Skepticamp 2009

We had an excellent night at the Edinburgh Skepticamp 2009. The two Alexes gave presentations on statistical fallacies and paranormal investigations, respectively, whilst someone I’d never met before called Terry spoke about how best to win over the believers, and I concentrated on alternative medicine with homoeopathy being the main focus.

It was the last Q&A section that started the most vigorous debate, where we were speaking about whether it would be easier to win over a fundamentalist or a moderate believer, with all of the speakers up on stage. One man stood up and asked the question “What’s wrong with being a believer?” to which someone on stage replied that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong (depending on what you mean by ‘wrong’), as long as it doesn’t affect other things. The man agreed, but continued with the sentence “it’s wrong for religionists to force their beliefs on others, just as it’s wrong for skepticism to be forced on others”.

This struck me as rather curious because he was comparing two very different things, religion being a set of dogmatic beliefs, and science and skepticism being a method best suited to acquiring the truth. So I said so and he replied that, for example, ‘evolutionism’ was a belief that we were forcing on others. Somehow then we got into a discussion about the evidence for evolution and established that although it’s not a fact, it’s about as close to a fact as we have in science. But this man maintained that since it is not a fact it should not be forced onto others.

I struggle to see what his point was. Was he seriously suggesting that it’s just as morally wrong to teach a child about evolution, with all the evidence in favour of it, as to teach the child about creationism which has no evidence for it whatsoever? It’s obviously more wrong to ‘force’ a lie onto someone than a truth, and although we can’t possibly know for sure whether something is true, that’s not to say that all beliefs are equally valid. We can put them in order of what is more likely to be true, based on the available evidence, and we do know that some claims cannot be true based on the current evidence.

But that’s missing the larger point that skeptics don’t force their beliefs on others! Skepticism is about criticising other people’s beliefs and claims, picking them apart and saying “this is unlikely to be true because A, B, C.” We may then propose another belief that is better supported by the evidence, but skeptics would be more than happy to defend their beliefs from critical argument, if only because at the end of the process we’ll be one step closer to the truth! It’s all about the free interchange of ideas, something that skepticism and science do well, because they are always changing, and something that dogmatic belief systems like religion do very badly, since they don’t change at all.

I’m reminded of this video that PZ Myers posted on Pharyngula this week of Wendy Wright from American Women Concerned for America or something. I only watched the first part because I’m short on time right now, but that’s enough to see that she’s asking for a ridiculously high level of evidence for evolution (her version of evidence is ‘if you can’t put it in my hand, it’s not evidence’), whilst allowing her own beliefs to slip completely under the skepticism radar. Take a look, here’s the first part and I’m sure you can find the rest of them.

Rock on, Corrie!

I went home over Easter (sorry for not posting but I didn’t take my laptop with me), and spent a while (which I’ll never get back) watching Coronation Street with my mum, who watches it regularly. One of the storylines was about an Easter service at the local church with a pet blessing afterwards. Here’s more or less how it goes…

A kid and his dad are putting the rabbit away in the garden. The nice old bag from next door compliments the rabbit and the hutch which the dad built, and after a conversation tells them about the pet blessing which they could take the rabbit to if they wanted. She thinks it’s a good harmless way of getting more people to go to church, even if it is just a novelty. Later the kid, his dad, his turkey-necked grandmother and narky (but surprisingly funny) old bag great grandmother, as well as the rabbit, are getting ready to go to church, when this scene happened, and my new hero Ken Barlow spoke out about the kid being indoctrinated, and after the service tried to teach him about humanism, albeit somewhat badly.

I didn’t think about it that much at the time, but apparently a load of fuddy duddies have complained! Seemingly, they called what he said “anti-Christian”, and said it was a disgrace to air such a thing on the holiest day of the year. (As I’m sure I’ve blogged before, theologically it may be the most significant day of the year, but in practice it takes second place to Christmas in terms of observance). 23 people complained to OfCom, the broadcasting watchdog, and 100 complained directly to ITV!

I fail to see how this is greatly offensive, as one viewer put it. When else are they going to run a religious storyline like this, just at any time of the year? It’s entirely appropriate to screen this storyline (alongside another one about the girl over the road becoming a Born Again, I might add) on one of the few days when attendance at church spikes. That’s when a non-Christian would be likely to go to church! At this time of year religion is also fresh in some people’s minds. I think some people need better things to do with their lives.

So if you want to speak up in favour of these comments, feel free to contact ITV with your views.

Religulous

Last night the Humanists went to watch Religulous, Bill Maher’s documentary about religious belief. If you haven’t heard about it, here’s the trailer:

We all thoroughly enjoyed it and it was very funny. Actually a lot of the laughs weren’t even at the expense of religious belief. So for example when some truckers in a chapel put their hands on Bill to pray for him when he was leaving, he walked away and said “Hey! Where’s my wallet?”, and after a conversation about hallucination, he told the cannabis-worshipping Dutch guy that his hair was on fire, and he shat himself. Brilliant. Some of the  best parts were when someone said something stupid or ironic and he just sat in silence, like in the trailer where the senator for Arkansas says “well, you don’t need to take an IQ test to get into Congress”, or when Ken Ham said “Well, he is God. Are you God?” as if he’d won some big point, and Bill just shook his head and quietly said no.

Now I’ve heard a lot of people saying that it was biased, that it only dealt with the craziest beliefs, that it didn’t poke fun at atheists too (‘Schindler’s List’ didn’t show the Nazi side of the story either, so what?), and I agree! The whole thing was slanted against religious belief, it was obviously edited to make the people he was interviewing look more stupid, but it’s a comedy documentary about how ridiculous religious belief is! It’s kind of in the title! Besides, you can’t deny that some of the things those people said, no matter how they were edited or what context they were in, were ridiculously stupid. Things like “I’m gonna go up to heaven and come back on a white horse!”, or ‘No, it wasn’t in here, Mohammed kept the winged horse outside in the courtyard!’, or that the Messiah was going to come, raise people on the Mount of Olives from the dead, hop over a wall and go through the Golden Gates. WTF?!

Anyone out there, especially theists, I encourage you to go and see it. Maybe it’ll show you a glimpse of how ridiculous some of your beliefs seem to people on the other side of the fence, people who don’t just make some of their beliefs immune to scrutiny or evidence, just because it comes under the label of ‘religion’ or ‘faith’. Maybe you can laugh when he pokes fun at a different religion, but remember that they’ll be doing the same thing to you too.

At one point Bill seemed to be making the point that lots of religious people will happily laugh at beliefs like Mormonism and Scientology saying they’re stupid, but they need to take a look in the mirror! Compared to the daftness of their own religious beliefs, Mormonism and Scientology are only a tiny bit more stupid. I sketched a quick chart, hopefully it’ll come out ok.

(You may ask why I don’t think Islam is as stupid as the other Abrahamic religions. Well this isn’t exactly to scale, I think it’s less less stupid than Scientology is more stupid [if you can follow that], but at least we are more certain that Muhammed existed than we are Jesus did.)

So yeah, go see it.

The AHS Launch

I fully intended to write this as soon as I got back from London, but one thing and another have stacked up and I’m doing this to take a break from essaying. It’s a relief to write my own opinion on something I care about instead of just the opinion that will get me marks on something boring.

So on Thursday, Andre and I travelled down to London to represent the Humanist Society at the official launch of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies at Conway Hall, home of the Ethical Society. The AHS is the umbrella union we were talking about creating a year ago in order to share ideas and resources with all the other irreligious societies around the UK. We held the inaugural conference in David Hume Tower over the summer, and Stuart and Greg attended the second conference in Leeds. It was a superb venue, and one that the AHS will be able to use again for other big events in the future.

The launch itself was attended by such prominent figures such as Richard Dawkins, AC Grayling, Polly Toynbee and Maryam Namazie. I already had Dawkins sign my copy of Unweaving the Rainbow at the Edinburgh Science Festival last year, but that’s who most of the others were really excited about. Instead I got a nice message in my copy of AC Grayling’s Against All Gods.

Each of the speakers gave really supportive messages of the idea for the AHS and encouraged us to work as an ideas factory for the movement as a whole. Dawkins also spoke about how evangelical religious organisations did not belong on university campuses as they poisoned minds and disrupted education. Perhaps more importantly, he said that the AHS would be well place to apply for funding from the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Apparently this was a particularly difficult charity to set up, and at one point he needed to clarify to the government what benefits science and reason bring to society, as opposed to religious groups which have no problem.

In any case it was good to finally meet the people I’ve been corresponding with over the internet for some time. We’re thinking the next conference should be in Warwick, but we’ll see. Keep your eyes peeled for media coverage (although a lot of it has already passed – we got a 2 page spread in the Independent and a fair bit of coverage on BBC Radio). More information at:

http://www.ahsstudents.org.uk/
http://www.secularportal.com/
http://www.humanism.org.uk/meet-up/groups/student-groups/ahs

Be prepared for another post soon as I’ll crave procrastination and this is at least mildly useful.

Occupation update

Still here at George Square Theatre. At the moment we’re watching a film called Sands of Sorrow. It’s kind of boring so I thought I’d blog instead.

So today I spent most of the day outside speaking to non-student protestors. There’s a frustrating situation where the university is refusing to allow anyon who’s not a member of the university into the building. This means we have people showing up outside to show us support and join the occupation, realising they can’t do very much and moving on. It’s also freezing outside so people inside are reluctant to come out. That said we’ve had a core group of people coming to our stall outside to help us hand out flyers, and generally just to have a chat. I’ve been sitting outside each evening and the dedication of some people is astounding.

Last night after I blogged a group of musicians came and played us some brilliant original music, and then we had a really long meeting to discuss the university’s response, which they’d said was final. Again using the consensus decisionmaking process (something I’m really glad I’ve been introduced to), we decided that we’d done everything we could with this occupation, and acknowledged that we had achieved a lot of our aims. Those that we hadn’t achieved, or those that we thought we could achieve more with, it’s perhaps more feasible to act upon them through the normal channels, or through further demonstration in the future. For example the university thinks it would be unethical to “deny access” to graduate job opportunities at companies making arms used by Israel by banning them from careers fairs. Of course this argument doesn’t stand up at all, they’re not denying access, the access to the jobs is still there through normal channels. All banning them would do is stop the university indirectly condoning their actions. But we can better act against this by demonstrating at the careers fairs and working through EUSA. I think the majority of us knew it was time to leave.

Seeing as the university administration is not around during the weekend (particularly Melvyn Cornish and Tim O’Shea), we decided that we would leave on Monday morning before lectures start. In the meantime we’ve been using the space to try to mobilise more support, hold workshops, screen films and hold lectures, in order to keep momentum and create a group which is ready and willing to hold the university to account over what it’s agreed to do.

As part of this we held a demonstration outside the front of the building, attended by just short of 100 people in total. To start with, a choir called Protest in Harmony came and sang some protest songs. This was the best thing I’ve ever heard, with lyrics like [paraphrasing] “the Venezuelans sent the Israeli ambassador home, for its flagrant disregard of international rules” (which was apparently taken straight from a newspaper article), but set to choral, hymn-like music. It was phenomenal, and got a lot of people outside who probably wouldn’t have otherwise been arsed. Then the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign showed up (who have also been great, they’re obviously very used to speaking publicly and one of their members, Mick, has MC’d both of these demonstrations, which helped it go a lot smoother) and we got a demonstration going. Several people spoke out, and we got a lot of signatures on our petition.

So things are going well.

Still here…

So I stayed overnight and we briefly prepared our response to the negotiations with the university. I’ve had a couple of classes and I went back to the Chaplaincy to sell more chocolate for the DEC Gaza Appeal. Now that I’m back, I’ve been watching some of the protestors doing a workshop on resisting arrest. At first it was quite practical like going limp instead of tensing your muscles and trying to calm the situation, but then it kind of degenerated into deep breathing and saying words at different volumes, and all the time lots of hugging. Personally I think preparing for such an eventuality is a bit paranoid, but it was quite good entertainment.

One thing that is mildly annoying me is that other issues are getting sneaked into the agenda. A lot of these protestors are really really liberal and have more interests than just this, so during the negotiations, some of the demands are having other things added to them. For example, we stipulated in one demand that any aid getting transported to Gaza gets shipped because it’s better for the environment. Fair enough and I don’t think anyone here disagreed, but it’s not really what this is about, it shouldn’t be in the demands.

Another, perhaps better example, is that one of the demands was to disinvest in any company producing weapons that are being used in Israel. I fully supported that, but then during this morning’s discussion, points were raised that the demand should be to disinvest in all weapons research. Not only do I think this is totally unrealistic and will make the protestors seem juvenile, but I also don’t think it’s desirable. Weapons are necessary for war, and war is sometimes necessary, at least in the current global anarchic system. I do hope for a day when weapons will not be necessary and there will be world peace, but the way to reach world peace is not through getting rid of weapons. Weapons are merely the tools, war would still exist without them. But regardless of whether it’s a good thing or not, it’s nothing to do with us. This demonstration is against this conflict in Gaza, not all war, as if that would be achievable. This is not an anti-war demonstration in general. Of course the Socialist Workers have been slipping their own familiar rhetoric in too, but that’s fine, they’ve been great supporting us so far.

Consensus agreement is also becoming more difficult as we get into the finer points, particularly because people are coming and going all the time so if we review something we’ve discussed before, some people don’t know what we’re on about, and others disagree with something we’ve already put through the consensus system. It’s difficult because I’m in agreement with the broad message, but some things about the protest are so frustrating.

One thing that picked up morale a bit was that an Eden Springs van came to deliver water this morning, and as some of us rushed down to tell them to get lost, security did it for us! So far the security guys have been brilliant, they’ve had no problems with us getting in and out (although so far they’re only letting UoE students in), and they’ve all been really friendly.

We got some news today that an emergency SRC (Students Representative Council) meeting was called to discuss the issue by a very pro-Israel member of the committee, and that their intention was to release a EUSA statement against the demonstration. Adam Ramsay, Naomi Hunter and Guy Bromley came down a few minutes ago to let us know what’s going on, and the SRC did not agree on that statement. Instead Adam paraphrased the statement they will be releasing, and they’re not saying anything, basically.

I’ve no idea how long I’ll be here but I’ll be popping in for a few hours each day until it’s over. Here’s some more photographs.

Gaza Protest

As I type this I’m sitting inside George Square Lecture Theatre, which I’d say is quite an unusual thing to do at 2.30 in the morning. At 12 midday yesterday, several activists at the University of Edinburgh moved into this hall and refused to leave until several demands were met by the university, and although negotiations have been taking place, the occupation is still ongoing. The initial demands, which I consider fairly reasonable, are as follows:

1. Boycott: That the universityimmediately suspend all contracts and relations with companies enabling the conflict and/or occupation, including Eden Springs. This demand is contingent on access to information to establish which other companies, eg. Agrexco-Carmel are implicated.

2. Disinvestment: That the university divest from and cut all links – specifically on-campus recruitment – with BAE Systems, MBDA, QinetiQ, Rolls Royce and all other “arms and defence” manufacturers whose products are proven to be in use by the Israeli military.

3. Scholarships: That the university make full scholarships available to at least 5 university students in Gaza, allowing them to attend Edinburgh University – this is specifically in response to the destruction of their universities by the Israeli military, and otheracademic restrictions which violate their human right to education.

4. Aid: That the university collect and make available non-monetary donations to war-damaged Gazan schools and hospitals, including but not limited to text-books, chairs, computers.

5. Education: That the university provide logistical and financial suport for a series of informative lectures and debates, involving university staff and guest speakers, on the Palestine/Israel question during the academic year 2009/10

Regular readers may notice that I’ve so far been silent on the Gaza conflict. This is because I recognise that my view, which is that Israel has no right to exist, is not the best way to achieve peace in the region, and that’s what we all want.

At about 1, we finished a discussion on the response the university gave to the first round of negotiations. Everything is being decided using a fairly effective consensus system, which means it takes quite a long time, but I think the benefits far outweight the disadvantages. There are other frustrations: the people who come to these kinds of protests, not that I’m being overly critical, tend to finish all their sentences as if it were a question (long term readers may remember I have a big beef with that), and sometimes use vocabulary which is clear to people they’re used to campaigning with, but not to others. That said, people are getting along surprisingly well so far and we all know we’re here for a reason. There are about 40 people here now, but I did a quick count during the discussion and there were over 50, and when I was here this evening before our Darwin Day celebrations there were many more, including a lot of non-student protestors, such as the Socialist Workers.

So, depending on how long the occupation goes on, I may be reporting from here over the weekend. Similar demands have been met in Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities, and I’m told there are 26 such occupations happening in universities around the UK, so I don’t think it’s too optimistic to be hopeful.

Homeopathy 5

Today was the day of the Wellbeing Fair, where the homeopaths at the Edinburgh University Settlement had set up a stall alongside a reflexologist and all the other health foods companies and stuff like that. Over the weekend a made a load of flyers (for some reason WordPress won’t upload Publisher files, I see what I can do to get them up) on homeopathy, informing people just how diluted the remedies are, which I’ve found to be a good way of dissuading people who believed in it before. They also mentioned how homeopaths theorise that it works (energy signals, succussion etc), and links to further information on the subject, including some studies.

I also sent an email to Naomi Hunter and Adam Ramsay (EUSA VP Societies and Activities and President, respectively), which I didn’t intend to be rude, but upon reading back this morning it did seem a tad over the mark towards the end. Anyway Adam replied to me by email that he agreed with me about it being a con, but that the University Settlement is part of the university community and it would be unfair to ban them. I disagree but I think that’s less of an issue to take up with EUSA and more with the University. Naomi spoke to me in person and said “everyone’s got different tastes” (I don’t really think it’s a matter of taste) but she also didn’t have a problem with me flyering the fair and even offered me a stall of my own! I politely declined because I had class at various points throughout the day, but it was good to get a response.

Generally speaking I was fairly pleased. Not all that many people came to the Fair, and many of those who did skipped straight past the homeopathy stall to others with more freebies. Of those that did peruse their materials, I made sure they also got one of my flyers so they weren’t just reading propaganda, like I was originally. One of Stuart’s friends, Max, was running the self defence society’s stall right next to the homeopathy one, so I got a load of flyers on that table and stood around handing flyers to anyone who walked through that section, which wasn’t too many. I still have loads left, but they’re easily reused, especially if we’re going to take this up further with the University.

What surprised me most was the attitudes of other people I spoke with throughout the day. An acquaintance of mine in the Christian Union asked what I was up to today, and when I told her, she didn’t see the problem with homeopathy. What amazed me most is that she’s a medical student! She said that all medicines go through stages of skepticism before they’re proven, and it’s clear to her that homeopathy works. I didn’t get chance to reply, but the way I see it they’ve already tried to prove it and failed, so it’s not like it works and just hasn’t been tested. If they somehow prove it does work, I very much doubt that it works in the way they say it does. I spoke to her flatmate later in the day and she said they’d had a similar conversation the previous night with some of their vet friends. Apparently they were skeptics, but they did a unit on acupuncture on horses or something.

Plenty of other people have expressed the opinion that if they’re benefitting from the placebo, we shouldn’t intervene, but I have a problem with lying to people to make use of the placebo, particularly in such a mumbo-jumboish way, as I’ve posted previously. One thing my acquaintance did say is that it works on eczema, and that’s not the placebo effect. I’ve had a quick look online and there doesn’t seem to have been much research or dialogue on that issue. So, thing’s I’d like to see more of are alternative medicine and placebo usage on animals, on very young children and on eczema. If you know anything about that, or where I can find some more information, let me know.

Morningside Baptist Church

So tonight was the night of the eagerly awaited alternative christmas service at Morningside Baptist Church. You know that ‘root of all evil?’ documentary where Richard Dawkins comments that the New Life Church is a bit like a rock concert? It reminded me of that quite a lot. This sounds stupid, but it was weird being in a round church. Every other church I’ve been in was cross-shaped. And there was a big screen at the front with images projected on it, and there was a very enthusiastic pastor (can’t remember his name). He actually seemed nice though, I don’t think he’ll go like Ted Haggard…

So I noticed there wasn’t a lot of religion involved at first. We walked in to Christmas songs played by the brass band, and then the pastor spoke about the “Just Christmas” thing, a kind of campaign where they want people to spend half as much on Christmas as the normally would, and donate the other half to the church which will send it off to a good cause. Last year they raised £60,000 and built a school for children in the Dalit (or untouchable) caste in India, the pastor said the money would be being sent out to ‘those guys’, so I presume it’s the same cause this year. All the way through there were a group of people at the back of the stage painting a canvass of a landscape, which they then covered up in adverts to show how humans had ‘ruined it’. When the congregation Then he invited his friend Howard onto the stage who did a standup routine! There was a bit more music by Hannah, the President of the CU (this particular church seems popular amongst CU members), a cake baked by the pastor and his wife got auctioned off for the charity (£250, seemingly quite a well-off congregation – I’ve also just realised that it sounds like his wife got auctioned off but she didn’t, it was just the cake), and there was a bit of an interval, complete with a snow machine spraying fake snow on everyone from the balcony above! Not a whole lot of God going on, I was impressed!

The second half was much more godly, Howard came back on and did some more comedy from Joseph’s perspective which was funny, but ended on the rather sober point that Jesus wouldn’t grow up to be a carpenter because he was destined to die to save humankind from sin. Then there was a mini dance-drama put on by the children where they used no props except for some identical sticks and no costumes, just identical teeshirts, but tried to show the Christmas and Easter story from the perspective of Mary, with the recurring message that Jesus was still her little child right through his crucifixion (that was surprisingly creative and well-coordinated, actually).

Then a woman came on stage and gave a really enthusiastic sermon/diatribe on the true meaning of the virgin birth with really dodgy theological statements such as (paraphrasing) “so a man called John was sent to show the way to the life-light which was Jesus, and so he’d come before Jesus, but really Jesus was before him because he was there from day one”, with noone pointing out how absurd what she was saying was. She also claimed (and it was later repeated by the pastor) that noone had ever caught even a glimpse of God before, noone knew at all what he was like, and Jesus was putting God right in front of everyone in plain sight. I felt like pointing out that actually Moses saw God face to face, but I didn’t really want to make a scene. We sang some carols (O Come All Ye Faithful and Hark the Herald, so nothing too offensive, at least not of Onward Christian Soldiers proportions), and we went through into the back (the building was deceivingly large) where there were refreshments and everyone could chat more informally.

It was great, I thoroughly enjoyed it (thanks for inviting me, Ruth) and only a couple of times did I cringe (such as when the pastor reflected on us having a relationship with God – I hate that expression, and when some people started singing really enthusiastically, eyes closed with one palm high in the air like you’d expect at an American church, that was quite… unexpected). It was totally unlike any service I’ve ever been to in the past, in a good way, although my Catholic friend Womble would refer to it as ‘happy-clappy’ (as did the pastor at one point). I suspect that, had I gone to a church like that in my youth, I’d still be a Christian.

It also reminded me of something I miss quite a lot about being an active member of my parish, and that’s the sense of community. At several points we were encouraged to talk to the people around us, and I got the distinct impression that most of the congregation knew each other. Humanism is nothing like that; other than sharing a worldview, we have very little in common. Humanist organisations are also fairly poor bases off which to do charitable work and I think there is considerably less opportunity to get involved in charity outside a congregation than within one. I know at school and church I was always involved in some kind of fundraising or something else, but since leaving I haven’t, really. It’s partly to do with time, partly to do with lack of motivation, but I think most of it is lack of accessibility. Don’t worry, these aren’t the kinds of things that would turn me back to Christianity, but I’m increasingly starting to think that the view of humanism as ‘all the goodness, none of the bullshit’ isn’t strictly accurate.

Sorry this was a bit long, hope it wasn’t boring.

The Case for Christ

I promised a couple of weeks ago that as soon as I finished reading The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel, I’d post a full review. Well I’ve found a couple of reviews that are much more extensive than I could ever be bothered writing, so instead of writing a full review here, I’m just going to link to those, and pick out maybe a couple of things I took from it.

There’s one tiny thing that I did find a little convincing. I’ve already said how it’s pointless trying to compare evidence for the gospels with evidence for secular documents, because they deal with very different issues, but one thing that was repeatedly said was that if the gospels weren’t true and Jesus genuinely hadn’t risen from the dead, then the apostles and the early Christians wouldn’t have claimed so for the rest of their lives, leading them eventually to rather gruesome deaths at the hands of the Romans. This was a problem for me whilst reading; I could dismiss a lot of the other things, but this kind of stuck. So I’ve thought about it myself, I’ve been reading around a little bit, and I think I’m past it.

The review I linked to above has a section on this assertion (the first part of “The Circumstantial Evidence”, near the bottom, page 246), which makes the assertion that plenty of people have died for their faith in the past, Mormons and Muslims for example, which doesn’t prove that what they’re saying is true. This only partly answers my problem. The objection in the text is that although plenty of people have died for something they believe is true, none would die for something they know is false, which if Christ didn’t rise from the dead, the disciples would know, since they were the witnesses of it.

Since finishing this book I’ve started on ‘The Portable Atheist’, a collection of exerpts by various authors, put together by Christopher Hitchens. There are a number of chapters by or about David Hume, the famous Edinburgh philosopher, which half addresses this problem. Hume says that miracles are miracles because they go against the human experience, they’re not what we normally see. This amounts to as great a proof as any human experience can provide. Therefore, if there is human testimony which supports the occurrence of a miracle, you have to weigh that testimony against your own, subtract the difference of strength between them, and then you will naturally incline on the stronger side, albeit with a diminution of certainty.

He goes on to state that “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact, which it endeavours to establish: And even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.” In simpler terms, is it more likely that the testimony come from someone who was deceived, or trying to deceive, or is it more likely that it’s true and the miracle took place? I think that in all cases I can think of, it’s more likely to be untrue.

Even the miracle of the sun at Fatima, where 70,000 people were reported to have seen the sun move and dive down towards the earth, can be explained using this logic, as Richard Dawkins writes in Unweaving the Rainbow. Would it be more likely that these 70,000 people were deceived into thinking the sun moved, or that the rest of the world were deceived into thinking it didn’t move whilst it actually did? That the people wouldn’t have been burnt up by the sun? That the physical effects of the sun’s nearness would be felt by the whole planet and would likely still be measurable? (In reality apparently there is some inconsistency in the reports of the crowd; Wikipedia says that some saw it dive down whilst others saw it zigzag. There are also no photographs of the event, despite photographers and reporters being in the crowd.)