Making the most of it

Back from Edinburgh on the 17:00 from Waverley, following a precious weekend with the woman I love.

Just before leaving, a pal IM'd to say that the mother of a good and long-standing friend had died. I made contact with the living on the way down through some long text messages. It's not the kind of thing to talk about in an open carriage. There is a funeral soon, at a time when I'm supposed to be recording a podcast. Should I go? I spent a long time staring out of the window at the dark countryside, remembering too much and wondering... the scythe has been too sharp, too close, too often. Two journos I knew over Christmas - my age.

My friend's mother I remember most as a Rabelaisan woman, full of good humour and earthy wit, cut with a pleasure in culture and her truly remarkable husband. My friend says I'd be good company for him, just at the moment. I can't imagine what he's going through.

BBC2 is playing a Bach sonata. The insouciance of that genius is overwhelming.

I am properly overwhelmed.

There are two answers to finding oneself clutching a mote of time drifting the endless, not knowing which sunbeam is the last. One is to bathe in the light, soaking it up, riding the eddies and screaming in delight like a kid on a rollercoaster. I like that one a lot.

The other is to gather what one can, outside and in, make something new and push it back out to the void. telling the cosmos that we can do things that it unaided cannot. Life is the making of pattern, treating the chaos as a playground of possibilities, mapping the infinite terra incognita, scrawling Kilroy Woz Ere on the walls of the cave. Banksie's holy work.

I like that answer even more than hedonism, but it's harder work. It needs faith, courage, ego, discipline - and the ability to listen to a Bach sonata without feeling like a nebbish. I'm not over-endowed with most of the above. It also needs friends: creating, like dying, is ultimately selfish. Nobody can do it but you. Yet that selfishness needs to be buoyed up by those around you, by evidence that what happens, matters.

I think I shall go to the funeral and fly the flag for the human spirit.

I hope, selfishly, there's no Bach.

Then, it might be time to decide what to do next.

Cereal port

What's to be done about the calamitous state of affairs concerning the technical knowledge of the blogging community? I'm used to being just about the only one in the office these days who knows not only what CP/M was but that such a thing existed in the first place, and quite relish my status as the weirdo who knows about RS232 and AT command sets.

But this takes the biscuit. Rather, it takes the cornflake. Gizmodo is beside itself with delight at the idea that someone's invented a tape which you can scratch with your fingernails to hear. It's a fine novelty, that's for sure, but it ain't 2006 vintage.

I remember getting these tapes free with breakfast cereal in the early 1970s. The idea was you ate the cereal (no problem there), made a small slit in the empty box, then pulled the tape through it to hear the ghostly, low-bandwidth message. Can't remember much more than that - hell, I can't remember yesterday's breakfast - but I suspect the cereal in question may have been Golden Nuggets, with Klondike Pete and Pardner, as that was a staple of the young, soon to be tooth-decayed, me. Doubtless, it was invented back in the shiny plastic 50s boomtime.

Likewise, betcha don't know the original integrated circuit was invented in Germany in the late 1920s, as a tax dodge. What about Gopherspace? Veronica?

What should I do? Write the definitive book of tech history trivia? A Schott's for nerds?

R

Jerusalem the tiny

There's nothing quite like being able to reach out and touch teh archyology to help one get a feel for what actually happened. In this case, wandering around Jerusalem and the environs brings home a few facts...

1. It's small. Really small. Two miles to Bethlehem, ten minutes to walk across Hell, blink and you're out of the Armenian quarter and into the Moslem.

2. Nothing anyone tells you is true. There are good bits, but while they speak for themselves you have to struggle to hear them above the din

3. The denim skirt is eternal

We've spent Shabat drinking red wine and declaiming revisionist theology. Loudly. It's amazing how much sense the Old Testament makes when you know just a few more facts than are included in the basic package. In particular, you know that business about faith-based versus reality-based government? One gets you smited again and again, with a side order of smiting, and the other gets you lounging on ivory couches eating stall-fed veal and larding yourself with oil.

Choose ivory couches. Choose veal. Choose reality. The Bible tells us so. (*)

I would say more, but L is getting really quite excited about telling the story in a potentially lard-enhancing sort of way.

Shalom!

Rupert

(*) Warning. This may have implications for the theology that validates your nation state. Please take professional advice before declaiming.

Anti-secularism without a prayer

The great joy of being on holiday is that you get time to read stuff you'd ordinarily miss. The great misery is much the same. I'm in Jerusalem on holiday with my charming companion, primarily to gawp at the archaeology and the funny hats, and also to enjoy the rare pleasure of being in a liberal democracy that doesn't go into a thundering great spasm over Christmas. There are also plenty of other distractions for the average liberal democrat to think about, but those can wait.

Today, though, my lesson comes from the first edition of the Herald Tribune to the International, 21 December, 2006. In Israel, the IHT comes wrapped around the (vaguely Guardianesque) Haaretz, much as in London they wrap real newspapers around fish'n'chips. I don't have strong feelings about the IHT, it's not that sort of paper. However, it – and the editorial page editor, one Serge Schmemann, who won a Pulitzer in 1991 and thus should know better - are the sort to publish prominently a large serving of unadulterated post-modern mooncalfery titled The Problem With Secularism".

Having read such a piece, you might hope to be able to answer simple exam questions such as "What, in the authors' opinion, is the problem with secularism? (5 marks)" or "Identify three arguments used in the piece to promote the overall view held by the authors. For each, show the structure and components (6 marks)." It is, after all, a newspaper editorial, the purpose of which is not necessarily to convert, but at least to inform the reader about the views of the writers.

In the seasonally adjusted words of St Nicholas, "Ho, ho, ho".

There is another way to see such an editorial – as a journey into the unknown. You may not expect what you find or understand all that you see, but you will be taken somewhere you haven't been before. With luck, you'll take back something worthwhile.

This editorial is most certainly a journey. It just doesn't get very far. Cast your mind back to the idylls of childhood and the joy of Walt Disney. One minute you could be frolicking in a flower-strewn glade, cute bunnies nibbling at your feet, butterflies and non-specific songbirds describing heart-shaped arcs through the air – the next, in a cursed part of the forest, where the trees have knots for eyes and the very ground rises traitorously to pull you beneath.

And so our journey begins.

"LONDON: Geopolitically, the resurgence of religion is dangerous and spreading. From Islamic fundamentalism, American evangelism to Hindu nationalism, each creed demands total conformity and absolute submission to their own particular variant of God's revelation.

Common to virtually all versions of contemporary religious fanaticism is a claim to know divine intention directly, absolutely and unquestionably. As a result, many people demand a fresh liberal resistance to religious totalitarianism."

Oh unwary reader, do be careful! Two introductory paragraphs, cast in the bright primary colours of un-nuanced, comfortable truisms? You're expected to nod happily to yourself as you walk down the primrose path, burying that slight twinge about Hinduism not being notably monotheistic. Yet tread carefully. Here comes the "But".

"But it is important to realize that this reduction of a transcendent religion to confirmation of one's own personal beliefs represents an ersatz copy of liberal humanism. Long before religious fundamentalism, secular humanists reduced all objective codes to subjective assertion by making man the measure of all things and erasing God from nature."

Whoa! There we go! You thought you were having a walk in the woods – but the trees have suddenly grown long spindly finger-like branches that pluck at your clothes.

It's news to me that secular humanism predates Islamic fundamentalism and Hindu nationalism. Whether it predates "American evangelism" depends on a lot of things we could talk about, but it's no 'ersatz copy'. People have always favoured religions, philosophies, ways of thought that confirm their prejudices. Also, which 'objective codes' are we talking about? Mathematics? Always warm the teapot before making tea? Morse? Perhaps our guides could take a moment to define their terms here? Provide a referent? A bit of evidence?

Nah. This is Descartes a la Disney.

"This was a profoundly secular move:"

Secular humanism makes profoundly secular move? Profundity indeed.

"It simply denied natural knowledge of God and thereby eliminated theology from the sciences. Religion, stripped of rationality, became associated with a blind unmediated faith — precisely the mark of fanaticism."

Every step of the way is now befouled by tendrils whipping around the ankles of the would-be traveller, as the ground softens underfoot to a stinking, boggy morass. "Natural knowledge": a phrase crying out for a spoonful of succour to help it go down. What on earth can they mean? Stuff you just know ? Knowledge of nature? "Simply": if ever there was a word unfit for purpose, it's this harmless little puppy, more suited to advertising skin care products than encompassing hundreds of years of hard-fought human thought.

Even if you give the writers the best possible interpretation on whatever it is they're trying to say, they're wrong. "Secular humanism" – by which, I suppose, our guides mean logical empiricism, but one is forced to guess – just says that the supernatural can't be part of science.

It doesn't say it can't include rational thought, just that if it doesn't include empiricism as part of that rationalism it ain't science. The writers' beef isn't with 'secular humanism', it's with empiricism, but its precise sin is hard to fathom. Are they saying that belief in God is empirically testable? Is this unrisen soufflé of concepts flavoured with Intelligent Design?

And since when has a 'blind unmediated faith' been the mark of fanaticism?

"Thus religious fundamentalism constitutes an absence of religion that only true religion can correct."

Straight out of left field a veritable log of illogic comes crashing down across our path, spattering us with ordure.

There is a good argument that religious fundamentalism is bad religion, if you take a theological viewpoint that religion is primarily about bringing the adherent to a closer understanding of God, themselves or whatever mixture of the two appeals. There is another good argument that fundamentalism makes for a terrific religion if you tend towards a sociological view that the purpose of the exercise is to make a society exhibiting evolutionary fitness. But you know and I know those are sunlit uplands of rational discourse miles from our dark, stinking woodlands. where religious fundamentalism is no religion at all. It's the 'thus' that gets me. Why not just put "Dawkins eats kittens: God exists. QED"?

"Although the cultured despisers of religion are once again making strident appeal to secular values and unmediated reason, they do not realize that the religious absolutism they denounce is but a variant of their own fundamentalism returned in a different guise."

Ah, the old "Atheism is just another religion" chestnut, cast down from on high by some unseen monkey in the canopy to land with a painful bonk on the noggin of the encumbered traveller. Have our guides not noticed that empiricism has certain claims to utility which no religion can match? Or is that introducing evidence – a sin so terrible to the popes of post-modernism that they cannot even acknowledge its existence? Please also to note the 'cultured', with its lovely hint of anti-intellectualism and the 'conspiracy of the intelligent and well-educated'.

"Richard Dawkins's" - he does eat kittens, you know - "barely literate polemic "The God Delusion" declares that religion is irrational without ever explaining the foundations of reason itself. "

This is the sort of sentence that plucks at the sleeve and invites one outside to bay at the moon. I would, only I'm up to my waist in putrescent bog. Dawkins, cultured as he was a moment ago, may indeed have written a barely literate polemic when he was six. "The God Delusion" - for all its faults - is not one such. Saying so is just dung-flinging, at least without chapter and verse.

And "without ever explaining the foundations of reason itself", while certainly an accurate observation, is about as useful as saying "We could all be living in the Matrix, you know" as if some profundity has been uttered that renders whoever says it first the winner. No. Nobody has explained reason. We've been trying for four thousand years. That does not render it useless, as anybody who's had occasion to switch on a light bulb may appreciate.

"Sam Harris's diatribe "The End of Faith" has to falsify history by claiming that Hitler and Stalin were religious in order to make its case for the malign influence of faith. The attacks on religion are becoming ever more shrill and desperate — a clear sign of atheist anxiety about the status of their own first principles and explanatory frameworks."

If ever you want to see ferocious argument about first principles and explanatory frameworks, try physics or cosmology. The only reason that people are getting "shrill" and "strident" about religion is because of people who claim equivalence to science, refuse to pay the affiliation fee, then go on and on about not being let into the club. Oh, and point of information – does "barely literate" and "strident" count as shrill? How about the wonderfully onomatopoeic "shrill"?

"This atheist apprehension is well founded, as the latest developments in biology, physics and philosophy all open the door to a revivified theology and a religious metaphysics."

Balderdash. I can't speak about the latest developments in philosophy, as I'm frequently unable to tell the difference between those and the advice that wanking with your left hand introduces a refreshing novelty to the process. But last time I spoke to jobbing biologists and physicists, the stuff that was getting them excited was science. Religion is nowhere to be found at the cutting edge.

"Darwinism is close to being completely rewritten. Hitherto, it had been assumed that forms of life are the product of essentially arbitrary processes, such that (as Stephen Jay Gould put it) if we ran evolution again life would look very different. However, evolution shows biological convergence. As Simon Conway Morris, a professor of biology at Cambridge University, has argued, evolution is not arbitrary: If it ran again, the world would look much as it already does."

Oh, the pain, the pain, the pain. What is this doing up from its grave? "Darwinism" – by which one assumes that the writers refer to evolutionary biology. Nobody in the business of finding stuff out about life uses it, any more than physics is Einsteinism – is about as close to being completely rewritten as the Massif Central is to turning into a large plate of coconut-dusted chocolate custard. Nobody – nobody, nobody, nobody – has assumed that 'forms of life are the product of essentially arbitrary processes', any more than anyone assumes the lights in Las Vegas are kept burning by pure chance alone. Evolution is – oh, so many things – mutation filtered through natural selection. There is a big random element, there is a big non-random element. The two together are what make it simultaneously creative and ordered. Is that so hard to understand that it must be so constantly misrepresented?

"Nor is natural selection now thought to be the main driver of biological change. Rather, life displays certain inherency, such that the beings that come about are a product of their own integral insistence. All of which means that there is no necessary conflict between evolution and theology. Indeed, evolution is no more arbitrary than God is deterministic."

Another great gobbet of unsupported illogic comes flying through the air from the invisible monkey above. "Now thought" – by whom? And what in the name of the archbishop's underwear does "beings that come about are a product of their own integral insistence" actually mean? I can't even parse it. Things come about because they have a built-in need to exist? Built into what, if they don't exist to start with? Sentences like that should be carved into the chest of whoever writes them, the scabs picked off on the hour and salt-and-vinegar crisps rubbed in until some sort of explanation is forthcoming.

"Similarly," - oh god, there's more - "in cosmology and physics the idea that the world was produced by chance has long been dismissed. The extreme precision of the gravitational constant that allows a universe like ours to exist requires an explanation. Rather than envisioning the world as an intended creation, secular physics posits infinite numbers of multiverses existing alongside our own. Thus, the sheer uniqueness of our universe is qualified by the existence of all other possible universes."

There's a reason why the world as an intended creation isn't popular with "secular physics" (a phrase that intriguingly implies there is a non-secular branch. I do hope it does better than ID). That's because it explains nothing and There Is No Evidence. EV-I-DE...oh, I'm not getting through, am I?

"The trouble is that this supposition sounds more bizarre than religion. Moreover, to posit this paradigm leads to the Matrix hypothesis that we are actually only a virtual simulation run by other universes more powerful and real. So religion finds itself in the strange position of defending the real world against those who would make us merely virtual phenomena."

I gape. I gasp. I struggle for breath. (I do know what they're on about here, but trust me, it's not mainstream physics. Nor does it pretend to be anything more than a thought experiment). Religion does not find itself in any such strange position. Go ask people who do religion.

"Philosophically, if one wants to defend the idea of objective moral truths, it appears ineluctably to require some sort of engagement with theology."

It might appear ineluctable to you, sunshine, but it's luctable to the rest of us. There are any number of good, reasoned, even potentially testable hypotheses as to why "moral truths" – and again, some examples might be nice. Murder is bad? Homosexuality is bad? Salt and vinegar crisps are bad? -- are derivable, preferable, even unavoidable, for purely secular reasons. A moment in the literature would get you lucted.

"For if there are universals out there, we need to explain why they care about us or indeed how we can know them at all. And if human beings do not make these truths, then it seems an account of the relationship between ultimate truths and human life can only be religious."

And if flying saucers abducted my cat then by Jove, I've got some questions that want answering. It could be that it just went out to catch a mouse, but aren't flying saucers so much more fun?

"Thus we are witnessing a real intellectual return to religion that cannot be reduced to the spread of fanaticism. It is also becoming clear that secularism reinforces rather than overcomes both religious fundamentalism and militant atheism."

Real intellectuals use evidence. EV-I-DE... no, it really isn't working, is it?

"In the new, post-secular world, religion cannot be eliminated and, properly figured, is in fact our best hope for a genuine alternative to the prevailing extremes."

Post-secular? When was that secular world, then? I must have missed it while I was cleaning the mud off my boots and the chestnut purée from my hair. At least, I hope it was chestnut purée.

Phillip Blond is a senior lecturer in religion and philosophy at St. Martin's College, Lancaster. Adrian Pabst is a research fellow at the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies.

Rupert Goodwins is severely ticked off by the lack of any sort of rigour in the nonsense posing for debate on this subject.