The Fascism of Knowing Stuff

WARNING – EXPECT AWFUL GRAMMAR (HASTE TO POST OVERTOOK REQUIREMENT TO FOLLOW THE RULES OF LANGUAGE, SORRY)

Last weekend I spent some of my time drinking beer and talking to Sir Peter Blake about Kendo Nagasaki. This weekend I spent an hour biting into a pen like a shire horse as my brain failed to comprehend a journalist I was sitting next to. I was at QEDcon, on a panel entrusted with the subject “Is Science the New Religion?”

It is the sort of title popular with media folk, like “is comedy the new rock and roll?” or “is knitting the new psoriasis?”

The answer to “is science the new religion?” is obviously yes, so long as you redefine religion as “a self-correcting, evidence based system of exploring the universe which attempts to unearth the least wrong laws and theories that can explain what exists or might exist whilst accepting that room must always be left for doubt and further enquiry”.
We went off topic pretty soon when the journalist explained that politicians, crippled by uncertainty, were now led by behind the scenes scientists. Whether true or not, the actual evidence offered seemed scant. Something about secondhand smoking and something else about education policy. From my view it seemed that the most that was actually being offered was the idea that MPs might cherry pick data to justify the policies they wished to put into place. This seemed very different to the notion that a muscular cabal of scientists are leading the nation into a dictatorship of evidence under the heavy hand of advanced critical thinking. I won’t dwell on my disagreements with the journalist’s position, hopefully a recording will be available soon and you can make your own judgements and throw a virtual egg or tomato at me via the means of futuristic communication.

Though I spent much of time either startle-eyed or furiously furrowed, as if an invisible Duchenne was experimenting on my face, there was one opinion expressed that continues to haunt me. There is a gaggle that seems to consider that expertise is an unfair advantage, that all opinions are equal; an idea that people who are experts in climate change, drugs or engineering are given unfair preference just because they spend much of their life studying these things. I do not think it is fascism that heart surgeons seem to have the monopoly of placing hands in a chest cavity and fiddling with an aorta. Though I have my own opinions on driving, I have decided to let others do it, as I have never taken a lesson. I do not consider myself oppressed by the driving majority. I own an umbrella and a thermometer, but I do not believe this is enough to place me on a climate change advisory body.

I attempted to explain to the journalist that the world we live in has never been more complex or filled with things that require work and patience to understand. Though democracy lovers may shiver at the idea, the penalty for living in the civilisation we currently walk through is that we must sometimes accept our ignorance and defer to others. We can hope that they might be trusted, that the heart surgeon is sober and the climate scientists isn’t swayed by the desire for fame on the front cover of Vanity Fair kissing a Polar Bear.

The journalist suggested this was the kind of fascistic thinking that held up women’s suffrage and the education of the poor. My belief that we are not always equipped to make the best decisions is apparently the alibi that has always been used by people like me who wish to oppress “the common man”. I believe that people should be given as many tools as possible to understand as many complexities of the world as possible, to be armed with knowledge. As William H Calvin wrote, “knowledge is a vaccine”.
But to blithely suggest that that the world is not complex, that expertise is not only not required but a form of oppression, seems to be a position that can only be taken if you are blinkered when progressing through 21st century society. Go back one hundred years and I believe that pretty much any tool or device in your house could be repaired by you with a little ingenuity and swearing. Look at what you have around you now. Look at the device you are reading this on or your television or mobile phone or digital radio, when they cease to function correctly I wonder how many of you would confidently turn to your toolbox, uncover the technology within and effectively repair it. When I picked up the journalist’s ipad, something which seemed to alarm him as if I was a Hyde-ish brute (and I almost was) and declared “mend this”, no answer came forth. Go back a couple of hundred years and there was something closer to a democracy of experts, the downside of this was that medical people couldn’t cure you, the streets had considerably more human excrement in them and life was often cold and short. The price of technology, comfort and hopefully greater understanding of the universe and our place in it is an acceptance that we may not know best in all events and common sense, a hammer and a bag of leeches may not get you through it all.

We should not trust people just because they are experts, but if we are not prepared to put the time and effort in to understand something, to take a step beyond that column we read in The Guardian or “what my friend Phil told me”, then we are placed in a position where must defer and try and make the best decision we can as to who we should defer to. If you are really interested in an issue, then you must take time to read and investigate it, to learn how to ask the best questions, to interrogate with interest, open-mindedness and rigour. A good society, a healthy democracy, is not based on complacency and whining.

FOOTNOTE (added 15/4)
This hour continues to haunt me. I have not felt this exasperated since I appeared on a TV debate show with Stephen Green of Christian Voice. I regret (indeed I had forgotten) saying “you’re a fucking idiot” to the journalist near the conclusion of the event. Insomnia, coffee, exasperation, and an audience certainly didn’t turn me into Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind.

here is someone else who watched the peculiar show – http://violettacrisis.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/eight-signs-of-bogus-historical.html

I am currently on tour – Hertford, Finchley, Salford and Reading plus many more soon http://www.robinince.com

also new stand up DVD, complete with Brian Cox commentary, is available from http://www.gofasterstripe.com

Most comments will be approved, even the spiteful ones if I am in the mood, though this will probably not be done very quickly due to tour commitments and wifi scarcity.

140 Characters in Search of an Audience

There has never been a better time to be self-obsessed. There are so many ways of try to get others obsess about that self through the library turned narcissist’s polished mirror of the world wide web. This is why I am taking a break from twitter. What was once the sluice for thoughts I could not volubly share due to my solitary touring lifestyle, a safeguard to prevent the wax in my ears shooting under the pressure of my inner babbling, has been my latest alibi for wasting my time. I am easily distracted by the inconsequential, most of my life has been spent deftly avoiding a sense of achievement, and twitter has become the most recent time robber. Once death takes me by surprise, I won’t have a gravestone, just a twitter feed #justash&boneshards.

What should be throwaway lines become obsessions. “how many times was that RTed?” “what was wrong with that tweet? it remains without response or RT.” “ah good, when I should be attempting sleep or, at the very least, lying still and staring upwards while contemplating my toes, I am instead arguing with someone who has misunderstood my intentions”.

Twitter has become a depressing reminder of the cognitive dissonance that keeps us all presuming we are sane. Here are the critical thinkers who lose all of their faculties when the criticism is of their pet ideologies, the writers I admire who RT people saying they are clever or handsome or hilarious, me excessively reminding people I am playing Aberystwyth, Aberdeen or Leeds or punctuating a sentence into a new and obtuse unintended meaning.

I also like twitter a great deal. I like the communication you can have with audiences and people you admire, this more than makes up for the trolls and sniggerers, the po-faced and the puerile defecators of slurs and taunts.

Now I will place my medicinal ego patch on my forearm and see how long I can stay away. Time to read someone else’s book rather than checking how many people are reading my sentence.

oh internet, why are you so alluring, engrossing and yet so frequently pointless.

My Life Without Odin Barely Defines Me

Take this as you will, that is the way of things. You have probably read this before, written by other people in a more pertinent and concise manner, but if you have a minute or two and nothing better to do…

 

About a month ago, someone asked if I felt i was a bit zealous with my atheism. I asked them for some evidence of my zealotry (yes, always a stickler for evidence, damn these scientists muttering in my mind) and they politely backed down as they realised that my zealotry was based on presumptions. 

This may be due to my Christmas shows, Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless people, which a few people seem to imagine is some rally where a gathering of excited atheists strip naked, smear themselves in the offal of dismembered papal emissaries and scream banshee-like as the high priest Richard Dawkins rears up on a mighty robot horse made of science. As those who have attended will know, it’s really a variety show with some skewing towards experiments with giant test tubes and a little laser harp jazz. I used to pop up on discussion shows as “the atheist”, but soon gave that up due to the temple throbbing lasting for days after the underwhelming televisual event. 

 

Late last year I wrote about my experience at Greenbelt http://robinince.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/uh-oh-a-liberal-atheist-writes-about-liberal-christians-this-cant-end-well/ and I may well repeat what I typed then, though not intentionally (the blog is free, please feel free to leave when you want).

 

I have always felt the term “militant atheist” is rather silly, a simple two word ad hominem attack, like “liberal intelligentsia” , “media elite” or “mule fondler”, a summing up of a character that means you can ignore what she or he has to say.  

Lately, I have started to fret a little that some atheists see their position of godlessness as the defining feature of their personality and agenda. Some seem to see the mere act of believing in any form of higher, seemingly mythicaI power renders that human an intellectual elf. I was amused that when I tweeted “I don’t mind these atheists, but these militant ones who don’t believe in any god at all seem to be going a bit far”, I received some furious tweets admonishing me with a fury such that the virtual spittle seemed  to spring vividly from my computer screen. This is the risk of RTs, once the context of the person tweeting has been lost, people don’t bother to stop and check before unleashing their unhappiness. I was amused, facetiously perhaps, that people who prided themselves on their rationality and ability to see through deity myths, did not take the thoughtful/sceptical approach with everything and had not thought to check the source or intention. That night I tweeted “being an atheist doesn’t mean you’re smarter. Being religious doesn’t mean you are more moral, being drunk doesn’t mean you’re Dylan Thomas”. It’s the sort of tweet that suggests I have been drinking and become loose with my fingers. Most people took it in the spirit I meant it; being an atheist alone doesn’t mean you must be smarter than your local cleric or pious bell ringer, just as their act of taking communion or pointing people to pews did not mean they were breathing the Olympian airs of a heightened morality . A few did suggest that being an atheist meant a higher chance of intellect and offered surveys that predicted as much. I read most surveys, whether they are about intelligence of the faithless or how the higher percentage of charitable works done by seventh day adventists, with my eyebrows arched. 

 

For a while I have worried there is a rise in the superior atheist, though I hope that is not true of most I know. I believe there can be a lack of imagination and experience amongst some atheists. We can gloriously bathe in the reprehensible examples of faith inspired misogynists, homophobes, terrorists and other thugs, and ignore the religious people who amble around us, filled with doubt, questions, compassions and a non-dogmatic view of the world. There are cultures and countries, where the repugnant, muscular hand of organised religion manipulates the populace. There are people who embrace dogmas, religious or political, and will refuse to view them with a critical eye, whatever the evidence might seem to be; old Maoists or Catholic die-hards who, while eagerly criticising other persuasions, will remain energetically blind to “their own sides” shortfalls. I am sure I have and will fail to notice my own shortcomings, while criticising those I see as opponents for exactly the actions I have been guilty of. It seems that is part of the human survival mechanism, though I hope I am becoming more vivacious in my eye for personal hypocrisy. 

 

 

I’ve gone off the point. I’ve been drinking. 

 

Free thinking can exist in a mind that also believes in some form of god. The Quakers, Unitarians, Anglicans, Reform Jews and others I have spoken to are not rigorously bound to text and hellfire preacher. Ask them to define their god and you will hear many and varied descriptions of what this figure, cloud or energy might be. As unnerving as this might be to a few non-believers, I have found many religious people whose beliefs are not a stumbling block to free thinking, it’s just that on top of ideas of particle physics, cosmology and evolution, they have a further belief that is liquid but present. 

 

The defining belief of my life is not atheism. I do not wake up and, when faced with the first quandary of the day, think “what would Sam Harris do?” (even when it comes to waiting time at airport security)

Atheism is a by-product of my other thoughts and beliefs. I attempt to be rational, hope to be reasonably freethinking despite the rapid flow of misinformation from screens and papers, and I hope to avoid dogmatism. 

Discounting people because they are religious. an atheist arrogance. I belief that by dint of not believing in some form of higher power, you must be smarter than your nearest cleric. 

 

I have reached a point of realising that the limits to my own knowledge are such that I might as well give up on the idea of being right, but that I can at least strive to be less wrong about things. This is not one of those statements that says there is truth in everything and so cultural relativism rules, there are many degrees of wrong. 

 

I have stung my hand on a nettle.

Well, dip the sting in milk, that will sort it out.

 

or 

 

Cut the hand off before the nettle satan transform you into furious vegetation.

 

Both may be wrong, well, you see what I mean. 

 

If I am an atheist because I see myself as a freethinker, then I should take that freethinking as far as thinking freely about religious people, and the breadths of people and beliefs that entails. An air of superiority solely due to godlessness sits uncomfortably with me. I will attempt to judge people by their actions and thoughts, not a label, which at least in my experience, seems far loser than some presumptions.

new DVD – Happiness Through Science is now available – includes 90 minute commentary with Brian Cox http://www.gofasterstripe.com is place to browse.

New tour has begun – Brighton, Maidenhead, Dublin, Belfast, Wolverhampton sold out, many more to come from Glasgow to Swansea, Spalding to Falmouth http://www.robinince.com

Thrashing At My Own Reflection Like a Man Stitched Monster

In case you have never read my blog before, be wary that I just hastily type it out in some form of public transport. It is the scraping off the top of my brain with no editing, spelling, grammar or logic check.

 

“if others examined themselves as I do they would find themselves as I do, full of insanity and nonsense” Montaigne

The internet has opened my eyes to too many people’s 140 character thoughts and selfish swipes below newspaper articles. I fear that the world wide web, this magnificent tool for the dissemination of information and encouragement of human contact without the embarrassment of having to look it in the eye, has made me a sociopath.  To access spite in the past you could look at a newspaper letters page, overhear it on a bus or take a look into some of the mean-spirited thoughts that had populated your own mind. Now it is wherever a wifi signal and a laptop lie, and even if you do not see it, you are aware that a finite but multitudinous number of monkeys are typing something unruly, foul or threatening in the houses and office cupboards of the world. Many of us have become obsessed by the importance of our own opinions and, thanks to the internet, we can always find at least one person who agrees with us, thus confirming that we are right. 

 

I am guilty. I have sold my opinions on the past. For a couple of years I was one of the smears of bacteria in the petri dish of TV list shows. In my naivety and, more importantly, my desperation, I imagined that saying things about Pamela Anderson’s sex tape or The Marx Brothers would earn me the next ladder rung to success and seat sales. One Christmas I realised that for 5 nights in a row, people could find themselves looking at my gesticulating face and wondering aloud,”who is this man who keeps ruining these clips with his interruptions”. TV reviewer Ian Hyland wrote that Christmas TV had been overly populated with clip shows with “Iain Lee and Robin Ince” and I realised the time had come to stop peddling my memories for £200 a shot (“We’ll Remember Blake’s 7 Wholesale”) mainly because I had no idea why  was doing it beyond habit and remuneration. The list shows are endlessly repackaged, and I am notified by tweets that my Dorian Gray is on again while I remain in the attic (yes, I am being loose with literary accuracy). 

 

I was then elevated to opportunities like Newsnight Review and given the chance to raise my eyebrows as Peter Hitchens was antsy about Philip Pullman. That stopped after I decided I wouldn’t cross a picket line. As I have moved further into middle age I have become increasingly uncomfortable with television. I decided against Question Time because I thought the space I would take up could be occupied by someone who knew what they were talking about. I am also a weaker human than Mary Beard and would not take well to having slurs and family threats hurled my way. Whether they would debate the capacity of my vagina too, I have no idea. I have taken a more primitive view of television, realising that the tribes who feared the theft of their soul by photography may have been on to something. Whatever you are on television, that’s what people thing you are. 

My last toe dips into television were a Stewart Lee produced stand up show and a panel show. I was unhappy with my performance on the night of the stand up show and went into  grey mood for a couple of months knowing I had armed those who would enjoy deriding me, while the panel show was apparently edited in such a way that it appeared to be like a William Burroughs exercise of literary cut up. Since then I have turned down the oddities offered to me, finally realising at 43 that TV is not a prerequisite to existence. If you perform, but no one is there to film it, have you made a sound?

 

I have not retired from forming opinions, I am just trying to take Neil Postman’s advice and cutting them down by a third, or maybe even a half. I still liberally project my thoughts when I tour, and then I can be taken to task in the bar afterwards. 

 

I am trying to be more careful with my opinions nowadays, but i am afraid I am still having them, I am just restricting where I release them, but…

 

To be continued (I have promised to keep all my blogs under 800 words, so splitting them up rather than learning how to edit)

My imminent tour starts soon, this is because it is imminent. Belfast, Wolverhampton, Spalding, Dublin and Eastleigh get early visits. http://www.robinince.com is place of dates.

the end of the world overran

What started as pub conversation over bitter and chips a little over a year ago, ended at Hammersmith Apollo at 23.32 on 21st December. It had a running time of 242 minutes and was possibly the live show of 2012 most likely to give you deep vein thrombosis. My shows have reputation for being overly long, though I call it value for money and a test of your character. One week beforehand the stage manager had suggested that, taking all into account, the show should be over by 10.30pm. I don’t think either of us really believed that, but it was a comforting illusion around Christmas time. So the idea was that there was no better time to celebrate rationalism, science, wizardry and angry music than on the day when the world was, as it so often is, predicted to come to its end.
So here, for those who were there and perhaps a few who weren’t, is the order of events of Brian and Robin’s End of the World show. (links are to original works not footage of the event itself)
An offstage ramble between Brian Cox and me about the beginning of the universe led into Scroobius Pip performing Thou Shalt Always Kill . He was accompanied by our house band, Trad Max, who provided the sort of trad jazz that eases us into the apocalypse.
Brian Cox then went into the pulpit. Yes, we had a pulpit. With people moaning, “but isn’t science a religion”, we thought we’d treat it as such for one night only – a religion that is self-correcting and which contains priests hankering to disprove the sacred texts. His readings included a little bit of this of course. Take it as read that I waffled between acts and asked What is the biggest bear? and Why Don’t women have beards?
Then our first and only self-proclaimed wizard Alan Moore talked of paranoid possibilities of our cosmological existence. Then it was into the biology module of the night with Professor Steve Jones on Darwin (he loves this clip ) and Aoife Mclysagt on figs. here she is not on figs . Then it was Stewart Lee in the guise of the Mayan god of death (not dissimilar to a gothic Ken Dodd) followed by a song from Grace Petrie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GntVz_VzW6o
Physicist Jon Butterworth talked of tooth fairies and the ATLAS experiment, then Brian sat in with the Phil Jeays band. Marcus Du Sautoy took us through the mathematics of the evening, a song from science teacher Johnny Berliner then it’s was Jim Al-Khalili with some Feynman. The Festival of the Spoken Nerd did something superb with overhead projectors which led to Adam Rutherford introducing this with live accompaniment (and hence backstage chaos) by 65 Days of Static An interval already, how strange, we are only two hours in.
David McAlmont and Guy Davies treated us to Christmas song, but here is another one of theirs in the guise of Fingersnap http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCAt6AHXRdc
Brian came back on to talk gravitational pulls, Hubble and Pale Blue Dots followed by Simon Singh talking of the enigma machine, delightfully there was a spontaneous round of applause for Alan Turing.
Then last minute guests, Evan Harris and Hugh Grant re-enacted Evan’s exchange with the Queen’s homeopath. Ben Goldacre astonished me by keeping to time, Josie Long read from her Charles Darwin diary and whooped for Bromley. Then, by now my mind addled by a day of organisational chaos, I accidentally introduced Kate Tempest ahead of time. She is a phenomenal spoken word performer. Oh and somewhere amongst this Steve Coogan popped on and introduced a Hacked Off video.
Then Brian skyped Eric Idle who urgently needed the cricket scores.
Jon Culshaw and Chris Lintott remembered Patrick Moore. We were nearly there, we really were.
Ben Miller read from his diary (also available in the Christmas New Statesman edited by Brian and I – here’s our editorial that has created more fracas than I imagined http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/sci-tech/2012/12/brian-cox-and-robin-ince-politicians-must-not-elevate-mere-opinion-over-sc )
Andrea Sella brought on a test tube taller than a human and made things bang and stink, THAT’S CHEMISTRY.
Richard Wiseman shocked the audience with lewd images that were revealed to be less lewd piglet photos to educate us about the pattern seeking nature of the human brain and then Dara O Briain rounded it off (almost) with some stand up about the film 2012.
Finally I took to the pulpit and read Richard Feynman’s “I an atom in the universe, a universe of atoms” as Brian played Vangelis, before seeking a new philosophy of life demanding that things must get better must get better. And so the angels and d:ream took to the stage, and with a flurry of pyros and a disco ball, the entire ensemble ended up backing singing Things Can Only Get Better.
And that’s variety. Then we had a drink.
All profits are going to Medecins Sans Frontieres, the Sophie Lancaster Charity and the Manchester University Science Scholarship fund.
I am touring my new show – Importance of Being Interested from February – dates here http://www.robinince.com There was no video or TV recording of the End of the world show, but we have plans to create something, maybe even a meeting of art and science, with the audio.
Happy Christmas

THIS POINTLESS SPAT

the below post is a right mess, so you can go to this Storify instead. Thank you Gia Milinovich

For the easily bored, here is why James Delingpole is attacking me this time.

You can ignore the majority of links as they are not actually links, merely time (ie 12h) and “expand” of twitter and lead to nowhere.

I post this in case he decides to write about the events. Here is what happened without edit but occasional interruption from me. At no point did I name him or direct anything to him until he entered the conversation.

I saw this on Mo Ansar’s timeline

Absolute Beginner ‏@cake_not_hate

http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/james-delingpole/8688061/treating-islam-with-special-reverence-is-cultural-suicide-and-just-plain-wrong/ … @MoAnsar

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12h

Mohammed Ansar ‏@MoAnsar

.@cake_not_hate Seems @jamesdelingpole is stirring up a Islamocentric hornets nest for ratings. Its about poor RE teaching. NOTHING more.

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After tweeted this comment to Mo, no dot before the name, just to Mo and obviously seen by anyone who might follow both of us.

Robin Ince ‏@robinince

@MoAnsar these events always seem to happen to these columnists but i never meet kids or teachers who EVER have those experiences

So by this, I mean I take all these articles with a pinch of salt. I like science, so I appreciate doubt. Then this comes my way

James Delingpole ‏@JamesDelingpole

@robinince @MoAnsar Yes Robin. You can bury your smug bien-pensant head in the sand and call my niece a liar. Or you can accept the truth.

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12h

Robin Ince ‏@robinince

@JamesDelingpole @MoAnsar I wasn’t talking to you. my point is simple, I did not call you a liar

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12h

Robin Ince ‏@robinince

@JamesDelingpole @MoAnsar I merely said it always seems to happen to columnists (lucky you, gave you something to write about)

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12h

Mohammed Ansar ‏@MoAnsar

@JamesDelingpole James, @robinince is right. As someone who carries out RE monitoring visits I’ve never seen or heard of such nonsense.

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12h

Robin Ince ‏@robinince

@MoAnsar @JamesDelingpole I am not saying it didn’t happen to JD, but I’ve never seen it, that is all.

And this morning it leads to this (there were others as well. you can check my timeline if you are so bored to make sure I didn’t bother with ad hom attacks)

James Delingpole ‏@JamesDelingpole

@robinince You sad, devious, dishonest, and self-deluding man: why not avoid future discomfort by keeping out of my life?

So the conclusion is, even to make a comment about a columnist to a friend is unaccaptable, while they are allowed to write publicly about anything and anyone they wish.

oh and this

James Delingpole ‏@JamesDelingpole

@robinince Stop wriggling. That was the only conceivable implication of what you said. Unless, of course, you were calling ME a liar.

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1hRobin Ince ‏@robinince

@JamesDelingpole it was a broad statement akin to “it’s always bloggers like you who have this experience”

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1hJames Delingpole ‏@JamesDelingpole

@robinince You sad, devious, dishonest, and self-deluding man: why not avoid future discomfort by keeping out of my life?

what is odd about the “keeping out of my life” statement is that I never came into his life. every time he writes an attack on someone for publication, does he think “actually, I should keep out of their life”? It seems to be the request for a mind police that can ensure no one even has thoughts on words you have published.

The comment is barely about the article.  It is about the number of pieces I used to read that declare “and they’ve banned the school nativity”, “they are only allowed to read in Esperanto now”, “my son is forced to wear a burqa” etc. I can only talk about experience of schools and teachers. I have never experienced much of what is written, so when it is written as if these things are rife, I think if they are so rife, why do I never see them in my life (there may be many reasons, but I hope you see my point). So what I have discovered is that to take certain journalists blog posts with a pinch of salt is repugnant, while ad hominem attacks, victimisation and (in the case of some journalists) writing conjecture based articles about me as if it were truth, is absolutely fine.

When Delingpole appeared on Horizon with Paul Nurse and some people found him laughable, i actually wrote to those I knew and suggested they didn’t include him by twitter name in their twitter comments about why they thought he had come across badly. As I have just found out, that would have made no difference.

NOTES

I am currently on tour and will also be doing a new show about Feynman and Darwin, all details here  (well if you can’t use something negative and disturbing as plug…)

 

Faith and Evolutionary Theory a guest blog by J F Derry

here is a blog not written by me, but by J F Derry, author of Darwin in Scotland and currently working on the Unbound project The Dissent of Man.  So in the grand tradition of such things – Views of the author may differ from views of the blog host.

In which we counter a certain claim about the value of religion, and end up on a road journey.

In an October article in Aeon Magazine, accompanied by a précis piece in The Guardian’s online Comment is Free – Why Dawkins’ Humanists Remind Me of Religion 

Michael Ruse argued for the coexistence of science and religion on the basis that they are, “asking

different questions”. I do not agree.

To accept that a religious mindset is appropriate in asking questions about the natural world at all, you

are forced to also accept its trappings of revealed wisdom and an untestable premise that there exists an unerring, higher source of knowledge. Without these, religion ceases to be religion. What is left, in its rawest, unadulterated form, is called “philosophy”.

Religion is clothing; a veil. Draped over philosophy, it became theology. Theology draped over geology, zoology and botany became natural theology. That is how christianity developed it’s position in opposition to natural science, by starting from a religious source, emanating from an entirely different school to that of scientific naturalism.

It is no mystery that science and religion have different starting points. For example, the UK’s Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, who believes that science, “is one of the greatest achievements of humankind, a gift given to us by God” (BBC 2012 Rosh Hashanah: Science vs Religion), defines it as, “science takes things apart, to see how they work”, whilst, “religion puts things together, to see what they mean”. From this dichotomy arises the single most used apology (sensu “argument”) for religion and the one that Ruse forwards, that religion can answer questions that science cannot.

This preconception is an important but often ignored conditioning of people. Their psychological predispositions are the difference that initially established and now perpetuate a polarised science- religion debate. Reasoned arguments are ineffectual because, in the minds of different people, the architecture of reason is constructed differently. Both cannot, by definition, be correct. It is quite clear from bountiful evidence that scientific logic is not only better founded, but will also provide a portal into dissecting irrational psychologies: the science of religion. The obverse cannot be claimed.

A better understanding of the psychology of faith is needed, because the divide will persist until there is sufficient comprehension of the irrational mindset. For this we must again rely upon scientific disassembly. On this point is where Ruse’s article and I do agree; in that same article he quotes from renowned naturalist, E.O. Wilson’s On Human Nature,

… we have come to the crucial stage in the history of biology when religion 

itself is subject to the explanations of the natural sciences. As I have tried to 

show, sociology can account for the very origin of mythology by the principle 

of natural selection acting on the genetically evolving material structure of the 

human brain.

If this interpretation is correct, the final decisive edge enjoyed by 

scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, 

its chief competition, as a wholly material phenomenon.

Human brain evolution has produced an inherently curious and intelligent reasoning that from a very early age seeks to identify causes for effects. Coupled with a propensity for patterns and design, it is hardwired into our cognitive faculties to recognise structural design in nature and interpret a purpose for natural phenomena. While reason and logic are adaptions towards problem solving, myths and religions are likely secondary products of our interpretation of the natural world, sometimes known as “spandrels” (sensu Gould & Lewontin: a byproduct of an adaption).

Over the course of human history, civilisations have used metaphors as indirect descriptors of their direct environment, to gloss over where information has been lacking. Prior to the Enlightenment, this has resulted in a host of supernatural explanations for natural dynamics, each associating change with purpose. People continue to be comforted in these explanations and communities strengthened, encouraged that everything happens for a reason and not at the whim of chance. It is no coincidence therefore that there is a close tally between the number of these stories and the number of cultural contexts that bore them.

Analogous to Darwin’s “Tree of Life”, the multitudinous faiths have evolved over time, diversifying, bifurcating and running in parallel, as related yet independent branches of thought. Some have died out and others have persisted. Some are closely related while others are quite alien, but what is consistent is how parochial all these stories were to their original context, how they relied upon reference to their nearby surroundings to construct their narrative, how they only attempted to make sense of their immediate environment. Psychologist and theologian, Justin L. Barrett expresses it in terms of,

the way our minds solve problems generates a god-shaped conceptual space 

waiting to be filled by the details of the culture into which we are born.

Despite the obvious origins of faiths, and as a footnote to sceptics and atheists, there is a Catch-22 hypocrisy in accepting the scientific evidence that myths and religions have emerged over time as products of our evolutionary history. It’s the having your cake and eating it type: as religion is an evolutionary byproduct, then it’s only nature and reacting against it is, well, in one sense of the word, unnatural.

While a large number of people do apply logic and conclude that religion doesn’t add anything to their world for whatever personal reasons, (usually because it fails to offer any further explanations beyond the laws of biology, chemistry and physics that comprehensively describe our universe), in contrast, most people in the world are religious, following one or other religion or faith system.

This may be mystifying, but it is not surprising. People are genetically programmed to do so. Indeed, it would be more surprising if they were not religious and the reasons given for adhering to religions reflect this innate urge: “I feel it in my bones”, “it comes from within”. While there is no evidence towards proving the existence of deities, there are however many cultural and social mechanisms that act throughout a lifetime to reinforce religion. In response, societal goals of a more rational understanding of the universe and a more rational approach to life, need a better education towards a greater science literacy. Being scientifically informed doesn’t mean that we can understand every aspect of the most technical problem, from particle physics to plate tectonics, but instead provides us with a basic toolkit of knowledge and skills about science and technology, and a way to look at the world. We can use the tools in this kit to better inform everything from living our daily lives to running whole nations.

Any good tool should provide a metric, some measure by which comparisons may be made. The one I feel most ideal is at the heart of the science-religion debate: the dissent over our origins as a dissociation from nature. Thus, to investigate human tendencies towards faith, think of a continuous road that stretches beyond the horizon in both directions. Close at hand we shall place a recognisable marker to identify a point by which all others can be measured in scale. The scale is defined through an ability to explain natural phenomena. Namely, nature in all it’s manifestations.

On the Origin of Species is essentially about the generation of biodiversity in nature. Darwinian evolution also features predominantly in arguments refuting the biblical accounts of human origins.

However, Darwinism has also been stretched far beyond its original scope. It has been applied to a cornucopia of human behaviour, from entrepreneurialism to war crimes, and held up as an answer or a scapegoat in countless situations. To differing degrees, it is an important part of how we understand ourselves, our history and our culture. So, let us place Mr Darwin here as a totem for neo-Darwinism,

the most comprehensive acceptance of his ideas, and rank the range of interpretations of Darwinism in order of their loyalty to those original ideas.

To achieve this I’ve interviewed over fifty commentators: conservationists and creationists, bishops and biochemists, palaeoceanographers and Intelligent Design theorists, theistic evolutionists and a Bahá’í lecturer, sex researchers, mathematicians, ophthalmologists, linguists, evangelical Christians, philosophers, physicians and the Astronomer Royal. As a starting point, I asked each one the same question: ‘what does Darwin mean to you as an individual, and as part of humanity?’

Contributors to date include, Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky, Oliver Sacks, James Watson, Ian Stewart, Edward Wilson, Martin Rees, Simon Conway Morris, David King, Aubrey Manning, Michael Behe, George Schaller, Brian Charlesworth, Bjørn Lomborg, Daniel Dennett, William Dembski, Stephen Wolfram, Rupert Sheldrake, Michael Ruse, Susan Blackmore, Lewis Wolpert, Steven Pinker, Richard Holloway, Richard Lewontin, Randal Keynes, John Polkinghorne, Tim Smit, Matt Ridley, Archimedes Plutonium, Richard Gregory, Ken Ham, Adrian Hawkes, and many more.

Now, on moving away from Darwin we can position each alternative interpretation along our road, measured out in units of “distances from Darwin”. Our journey will take us quite some distance away from Darwin until he is but a dot on the horizon from which we set out. But the order in which we distribute alternative interpretations en route may not accord to a preconceived sequence reinforced by the polemics that usually dominate this debate. Much of what I’ve discovered is surprising and exciting – preconceptions are challenged, antagonists are revealed to be uncomfortable bedfellows, and the extremists aren’t necessarily who you might think they are.

A them-and-us approach has resulted in a stand-off. Clearly there is more complexity involved in the science-religion debate. When we are done with our gradient, we will be able to look back along our journey and recognise the true diversity of understanding that really describes a continuum spelled out by individuals standing shoulder-to-shoulder along our road. Nonetheless, we will have our path running from one extreme to the other and between them a Distance-from-Darwin gradient that traverses the rich and fertile landscape of human thought.

JF Derry’s new book, The Dissent of Man can be supported via the Unbound website at http:// 

unbound.co.uk/books/the-dissent-of-man/