The Nature of Faith

I know I’ve already done a few pieces on the issue of faith, but it’s come up a few times recently at the ECG and at Student Alpha, and I want to address a couple of specific claims.

Firstly, at Alpha they were saying that we use faith for everything. Sitting on a chair, for example, you don’t know if it’s going to support your weight but you put your faith in it. I later said in the discussion that it’s a totally different kind of faith. From experience you know that most chairs do support your weight because that’s what they’re designed to do. So even though it’s not 100% certain that it won’t collapse, you can be fairly sure. Someone gave the other example that you put faith in all kinds of experts who say things about which we have little to no idea, such as your doctor’s medical advice, but again this isn’t blind faith. Scientists and even just academics in general go through a lot in the way of peer review to get their work published, as I’m sure Tim over at the Friendly Humanist will testify. The faith that you put in these kinds of everyday things is also not unfounded, it is again based on experience. You can’t really say the same about religious faith. So just because we sometimes use the same word to describe it, doesn’t make it the same thing.

It was said at the ECG that you must put faith in any account of the origin of the universe and that God is one of those accounts. Particular attention was drawn to people believing in the multiverse theory in spite of the lack of evidence, and that this is no different to faith in God. I have a couple of points to make about this.

1. Belief in the multiverse theory is not totally unfounded, it is to a small degree based on experience. We live in one universe, why could there not be other ones like it? Similarly there’s no reason to suggest the Universe could have existed forever, why does it have to be a beginning?

2. As I’ve said about a gazillion times, I have no problem with the deist idea of God as the first cause, or the idea of Spinaza’s God; it’s just as valid as any other origins theory. But this is totally different to the personal Christian God that the people at the ECG were talking about. It is not a case of accepting all or nothing.

There’s also the issue that I don’t put faith in things that are really important. I wouldn’t advocate the use of faith in something so important as whether to worship God every day of my life or not, or what to believe on certain contentious moral issues that have an effect on everyone. That I leave to reason, as I think we all should.

Back to the ECG… again!

So last night kick-started another series of lectures from the Edinburgh Creation Group, hosted at the Greyfriars and Buccleugh Free Church. Take note that I’ve added their blog to my blogroll on the right of your screen. I only discovered it yesterday but it’s good to have a written explanation of a theory. I’ve often said that text such as on websites and forums is a much better medium through which to hold a debate than in person, so maybe it’ll be a catalyst for further blog posts in the future.

Anyway last night’s presentation was entitled “Chosen Planet: Earth’s Uniqueness for Life” by Dr George Marshall. In many ways it was quite similar to another talk last year but it didn’t go anywhere near as far as that one did. Several things were covered that I wasn’t aware of. For example, I knew that the moon caused the tide but I thought it was just the gravitational pull of the moon which pulled the water towards it, causing deeper water. Apparently there is also a high tide on the opposite side of the earth too! The point was that if the moon was closer it would cause catastrophic floods which would hinder the development of life on earth. Any further away, and the oceans wouldn’t be churned up enough to allow nutrients to come to the surface and feed the algae which are so fundamental to the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But ours is juuust right, so that’s ok (you’ll notice this becomes something of a theme).

Next up is the Earth’s orbit. If it were smaller, we’d be too hot, bigger and we’d be too cold. If our orbit were more elliptical the temperature would be too temperamental, and if other planets had elliptical orbits it would pull ours out of orbit creating the same problem. A bigger orbit would also result in a greater level of vulnerability from comets and asteroids. But ours is just right.

Many stars, including red dwarves, give out massive solar flares which would also make the climate too temperamental to support life. But ours is just right. Our solar system’s location in the galaxy is also idea to support life.

So, as the more astute among you may have noticed, this is no coincidence. We shouldn’t be surprised that, as living beings, we live on a planet that is suitable of supporting life. I was about to point out that the way the world is is exactly as we should expect it if it happened naturally, when someone on the front row came out with “What exactly is your point?” What followed was a very heated discussion whereby the question-asker didn’t at all make himself clear, really annoyed Dr Marshall (who didn’t understand the point he was making at all), and abiogenesis was brought up which has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand (oh, I should mention that halfway through the presentation it emerged that Dr Marshall is a biologist, not an astronomer), and the discussion went nowhere. I kind of brought it back up again in a more polite and clear way, and got the answer we were looking for. Dr Marshall wasn’t arguing that all these parameters amount to such a coincidence that God must have done it, it’s just that you have to step back and say “wow”. He still referred to it as a coincidence though, so I don’t think he grasped the idea that it’s not a coincidence at all.

Anyway, I think this shows the importance of at least appearing to be tolerant of people’s ideas. You don’t get anywhere by shouting and screaming, you just kind of come across as a bit childish. We were both on the same page, he just went about it a different way which I think was detrimental to the discussion.

In short, I’d heard all the arguments before and more along the same vein (which if people would like to bring up here I’m happy to discuss – last time Dr Ross’ 101 quantities was mentioned), so it was nothing new, although some things were mentioned that I hadn’t been aware of. It was also claimed that it takes faith to believe in a multiverse or an oscillating universe just as it does to believe in God. I have my own opinion on that and if anyone wants to discuss it further, drop me a comment here.

Ritual

David Robertson mentioned (at the Is Faith in God a Delusion? debate), in response to a question about how atheists are religious, that we all have our rituals. Of course he’s totally missing the point, there’s a difference between doing something because you’re used to doing it and doing something because it’s written down in a magic book. But there are other kinds of ritual that are common between atheists and religious people (in the conventional sense); the kinds of rituals that celebrate the various stages of a persons life. I’m talking about things like weddings, naming ceremonies and funerals.

For many people, these kinds of ceremonies are the first point of contact with humanism. When I mention that I’m a humanist, people often say “Oh, my Uncle Bob had a humanist funeral, it was really good!” (well, they don’t say that if they don’t have an Uncle Bob, but you know what I mean). Just this Saturday gone I overheard an old woman who drinks at my work fairly often talking about a humanist funeral she’d been to, and when I mentioned that I’m a humanist, she said “so… you want all the ritual with none of the spiritual!” as if it were a bad thing, and I replied “Yeah, all the goodness, none of the bull!” I don’t think she realised that humanist organisations do a lot more than just bury people and marry them (not the same people you understand), but nevertheless the ceremonial aspect is important for a lot of people.

I was talking to a friend of mine about trying to get excommunicated from the Catholic Church (still no sign of my baptism certificate. Not being at home I can’t really go searching for it). She said that I shouldn’t do it because then I wouldn’t be able to get married at church. In reality this is one of the few things holding me back from making a real effort to find it and get ranting about it. Say I want to get married, and my future wife wants to have a church wedding, we won’t be able to and it’d be a great shame just because I didn’t want to be associated with the Catholics. But at the same time, is it not very hipocritical of me to keep my membership just for the associated benefits, when by any measure of the word I am no longer a Catholic? Undoubtedly it is. Perhaps I might go back to Christianity one day? I’m fairly sure that’s the reason my mother won’t hand over my baptism certificate. But even in the extremely rare event that some kind of proof of God is discovered, and I do turn back to Christianity, I’d never go back to Catholicism (too much human input to dogma), so it’s irrelevant.

I think I may be hunting out that certificate when I go home for Christmas.

Alpha Course

This afternoon I had an interesting yet challenging encounter with the CU. Ruth, who I’d met at the society’s fair, invited me along to a lunchtime talk but I didn’t realise it was the Alpha Course. Maybe that’s a good thing because if I’d realised that I probably wouldn’t have gone (I’ve seen some of the materials used and it’s clearly geared towards Christians). In any case that wasn’t the interesting part, that was mainly just an exploration of Christian theology, which I’m not too interested in. I think it was good for them too to have an atheist come along and ask questions from that point of view.

I started by commenting on the notion of justice. During the talk there had been a section on grace and mercy which linked in with justice. God has to punish somehow, else where would the justice be? We wouldn’t be too happy if the Nuremberg Trials had just given Hitler a slap on the wrist (had he survived, of course), for example. But I entered the suggestion that an eternal punishment of any kind cannot be justified (whether you view hell as a place of torment or just a separation from God), there should always be some kind of time limit on it. One of the humanist society’s newer members, Greg, has made this argument before, but I think he made the mistake of saying you can’t justify eternal torment, when in fact a more modern interpretation of the idea of hell is that it’s just a separation from God, which takes the poke out of his argument, when in fact it should be on the idea that it’s eternal. There’s nothing you could do to warrant an eternal punishment. Someone brought up that even in human justice systems we have life sentences which, if you don’t believe in an afterlife, is essentially eternal, but for me that’s nothing to do with punishment, a life sentence is to protect to public from a dangerous person. The conversation kind of concluded on the thought that hell isn’t a punishment either, it’s a choice. People have chosen not to be with God, and hell (a separation from God) is the outcome of that choice, people just don’t realise how bad it is. That doesn’t really sit well with me either, but we kind of cover that later.

I then moved the conversation onto predeterminism, much to the groans of the others. The fact that God supposedly knows me and knows what I will do before it happens means that (presuming I don’t accept Jesus Christ as my personal saviour) he has created me purely so that I can go to hell, which is a problem because he’s supposed to love me. Balancing free will against this predeterminism is also a significant problem with me. I suppose knowing what I’m going to do isn’t necessarily the same as controlling it, but in that case why does he bother with our time on earth, why not just judge us based on what he knows we’re going to do?

Free will is also one way to explain away the problem of evil which I brought up next. If God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then how can evil persist in the world? Someone asked if I thought God controlled everything and I said no, just that he would intervene to prevent evil. The extension of that argument is that it would contravene our free will, but so what? Surely an omnibenevolent God would place the prevention of evil above free will? Even if not, free will doesn’t explain natural disasters and genetic diseases, but that can be explained by the Fall. Apparently the earth took the physical consequences of our sin. I have my own problems with the Fall (for example, there’s no evidence that sin is genetic), but for the purposes of the conversation I left that aside.

-It’s awkward, I keep remembering important things we talked about, but we were talking for a good 2 hours or so, I can’t possibly include it all here, which is a shame. Maybe I’ll fill in the gaps in another post another time-

I think I’ll finish on our discussion of the trilemma and its branches. You may be familiar with CS Lewis’ argument that Jesus was either ‘lunatic, liar or lord’, and that if he’s either of the first two he cannot be merely a great moral teacher on the lines of Ghandi, Buddha etc. I added the possibility that he was merely lied about (apparently a lot of people add the words ‘or legend’ at the end), but for the people there, the historical evidence is so overwhelming that that’s not an option. I’ve already dealt with this kind of thing in my review of The Case for Christ and I don’t accept it (it’s based on the view that miracles are just as likely as normal stuff, whereas I’m like Hume – after all, if we accept the possibility that witches might exist, what happens after that is the Inquisition, it’s a twisted logic). From their perspective I look like the closed-minded one, but they’re going to have to show me the evidence before I believe in miracles. I’m not likely to budge on that one. I also queried whether Jesus could be a good moral teacher if he was a lunatic, because as far as I know, morality and lunacy aren’t mutually exclusive. This really puts the trilemma in hot water because the only reason Lewis accepts Jesus as the Son of God is because the other options aren’t feasible.

It was good to go along and discuss this kind of thing. I think I was invited personally because I like to listen to people (this is something we’re not very good at as a society – even during our own meetings we get sidetracked into our own little conversations and people get ignored, a personal pet peeve of mine), and I appear more open to discussion, whereas other members of our society can seem intimidating. That’s going to be a weakness in interfaith events, I think. I also had to leave aside points of contention (like interpretations of genesis, for example) which I knew we wouldn’t get anywhere on. Anyway I think I’ll go along next week, but my timetable changes in 3 weeks so I may be unable to go after that.

That was a long post and I still didn’t cover half of it.

Diversity

I’ve just returned from the Chaplaincy’s Multi-faith Public Conversation on the subject ‘The Richness of Diversity’. As a humanist and an atheist it can be difficult to go to such events, especially when they’re entitled ‘Multi-Faith’, but it’s often an interesting experience and it’s important that as a society we build up relations with other societies based at the Chaplaincy. That’s something we don’t do nearly enough, in fact I was sitting next to a couple of the Vedics who said they noticed we weren’t there at the interfaith dialogue (although I’m sure Greg went along – Stuart and I were both working). I do intend to go to a couple of the CU meetings when I’m not working in the next few weeks but I’ll have to see what’s happening.

In any case I was a little disappointed. Of course with such a short space of time to discuss such a vague and in many ways diverse topic, it’s difficult to come up with a satisfying response, and I’m not sure that was the intention, to get a response, that is. For some time the three speakers (whose names I’m afraid I don’t remember – it was a Rabbi, a Bishop and a representative from the British Muslim Council) spoke about why diversity was important and what kinds of diversity there are, which I think is something we all know. In many ways it was something of a ramble. The Bishop made some attempt to explain why there is so often an intolerance of diversity, stemming from a fear of losing their religious identity, as well as economic fears like “they’re taking our jobs and our benefits”, which made the conversation a bit more dynamic, and only the Rabbi had the balls to come out and say that at the end of the day if you believe your particular faith position is correct and someone else’s isn’t, you cannot embrace diversity in the way that people had been talking about.

Reflecting back, the opinions expressed were so watered down that they were in their lowest common form which sounded essentially like humanism. Several comments were passed like “flowers are each beautiful in their own way, but they’re most beautiful when they’re put together”, and even a saying used by the HSS, “we’re a’ Jock Tamson’s Bairns” (the Bishop said in that case, Jock has been doing a bit of globetrotting), and the last sentiment on the issue came from a woman sitting at the back who said that if we want to be truly tolerant, we have to approach the table as human beings. We’re people first above all. I think that’s a truly admirable sentiment and one I’ve used before, but mainly when talking about the Scout movement.

Anyway, frustrating but intriguing, I’m glad I went.

Alcohol Consumption

This morning I, along with about a hundred other students, went to a protest outside the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood about the proposed ban of off license sales of alcohol to under 21s. We felt it was discriminatory, that it went against the evidence, that it wasn’t even internally logical (if they’re trying to tackle anti-social behaviour in public, why are they targetting young people drinking at home?), and that it wasn’t in line with the law as it exists now and as the SNP proposes to change it (granting the franchise to 16 year olds whilst banning under 21’s from buying alcohol is sending mixed messages, to say the least). What really got me (and continues to annoy me about the system in the US) is that someone can take a bullet for their country, but they can’t have a drink afterwards. Some system that is. I won’t bore you with details but suffice to say we won.

Anyway, I’ve been reflecting on my position about alcohol consumption. As you may know I’ve been a barman for a few years now and I grew up in the pub culture because my parents were licensees. Just last night I had a mental night at work where one drunk guy was crying on my arm because his friend had died in his arms of a heroin overdose, and was quite obviously considerably more depressed because he’d consumed so much alcohol. Alcohol was certainly a significant factor in an accident where one man slipped off the kerb and cracked his head open quite badly right outside the pub; I got him taken to hospital right away. Over the years I have seen people quite literally lose their lives to drink, losing their families and their careers. When you’re the only sober guy in the room and you have to decide who’s had enough, it’s an awfully big responsibility, and one I take very seriously. Just recently a friend of mine was arrested and will be taken to court because he served a drunk.

So I’m caught in a number of positions. Firstly I am only too aware of the serious implications alcohol can have. On the other hand I believe that prohibition of alcohol is an infringement on our civil liberties, and that at the end of the day it is your own choice whether to drink or not. Then again I am the one who decides whether someone on the other side of the bar can have a drink or not, so in a sense I undermine that freedom of choice. And if I see the effects of alcohol on a daily basis (both long and short term), why am I involved in dispensing it, when it’s so crippling both for society and for individuals? The issue gets even more complicated when I bring in my opinion on other drugs. I have said for a long time now that if tobacco and alcohol are legal, cannabis should be legal. In fact whilst we’re on the issue of prohibition, I have several good arguments for the legalization of all drugs (which I won’t go into now), ones to which I struggle to find any counter-arguments, but still I don’t think I would vote to put them into practice. It’s a conundrum of many sides.

I’d welcome other people’s views on the matter.