More Questions

A long time ago, in the early days of this blog -- posts predating September 2007 have been adopted from my old blog into the prehistory of this one -- I wrote about how I'd learned something of the truth about a story I'd once assumed was an urban myth, a kind of local ghost story.

One of my childhood friends used to tell me a story, heard from his older brothers, of how years earlier a little boy who lived up near the church in Palmerstown had been murdered by his teenage next-door neighbour, crucified in an attic as a Satanic ritual. I believed this as a child, and dismissed it in my teens, and then in my late teens discovered that the story had basically been true. A few years ago, a brief window of access to the Irish Times archive enabled me to find out how the story had been reported at the time: how little John Horgan’s death had initially been reported as accidental, and how hardly any details were revealed in the court reports, with the murderer's name – Lorcan Bale – being withheld, and the facts of the case not being reported.

I was watching Criminal Minds one day last week -- yes, I know, but there was a brief novelty value in the telly suddenly working and having an abundance of channels -- with the gang investigating what appeared to be a Satanist murder, when it was pointed out that despite popular belief there have never been any Satanic murders in America. This got me thinking, of course, and so I went a-googling, as I do about once a year on the subject in the vain hope that I'll discover something.

This time was different. A book had just come out on the subject, and there were articles scattered here and there, and the names of both victim and murderer were everywhere, and if you're inclined to listen to Joe Duffy, well, there was a show just for you.

Ghoulish though the subject is, and broke though I surely was, years of curiosity won out over poverty and propriety and moments had scarcely passed before I'd ordered the book, with it arriving a couple of days later. In a nowadays atypically efficient burst of reading I ploughed through the whole book on Friday, before falling ill the following morning. I've been pondering it since.

If I had to sum up my thoughts, though, I'd just say it's not very good. It's not wholly worthless, as some information is better than no information, but it's certainly not worth shelling out on.

The Devil's in the Details

There's a section in his Histories where Polybius, the second-century BC Greek historian of the rise of Rome, discusses other historians and says something which offers a fine principle for evaluating any books which claim to be factual.

'As the proverb tells us that a single drop from the largest vessel suffices to tell us the nature of the whole contents, so we should regard the subject under discussion. When we find one or two false statements in a book and they prove to be deliberate ones, it is evident that not a word written by such an author is any longer certain and reliable.' (12.25a.1-2)

I think this works in a broader sense: it's not just that we should be wary of authors who get things wrong deliberately, but that we should watch those who make sloppy little errors. Those who are not to be trusted in little things are not entitled to our trust when it comes to big things.

The first indication for me that something wasn't right with the book came with a little bit of creative writing in the first chapter.

'A highly educated Irish speaker from Kerry, Father O'Keefe was well-respected, and known for his pulpit oratory, but his was no liberal message of live and let live -- his voice thundered on the dangers of sin, the fires of hell, and the temptations of the devil; for the believer, he spoke of the path to redemption. This was unusual for a Catholic priest; such fire-and-brimstone messages are more characteristic of the low churches, and evangelical Protestantism.

That late spring morning, as he passed the shrine to the Virgin Mary overlooking the murky fish-pond, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The priest unlocked the front door and entered the porch. The vials of holy water were untouched, as were the notices advocating the conservative group for laity, the Legion of Mary. And yet the cleric sensed immediately that something was wrong.'

He wasn't the only one. As he passed the shrine to the Virgin Mary? In 1973? The shrine that wasn't constructed until at least the late 1980s? That one? I had to check this with my brother, as I thought maybe I was remembering things wrong, but no, the shrine definitely wasn't there in the 1970s. Sure, doesn't it block the route that he and his mates used to use when running through the church grounds to go and play in the quarry full of rusting machinery? The priest back in the day used to chase kids off to stop them running there, and he'd hardly have needed to do so if the shrine had been there to block their way.

That's bad enough, but then just a couple of pages later we read:

'John Horgan would have been excited leaving Mount Sackville Convent School in nearby Clondalkin that Thursday afternoon.'

Now, you might argue about whether Mount Sackville, only about a mile across the Liffey as the crow flies from John Horgan's house, should be regarded as being in Chapelizod or Castleknock, but you certainly can't say it's in Clondalkin, three miles south.

It’s hard to believe, reading this, that the book’s author, David Malone, was born in Dublin and lives there now. The book gets even sloppier, really, with the second chapter opening with a description of local geography that makes it seem as though the local bank is on the same street as several other shops, as opposed to sitting isolated on another street -- what was once the main road to Galway -- a couple of hundred metres away. It’s as though Malone didn’t get to know the area at all, something that seems to be supported by things I’ve heard from people from that part of Palmerstown about him getting loads of things wrong. Certainly, he missed a trick in his summary of Palmerstown’s history by not mention how Lord Palmerston, the nineteenth-century British Prime Minister and political realist par excellence, took his title from this otherwise obscure west Dublin village; the Temples were Irish peers, though I don’t think Palmerston himself ever set foot in the place.

And then there are Bigger Problems...

If little errors and omissions such as these would cause one to approach the meat of the text with care, more substantial matters don’t inspire more confidence. Malone offers two wholly incompatible accounts of how John Horgan’s body was found, one coming from the then Detective Sergeant Jim Noonan and one from another Garda, a Seán O’Laughlin: Noonan describes how he’d worked out that something was amiss with the teenage Lorcan Bale’s story and how he and two other Guards had told the murderer they’d search the house from top to bottom, such that he cracked and admitted John’s body was in the attic. O’Laughlin, on the other hand, describes how he’d spotted broken plasterboard pieces in the bottom of Lorcan’s otherwise empty wardrobe, looked up, seen the secret hatch into the attic, and then entered the attic the conventional way, only to see the little boy’s body tied spread-eagled to the rafters; both men claimed that on finding John’s body they checked him for signs of life.

It’s pretty obvious from reading the two accounts, a convenient fifty or so pages apart, that Noonan’s account is by far the more likely to reflect what happened: it’s a team effort, less dramatic than O’Laughlin’s, rooted in sensible steady policework, and is corroborated by other people. 

O’Laughlin’s, on the other hand, looks patently false: all the work appears to have been his own, for starters, without any cooperation with anybody else, and he seems to have been sparked in his thoughts by hearing from the victim’s father that ‘that weird bastard next door’ had a Ouija Board. It seems unlikely that this would have been known and that the teenager wouldn’t have been a speedy object of suspicion – although Malone returns to the statement later to speculate on whether Lorcan Bale’s father had also been aware of this.

O’Laughlin describes the teenage Bale getting nervous in response to questions and glancing upstairs, and then says O'Laughlin asked Bale’s father whether he could go into the boy’s locked bedroom; where Lorcan himself was when this conversation took place isn’t clear, and nothing’s said of his reactions, which seems odd as according to this story he was clearly present when O’Laughlin searched his room.

Even the description of the cupboard is odd; elsewhere in the book the tidiness of the bedroom Lorcan Bale shared with his brother is noted, but according to O’Laughlin there were broken bits of plasterboard all over the base of the otherwise empty built-in wardrobe, the chippings scattered there from the hatch above – an elaborate hatch with a rope and pulley system that had been made months earlier. Is it really likely that Lorcan Bale wouldn’t have made some effort to clean away his handiwork, to hide it from the brother with whom he shared his room?

Indeed, is it even plausible that a built-in wardrobe in a shared room in a family home would have been entirely empty, or that Lorcan wouldn't have relied upon the wardrobe being full to hide his secret route to the attic? His old school friend Lorcan Conroy, one of Malone's main sources, told Malone that there were indeed clothes in the wardrobe, and that they needed to be pushed back on their rail in order to afford access to the attic hatches.

How does Malone resolve these difficulties? In practice he doesn’t; he divides Noonan’s account into two parts, so that the breakthrough is described early in the book and the aftermath is described much later, after O’Laughlin’s account, which Malone refers to when he wants to discuss details later on. Malone seems hardly troubled by the Noonan's and O'Laughlin's accounts being at odds with each other:

‘Other records of the events of that day differ very slightly in the detail, but the substance of the search and subsequent discovery of the body remains consistent. A slightly differing version, which I’ve recounted in detail in Chapter One, is Detective Sergeant Noonan’s account, supplemented by other witnesses. [...] The discrepancies between the two policemen’s accounts can easily be explained away by the passage of time. But common to both is seeing the body and immediately checking for any signs of life.’

This, of course, is nonsense. Nobody’s disputing that the boy was killed, or that he was found, or that the policeman who found him immediately checked to see if he was alive. The two stories don’t just differ slightly: they differ in serious and profound ways, and it’s surely the case that anybody on hearing and thinking through these stories should have thought to doubt O’Laughlin’s version of events. It's pretty clear, really, that O'Laughlin was just spinning Malone a yarn, but unfortunately, rather than doing his job as a journalist and trying to get his facts right, Malone just throws out every bit of data he's got and leaves it up to us to decide. 

The reality is that he hasn’t got a lot else to use, and has to include every trivial claim and counter-claim he’s ever heard on the subject simply to fill the book out. Tangents and speculation are an irritating feature of the book, padding out what is, in truth, an insubstantial piece of work. Much of this has to do with Malone’s lack of data: Lorcan Bale, long freed from custody and settled in society, wouldn’t tell him anything, the Horgans wouldn’t deal with him and didn’t welcome the book being written at all, and crucial information was simply inaccessible, hidden away by the demands of doctor-patient confidentiality. Malone’s been forced to bulk up what could, in itself, be a very good magazine feature in the right kind of magazine. It’s not a book, not as it stands.

Little Virtues

It’s not all bad, of course. There’s useful and interesting information there, and it was a strange relief to hear that John Horgan’s death was swift, rather than the agonised torture I’d always assumed: he wasn’t crucified, but was clubbed to death in the field behind his home, before being smuggled upstairs and into the attic, there to lashed to the rafters in Lorcan Bale’s black mass. Malone raises interesting questions about how Bale had ever got involved in Satanism, and wonders about the possibility of there having been a coven of some sort in Meath, but though he raises questions, he can offer no answers. 

Malone makes a real effort to get across a sense of place in the book, and he doesn’t wholly fail in this, in that I recognise his descriptions of the Palmerstown of 1973 as a lot closer to the Palmerstown of my childhood than to the Palmerstown of today. It was far smaller, for starters, with perhaps less than half the population, and mostly fields, cliche though that is. It’s a huge shame he doesn’t include maps showing how it’s changed, and photographs from Palmerstown back then, as there must be some around.

Now and Then, more or less

Although some names have been changed it’s oddly chilling to see familiar names cropping up, whether of people I’ve known such as the parish priest Father Kevin Daly, the local builder – and publican – Frank Towey, and Dr T.B. Sherry, or prominent national figures such as Maureen Gaffney. All this, and the fact that I know intimately all the places mentioned in the book makes reading it a disturbing experience. There’s something horrifying in reading of something so terrible taking place somewhere so ordinary, so familiar.

At the same time, though, the places where we grow up are never just mundane, are they? They’re invested with a profound – almost a mythic – sense of reality, where bushes and pillars stand as markers of stories we’ve heard and things we’ve done, monuments to a world which to an outsider is insignificant, but which means everything to those who live there. I made the Iliad from such a local row, wrote Patrick Kavanagh back in the day.

In Short...

These, however, are the book’s very few virtues, and more than anything it comes across as a missed opportunity. It offered a chance to say important things about Ireland in the 1970s – and it does at least hint at one thing, which was that back then Irish people simply didn’t share knowledge of bad things they’d heard of, such that wicked things might have been heard of but just weren’t discussed – but rather than delving into them, nothing is dealt with in anything more than a superficial level.

A couple of years back one of my oldest friends asked whether I’d be interested in doing the work on this myself, on finding out just what had happened, knowing my interest in this. I paused, and said no. Doing so, I thought, would be intrusive. It’s obvious that the two families wanted to leave the past behind them, and they should be left in peace. Sure, people would be interested to learn of this, but did they need to know about it?

Having read Malone’s work, I’m far from convinced that this story needed to be told. It may have satisfied my curiosity, to some degree, but I could have lived without that. More than anything it felt like an exercise in voyeurism.

The End of an Era: Squandering Our Influence for a Million Euro

I don't think I'll ever vote for Fine Gael again. Despite having long supported them at home, even having joined Young Fine Gael when in university -- though busy as I was, spending three hours every day bussing my way across Dublin not to mention working five nights a week in a local pub, I could hardly be described as every having been an active member -- their words and deeds in government have left me regretting how I voted before returning to England this spring.

The current government's been in office less than nine months, during which time its arrogance, mendacity, and stupidity have disheartened and disgusted me on an all too frequent basis. It seems that Fine Gael is no more encumbered by principles than Fianna Fáil was, and that the only real difference is that it pretends to be. Hypocrisy, as they say, is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

Time and again, I've been left dejected...

• By Enda Kenny's broken promises to the people of Roscommon, his dishonest denial of having made such promises, and his condemnation of those who challenged him for having lied... 
• By the Taoiseach's lying to the Dail and misrepresenting the Cloyne Report, attacking the Vatican on spurious grounds rather than focusing on real problems at home...
• By the Government's failure to take any action to challenge the vast majority of child abuse and neglect in Ireland -- almost all of which takes place in the family circle -- and by its undermining of child protection in real terms through the slashing of funding for child and family support charities...
• By the Government's eventual dismissal as legalistic pedantry of the Vatican's refutation of the Taoiseach and Tánaiste's false allegations...
• By the introduction of clumsy legislation that appears to criminalise anyone who has ever failed to report knowledge of even the most trivial theft...
• By the attempt to rush through constitutional amendments without any national debate as though they were of pressing urgency, and sneering ad hominem attacks on those who'd questioned the wisdom of the way those amendments had been worded...
• By the whipping of the Fine Gael party in the Seanad to amend a motion condemning how millions of girls are routinely aborted in China and India because they're female, in favour of instead condemning an undefined and general concept of infanticide...
• By the decision just this week to pay €700 million to bondholders of Anglo-Irish Bank to whom the state was neither morally nor legally beholden, as the current minister for Finance had admitted last December little more than two months before assuming office...

It's almost enough to make me lose faith in Irish politics altogether.


It's not just the Economy, Stupid!

And then, yesterday, the Government announced that it's going to close our third-oldest embassy, that being our embassy to the Holy See, which we've had since 1929.

(Yes I know we didn't call it an embassy then, since we didn't call any of our diplomatic representatives ambassadors until 1950. You know what I mean.)

Doing so, it appears, will save us a million euro or so, and we just can't afford that nowadays, especially at a time when we're choosing to pay several hundred times that amount to bondholders to whom we're not beholden. ''While the Embassy to the Holy See is one of Ireland’s oldest missions,' says the Government, 'it yields no economic return.'

Now. The Embassy's own website -- and I think we can assume that as an embassy it's speaking for the Government -- says the following:

'The Embassy of Ireland to the Holy See is the official channel of communication between the Irish Government and the Holy See: such communications cover a range of international political, economic, developmental and human rights issues.

The Embassy maintains contact with the many Irish Roman Catholic religious living and working in Rome. It has contact also with the representatives of other faith communities, Christian and non-Christian, that are in dialogue with the Holy See.'

You'll note two things there. Firstly, it seems the Embassy to the Holy See is an official channel of communications on economic issues, which rather seems to contradict the idea that the Embassy yields no economic return. Secondly, it does lots of other things too, as indeed do all our diplomatic missions.

We have quite a few diplomatic missions that hardly have economic returns as their priority, after all. In France, for instance, we've a permanent delegate in Paris to the United Nations Educational, Science, and Cultural Organization, and an ambassador in Strasbourg who acts as a permanent representative to the Council of Europe. We've two ambassadors to the United Nations, these being in New York and Geneva. Our delegation in Brussels to Partnership for Peace and our permanent mission in Vienna to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe are both headed by ambassadors. The reason why we have such missions and delegations is very simple: our national interests are not exclusively economic.

Paddy Power is Soft Power

Ireland's a small country, and one almost wholly lacking in what's called 'hard power'. We may have a trade surplus second only to Germany in the EU, but I think we all know that if we got into an economic war with anyone we'd lose. And that's just economic war; can you imagine how we'd do in a real one? Our army isn't capable of protecting the national territory, our air force isn't even tasked with protecting our national airspace, and there's no conceivable way the eight patrol boats in our tiny navy could protect our territorial waters, much less protect our exclusive economic zone or prevent an invasion. We spend a smaller proportion of our GDP on defence than any other EU country bar Malta. Incapable of defending even ourselves, we couldn't even dream of using force projection to achieve our foreign policy aims.

We rely wholly on soft power to achieve our international aims. We talk to people. We get things done in meetings, but even more so we get things done in corridors and over drinks. And we've always been very good at this. We don't throw our measly weight around. We rely on informal networking, haggling, and chat, and we're extraordinarily good at it. To take an obvious example from European politics, Jason O'Mahony expressed the reality of the situation superbly in his excellent and hilarious Spoofers Guide to the Lisbon Treaty:

'Fact: Ireland does not rely on the size of its population to negotiate what we need within the EU. How the hell do you think a country with 0.8% of the population negotiated €30 billion in aid? '

Catholic stuff aside, I fear the Government's decision after 82 years of continual diplomatic networking to shut the designated embassy to the Holy See shall prove hugely detrimental to our national interests. We rely on informal networking to achieve our national objectives, after all, and even if we'd save a million or so euro by shutting our embassy to the Holy See, this saving would come at a price, as Paddy Agnew wrote in the Irish Times back in July:

'Not only would it strain relations with the Holy See, but Ireland would be cutting itself off from one of the world’s best "listening posts", given that the Vatican has an unparalleled worldwide network of contacts, intelligence and information.'

Networks and Nodes

A groundless fear? Hardly. Hell, anyone who's watched the West Wing episode 'Inauguration, Part I' will remember a few exchanges relevant to civil war in a -- fictional -- African country, notably where one Bob Slattery, the National Security Advisor, says: 'Intelligence is thin outside Bitanga. In fact, the Archbishop's network of clerics is probably as good as it gets.'

Startled, the President replies, 'The Catholic Church has better intelligence than we do?'

'It's a very small embassy, maybe ten people,' says the embarrassed Bob, 'And no Agency presence.'

Contrary to popular belief and myth-mongering, the Catholic Church isn't a neat organisation. It's not even close to being a pyramid with the Pope at the top, and with each country run by an archbishop or a cardinal or a bishops' conference. The Irish Church, for instance, has more than 180 interlinked and identifiable parts many of which aren't even theoretically answerable to the Archbishop of Armagh. A bit like the Church of England, the Church isn't a corporation so much as it is a huge network of overlapping and often largely autonomous clusters, but within this network there are certain nodal points, the most important of which is Rome. If local dioceses, churches, bishops, priests, charities, institutions, schools, hospitals, or ordinary laypeople want to, they can pass information along to these points, and that information can spread. It's messy and uneven and often deeply inefficient, but it can work very well. 

The simple fact of the matter is that with institutional Catholic presences in almost every country in the world, the Church has access to information to situations on the ground that no other organization can rival.

Anyone who thinks that this sort of informal information is redundant in an era of modern telecommunications needs to sit down and start reading some American foreign policy, strategy, and intelligence papers from a decade back. In the aftermath of 9-11, it was recognised that major failings in American intelligence had enabled the attacks, and that chief among these failings was a fetishization of technology that led the American intelligence agencies to divert resources from traditional human intelligence; since then the Americans have been working very hard and investing huge amounts of money to make up lost ground. They've learned in a horrifying way something they should have known all along just based on their own lives: that there's no substitute for personal contact.

What's more, there are Irish people throughout the world, often engaged in charity and development work; it makes sense for the Irish State to maintain close and cordial diplomatic and personal ties with Rome's diplomats, given that the Church is often better equipped and positioned than the Irish State to help Irish people far from home.

Caution from an Unexpected Corner

Even the Irish Times, which has long made it its mission to challenge the Church in Ireland, warned a couple of months back against the Government reducing our diplomatic clout by ceasing to accredit an ambassador to the Holy See:

'... there has been and continues to be a national interest in maintaining a close relationship and dialogue with the Catholic Church at an international level. It articulates the faith of the majority of our citizens and its representatives play a crucial daily role not only in the spiritual guidance of our people, but in the education of our children and our health services.

In 2009, the McCarthy report on public spending recommended that the State’s network of embassies and consulates be reduced from 76 to 55. The scale of that cull was rejected by the department but a review is under way. It would be a mistake, however, if cost considerations tipped the argument, inflamed as it is by the current controversy, in favour of closing the Villa Spada.'

All very well, you might think, but in what areas might the Irish State want to haggle and network with people who work in the Vatican or who have connections with the Holy See in one way or another? This is, after all, the twenty-first century.

A Soft Power Superpower

Just to think in terms of our national strategic interests, I talked about this to some degree in connection with the Papal visit to Britain last year. Quoting myself to save on typing:

'There are straightforward political reasons why the British government should have wanted the Pope to visit. The British government and the Holy See work together in the fields of international justice, development, and debt, as well as other issues such as the environment. The government wants to develop these ties further to make use of what it perceives as the Holy See's massive 'soft power' in these areas. This is why the Pope has been invited here on a formal state visit, and is why more than half the cost of the visit is being paid for by the state.'

The same principles are at work in the case of Ireland. The Church is the second-largest international development body and the second-largest humanitarian organization in the world, and its help is not contingent on people signing up to Catholic dogma. As the current Pope put it in his 2006 encyclical, Deus Caritas Est,

'Charity, furthermore, cannot be used as a means of engaging in what is nowadays considered proselytism. Love is free; it is not practised as a way of achieving other ends. [...]  Those who practise charity in the Church's name will never seek to impose the Church's faith upon others. They realize that a pure and generous love is the best witness to the God in whom we believe and by whom we are driven to love. A Christian knows when it is time to speak of God and when it is better to say nothing and to let love alone speak.'

Sure, I've no doubt that there are plenty of Catholics throughout the world who disregard this. That's what happens: people are individuals, and they're not controlled by Rome. Nonetheless, throughout the world, millions upon millions of Catholics act in harmony with the Church's teaching and in communion with the Pope, working to help people because they themselves are Catholic, not because they people they're helping are.

I'd recommend you to take a look at how the monks in Of Gods and Men help their Muslim neighbours to get some idea of how and why this works, but just to take some examples to give a broad view...

Catholic bodies run a quarter of all African hospitals and arguably do more to fight HIV-AIDS than any other organization in the world. The Church plays a huge role internationally in conflict resolution, disarmament negotiations, and hostage releases, not to mention campaigning against the death penalty, the international arms trade, and specific wars such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  The Church has long been a leading advocate of financial and other aid for the developing world, an ardent proponent of debt cancellation for the poorest of countries, and one of the driving forces behind the Millennium Development Goals.

Have we placed a new Ideology over our National Interests?

Put simply, if Ireland cares about international development, world peace, health and education in the developing world, or any of the other things I've mentioned -- and I believe it does* -- then it needs to work closely with the Holy See. And if it cares about the interests of Irish people scattered across the world, then it makes sense to work closely with the Holy Sea. Having bankrupted ourselves, we're weaker now as a country than we've been in decades, and we need all the friends we can get right now. 

It's madness to weaken ourselves still further by turning our back on the most important player in global civil society.

___________________________________________________________________________

* I'd include the Environment on the list too, as Rome's worked hard and spoken out often on that issue as well, seeing us as having responsibilities as stewards of the world in which we live, but it appears that the Government's now decided that climate change isn't really something we need to worry about. And so, as though one were needed, Phil Hogan supplies a tenth obvious reason to give up on Fine Gael.

Nugent's Nonsense: Spilt Ink in the Irish Times, Part 5

I'm glad to say that Michael Nugent's abysmal series in the Irish Times has finally ground to a halt. A classic example of how a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, the series as a whole has been a wanton waste of ink, paper, and bandwidth, being ill-informed and ill-considered throughout, such that it should embarrass any knowledgeable and thoughtful atheists.

Today's may just be the worst piece yet, not least because it seems to contradict itself in a spectacular way; I'm not quite sure that it does, as I'm getting a headache trying to decipher what Mr Nugent's talking about, but there seems to be a blatant contradiction squatting at the heart of his confusion. Nugent confidently states that the Pauline letters are the earliest books of the New Testament and that these testify to a Christian belief in the Resurrection, but also states that at the time Mark's Gospel was written Jesus was merely regarded as an apocalyptic preacher, with Resurrection stories not appearing until the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

Now I could be reading it wrong, but that certainly seems to be what Mr Nugent says. I can't help wondering whether the editorial team of the Irish Times even bothered to throw their eyes across this. It really looks as though they didn't.

Not a bad idea, but some caveats...

Nugent's thesis is that it makes sense to read the New Testament books in the order they were written, rather than in their conventional order; I think there's a huge amount be said for this idea as long as we bear a few things in mind, none of which come across in Mr Nugent's article.

• Nobody is certain of the exact order in which the books were written, though the generally accepted order is more-or-less as follows: Pauline letters, Synoptic Gospels, Acts, other letters and Revelation, and John.
• While many Pauline letters can be dated with a high degree of confidence, the dating of other books is a matter of serious dispute, and there's a strong case that all three Synoptic Gospels were in circulation by 65 AD.
• Although modern scholars typically argue that Mark was the earliest of the Synoptic Gospels, it has been believed since at least early in the second century that Matthew was written first, albeit perhaps in an earlier Aramaic incarnation.
• It cannot be stressed enough that the books of the New Testament arose within the Church, and that it was not the case that the Church was founded upon the New Testamant books.
• The evidence provided by Acts for the experiences, beliefs, and practices of the Church in its first three decades should not be ignored.
• The Church was born in the era of Cicero, Lucretius, Augustus, Virgil, Ovid,  Seneca, and Tacitus. The ancients had brains every bit as good as ours.

Now, bearing these points in mind, let's see if Mr Nugent's thesis holds up. Nugent says that a study of the New Testament books ensures that:

'You will see how a human Jewish preacher evolved into part of a newly invented Christian god. You will also see how his relationship with the main Christian god gradually started earlier and earlier as time went on: from his resurrection in the letters of Paul, to his baptism in the Gospel called Mark, to his conception in the Gospels called Matthew and Luke, to the start of time in the Gospel called John.'

Let's try to avoid getting too hung up on the whole 'god (small "g")' thing this week, shall we? It's obvious Michael doesn't understand what he's saying on that front. And yes, for the sake of convenience let's gloss over how he seems to think the Bible presents God the Father and God the Son as separate -- if connected -- gods. He really doesn't seem to understand the principle that if you're going to attack an argument or a belief you have to engage with it on its own terms, as otherwise you prove nothing.


Falling at the First Hurdle, Michael...
Instead let's just look at this point: Nugent claims that the Pauline letters show that the Christian community at first only saw Jesus as related to the Father through his Resurrection, and that it was only decades later, when John came to be written, that the relationship between Jesus and the Father was understood as dating to the beginning of time.

Now, Paul's letters include certain stylistically distinctive passages such as this one from Paul's Letter to the Philippians 2:5-11:

'Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.'

Widely regarded as a Christian hymn that predates Paul's inclusion of it in this letter, it is at the very least evidence of a high Christology in Christian thought by 62 AD, which is when Philippians is generally thought to have been written, though some date the letter to several years earlier. Look at what Paul says here: that Jesus had the form of God and that he deliberately emptied himself to become born as a man and die on a cross, being exalted afterwards. This utterly refutes the idea that in Pauline thought Jesus' relationship with the Father was seen only to have begun with the Resurrection; it's clear from this that Paul believed it predated his conception.

There are those who dispute whether the Letter to the Colossians was written by Paul, arguing instead that it dates from the 80s, but even if we accept that, we'd surely have to concede that the 80s precedes the 90s, which is when Mr Nugent claims John was written, putting forward for the first time -- he says -- the idea that the relationship between Jesus and the Father existed at the beginning of time. Well, Colossians 1:15-20 features a Christological hymn too:

'He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities -- all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross'

Look at that. Before John put pen to papyrus, there's Paul or someone writing in his name testifying to the Christian belief that all creation was created in, through, and for Jesus.

And for what it's worth, Michael could do a lot worse than taking a look at the Letter to the Hebrews too. It's not Pauline, but it's more than likely that it dates to the 60s, to judge by what it says and what it fails to say, given its subject matter. It certainly predates John by some distance, and yet look at how it begins:

'In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power.'

Again there we see the idea of the world having been created through Jesus, who upholds the Universe. There's a lot more of this sort of stuff in Hebrews, and though I'm not saying I don't expect Michael Nugent to find this crazy, I do think it inappropriate that he should gloss over this stuff as though it's irrelevant to his thesis. Such cherry-picking of evidence to create false impressions raises questions about whether he's actually read the Bible, as he so exhorts others to do, but perhaps it's churlish to suggest that he's either lying or incredibly unobservant.


Let's take a look at Acts...
It would, of course, be foolhardy to dismiss Nugent's thesis as being wholly without merit. Indeed, a study of Acts indicates a real development in Christian thought in its earliest years. The sermons therein tend to follow a predictable pattern, or at least to centre on particular themes, notably that Jesus' relationship with the Father -- and indeed with us -- is defined by the Resurrection. On the face of it, this might seem to give some support to Mr Nugent's broad argument, in that the Christological understanding of the early Church developed over time -- something I think all informed Christians would accept -- but in fact it undermines his argument further.

Luke was a disciple of Paul, and seems to have written Acts by 64 AD -- others would dispute this point, claiming that it's a later work, but it's incredibly difficult otherwise to explain why Acts excludes such crucial events in early Christian history as the Great Fire of Rome, the Neronian Persecution including the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, and the Jewish War with particular reference to the destruction of the Temple. What's striking about the sermons in Acts is that they reveal a deeply un-Pauline Christology, a Christology that knows nothing of our having been saved by Jesus' death, seeing Jesus' death merely as a necessary evil, something that had to happen so that the Resurrection could take place.

It was common practice among ancient historians to compose speeches and place them in the mouths of historical figures. It seems unlikely, however, that a Pauline Christian such as Luke would have attributed such un-Pauline sentiments to Peter, Stephen, and indeed Paul unless he either knew that such things had been said by them, or, at the very least, unless he knew that that sort of thing had been said by them. In other words, Luke seems to have had reason to believe that the Christology of the Church of the 30s was not so developed as that of the Church in his own day.

Do you see where this is going? The Church of the 30s and 40s was clearly a real thing, a real historical phenomenon, and one which Luke described in what seems to have been a historically honest way, not glossing over how rudimentary its Christology must have seemed to him. Had he simply been writing propaganda he could have polished and updated the sermons, but he didn't do so. As such they stand as simple testimonies to a Church that had witnessed the risen Christ and that was still trying to come to terms with what it had experienced.

Any discussion of the historicity of Jesus and the Church's understanding of him that doesn't even attempt to grapple with the picture of the early Church as revealed in Acts should be regarded as lazy, inept, ignorant, or dishonest, if not all four. One can disagree with what Acts tells us, but it takes some nerve to pretend that it tells us nothing.


What of Evidence for the Resurrection?
'The physical resurrection of Jesus is the central tenet of Christianity,' says Mr Nugent, 'but the evidence for this extraordinary claim is nonexistent outside the Bible, and contradictory within it.'

I'm not sure the evidence for the Resurrection outside the Bible is really non-existent, though I suppose it depends on what you'd consider to be evidence. Certainly, there are later non-canonical Gospels, and there's a passage of Josephus' Jewish Antiquities that many think was doctored by later Christian scribes, and there are Christian writings from the late first and early second centuries which speak of the Resurrection. More importantly, though, there's the existence of the Church itself, which from the 30s onwards was a missionary movement that was willing to brave persecution and death in order to spread the Good News of -- what?

Because that's the key question that needs to be answered in dealing with this subject. As N.T. Wright puts it in The Resurrection of the Son of God, 'at the end of the day, the historian can and must ask why Christianity began, and why it took the shape it did. Since the universal early Christian answer to that question had to do with Jesus and the resurrection, the historian is forced to ask further questions...'


The Earliest Evidence?
In the earliest written Biblical reference to the Resurrection, says Mr Nugent, 'Paul says the risen Jesus appeared to more than 500 people at one time,' except this isn't true. The detail of the 500 witnesses is to be found in 1 Corinthians 15.6, as part of the following passage:

'For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.'

It is an enormously important passage, but written though it was in the mid-50s and evidently based at least in part on rather earlier creedal statements, it's clearly not the earliest written Biblical reference to the Resurrection, that surely being  1 Thessalonians 1:9-10, which says:

'For they themselves report concerning us what a welcome we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.'

Universally dated to between 48 and 50 AD, 1 Thessalonians is regarded as the earliest book of the New Testament to have been written, and it's a book which speaks not merely of the Resurrection but also addresses the reality that Christians had died and that more would die before Jesus should come again. This is important, as it shows that even in Paul's early writings he didn't really see Jesus as having been somebody who believed the world would end within the lifetimes of his immediate audience.

Of course, that shouldn't surprise us, as the first Petrine sermon in Acts implicitly makes a similar point, with Peter saying 'For the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are far off, every one whom the Lord our God calls to him.' That Peter said Jesus' promise was made not merely to his audience but to their children, not to mention those in far off lands, rather challenges the view that Jesus message was for the Jews of his own generation, and that the world would end within their lifetimes.


Contradictions?
Is it problematic that 1 Corinthians mentions the risen Jesus having appeared to five hundred people but that the extant original text of Mark seems not to have described Jesus appearing to anyone at all? Surely not: leaving aside the probability that the current ending for Mark replaces a lost ending, even in truncated form Mark features an indication that Jesus would meet Peter and the disciples in Galilee.

Indeed, it's quite easy to reconcile into one straightforward narrative all encounters with the risen Christ reported in the Bible. We hear of an encounter with Mary Magdalene and other women, an encounter with Peter which is twice referred to but never described, an encounter with two disciples on the road to Emmaus, at least five -- probably rather more -- encounters with the Apostles as a group, an appearance to five hundred of Jesus' followers at the same time, an appearance to his kinsman James, a final appearance to the Apostles, and then an encounter with Paul on the road to Damascus. Given how the New Testament texts were written for different audiences and in different contexts, it's hardly surprising that they don't habitually reel off the same comprehensive list of encounters.

As I've said, it's easy to pull these together into one narrative; I'm not going to say there aren't bumps in it, but they're tiny ones by the standards of ancient history. For example, was Bocchus I of Mauretania the son-in-law of the Numidian king Jugurtha, as per Plutarch's Marius 10, or was he his father-in-law, as per Plutarch's Sulla 3? Did Caesar meet up with Pompey and Crassus at Luca in 56 as Plutarch says? Cicero,  who notes that Caesar had already met with Crassus at Ravenna, seems to be aware only of a meeting with Pompey, while Cassius Dio gives no obvious indication that any conference took place. I could go on, but that example from the decade of ancient history for which we have the best evidence surely makes my point sufficiently well: evaluating this stuff is always tricky. If it was easy, anybody could do it.



Not a Nice Guy?
One of the things Nugent wants to do in this piece is to argue that the Biblical Jesus is hardly a moral exemplar, but clearly under pressure for space he barely manages a couple of jabs on this, so slight as to appear to have come out of the blue.

'Nor is the biblical Jesus exclusively peaceful, or even just. In the Gospel called Luke, before the Garden of Gethsemane incident, he instructs his disciples to buy swords. In the Book of Revelation, he threatens to kill the children of Jezebel for the sins of their mother.'

I like the idea of 'The Gethsamane Incident'. It sounds like a Ludlum novel. That aside, though, I almost agree with Nugent on this, in that if we start ripping lines and episodes from the Bible out of context, as he does in this instance, then we're bound to reach some troubling conclusions very quickly. As I said weeks ago, the Bible needs to be read in its entirety and it needs to be read within the Church.


And with that, Michael wraps up, cluelessly referring to 'more primitive times', and summing up by repeating things he's said in earlier articles. What he doesn't do, however, is say what kind of evidence he'd deem sufficient for him to be convinced of God's existence. Remember that? His first piece, back in the day, was headed 'We atheists will change our minds if evidence shows we are wrong'. Five articles he's written, squandering a lot of valuable ink along the way, and he still never said what kind of evidence it would take to change his mind.

Do you think he's ever seriously considered that question?

Ah well.

Reasonable Faith: A Dialogue of the Deaf, Part 4

And so, finally, after two statements and a series of responses, the debate was brought to an end. It had been decided that there wouldn't be a vote to see which speaker the audience believed had won -- which I thought was wise, given the partisan nature of the crowd and the fact that it was pretty unlikely than anybody had changed their mind in response to the arguments they'd heard.

Instead there was a short informal discussion chaired by one Peter S. Williams, during which Atkins made it clear that he regarded atheism as the normative state of human belief, such that it didn't really need arguments to justify it, and continued to hold to the line that Craig's arguments were wholly faith-based. He felt Craig was placing anecdotes over evidence -- despite his own Independent aside and in determined scorning of Craig's references to Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin's work -- and condescendingly claimed that Craig's arguments would have gone down a storm a thousand years ago.

Nonsense, of course; Craig's argument would have been impossible a thousand years ago, not least because the Aristotelian revolution as led by the likes of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas didn't happen until the thirteenth century. Yes, the same Aristotelian revolution that gave the scientific method its theoretical and first practical underpinnings, because western science only became possible when Aristotelian thinking was tied with the Christian belief that God had made the Universe in a way that was reliable, and that nature would therefore act in accordance with natural laws.

Anyway, when quizzed on where he stood on philosophy in general, Atkins dismissed it out of hand, calling it  'a complete waste of time'. He conceded that moral philosophy has its uses -- he could hardly do otherwise, given how he'd argued that morality is something we work out ourselves -- but insisted that philosophy in general was just idle speculation.

He didn't seem aware of just how bizarre, not to mention ironic, that claim was coming from the mouth of someone who'd quoted Voltaire, cited Zeno, and argued against miracles on the basis of David Hume's philosophy, but then, he didn't seem a particular thoughtful sort. He seemed blissfully unaware of how the scientific method itself is wholly dependent on a series of philosophical presuppositions, and was scathing when Craig pointed this out to him.

On then to morality, with Atkins equating morality with usefulness -- an attitude that quite a few philosophers, starting with Socrates, would have had cause to question -- and saying that he believed it immoral to intervene in anyone's life. Well, not quite anyone, he explained. If he could intervene in Hitler's life, he would.

I'm not sure what he meant by that. Did he mean if he could go back in time to stop Hitler he would do so? Does he mean that he'd intervene in the life of a modern Hitler? Was he saying he'd go back in time to kill Hitler if he could? Your guess, frankly, is as good as mine.

The only thing I was left certain of, at 21:33 on Wednesday 26 October 2011, Peter Atkins blinked first, being the first person in the evening to mention Nazis. 

And so, with Godwin's Law finally having been fulfilled, it was time to call the evening to a close.

We'd a good chat in the pub afterwards, mind. 

Reasonable Faith: A Dialogue of the Deaf, Part 3

First Rebuttal

Feeble though I'd though Peter Atkins' case had been the other night, I didn't think William Lane Craig did himself any favours when he began his first rebuttal by claiming that Professor Atkins had effectively taken an agnostic stance in his case, saying that Atkins  hadn't argued that God didn't exist, merely that God's existence seemed to him to be improbable. I wasn't happy with this. It seemed to me that Craig was overplaying his hand by demanding that Atkins insist that God's existence is impossible. We all know that it's philosophically impossible to prove a negative, and for Craig to mischaracterize Professor Atkins' modicum of intellectual honesty as a surrender was, I felt, deeply dishonest.

That said, Craig was spot on in rejecting how Atkins had tried to paint him as having pursued a 'God of the Gaps' argument, and in pointing out that contrary to what Atkins had said, his argument had not been exclusively theological. Rather, he said, he had cited scientific evidence in a philosophical argument with a theological conclusion.

Homing in on how Atkins had assailed his cosmological line of argument, Craig took particular umbrage with how Atkins had spoken of the possibility of the Universe coming from nothing, arguing that Atkins didn't even understand the concept of 'nothing'. He cited Atkins as having argued that the Universe's matter and antimatter cancelled out in such a way that in reality it's accurate to say that 'nothing' exists. I thought this was surely yet another unfair misrepresentation, but later on Atkins made it clear that that is indeed what he believes.

Anyway, in the course of tackling Atkins on this matter, Craig was a bit unfair in glossing however how Atkins had implicitly shown an awareness of the difference between 'nothingness' and 'non-existence' as philosophical concepts, and but that aside, after showing how Atkins seemed to be believe that we are nothing, he wrapped up with the priceless line, 'the conclusion is he is clearly absurd.'

Or, at least, so I've rendered his words in my notes. I might have misheard.

Professor Atkins Replies

Up jumped Professor Atkins to replace Craig at the podium, clearly indignant at what he described as Craig's 'travesty of my remarks about nothing coming from nothing.'  I'm not sure he did anything to correct Craig's summary of his argument, though, other than to try to redefine 'nothing' and to insist that Craig hadn't presented any scientific evidence, something that was hardly surprising given that -- as he believed -- science and religion were incompatible. Instead, he argued, Craig had merely resported to philosophical obfuscation.

Provocative though that was, and wholly unsupported by any evidence in its own right, Atkins was on firmer ground in challenging how Craig had unfairly misrepresented his circumspect and honest recognition that it's impossible to prove a negative.

He was absolutely right on that but he immediately abandoned the moral high ground when he began to vent his rage at Craig having said that it's impossible to be moral without belief in God, despite Craig having said no such thing. What Craig had said, of course, is that morality -- in the sense of something objective rather than a mere matter of opinion -- can not exist without God. Anyway, obviously furious at this imagined sleight, he wheeled out that old chestnut that is Voltaire's line about 'those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.'

Remember that. I'll come back to it.

Turning then to Craig's third argument, he disparaged the whole thing, albeit missing its weak points entirely. He ranted about how the Gospels were obviously political propaganda, written decades after the events they purported to describe, and the the Christian creeds were based on these Gospel fictions. This, of course, is historically ignorant claptrap, as he'd realise had he any historical training whatsoever. Even if we date the earliest of the Gospels, as I'm increasingly inclined to do, to around 60 AD, the fact is that the Pauline letters predate them, and these letters provide clear evidence of creedal statements believed by the nascent Christian Church before Mark was ever written. 

This, after all, is crucial. The most important evidence for the Resurrection is the existence of the early Church and the nature of the earliest Christian beliefs, with particular reference to the religious matrix of the time. The Church predates the Bible, though the Bible -- and other writings -- testify to the existence, the experiences, the activities, and the beliefs of the Church. 

Drawing on David Hume's argument against miracles -- an argument which, to be frank, really does little more than proclaim a prejudice to be a principle -- he insisted that the Resurrection is an extraordinary claim, which it is, and that as such it demands extraordinary evidence. There is no such evidence, he said, though his credibility in making such a claim looks pretty feeble in light of his obvious lack of familiarity with what evidence there is.

Craig Again

Up Craig got with a huge grin for his second rebuttal, where he almost immediately gestured to Atkins while saying 'in light of Professor Dawkins' critique', and carried on while Atkins flapped in fury at the desk, referring to him as Dawkins a second time, leaving Atkins looking throughly put out.

Refuting Atkins' claim that Craig hadn't presented any scientific evidence, Craig again cited Borde, Guth, and Vikenkin's 2003 work on the possibility of a Universe without a beginning, mentioning Vilenkin's book Many Worlds in One. I'm not convinced Craig had quite got their argument down, but I was surprised that Atkins seemed impotent whenever this was raised, as surely he must have known Craig would bring it up as he's done so before. His inability -- or refusal -- to engage with this left him looking foolish. If Craig was misrepresenting their work he ought to have been able to say so; if Craig had it right he had no place claiming that Craig hadn't featured any evidence. 

As it stood, the only person in the whole debate who brought any evidence to the table was Craig, and he argued that the evidence was such that it had implications that any reasonable man was obliged to consider.

Craig then corrected Atkins's misunderstanding and misrepresentation of what he'd said about Craig's argument from morality, and moved on to Atkins' deployment of Hume against the reality of miracles and the effective impossibility of their being evidence of such. Hume had written before the methodology of Bayesian probability had been established, and as David Millican has admitted in a debate earlier in the week, Hume was wrong.  The fundamental question isn't 'given the evidence we have, what is the likelihood that the Resurrection happened?' so much as 'what is the likelihood we'd have the evidence we have if the Resurrection didn't happen?'

And that, I tend to think, is pretty much the kind of argument Raymond Chandler has Philip Marlowe make in Playback:

'There was no other possible way to look at it. There are things that are facts, in a statistical sense, on paper, on a tape recorder, in evidence. And there are things that are facts because they have to be facts, because nothing makes any sense otherwise.'

Atkins Returns to the Fray

If there was a point where Atkins lost the debate, I think it was when he strode up to the podium and started repeating things he'd already said, albeit rather louder. Granted, given Craig's tactics, I think he never really had a chance, but the way these things work is that in practice if you lose your temper you lose the argument. 

There was no evidence for anything Craig had said, he insisted; as before he refused even to acknowledge the 2003 paper that Craig had so smugly cited in his initial statement and his second response. This struck me as deeply and foolishly dishonest, given that everyone had heard Craig referring to something he regarded as scientific evidence, the credibility Atkins hadn't even attempted to contest.

Craig starts his arguments from the view that God exists, Atkins decreed, and therefore Craig's arguments are meaningless; this wholly ignored how Craig's formal arguments, for all their failings, most certainly don't start from that premise and work towards it as a conclusion. Yeah, sure, Craig rather expects his arguments to lead to God, but is that all that different from a scientific testing and working towards a hypothesis?

As for Craig's use of philosophocal arguments, well, it was clear that Atkins didn't value them at all. Philosophers, he said, always had 'an air of pessimism' about them, and he said something about philosophers saying that it'd be impossible to discover certain things. This was one of those things that left me blinking, scribbling into my notebook that Socrates, at the very least, would hardly have taken such a line on impossibility, and that Atkins seemed to be setting this up as a conflict not so much between science and religion as between science and philosophy.

To be fair, I probably shouldn't have been surprised that he'd taken such a line. Granted, of his works I've only ever read Galileo's Finger, but based on that he seems to hold to a narrowly scientistic view of human knowledge, such that he doesn't regard other routes to understanding as being valid. 

Atkins tried to swat aside what Craig had said about evidence for the Resurrection with reference to spurious Elvis sightings, as though wholly unaware that the two phenomena are demonstrably different in numerous ways:

• Jesus had been put to death by the State in a public execution after a public whipping, with an agent of the State having driven a spear into the side of his corpse to make sure he was dead, whereas Elvis died of natural causes in privacy.
• Jesus' followers soon came to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead, whereas those who claim to have seen Elvis claimed that Elvis had never died.
• Jesus' followers came from and lived in a cultural milieu where the idea of something rising from the dead of their own accord was unthinkable and were miraculous resurrections of any sort were hardly ten-a-lepton, whereas those who claim to have seen Elvis live in a world where we know  people occasionally fake their deaths and go into hiding.
• The risen Jesus supposedly spent a lot of time with his closest followers from before his execution, dining with them and being witnessed by large numbers of them together, whereas Elvis seems only ever to have been spotted by people who hadn't known him.
• Those who claimed to have spent time with the risen Jesus had nothing to gain from doing so, and risked ostracism, beatings, imprisonment, and execution for making such claims, whereas those who claimed to have seen Elvis were often rewarded with newspaper notoriety.

Even if we dispute the evidence for the Resurrection, we have to recognise that claims of the Resurrection are of a wholly different type to 'Elvis sightings'; Atkins' failure to recognise this and his treatment of the two things as though they were functionally indistinguishable was historically ignorant and logically incoherent. I hope he doesn't take such a cavalier approach in his professional activities.

Unlike religious people, Professor Atkins proclaimed confidently, he was cautious. The certainty of religion is a dangerous thing, he said, ending with, in effect, an ad hominem attack on all religious people, citing a story from the Independent about how three women had died from AIDS after being directed by their Evangelical pastors to cease taking medication. Horrible, certainly, but all that really shows is that gullible people can always be misled by people in authority. Plenty of people have died after receiving bad instructions from doctors, after all, but I doubt Professor Atkins would see this as grounds for abandoning belief in medicine.

Of course, one might note that the fact that he's quoting the Independent in the post Hari-gate era raises questions about his preferred sources of information and his ability to weigh historical rather than scientific evidence, but let's not be mean. It's not as if he's been trained to do this, after all.

Questions and discussion followed the rebuttals. I'll wrap up by looking at the them tomorrow.

Reasonable Faith: A Dialogue of the Deaf, Part 2

Peter Atkins replaced William Lane Craig at the podium when Craig's twenty minutes were up, and immediately began by insulting Craig and the majority of the audience. Craig's arguments would have gone down a treat in the eleventh century, he said, but they're utterly meaningless in the twenty-first.

This, after all, is an age of science, not of theology; we believe in scientific evidence, and theological arguments just won't wash.

This was to be a running theme in Atkins' arguments over the evening, and unfortunately it tended to show that that while he might be a good scientist or a talented explainer of science -- I've enjoyed his Galileo's Finger -- he's clearly none too sharp when it comes to the history of ideas. His general line, indeed, was hectoring and dismissive throughout, such that the whole debate was of a sort to shed a lot of heat but precious little light.

That said, I don't entirely blame him for his hostility; it was understandable, given the argumentative fork Craig had faced him with.

Craig had outlined three big arguments, all of which had subtle weaknesses, but those subtle weaknesses would take a lot of time to dismantle properly. This forced Atkins to make a choice: address all three arguments in a cursory way, and then be chided for not having addressed anything properly, or address just one argument in at least some depth, and then be chided for not having really addressed that properly and not having addressed the other arguments at all? That's a nasty choice to face, but it's probably an inevitable failing of the debate format.

Atkins admitted he couldn't prove that God didn't exist, but said the data, such as there was, made it look vastly more likely that God didn't exist than otherwise. His whole argument was based around this idea: that the existence of God was immensely improbable.

He dismissed Craig's use of the cosmological argument by saying that the phrase 'outside time' was meaningless -- though I'm pretty sure I remember the likes of Stephen Hawking being quite comfortable with that idea -- and also took issue with how Craig had attempted to deal with the issue of infinity, citing Zeno's paradoxes as examples of how stupid such discussions are.

More broadly, he decreed that any being capable of doing all that Craig believed God to do and have done, must be a being of extraordinary complexity. He didn't say why he believed this, of course, and didn't consider for a moment whether they might be spiritual beings which could be simple rather than complex; he dismissed any belief in God was lazy, an indolent way of filling in the gaps in our understanding of the Universe, and something that people only believe because it's comforting.

This is presumably because Atkins thinks the doctrine of Hell, to which Craig holds very strongly, is a comforting one. Indeed, it seems that as far as Professor Atkins is concerned, Christians obviously look forward to the prospect of being eternally separated from God, and take solace in the prospect of people they love being likewise so deprived. I'm not sure how many Christians he's ever spoken with. I wonder how often he's ever listened.

Still, rebuttals were for later, so Atkins set out his own stall. He claimed that there were six basic things to consider in connection with why we should reject the idea of God's existence. I hope I've got this right, and may have to check it later, but just going on my notes and how I've underlined things...

1. Contingency: The existence of the Universe does not depend on the existence of God, he said, not least because it's conceivable that something can indeed arise from nothing. He didn't say how this could happen, but distinguished between two ideas of the Universe in considering how it might have began, referring to two types of beginning, a creation that would lead to an 'original universe' and a procreation that would lead to a 'daughter universe'. In either case, he said, it was entirely plausible that the Universe could have come into existence without having been created by God. Given that God's existence is unnecessary, he insisted, people could only believe in him for irrational emotional reasons.'Heart reasons', he called them.

I found this argument very odd, I'm afraid. In essence it was just Aquinas' second objection to the question of whether God existed, that being that there seems to be no need to postulate the existence of God in order to explain the Universe, as it's possible to explain away the Universe by recourse to just one principle, that being nature itself. The thing was, though, aside from lacking any supporting evidence, it seemed to be saying that it's illogical to believe something unless we believe that same something could not be any other way.

I don't think such a conflation of truth and necessity makes any sense, and don't see how Professor Atkins can do likewise unless he takes such a rigidly mechanistic and deterministic view of the entire Universe that he thinks we have no control whatsoever over our own thoughts.

2. Fitness: Atkins homed in here on what Ronald Knox used to call 'the stupid man's argument' for the existence of God, that being Paley's argument from design, which holds that the Universe and everything in it appears to be set up towards certain ends, and therefore must have been designed with those ends in mind; it's often confused with the older and less presumptive argument from order, of which it is really just an application. This idea, that the Universe has been set up as though for our sake, Atkins simply dismissed as entirely speculative. 

I think he's right on this. Philosophically speaking, it doesn't really work, not least because it presumes to know the mind of God. I imagine this is why Craig didn't subsequently engage with it, much to Atkins' annoyance.

3. Purpose: I'm a bit embarrassed to say I didn't write anything down here. I think he just said that there's no scientific evidence for the existence of God and no reason to believe that the Universe is anything other than purposeless. Whatever he said, it certainly wasn't very memorable -- my notes have blurred together on points two and three, which rather reflects how there didn't seem to be much difference in what Atkins said on the topics.

(If I've got my notes right, though -- and I'll be able to check when there's a recording of the debate online -- it does seem that Professor Atkins was making a huge logical error here of he really said that there's no evidence for the Universe having a purpose or for the existence of God. What he must surely have meant is that he is aware of no such evidence; I hope he realises that  absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.)

4. Miracles:  Can you imagine any atheists being persuaded towards theism by a priest standing up and announcing that they should believe in God because miracles happen, because there's evidence for them, and some priests say they think some things are miraculous? No, you can't, can you?

Miracles, Professor Atkins said, don't happen, and there's no evidence for them. He talked of how the Catholic Church requires evidence of miracles before it will recognise someone as being a saint, and said that any doctor who took the view that any healing had been miraculous should be struck off. Therefore, he said, miracles offer no evidence for God's existence.

I didn't think this was much of an argument, I'm afraid, not least because it again seemed to be confusing absence of evidence with evidence of absence. Aside from it having a somewhat circular quality it really just came down to him saying he didn't believe in miracles, which is probably what we all expected anyway, and that he didn't trust the judgement of anybody who did. At the very least, this kind of argument requires specific evidence, not the trotting out of a principle as though it's a proof.

5. Theodicy: One of the biggest questions that religious people have to face is why, if God is good, is there evil and pain in the world; indeed, Aquinas regarded this as the most fundamental objection to the possibility of God's existence. He thought that God allowed evil to exist so that he could produce goodness from it. Others have argued that we're too small and our lives here too constrained for us to be able to understand the meaning of things, but that things make sense on the other side of the tapesty. Others still will point out that God has never said we'd be free of suffering, or that he'd explain our suffering, just that he'd be with us in our suffering. I think there's merit to all these ideas, but the fact is that we just don't know why there's evil in the world.

Atkins's view, on the other hand, was that given the evil in the world, the whole idea of God was implausible.

None of this is particularly original, of course, and though I understand the argument, it's not one that I think carries weight unless we are utterly convinced that if God existed then we would be able to know his mind and understand the significance of everything. I always find it strange that it's the people who most stridently insist that God can't exist who are most confident that if he did exist that they would understand him.

Their arguments tend to reduce to something along the lines of 'If I were God, I'd do things differently.'

One of the oddest parts of Professor Atkins' argument was when he spoke of evolution as an evil process, proof of God's nonexistence, where species after species falls, wastefully, by the wayside. I found this a very strange line of argument, and not merely because he clearly doesn't think that nature can be either moral or immoral. 

Evolution's pretty simple, when you get down to it. It has two separate processes, being mutation and natural selection, and is wholly bound by the basic principle of mortality. The principle of mortality is a crucial one, such that there's an important sense in which the whole idea of the 'survival of the fittest' is nonsense: on an individual level, the fittest don't survive, because ultimately everything dies. It's the fittest species that survive -- at least for a while -- but when you get down to it species are just arbitrary classifications of groups of individuals, and all individuals die. 

Really what Atkins was saying was not that evolution is evil, but -- much more fundamentally -- that death itself is a disgrace. And it is. I don't think there are any Christians who'd dispute that.

6. Morality: Religious people, said Professor Atkins, tend to see God as a fountain of love and thus the source of distinctions between good and evil. This, however, was a mere comfort blanket, he argued. The reality is that it's perfectly possible to derive a fine working morality from history, anthropology and so forth.

Of course, at least with reference to Christianity, Atkins hadn't quite got things right. Christians do indeed see God as a fountain of love -- 1 John says that God is love, and that it's his love that empowers our love -- but it's not really true to say that Christians see God as the source of distinctions between good and evil, except insofar as they believe their God-given reason enables them to discern the Natural Law we see pointed to at the start of Romans. 

Christians believe that God is good; that is, they believe that God is infinite goodness. They do not hold that he distinguishes good from evil, but that he is good and that creation itself, coming from God, is also good. Moral evil exists, insofar as it does, not as a positive thing in its own right but as an absence, a Godlessness in our actions, a detachment from God in our lives.

I would think that any sane Christian would fully agree with Professor Atkins that it's entirely possible for people to deduce a decent moral code based on knowledge, experience, and reason; this doesn't in any respect challenge the standard Christian views that our reason and our basic moral sense are themselves divine in origin, let alone the view that there is an objective and transcendent universal standard of goodness, which we call God.

So to sum up Professor Atkins' argument, he basically said we shouldn't believe in God because he thought it was possible to explain the Universe and derive morality without recourse to the idea of God, because he was aware of no evidence that supported the idea of God, and because bad things happen.

Or, if you like, Peter Atkins said we shouldn't believe in God because:

1. It's possible to make sense of things without believing in God.
2. In the unlikely event that God exists, he doesn't behave like Peter Atkins.

I'll talk about the rebbuttals tomorrow.

Reasonable Faith: A Dialogue of the Deaf, Part 1

Cajoled along by a good friend, I spent yesterday evening at the 'Reasonable Faith' debate in Manchester between William Lane Craig and Peter Atkins. The debate was on the straightforward subject 'Does God Exist?'.

I still can't quite decide whether we'd have been better off just going to the pub instead of sitting through the debate.

I had misgivings about the debate from the start; the whole thing looked like an exercise in cheerleading. It didn't look as though it was ever going to be constructive, or as though it would ever change anyone's mind. To be frank, I'm not remotely convinced that the public debate format is a particularly useful way of evaluating arguments. Constraints of time and format make it almost impossible to deal with subtle arguments and serious evidence in a precise, subtle, or even interesting way. Such debates aren't about truth: they're about winning.

Still, I'd not seen my friend in a long time, and I'd not seen her friends in even longer, so we met up and went along, disparate band that we were, filing into a bustling and rapidly filling lecture theatre: a mainstream but fairly non-denominational Protestant, a largely lapsed Catholic, a Methodist, an Atheist who's struggling through the Bible out of curiosity and a sincere desire to engage with his religious girlfriend and friends, and a Catholic revert from atheism.

Craig's Initial Argument

Introduction followed introduction, and then Craig took the stage, smiling and wearing one of those head-mounted microphones that made people look like motivational speakers. He kept smiling through the whole debate; I still can't figure out whether this made him look cheerful or smug. Either way, it was more compelling that Atkins' sometimes justified scowl. 'Does God Exist?' Craig asked, and holding that he did, he outlined three basic arguments for God's existence, these being a cosmological argument, a moral argument, and a historical argument based on Christ.

The Kalām Cosmological Argument

He was strongest by far on the cosmological argument, which was superficially Aristotelian: everything that comes into existence has a cause, and the Universe came into existence, therefore the Universe has a cause, which we call God. This streamlined variant on the cosmological argument is known as the kalām cosmological argument; it was popular among Muslim scholars in the middle ages, and is pretty much Craig's argument of choice. Central to how his argument worked was his belief that an infinite chain of causality is impossible. He exppounded on this at I think unnecessary length, and in connection with it he bypassed Lemaître's 'Big Bang' Theory* and talked of Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin's 2003 paper 'Inflationary spacetimes are not past-complete' in order to argue that any universe, however we conceive of it, must have a past space-time boundary.

Now, granted, Craig didn't attempt to engage with Stephen Hawking's hypothesis that time may be finite without a real boundary -- like the interior of a sphere -- and I don't think he grappled in a serious way with what Vilenkin and the lads actually argued, but it probably should be admitted that time was pressing. In any case, it's worth noting that this was, as far as I can remember, the only point in the debate when modern scientific developments were ever cited by either speaker.

That said, I wasn't wholly convinced by Craig's  philosophical arguments that there can be no true infinity, and it's worth bearing in mind that back in the thirteenth century Aquinas argued that it was not possible to prove philosophically that the universe must have had a beginning in time. As ever with Aquinas, he needs to be read slowly and comprehensively, but still, here's part of his answer:

'By faith alone do we hold, and by no demonstration can it be proved, that the world did not always exist, as was said above of the mystery of the Trinity (q. 32, a. 1). The reason of this is that the newness of the world cannot be demonstrated on the part of the world itself. For the principle of demonstration is the essence of a thing. Now everything according to its species is abstracted from "here" and "now"; whence it is said that universals are everywhere and always. Hence it cannot be demonstrated that man, or heaven, or a stone were not always. Likewise neither can it be demonstrated on the part of the efficient cause, which acts by will. For the will of God cannot be investigated by reason, except as regards those things which God must will of necessity; and what He wills about creatures is not among these, as was said above (q. 19, a. 3). But the divine will can be manifested by revelation, on which faith rests. Hence that the world began to exist is an object of faith, but not of demonstration or science. And it is useful to consider this, lest anyone, presuming to demonstrate what is of faith, should bring forward reasons that are not cogent, so as to give occasion to unbelievers to laugh, thinking that on such grounds we believe things that are of faith.'

Aquinas did believe the Universe had a beginning, of course, but he believed that as a matter of Faith, and this belief played no part in his cosmological argument. Indeed, like Aristotle and Leibniz, Aquinas argued that the Universe must have an uncaused cause even if the Universe has always existed.

Anyway, with the cosmological argument outlined, he moved on.


The Moral Argument

The moral argument for the existence of God is closely related to Aquinas' fourth way, and is an argument that I like, albeit with serious reservations. Simply and syllogistically put, Craig argued that if objective moral values exist, then God must exist, and since they do, then so too must God. I'm deeply uneasy about the argument as outlined in this sense, because while I think the first half of the argument is completely sound, I'm not sure about the second half.

Moral values must be either objective or subjective: either they exist independently of us, such that some things are intrinsically good or evil, or else they are things we create, which ultimately means that they have no inherent value; they are merely agreed norms, and agreement on these norms is simply a matter of culture or fashion. If they exist independently of us, we need to ask why or how can this be, and thus begins a chain of argument that leads us to the idea of a universal external standard of goodness, which we call God.

Fine. I'm grand with that. I'm also quite content that if we identify goodness in its ultimate sense with God, as Christians do, then both horns of the Euthyphro Dilemma are rendered completely blunt. The problem is that we can't philosophically prove that objective morality exists. Yes, I realise that everyone -- psychopaths excluded -- acts as though there's such a thing, which is why they get irate at things they perceive as being unfair or wrong, but that doesn't mean that everyone would accept Craig's premise. There are no shortage of people who'd argue that morality's entirely relative, and who would say, with Hamlet, that 'there's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so'.

Neither Craig's cosmological or moral arguments show that God exists; what they do is show that belief in God is reasonable, and more prudently expressed that point would have been clear. He'd said good stuff, but he'd over-reached. Still, onward he went then to the part of his argument I thought he put across most feebly.

The Historical Argument
Craig sped through this one, but the essence of his argument was as follows.

1. 'There are three established facts concerning the fate of Jesus of Nazareth: the discovery of his empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances, and the origin of his disciples' belief in his resurrection.
2. The hypothesis "God raised Jesus from the dead" is the best explanation of these facts.
3. The hypothesis "God raised Jesus from the dead" entails that the God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth exists.
4. Therefore the God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth exists.'

Now, there's a huge amount to be said for this argument, but it doesn't work in this simplistic form, even as barely elaborated by Craig in his speech, and again he overplayed his hand.

He quoted N.T. Wright, for instance, as saying that the Resurrection was a historical event as credibly attested as the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD; this is nonsense, I'm afraid: I think it is credibly attested, but given that the destruction of Jerusalem is attested in contemporary writings and iconography, and is confirmed by archaeological evidence, I can't think for a moment what Wright -- who's normally brilliant -- was doing saying such a thing.** As for the three facts that Craig discussed, I think he's right on all of them, but I'm not convinced he's right for the reason he says he is. The earliest resurrection account, for instance, doesn't mention the empty tomb, and mentions important details the later accounts omit. What Craig danced around is the fact that the Church preceded the Bible, and it's the existence of the Church -- and the behaviour and beliefs of that Church in the first three decades of Christianity -- that's crucial to this argument.

Is the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead the best explanation of these facts? Judged on its own merits, I'm not sure. It's certainly a better explanation than any of the purely naturalistic ones I've ever heard, all of which seem to defy both human nature and what we can confidently say about ancient history, but I'm not sure that it excludes any other supernatural explanations, if we're willing to accept the concept of the supernatural.

Dubious though I was about that stage of the argument, I don't think that the next stages worked at all. Even if we accept that God raised Jesus from the dead, it doesn't automatically follow that 'God' is one and the same with 'God as revealed by Jesus', and that Jesus' God therefore existed. Obviously, I believe God exists, and that God reveals himself in Christ -- I'm not disputing that -- but I was far from convinced by Craig's argument, which seemed to be missing some important stages. All else aside, it's not merely Christians who believe God raised Jesus from the dead. Muslims believe it too, and just as Christians believe Muslims have got God wrong, so do Muslims believe Christians have got God wrong, holding that he's not Triune. For what it's worth, Bahá'ís believe Jesus was a manifestation of God -- as they understand him -- and that his resurrection was not a physical thing.

The depressing thing about this was that Craig was putting forward good, meaningful, thoughtful arguments, but he wasn't expressing them in a good, meaningful, thoughtful way. Rather, he set them up like rehearsed chess moves, creating a situation where Peter Atkins was faced, strategically speaking, with a forked attack that he wasn't remotely capable of addressing.

This was good debating, designed to trap an opponent and to set up a rhetorical victory. It had very little to do with truth. I believe Craig was absolutely right, but that he wasn't right for quite the reasons he gave.

More tomorrow. No, really.

* Yes, I know Lemaître didn't call it that, but we all do.
** Though if you're curious, you'll find it on page 710 of his monumental The Resurrection of the Son of God, the third volume of his phenomenally thorough Christian Origins and the Question of God.