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.

Nugent's Nonsense: Spilt Ink in the Irish Times, Part 4

Michael Nugent's Irish Times column this week is pretty thin, which is a relief, because I've work to be doing and I've already blogged once today, talking about the battle of Agincourt. 

That said, thin though it is, this week's column is no less flawed than his previous efforts, and yet again it leaves me wishing somebody would explain to Mr Nugent, using small words, why there's a whole universe of difference between the concepts of 'God' and 'a god'. Until he understands that, he really should steer clear of discussing theology or religion in general. Frankly, he should keep away from mythology and philosophy too.

Did Augustine really say that?

This week's Irish Times article has him off on yet another semi-learned rant, during which, speaking of Christians in late Antiquity, he cites one of James Mackey's July articles:

'Prof Mackey also suggests that Christian faith is supported by reason, because early Christians were able to borrow from Platonic philosophy to support their beliefs. He quotes St Augustine as saying of the Platonists, "Change a few phrases, and they might be Christians."'

I was puzzled when I read that Mackey article, as I've not been able to find such a line -- however we might translate it -- in Augustine. It doesn't seem to be in the relevant part of the Confessions, but that doesn't mean it's not in On True Religion or any of the other zillion things Augustine wrote. That said, it is a curious phrase, and not merely because the only place I can find it online is an unreferenced citation in Mackey's own book Christianity and Creation; discussing Neo-Platonism in his Confessions, Augustine's at pains to stress its value as a step towards truth, but its inadequacy as a ladder. It would take rather more than a 'few phrases' to turn Neo-Platonists into Christians.

That aside, I don't think it's accurate to say that Professor Mackey had suggested that Christian faith was supported by reason because early Christians recognised a harmony between their own beliefs and the ideas of the likes of Plato. His point, rather, was to argue that to be a theologian is simply to reason about gods, and that the early Christians saw it as entirely legitimate to do so from a non-Christian stance, such as adopted by Plato. Granted, they though such reasoning would only get you so far, but they thought it fully legitimate for all that.

Ah, the old God/god chestnut again...

Nugent goes on, saying:

'It is true that they partly succeeded in this, by selectively using parts of Greek philosophy. Aristotelian logic, and ideas such as the first unmoved mover, could be used to help to support (already-existing) beliefs in a god.'

The first ludicrous thing here is the reference to Christians 'selectively using parts of Greek philosophy'. This suggests that Greek philosophy was all of a piece, a single unity from which Christians had to prise convenient bits. Nothing could be further from the truth: Greek philosophy was a huge matrix of thought, encompassing Neo-Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, and far more besides. It wasn't a unity, and it could only ever be drawn from 'selectively'.

That aside, it's preposterous to claim anything Aristotelian, let alone ideas such as the first unmoved mover, could be used to buttress pre-existing beliefs in 'a god'. One thing neither Plato's nor Aristotle's ideas could ever do is support such ideas as belief in Zeus, Isis, Mithras, Dionysus, Caesar, or Mercury. Rather, their ideas indeed pointed towards the idea of a single being, an unmoved mover and a first cause, which could be understood as God -- and indeed, they blended quite naturally with the Jewish and Christian ideas of God.

Not everybody was a Neo-Platonist

Onward he goes:

'But in a wider context, the Augustinian project failed. Its aim was to synthesise all knowledge by rationally reconciling Neoplatonism with Christian belief. Because they found it useful to use Aristotelian logic, Aristotle was incorporated into Christian tradition as "an authority".'

Again, this could hardly be more wrong. Augustine wouldn't have thought that the reconciliation of Neo-Platonism with Christianity would have synthesised all knowledge. What's more, in terms of appreciating a harmony between the two, such that Neo-Platonism could be seen to throw light on Christianity, just as Christianity could be translated into Neo-Platonist terms, Augustine was hardly first to the banquet: among those who preceded him, Origen was probably the single most important figure; it is, frankly, ludicrous to speak of an 'Augustinian project'.

I don't know where he's getting this idea of Aristotle being thought of as an 'authority' in late Antiquity, because of the use early Christians made of his systems of logic. The fact is that Aristotle had fallen from fashion in that era, such that his influence was felt only indirectly, through the writings of others who'd been -- themselves often indirectly -- influenced by him. It's true that people such as Boethius translated his logical works, such as Categories and On Interpretation, but they don't seem to have been in wide circulation in the west, though there was a much greater cultural continuity in the east. Insofar as his ideas filtered through into the western Christian worldview, it was his metaphysical ones that had the greatest -- albeit indirect -- impact!

Rejected by some, accepted by many...

Of course, they hit the Christian West with rather more direct force centuries later:

'Later, Aristotle’s metaphysics – with, for example, its eternity theory contradicting creationism – reached Christians via Ibn Rushd. Christian philosophers now had the dilemma of rejecting Aristotle’s metaphysics, without undermining his "authority". Aquinas attempted this, partly by arguing that some issues can only be decided by divine revelation, but his compromise was rejected (by both conservative Augustinian Christians and strict Aristotelians).'

This is the kind of stuff that's tricky to deal with, as its wrongness is so subtle as to look right. It is true that the recovery of Aristotle in the west changed everything -- indeed, it's quite probable that it was the single most important intellectual phenomenon of the last millennium -- and it's also true that Christians found his ideas quite a challenge, and the likes of William of Auvergne grappled with him at length. That said, they never thought of him as in some way divinely inspired, so it was wholly plausible for him to be right on some matters and wrong on others, especially where his premises were flawed. 

As for Aquinas, while he did more to show how Aristotle could be harmonised with Christian thought than anyone else had done, it's a tad disingenuous to suggest that he just fudged things. He's philosophically agnostic, for instance, on the question of whether the Universe has always been here or not: he says that philosophically speaking, Aristotle could be right, but that there's no way of being certain; however, as with the early Christians who felt the likes of Plato would only get us so far, so he says that only Divine Revelation can let us know for certain.

This isn't a fudge. Indeed, it's entirely correct. Left to philosophy and science, and given how time is itself a physical phenomenon -- a property of the Universe, it is impossible to tell whether the Universe has always existed or not. Even if we can identify a moment when our Universe began -- a Big Bang, if you will -- it's still conceivable that ours is a daughter or successor universe, and that the Big Bang had followed a Big Crunch, say. This may be an area for intriguing speculation, but it's not empirically testable, and as such is beyond what science can tell us.

Divine Revelation, on the other hand, indeed tells us that the Universe had a beginning, and as Aquinas argues that Revelation is itself trustworthy -- that's another argument -- so he trusts it. He believes, as a matter of Faith, that the Universe began and that it has not always existed, but he believes that that Faith is itself reasonable.

This isn't a compromise, and though it was opposed by those in the Church at the time, it caught on to such an extent that eventually Aquinas became almost an 'official theologian' of the Catholic Church. It's certainly nonsense to say, baldly, that 'his compromise was rejected'.

Technically, Nugent's right to say that, of course, in that some indeed rejected what Aquinas argued, but on that basis one could as easily claim that the theories of Newton, Darwin, Mendel, Lemaître, and Einstein were rejected. They were, of course, but they were also accepted, and it'd be more than a bit disingenuous to gloss over that all-important fact.


Could Mr Nugent wrap things up in a more hackneyed way?
And with that, the oldest canards of all appear...

'Christianity has always been good at absorbing parts of the customs and beliefs of other cultures, in order to make it easier for other people to become Christians. Early Christianity combined Jewish traditions with a god that had a similar virgin birth to other gods of the time. Existing seasonal festivals became Christmas, Easter and All Saints celebrations. We could perhaps reverse the quote of Augustine, and say of some Christian theologians: "Change a few phrases, and they could be pagans."'

Well, yes, we could do that, Michael, except we'd be wrong to do so. Early Christianity couldn't have combined Jewish traditions with beliefs about virgin births in other religions at the time, as there weren't any, contrary to popular misunderstanding. Despite popular beliefs, Christmas doesn't seem to have been an existing seasonal festival at all, instead seeming to have been located on the calendar based on fairly elaborate calculations from Jewish tradition. Easter was sort of a seasonal festival, in that as the Gospel makes clear it happened around Passover, but its roots certainly weren't pagan; like Christmas, they were Jewish, and the only people who think otherwise are those who twist and misapply Bede's comments about Eostre in England. And though the original date of All Saints -- 13 May -- coincided with a much earlier Roman festival propitiating the malevolent dead, there's not even a vague consensus that their relationship was in any sense a causal one.

Just one more of these, I think, assuming Nugent's trying to match Mackey round-for-round.

Nugent's Nonsense: Spilt Ink in the Irish Times, Part 3

I'm increasingly convinced that either the Irish Times has a surplus of paper and ink or else Michael Nugent knows where some very embarassing bodies are buried, because his latest piece on atheism is even worse than his previous ones, and it's hardly doing the paper any credit to have that wasting space on its pages.

Entitled 'Atheists and religious alike seek to identify foundation of morality', this week's article addresses the issue of morality, and soon gets to the heart of the matter: either morality is something subjective that we make up or else it is something objective that exists independently of us; in practical terms, he says, this matters little as we all have the same task, that being to decide together what we believe to be right and wrong.

I'm not sure whether this is of quite such practical irrelevance as Nugent feels, not least because if morality is an objective reality, rather than a mere matter of opinion, then this invites serious questions of how such an intangible thing could be an objective reality. I'm also not sure how he envisages us getting together to decide what we all believe to be right and wrong: if people on the far side of the world decide it's perfectly moral for them to kill baby girls while they're still in the womb, who are we to tell them that this is morally wrong unless we believe that there is an objective morality which transcends cultures and fashions?

Enter the Straw Men...

Still, dodging the fact that a transcendent morality is an idea with serious implications, and that an absence of transcendent morality would reduce morality to the basic and toothless principle that it's nice to be nice, Nugent pooters on:

'So what criteria should we use? Most religious people believe that their god (small "g") dictates what is right and wrong. Most atheists believe that we have to work it out ourselves.'

Yes, there's that category mistake again, resolutely confusing the ideas of 'God' and 'god' just like he's done in the last two articles. You'd really think that by now somebody would have pointed out to him how different the two concepts are. Or else you'd think that if somebody had pointed this out, he'd have understood. Maybe he's just not very bright.

That aside, though, watch how Mr Nugent lines up his straw men. The idea that most religious people believe that their deity dictates what's right and wrong and that they don't have to work it out themselves -- aside from spiking the argument very quickly and very conveniently on one horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma -- is complete tosh. Religious people, even when believing that they've somehow received moral guidance from their deity, nonetheless have to spend a lot of time wrestling with moral issues. That's why moral theology tends to be a huge field of study. Matters aren't simple, and most religious people are smart enough to realise this.

What's more, Christians tend to recognise that all of us do and can work out morality for ourselves, with the proviso that at some level God defines our morality and empowers our moral behaviour, regardless of whether or not we acknowledge his role in this. We believe there's a Natural Law, a transcendent morality to which we should all subscribe, and that we're gifted with the faculties necessary to discern this transcendent morality. Look at Romans 1:19-20, which says: 'For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made,' and 1 John 4:19, which recognises our moral behaviour as an expression of God's love 'We love, because he first loved us'.

Nugent's line that religious people believe their god dictates what's right and wrong doesn't really hold up for Christians, as it happens; I can't speak for devotees of other religions, but Christians have always recognised God as not merely being a being who dictates what's right and wrong, but a being who is the defining expression of rightness. That's what Aquinas's 'fourth way' is about: that we recognise an ultimate standard of goodness, which we call 'God'. This is the running theme of 1 John, as it happens: not that God tells us what's good, but that God is love, and that as such all goodness is an expression of him, empowered by his love.

Nugent's First Difficulty

As far as Michael's concerned, there are two problems with the religious view of morality -- or the religious view as he understands it, which is of course not quite the same thing: 

'Firstly, different people believe that different gods are telling them that different things are right and wrong. Even when people believe in the same god, they often believe that this same god is telling them that different things are right and wrong.'

The first sentence doesn't really work, not least because it rests on the idea of different gods. Religious people tend to believe there's only really one God, and that he communicates just one morality; if we differ on God's nature or indeed on the nature of the morality he communicates, this is merely because people have misunderstood, for one reason or another.

And no, this isn't a new way of thinking. The Romans did it all the time: they didn't think a Roman god led away the souls of the dead Romans and a German one led away the souls of dead Germans; they instead thought Mercury and Wodin were the same deity, worshipped under different names. Likewise they didn't think there were lots of different sun gods or thunder gods, handing over duties when in someone else's territory; they assumed a basic pantheon which was understood differently from culture to culture.

As for the next sentence, all Nugent's really saying is that religious people have to think about what morality entails, and what might constitute moral or immoral courses of action. I'd hardly call this a problem. It's only a problem if you take the view, as Mr Nugent appears to do, that religion is something that should stop our thought; the reality, in my experience, is that it gives our thoughts a reliable foundation.


Michael's Second Difficulty
Nugent's next point really brings home the significance of the category error he's been making throughout this series:

'Secondly, there is the question that Plato raised in his dialogue between Socrates and Euthyphro: if you believe in a god, what criteria does your god use to decide what is right and wrong? Do gods cause random torture to be wrong, based on an arbitrary decision, or do they identify that random torture is wrong, based on independent criteria? If it is the former, then they could just as easily have decided that random torture is right, and so morality is arbitrary. If it is the latter, then there is a foundation for morality that exists independently of gods.'

The Euthyphro dilemma asks a very good question in the context of gods, such as the Greek Olympians or the Norse Aesir, but it's a false dilemma when dealing with the concept of God, as understood by pretty much every religious person who might read the Irish Times. Remember Aquinas's fourth way? God is the ultimate standard of goodness, or, as the New Testament tells us God is truth and God is love.As such, Christians don't believe that God either decrees or discerns what is right; rather, God embodies -- for what of a better term -- rightness, and rightness is an expression of God.


Dodging a Bullet
Look at that second problem Michael thought he could see in religious approaches to moral questions. Embracing the false dilemma that the Euthyphro proposes for Christians, Nugent says that gods, if they exist, must either decree what is  right, based on arbitrary criteria, or discern what is right, based on independent criteria. This, of course, is far less of a problem for God than it is for us. We're faced with this question: do we decide for ourselves what we decree good and bad, or do we discern it based on some independent criteria? And how does Michael Nugent express this? Watch...

'This brings religious people into the same place as atheists in seeking to identify the foundation of morality. Many atheists believe that the best criteria to use is: what effect does this action have on the well-being or suffering of sentient beings?'

Yep, he dodges the question of whether morality might, in fact, be wholly arbitrary and instead assumes that morality is objective and has a foundation which we can identify. This isn't something that just can be assumed if you're an honest atheist: I know quite a few and they are quite open about the fact that, in principle, it makes no sense for them to claim that there is an objective and binding morality. It's Hume's famous is--ought problem: you cannot construct an 'ought' from a universe consisting solely of 'is'. Bertrand Russell used to lament this fact, saying that he wanted to be able to condemn as immoral the actions of the Nazis, but his philosophy didn't allow him to do so.

And so, having evaded the very serious possibility that there may in fact be no objectively binding and discernible morality, and that what we call morality may simply be a cultural phenomenon, the collective names for a whole matrix of fashionable social codes differing according to time and place, he turns to Sam Harris as the voice of authority.


Sam Harris clearly trumps Plato
It's bizarre, isn't it? Last week we had him babbling about Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking's latest work, while this week it's the Euthyphro Dilemma -- misunderstood -- and Sam Harris. It's as though he has a shelf entitled 'Stuff That Backs Me Up'. I wonder how much he's read that challenges him. How familiar is he with the work of scientists who find religious belief and science entirely compatible? Has he read Aquinas, perhaps with the help of Edmund Feser, say? Has he read any Plato other than the Euthyphro?  How familiar is he with Aristotle? Given what he goes on to say, it really looks as though he's read no Aristotle and only looked at Plato with a view to dragooning him in support of his own views...

'Many atheists believe that the best criteria to use is: what effect does this action have on the well-being or suffering of sentient beings? The neurobiologist Sam Harris examines this in his recent book, The Moral Landscape. He argues that the worst possible world is one in which all conscious beings are suffering to the maximal extent for no reason. He argues that, in principle, every step away from that world is right, and every step towards that world is wrong.'

Now, in The Moral Landscape Harris argues that there are indeed moral facts, relevant to the well-being of conscious beings, and that these facts can be discerned by taking the consequentialist line that the moral argument is that which maximises the most well-being. Leaving aside the huge question of what constitutes consciousness, it's notable that Harris makes no effort in the book to define well-being. Given that this is the crucial variable in his hypothesis, that's quite an oversight, and it's striking that Mr Nugent doesn't seem to be aware -- or at the very least to be bothered -- by it.

That aside, Harris basically reduces morality to a crude question of what produces the most good, something that'd have caused Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to raise sceptical eyebrows. The fact that Nugent seems not remotely uneasy with this suggests that he's hardly read Plato at all, which leaves me wondering why he felt so confident wheeling out the Euthyphro dilemma, though it does explain why he was oblivious to its irrelevance to the question he was asking. The Euthyphro Dilemma isn't a rhetorical trick, after all; it's a serious question, that has an important place in Platonic thought, and Mr Nugent really should do something to find out what Plato thought about natural goodness in general, perhaps by reading the Charmides, the Lysis, and of course both the Symposium and the Republic.

And then he should look at Aristotle, to figure out where Aristotle disagrees with Plato, and why. He might like Aristotle.

That's not the only problem with Harris' thesis, of course. One of the major problems with it is that he effectively denies that we have free will, something which is necessary to the whole concept of moral action. Nobody in their right mind ever tries to argue that the weather is either moral or immoral, save insofar as it can be useful, because weather is a physical phenomenon, wholly incapable of controlling itself.

Harris tries to get round this by talking of the illusion of the illusion of free will, but nothing he says refutes the idea that if we're purely and exclusively physical beings then our thoughts must likewise be purely and exclusively physical phenomena, subject to all the laws of physics. If he's right, then our wills are not free; they might be free from coercion, but they're not even marginally free from causation, and there's no way we can claim that 'we' control them, as 'we' are ourselves nothing more than physical phenomena. Thought, will, and identity: all three, to a materialist worldview, are simply physical phenomena, no more meaningful than the wind in the trees.


And Religion is Bad because?
Nugent takes the view that in light of Harris' argument, religion distracts us from discerning right and wrong because, he says:

'... religious commands are not based on maximising the well-being or minimising the suffering of sentient beings.  Instead, they corrupt actual real-life morality with imaginary ideas of supernatural souls and imaginary consequences in an imaginary afterlife.'

He seems to be opposed to religion because it's not a narrow consequentialism, but I really don't think that works, not least because there are all manner of moral dilemmas that Harris' thesis won't help us in, not least because he never defines, and thus cannot quantify 'well-being'. Saying that imaginary ideas of souls, consequences, and an afterlife corrupt the argument is a fair point as long as it's the case that such things are imaginary; if they're not imaginary, then taking them into account clearly doesn't vitiate morality in any sense.

Frankly, even if we take the view that we can't be sure, then the jury's out. Religious ideas must have been responsible for at least as much good as evil. Take, as one obvious example, how the American Declaration of Independence declares, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.' The equality of man, and man's most basic rights are rooted in the idea of man as the creation of God. Our modern conceptions of human rights are based on Enlightenment values of such, which were in turn based upon older religious values, notably the key one that we are all made in God's image.

Look at the Greeks, for instance, and you won't find a trace of such an idea. The whole idea of universal rights is, in essence, a religious one, and is, more specifically, a Christian one. Others have adopted it, and treated it as an axiom in its own right, but good luck deriving such a principle in a purely material universe.


A Facile Contrast
He goes on:

'Certainly, the Christian Bible distracts us from identifying right and wrong, because the Christian god conveys instructions that we intuitively know are wrong. The Bible says we should love our neighbour, but stone him to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath.'

I've already talked in my first piece about Mr Nugent and Atheist Ireland, about how this leaves me wondering whether Mr Nugent is even aware that not all Christians use the same Bible, so I won't get into that here, barring to growl at this 'god' nonsense again.

More importantly, there's something rather pernicious in how he orders the two Biblical injunctions. Seven of the eight Biblical instances of the phrase 'love your neighbour' are from the New Testament, unlike the Old Testament reference in Numbers to a man being stoned for gathering sticks on the Sabbath. The sentence would read rather differently if its elements were more honestly placed in their proper order.

The Old Testament is basically about two things: what's wrong with the world, and how God readied the Jewish people for the coming of Christ. As such, Old Testament morality is often best understood as the morality of an army on the march, where discipline is everything, utterly necessary to maintain the cohesion of the group while it's en route to its destination; I say that not merely theologically, but historically and anthropologically too, and from having studied the seemingly trivial concerns of modern armies and how they build esprit de corps. Extreme punishments and rulings over when and how certain actions can be carried out fit naturally into that model. It's in that light we need to think of the injunction against working on the Sabbath.

The New Testament, however, changes things. It's been a precept of the Church from the beginning that the Old Testament must be read with reference to the New Testament, holding that the meaning of the Scriptures cannot be discerned save when understood as a unity within the Church, read by the light of Christ. Jesus expanded the definition of neighbour beyond a narrow Jewish identity, and also opened up the Sabbath by saying that it was made for man, and man was not made for it. Contrasts such as this can't simply be set up to be mocked: Christians, as a rule, have throughout history been smart enough to notice apparent paradoxes.


And Finally...
Michael wraps up by saying:

'Religion assumes that man is incapable of making moral decisions without supernatural guidance. But we are. It is a skill, and our understanding of it evolves as we practise empathy and reciprocity.'

A fairly sweeping generalisation about religion there, don't you think? Of course, 'religion' assumes no such thing, because religion is a word we use to describe a range of practices and beliefs and so forth; it's not a person, or even a corporate entity, capable of assuming anything.

That aside, Michael sets up a spectacularly false contrast, wholly misrepresenting religion to suit his own purposes.

Certainly it can be said that Christians have always held that we can make moral decisions without guidance through any kind of supernatural revelation. The basic moral law is part of nature, as I've said, such that we can discern it through our reason, and we are all able to love, being empowered to do so by God's own love: we love, because he loved first.