsky's own suicide following threats of being "outed" as a homosexual). During the first movement there is a section where the music erupts into an almost hysterical outpouring of grief. At that point, I recall the sense of a tingle that passed from the top of my head right through me, and that the smile had been wiped completely not just from my body, but my soul. And yet it wasn't a miserable experience - it was strangely uplifting to be taken solemly to the edge of the abyss, to stare into it, and to get the feeling that this was alright and that there was nothing to fear in this calm contemplation of total loss. Similarly the tragic slow last movement left me incapable of smiling, and in a way enriched that the joker inside me was silenced for a while.

This post was prompted by hearing the same last movement of Tchaikovsky's Sixth played on Classic FM yesterday. Again the music worked its solemn magic on me, and again the smile was wiped off my face for a while. Now, I really like to listen to Classic FM quite a bit, especially on the car radio, but occasionally they really irritate me. Such was the case here - after the movement came to an end, the honeyed tones of the announcer said this:

Tchaikovsky ...... at his melancholy best!!

To which the only response can be:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHH !!!!!!

Ever-looshun on an open top bus tour.

2006-12-29T15:44:00.000-08:00

Went on an open top bus tour round London today to see the lights, with mother and family. We had a wonderfully entertaining guide giving the commentary. He said his name was George, but if we didn't like the tour and filled in a feedback form that would be read by the managers in his company, then his name was Shirley (I've changed the names to preserve anonymity). I've decided I liked him and hence he is "George".

Despite having been to London so many times, it was very interesting to get an "overview" and tour round so many sites, embellished by many anecdotes given by George. I now know the origin of phrases such as "laughing your head off", "on the wagon", "one for the road", and the locations in London where they originated. I now know where various famous people live - that Margaret Thatcher has a police guard outside her house to prevent her escaping, how much Madonna paid for the lease on her London house, and a host of other fascinating details.

One incident, however, got me wondering. George gave us a list as long of your arm of people buried in Westminster Abbey. When he got to Charles Darwin, he made the following interesting comment:

I don't know why Charles Darwin is buried in a church, because he discovered the theory of evolution and the the theory of evolution goes right against any idea of religion.

I remember raising my eyebrows and saying "Oh no it doesn't!". Where did he get this idea from? Does he mean ALL religions, or just Christianity?

A clue as to where he might have got this notion from lay in his pronunciation of the word "evolution". Though clearly a Londoner through and through, he pronounced the word in the American style with a short "e" as in "ever - looshun". For the correct pronunciation, we must listen to the beautifully modulated Oxonian tones of the Professor of Public Understanding of Science (Richard Dawkins) who usually pronounces it thus: "ee-vol-you-shn". It's important that this most English of ideas, discovered by an Englishman who is buried in Westminster Abbey, should be pronounced correctly.

I am guessing that the reason a Londoner pronounces evolution as everlooshun as opposed to eevolyoushn is that he has been listening to certain of our American friends who like to preach that chrisitanity will collapse as soon as we accept the idea that the earth might be more than a few thousand years old. Apparently 40% of Americans are of this opinion.

But all this is spectacularly unfair to poor old Charles Darwin; it is clear that he never intended his ideas to be countrary to religion, as is evidenced by the following excerpt from a letter of his to Asa Gray in 1860, the year after publication of "Origin of species":

With respect to the theological view of the question: This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice... On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.

(Note: the Ichneumondiae are parasitic wasps)

What seems fascinating to me is that Darwin apparently believed in a sort of Intelligent Design - to the extent at least that God designed the laws of the Universe. Another even more telling Darwin quote comes from the London Illustrated News of 21st April 1862:

I feel most deeply that this whole question of Creation is too profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton! Let each man hope and believe what he can.

It seems to me that Darwin is here not far from the apostle Paul who states "Now we see through a glass darkly" (I Corinthians Ch 13).

Though Darwin's inital faith was gradually replaced by agnosticism, motivated probably more than anything else by the tragic loss of his daughter, I do not feel, given the humility and sense of wonder at the universe and Creation displayed in Darwin's quotes given above, that it's inappropriate that Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey and nor do I feel that his theories are at all counter to religion - certainly he never intended them to be so.

Our friend Richard Dawkins I think would like evolution to be counter to religion, and lead us all to be atheists. I guess he would not appreciate being buried in Westminster Abbey. However, as "George" told us that the Abbey has been declared full and there will be no more people buried in it, I guess that is impossible that Dawkins will find the same resting place as Darwin. Dawkins has said (I recall) that he would consider it an honour to become a fossil, so may the Powers That Be grant him that honour ;-)

There is only one form of evolution that I am definitely opposed to. The mutation of the pronunciation from ee-vol-you-shn to ever-loo-shaan is to be resisted at all costs.

Haiku

2006-12-22T17:00:00.000-08:00

Kicking through piled leaves
Frosty on the sunlit path
Shrinks his age to five.