So What?

Ten Features of Conversations with Atheists

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I've recently been in conversation with atheists on a discussion board around the theme of 'the fundamental flaw of religion'.  This is the first of a series of posts reflecting upon this exchange in various ways.  It has been an interesting experience and also rather frustrating, doubtless for the atheists as well as for me.  So, this first post is a superficial review of my experiences.  More depth later.

1. There is a profound lack of humour (say what you like about atheism, Flastaffian it ain't).  The last time I encountered something like this was the Christian Socialist Movement.  I was used to the light hearted meetings of the late lamented Alliance of Radical Methodists.  I found the Christian Socialist Movement far too serious and so never really got on with them. 
2. There's also a lot of anger.
3. There is a constant demand for evidence for the existence of God.  What would constitute satisfactory evidence for the existence of God remains a mystery.
4. Contrariwise, many claims are made about the Christian God that are rarely supported with so much as a Bible reference. 
5. There is little appreciation that Christians actually hold a variety of views.  It is frustrating being told that views I have held for many years, alongside many other people, are not Christian. 
6. Indeed I suspect I disappoint because I'm not fundamentalist.
7. I had no sense of being part of a mutual attempt to make sense of human existence.  When I dialogue with Christians from other traditions or people of other faiths, the tendency is to share.  Here I have been unable to find any common ground at all.
8. It feels like the culture is one of suspicion and fear.
9. Overall, the atmosphere is aggressive and dogmatic.
10. Even if we allow the premise that religion is fundamentally flawed, there is little discussion about what practically can be done about it.

These are fairly arbitrary and are very much first impressions.  I'd certainly like to hear of others you would add or refinements.  In my next post I will explain what I see as the main problem with these conversations.

I've Joined the Twitterati

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I have finally succumbed and joined the Twitterati.  This does not mean I understand it or have much idea about what I'm doing.

I know what a Tweet is but most of them are incomprehensible.  I suspect you don't actually need to understand them.  Most of them point you to somewhere else.

The reason I've joined is because I am planning a campaign to launch my 'official' blog, Methodist Ecumenical News (MEN).  I went to see a colleague about the launch and he showed me Twitter and explained you don't have to access it on your mobile phone.

So, soon I will open a second Twitter account for MEN.  My current account, which is linked to the sidebar on this blog and its partner blog 'Exploring Ecumenism', is a trial to work out how to use it.

It is difficult to find anyone on Twitter.  For some ISPs, it's possible to get Twitter to search your emails for current members.  I'm on AOL and it seems it was once possible to do this with an AOL account. Not any longer.  Presumably they've fallen out.

I've tried searching for terms like 'Methodist Church' or 'Progressive Christian' or 'Ecumenism'.  It seems no one Twitters under these names or if they do, they live in the USA.

Despite these setbacks I am determined to make it work.  Just as soon as I work out how I'll know once I've made it work!

On Imagination: Christianity

One of the debates I've had, with Christians and atheists, is whether Christianity is a materialist faith.

It seems some American Christians are rather touchy about this.  Communism is materialist and they're very scared of communism.  Such debates can be difficult!

One American Christian explained the Old Testament is dualist (matter / spirit) and not monist (matter), as he thought I was claiming.  It seems I had said matter has a spiritual dimension and he was quite certain I had it the wrong way round, spirit has a material dimension.  We also disagreed about dialectical materialism.  Where, he asked, is the thesis, antithesis, synthesis in Christianity?

Whichever way you look at it, matter has a spiritual dimension or spirit has a material dimension, you have a dualism.  The two are set at contradiction with each other.  The Christian writer was correct in saying spirit gives rise to matter, at least insofar as it is easier to see how spirit or consciousness, the perceiver, gives rise to the perceived. 

However, this contradiction between spirit and matter is not resolved by saying one gives rise to the other.  Whichever way round, it implies one is superior to the other.  The Christian faith has been plagued by this false dichotomy that seems to reduce to: spirit good, matter bad.

But what we easily forget is Christianity is neither monist not dualist.  It is Trinitarian and this is why I reject the view that Christianity is not materialist.

The synthesis that transcends the opposition between spirit and matter is implied in the Trinity, where God does not remain spirit but becomes flesh.  Spirit and matter are placed into a new relationship and this is something taking place in our imaginations.

That's the problem for many moderns, we're not prepared to make the effort to imagine how spirit and matter might be married. 

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On Imagination: Religion

One of the most condescending things atheists say about Christians, is Jesus is our imaginary friend.  Our faith is in our imagination, it has no reality in the material world.

Well, yes of course it is.  Where else can we encounter God other than in our imagination?  We create works of art, find our way around our neighbourhood, study the structure of chemical molecules in our imagination.  Why should we not encounter God there too?

I'm not saying God has no reality outside the imagination, just that our imagination is where we encounter God.  Are atheists really saying the imagination is in some sense not valid?  If so, they have a problem.  If imagination is not valid, what are the implications for science?

Christians have a problem too.  It is hard to claim God has an objective reality outside of the imagination because it is not possible to point to any evidence of God's actions outside of the impact imagining God has on human behaviour.

And that in itself is a big problem.  Human imagination is not terribly disciplined - how do we know what we imagine is real, is right, is ethical?

Where the scientist has reality to check results of experiments, the Christian has few things to validate their position.  Methodists identify scripture, tradition, reason and experience.  Most traditions look to a similar list.  But it is hardly surprising traditions cannot agree about everything.

Also our imagination is prone to run away with us.  We project our repressed negative thoughts onto others and onto God.  We project what we know, kings and dictators, onto God and turn God into a monster.  How can we possibly know whether we are imagining the right things?

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On Imagination: Science

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Sometimes debates between atheists and Christians can become rather tedious.  The question of whether or not God exists seems to be endlessly fascinating to some.  However, once you clock there's no possibility of proving either way, the argument seems rather pointless.

One argument is science is materialist and doesn't allow for a spiritual dimension to life.  This assertion, often accepted by both sides, has always seemed dubious to me.

Science like all human activity is an act of imagination.  In an earlier post I explained how all our experiences are subjective.  Science helps us agree about what we perceive.  Its bedrock is replicable experiments.  We can take our local experiences and if they are replicable elsewhere we can add them to a resource of objective observations.  It is that they are replicable that makes them objective.

So, when we say science is materialist, what do we mean?  Do we mean we have found a means to accumulate tried and tested observations, hypotheses, theories about the universe?  A method that is extremely successful.  Or do we mean that in some sense science reflects the universe as it really is?  It is worth asking whether the success of science, as a materialist approach, reflects the universe as it is.

Whilst the universe may be material, the means by which we wrestle with our observations and interpret them is through the imagination.  This is the same means by which we write novels and compose symphonies.  

Think of Kerkule, who discovered the benzene ring after dreaming of the Ouroboros, the serpent holding its tail in its mouth.  Or the many interpretations of quantum mechanics.  The first is an example of a feat of imagination leading to a convergent solution on the specific structure of a specific molecule (although we can't see atoms and so any structure is in some sense imaginary).  The second is an example of a divergent system, where speculations about its meaning are unlikely to lead to consensus.

I'm not denying the effectiveness of scientific method.  I am asking us to be careful when we assume a materialist approach reflects all we can know of the universe.

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On Imagination: Media

Today our imagination is constrained by commerce.  This is not say imagination was not constrained at other times and in other cultures.  Indeed, Jesus' ministry had the same aim, within the culture of his time, to release imagination from similar constraints.

The powers always want to control the people.  In Rome it was 'bread and circuses' and in our time junk food and the market, especially entertainment.

It is as if art has been elbowed aside by the media.  What counts is our ability to reproduce things as commodities.  I suppose it goes back to early manufacturing.  Instead of depending on local craftspeople, it became possible to purchase goods mass produced to common standards.

From the beginning this was both a blessing and a curse.  The retail co-operative movement aimed to ensure that food was at a good standard, not adulterated.  These co-ops ameliorated the exploitation associated with control of the means of production and also helped mutual societies develop modern transport, wholesale and retail infrastructure.  Today, many of the mutual associations, designed to protect the interests of working people, have long ago been absorbed into the world's financial markets.

We have never had access to so much art.  Through media whether it is TV, film, DVD or the Internet we have historically unparalleled access to art.  This is possible through our ability to reproduce and distribute millions of identical copies.

Art can lose its moorings in our minds when we become consumers of entertainment, no longer able to relate its imaginary worlds to reality.  So, we have the example of the recent film Alice in Wonderland, where the book is lost, its anchors in reality cut away so to float it in the hegemonic pabulum of American imperialist culture.  It is no longer a work of imagination but something that stands in for imagination.  For all its tricksiness, it is held firmly in the teeth of those who would tell us what to think.

This misuse of imagination as a means to enslave, is not restrained to art and media.  Fantasies rooted in false consciousness generated by the powers, is always in tension with the art of the day.  Art at its best is a means of seeing beyond illusions to something real.  Sometimes our eyes are opened and we recognise the real world beyond the magician's lamp.

The problem is the world behind our fantasies is not the world of ideals, such as Plato suggested were behind the shadows projected on the wall of his cave.  Today, we see these ideals are themselves an illusion.  So, what is real?  If we want to answer that question we need to use our imagination.

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On Imagination: Arts

We naturally think of art when we think of imagination and so it is a reasonable place to start.  The thing about the arts is not that they are imaginary but their reality.  When we look at a work of art (or listen to it, even taste it) we relate to what we recognise in it.  So, when I look at a Caravaggio painting I see something I can relate to.  The theme might be biblical, even mythical, but I find real people struggling with real lives.  The same themes in a baroque style leave me cold; I recognise less in a baroque painting.

I've always had a fondness for science fiction and so permit me to illustrate what I mean through a brief review of the recent series of Dr Who on BBC 1.  I have followed Dr Who, with a break for the period when I was a grown up, since I was 9, when it started in 1963.  It is interesting to see how each era is reflected in the stories and in the way they are told.

Recent episodes have made me uneasy and I think the reason is that I am not recognising in them a reality I can relate to.  Let me go back to the final episode that featured David Tenant as the Doctor.  In that episode he fell out of a spacecraft, crashed through a glass ceiling and landed on a marble floor.  He sustained a few cuts but was otherwise unscathed.  The problem is, this was lazy writing but you can get away with it, if the story is strong.

The story was not strong.  The whole universe was under threat (again).  The jeopardy was ramped up to such a degree that the writers only option was to hit the reset button and use what used to be called deus ex machina to restore the status quo ante.

The same problem can be found in the finale of the most recent series.  The cliffhanger at the end of the penultimate episode included all of the Doctors enemies ganging up on him, imprisoning him in a prison designed so no-one could get out of it, meanwhile the Tardis exploded, bringing the entirety of space and time to a halt.

The final episode was full of neat tricks but to me was unconvincing.  I couldn't relate to the premise of the end of universe (again).  Contrast this with an earlier episode about Vincent Van Gogh.  Here the Doctor was unable to prevent Van Gogh's suicide.  It was written by Richard Curtis and featured reproductions of Van Gogh's paintings as sets.  Much of this was convincing even though it was also fantastic.  The episode featured a most unconvincing monster and it didn't matter at all.  The monster had a function to enable a bigger story to be told.

Now, I appreciate Dr Who is not high art but its popularity suggests it touches on themes that have meaning for people.  It is fantastic but also familiar.  Works of the imagination function best when rooted in reality.  Pure fantasy becomes boring because it has no meaning for us.

Applied imagination can speak to us through art.  Imagination left to its own devices, connected to nothing, does not make connections to what we know. 

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On Imagination

I have been giving some thought to the nature of imagination and in this, and a few posts following, I will share them.

I have suggested (most recently in my last post) there is far more about the universe than is picked up by our senses and perceived after being processed by the brain.  This is an evolutionary necessity.  Our senses and brains select enough to present a reasonably stable picture of the world around us.

Other species have senses different from our own.  So, birds and insects for example, detect different wavelengths of light.  They perceive colours unknown to humanity.  We cannot conceive of different colours to the ones we know.  But we know they exist because they relate to wavelengths of light and some animals can see light we cannot.

One question philosophers have asked, is whether we all perceive the same thing.  The answer seems to be both yes and no.  Yes because we perceive in sufficiently similar ways to be able to communicate about the things we perceive.  I don't suppose we can ever be certain we all perceive, for example, colours in the same way.  But the chances are we do because we seem to have a similar response to them.  I suspect the major differences are culturally determined.  There was a time when colours were not named and so people compared the colours of things, eg Homer, I think, writes of the 'wine dark sea'.  Some people have a condition called synaesthesia,  where they experience the sense data of one sense from the stimuli of another, eg some people perceive numbers or musical notes as colours.

So, everything we know is inside of our heads.  We cannot know the universe as it really is because we have no access to it as it really is.  We can use instruments to detect things outside the range of our senses but ultimately everything is processed by our brains.

The odd thing is we can agree about so much.  I can describe an object to you and you can locate it and pick it up, I can give you directions to my house, I share a place with my neighbours and we all experience it in a very similar way.

My suggestion is everything we perceive is the work of our imagination.  We distinguish what we call 'real' from what we call 'imaginary' through recognition.  We carry a picture of a place or person in our minds and name what we see according to that picture.  Several descriptions of the same thing will be both different and recognisable. 

Theologically, I suggest we think of recognition as love.  It is recognition this person and this place is unique, something to be treasured because it is unique.  We fall in love when we contemplate the form of a tree, the detail of a beetle, the apparent infinity of the universe.  Each of these things has its integrity, each time we look we see more and yet recognise it as the same. 

Even the thing we hate has this property.  Emotion often accompanies recognition and so it should.  The thing we should fear is not our passions but our indifference.

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Observing the Big Bang

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I recently wrote about the quantum singularity that, it seems, defined the probability of the Big Bang.  Singularities collapse when they are observed and so the question is, who observed the Big Bang? 

It is tempting to jump to the conclusion that God was the observer.  The implications of this for the inflated egos of some Christians is something to be avoided.  Proving God is a preoccupation for those Christians who find faith difficult and so have to bolster it with a dose of triumphalism to help God along in God's relationship with humanity.

This view of God as all powerful is immensely damaging.  It feeds the egos of church hierarchies and anyone who believes the most important thing is to be right.

There are, as I said in the post (link above), other interpretations of quantum mechanics where an observer is not needed.  As ever we are not dealing with certainties.

There is of course another option.  Someone else observed the singularity who is not God.  Of course, there is only one known possibility and that is humanity.

We know humanity has observed evidence of the Big Bang (not the actual event obviously).  Remember Schroedinger's cat; we don't see it die, it is both alive and dead until it is observed.

What if over all the millions of years before humanity, the universe was in a state of neither existing nor not existing?  Until humanity appeared on the scene, aware of their own existence and of the universe around them.

The universe becomes real as we become aware that it is real.  The universe is a construct of human consciousness.  We know that.  Our senses and brains strip out most of the information available to us.  We depend on this for survival.  The world we perceive is constructed by our brains.  There is, of course, a reality we have in common, something we perceive and are able to agree about, otherwise science would not be possible at all.

The Christian story is a story of God becoming human.  We call this incarnation.  This human being was murdered and rose from the dead, ascending into heaven.  So the story goes.  The Body of Christ is the incarnation of God in humanity today.    

Maybe one way of thinking of it is the story of the universe as the story of the birth of God into the world.  This is a God who becomes self-aware though humanity.  Not a God on high but a God who lives as a part of the universe, seeing through our eyes, exploring through our feet and loving through our hands.

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As Mad as a Bag of Trifle

So, it says on the billboards for Alice, a play currently showing at Sheffield Crucible.  The Times, I think it was, claims Alice is as mad as a bag of trifle.  This got me thinking about trifle.

It would be mad to put trifle in a bag.  Trifle needs to be in a large transparent glass dish, so you can see the layers.  There's nothing like pushing a large spoon through the pristine cream surface, down through the layers and into the jelly, so that it makes a sucking noise as the spoon returns to the surface, laden with  ... well what?

Two trifles stick in my mind - neither terribly successful.  A colleague told me she had never eaten trifle and so I offered to make one for the office Christmas party.  I remember we were interviewing for new staff and I nipped out between candidates to add more layers.

You start with sponge (there used to be trifle sponges although I haven't seen them in years) and I usually use some shop bought cake.  Swiss roll is good and it can be a bit stale.  You add fruit, almost anything, usually tinned, but see below.  Then jelly ...  I should explain to American readers, there are some linguistic issues here.  Apparently, Americans have no word for marmalade and call it jam instead.  Consequently, jam is called jelly and so jelly is known as jello.  My experience of jello is of dismal crystals in a paper sachet.  Proper jelly comes as translucent cubes, dissolved in hot water.  If this is to be church trifle, you add sherry.  Chapel trifles do not have sherry or the Methodists won't let it on the premises!

Anyway, next there is the custard layer.  This can be blancmange, which is really coloured custard and seems to have disappeared from our kitchens.  Finally, whipped cream and decorations, eg glace cherries, or angelica (remember that?) or 100s and 1000s or roasted almonds or those edible ball bearings.  I like jelly spiders.

The jelly spiders were a problem.  The trifle was presented at the party in all its glory.  What are those my colleague asked?  Ah, they are made of gum which comes from cows and so is jelly.  She is Hindu and this is why she had never eaten trifle.  (It did get eaten but it's interesting how religion can determine trifle recipes.)

My next attempt was where I recountered the story of the spiders and was challenged to prepare a trifle for a meal at church.  It was a big meal and there would (fortunately as it turned out) be a huge number of trifles prepared.  My first big mistake was to add pineapple, then jelly and then when it didn't set, read the packet.  Certain fruits, prevent jelly from setting!  It was thick liquid but not jelly.  Worse the custard didn't set either (can't remember why).

How to get liquid trifle from home to church by car?  I placed the trifle bowl inside a large mixing bowl and placed it on the front seat of the car.  Sheffield has a lot of hills and as the car went up and downhill the trifle maintained the same orientation to gravity.  The dish and bowl did not.  This meant the trifle sloshed over the sides of the dish into the bowl.

Wise counsel held back my trifle until the next day when we could drink it in the privacy of coffee after the service.

I have described the proper trifle (identifiable as such despite my ministrations).  It's not a pudding - it is a dessert or sweet (puddings are steamed with suet and served with hot custard).  There are claims that proper trifle has no jelly in it - apparently this is true of the earliest versions - but jelly definitely improves it.  You start with sharp jelly and fruit and finish with the smooth cream and custard - there's no other way to eat it!

There's also Eton Mess, which is OK (meringue, strawberries and cream - it is of the same ilk but not trifle.  Eat it by all means but don't let it trifle with your affections, never forget the real deal.

Apologies for those expecting theology and found a mere trifle of a post.

(I haven't tried the recipes below.  They're as close as possible to my idea of a proper trifle.  Don't use individual dishes or you won't get the proper sucking noise.)

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