Philosophy

This is an article by Dr James le Fanu in today’s DT. It is interesting to contrast how little we actually know with how much we think we know. A parallel to this article is the mess that is currently theoretical physics – we know very little more than we did 70 years ago, except to enlarge upon the vastness of our ignorance.

‘”Wonders are there many,” observed the Greek dramatist Sophocles, “but none more wonderful than man.” And rightly so, for we, as far as we can tell, are the sole witnesses of the splendours of the universe – though consistently less impressed by this privileged position than would seem warranted.

The chief reason for that lack of astonishment has always been that the practicalities of our everyday lives are so simple and effortless as to seem unremarkable. We open our eyes on waking to be surrounded by the shapes and colours, sounds and smells of the world in the most exquisite detail. We feel hungry, and by some magical alchemy of which we know nothing, our bodies transform the food and drink before us into our flesh and blood. We open our mouth to speak and the words flow in a ceaseless bubbling brook of thoughts and ideas.

We reproduce, and play no part in the transformation of the fertilised egg into a fully formed embryo with its 4,000 functioning parts. We tend to our children’s needs, but effortlessly they grow to adulthood, replacing along the way virtually every cell in their bodies.

These practicalities are not in the least bit simple, but in reality are the simplest things we know – because they have to be so. If our senses did not accurately capture the world around us, were the growth from childhood not virtually automatic, then “we” would never have happened.

There is, from common experience, nothing more difficult than to make the complex appear simple, just as a concert pianist’s effortless playing is grounded in years of toil and practice – so that semblance of simplicity must reflect the complexities of the processes that underpin them. This should, by rights, be part of general knowledge, a central theme of the school curriculum, promoting that appropriate sense of wonder in young minds at the fact of their very existence.

But one could search a shelf’s worth of biology textbooks in vain for a hint of the extraordinary in their detailed exposition of those complexities of life. Rather, for the past 150 years, scientists have interpreted the world through the prism of supposing there is nothing in principle that cannot be accounted for – where the unknown is merely waiting to be known. At least till very recently, when the findings of two of the most ambitious scientific projects ever conceived have revealed quite unexpectedly – and without anyone really noticing – that we are after all “a wonder” to ourselves.

It started in the early 1980s with a series of technical innovations in genetics and neuroscience that promised to resolve the final obstacles to comprehensive understanding of ourselves. They were, first, the immensely impressive achievement of spelling out the entire sequence of genes strung out along the double helix – the genome – of worms, flies, mice, monkeys and humans, which should have identified those “instructions” that so readily distinguish one form of life from another.

And second, the development of those equally impressive scanning techniques that would permit neuroscientists for the first time to observe the brain “in action”: thinking, imagining, perceiving – all the seemingly effortless features of the human mind.

This was serious science of the best kind, filling learned journals and earning Nobel Prizes while holding out the exhilarating prospect that these most fundamental questions of genetic inheritance and the workings of the human brain might finally be resolved.

The completion of the human genome project, on the cusp of the new millennium, marked “one of the most significant days in history”, as one of its architects described it. “Just as Copernicus changed our understanding of the solar system… so knowledge of the human genome would change how we see ourselves.”

At the same time Professor Steven Pinker, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after reviewing how neuroscientists with their new techniques had investigated everything “from mental imagery to moral sense”, confidently anticipated “cracking the mystery of the brain”.

Nearly a decade has passed since those heady days, and looking back, it is possible to see how the findings of both endeavours have enormously deepened our knowledge of life and the mind – but in a way quite contrary to that anticipated.

The genome projects were predicated on the reasonable assumption that spelling out the full complement of genes would clarify, to a greater or lesser extent, the source of that diversity of form that marks out the major categories of life. It was thus disconcerting to learn that virtually the reverse is the case, with a near equivalence of a (modest) 20,000 genes across the vast spectrum from a millimetre-long worm to ourselves.

It was similarly disconcerting to learn that the human genome is virtually interchangeable with that of our fellow vertebrates, such as the mouse and our primate cousins.

“We cannot see in this why we are so different from chimpanzees,” remarked the director of the chimp genome project. “The obvious differences cannot be explained by genetics alone.” This would seem fair comment but leaves unanswered the question of what does account for those distinctive features of standing upright and our prodigiously large brain.

More unexpected still, the same regulatory genes that cause a fly to be a fly, it emerged, cause humans to be humans with not a hint of why the fly should have six legs, a pair of wings and a brain the size of a full stop, and we should have two arms, two legs and a turbo-sized brain. These “instructions” must be there, of course, but we have moved in the wake of these projects from supposing we knew the principles of the genetic basis of the infinite variety of life, to recognising we have no conception of what they might be.

At the same time, neuroscientists observing the brain in action were increasingly perplexed at how it fragments the sights and sounds of every transient moment into a myriad of separate components, with no compensatory mechanism that would reintegrate them together into that personal experience of being at the centre of a coherent, ever-changing world.

Meanwhile, the greatest conundrum remains – how the monotonous electrical activity of those billions of neurons in the brain “translates” into the limitless range and quality of subjective experiences of our lives, where every moment has its own unique, intangible feel.

The implications are clear enough: while theoretically it might be possible for neuroscientists to know everything about the physical structure of the brain, its “product”, the mind, with its thoughts and ideas, impressions and emotions, would still remain unaccounted for.

“We seem as far from understanding the brain as we were a century ago,” says the editor of Nature, John Maddox. “Nobody understands how decisions are made or how imagination is set free.”

There is in all this the impression that triumphant science has stumbled on something of immense importance – a powerful parallel reality that might conjure the richness of the living world from the bare bones of the genes strung out along the double helix and the parallel richness of the mind from the electrochemistry of the brain.

Certainly, for the foreseeable future there will be no need to defer to those who would appropriate our sense of wonder at the glorious panoply of nature and ourselves, by their claims to understand it. Rather, the very aspect of the living world now seems once again infused with that deep sense of mystery of “How can these things be?”‘

Below are two reviews of ‘Moral Minds’ by Marc D. Hauser; the first by Richard Rorty from the New York Times and the second by Jonathan Derbyshire from the Guardian. They encapsulate my feelings precisely and they say it better than I could. The book is unsatisfying on many levels, not least the drudgery of wading through his rather dense prose.

Richard Rorty’s Review

‘Nazi parents found it easy to turn their children into conscientious little monsters. In some countries, young men are raised to believe that they have a moral obligation to kill their unchaste sisters. Gruesome examples like these suggest that morality is a matter of nurture rather than nature — that there are no biological constraints on what human beings can be persuaded to believe about right and wrong. Marc Hauser disagrees. He holds that “we are born with abstract rules or principles, with nurture entering the picture to set the parameters and guide us toward the acquisition of particular moral systems.” Empirical research will enable us to distinguish the principles from the parameters and thus to discover “what limitations exist on the range of possible or impossible moral systems.”

Hauser is professor of psychology, organismic and evolutionary biology, and biological anthropology at Harvard. He believes that “policy wonks and politicians should listen more closely to our intuitions and write policy that effectively takes into account the moral voice of our species.” Biologists, he thinks, are in a position to amplify this voice. For they have discovered evidence of the existence of what Hauser sometimes calls “a moral organ” and sometimes “a moral faculty.” This area of the brain is “a circuit, specialized for recognizing certain problems as morally relevant.” It incorporates “a universal moral grammar, a toolkit for building specific moral systems.” Now that we have learned that such a grammar exists, Hauser says, we can look forward to “a renaissance in our understanding of the moral domain.”

The exuberant triumphalism of the prologue to “Moral Minds” leads the reader to expect that Hauser will lay out criteria for distinguishing parochial moral codes from universal principles, and will offer at least a tentative list of those principles. These expectations are not fulfilled. The vast bulk of “Moral Minds” consists of reports of experimental results, but Hauser does very little to make clear how these results bear on his claim that there is a “moral voice of our species.”

Many of the experiments Hauser tells us about are intended to delimit stages in child development. Three-year-olds already know, for example, that “if an act causes harm, but the intention was good, then the act is judged less severely.” Hauser takes this fact to support the claim that “rather than a learned capacity … our ability to detect cheaters who violate social norms is one of nature’s gifts.” But do such facts as that children learn to use expressions like “didn’t mean to do it” at roughly the same time as they learn “shouldn’t have done it” help us draw a line between nature and nurture? Hauser does not spell out the relevance of data about child development to the question of whether internalizing a moral code requires a dedicated area of the brain.

To convince us that such an organ exists, Hauser would have to start by drawing a bright line separating what he calls “the moral domain” — one that nonhuman species cannot enter — from other domains. But he never does. The closest he comes is saying things like “a central difference between social conventions and moral rules is the seriousness of an infraction.” He takes this to suggest “that moral rules consist of two ingredients: a prescriptive theory or body of knowledge about what one ought to do, and an anchoring set of emotions.” Apparently both rules of etiquette and moral rules embody knowledge about what ought to be done. All that is distinctive about morality is added emotional freight. But, as Hauser tells us, many nonhuman species obey social conventions. (For example, “Do not start tearing at the carcass before the alpha male has eaten his fill.”) It is hard to see why evolution had to carve out a new, specialized organ just to generate the extra emotional intensity that differentiates guilt from chagrin.

Perhaps Hauser does not mean to say that greater seriousness is the only, or the most important, mark of the moral domain. But the reader is left guessing about how he proposes to distinguish morality not just from etiquette, but also from prudential calculation, mindless conformity to peer pressure and various other things. This makes it hard to figure out what exactly his moral module is supposed to do. It also makes it difficult to envisage experiments that would help us decide between his hypothesis and the view that all we need to internalize a moral code is general-purpose learning-from-experience circuitry — the same circuitry that lets us internalize, say, the rules of baseball.

Hauser thinks that Noam Chomsky has shown that in at least one area — learning how to produce grammatical sentences — the latter sort of circuitry will not do the job. We need, Hauser says, a “radical rethinking of our ideas on morality, which is based on the analogy to language.” But the analogy seems fragile. Chomsky has argued, powerfully if not conclusively, that simple trial-and-error imitation of adult speakers cannot explain the speed and confidence with which children learn to talk: some special, dedicated mechanism must be at work. But is a parallel argument available to Hauser? For one thing, moral codes are not assimilated with any special rapidity. For another, the grammaticality of a sentence is rarely a matter of doubt or controversy, whereas moral dilemmas pull us in opposite directions and leave us uncertain. (Is it O.K. to kill a perfectly healthy but morally despicable person if her harvested organs would save the lives of five admirable people who need transplants? Ten people? Dozens?)

Hauser hopes that his book will convince us that “morality is grounded in our biology.” Once we have grasped this fact, he thinks, “inquiry into our moral nature will no longer be the proprietary province of the humanities and social sciences, but a shared journey with the natural sciences.” But by “grounded in” he does not mean that facts about what is right and wrong can be inferred from facts about neurons. The “grounding” relation in question is not like that between axioms and theorems. It is more like the relation between your computer’s hardware and the programs you run on it. If your hardware were of the wrong sort, or if it got damaged, you could not run some of those programs.

Knowing more details about how the diodes in your computer are laid out may, in some cases, help you decide what software to buy. But now imagine that we are debating the merits of a proposed change in what we tell our kids about right and wrong. The neurobiologists intervene, explaining that the novel moral code will not compute. We have, they tell us, run up against hard-wired limits: our neural layout permits us to formulate and commend the proposed change, but makes it impossible for us to adopt it. Surely our reaction to such an intervention would be, “You might be right, but let’s try adopting it and see what happens; maybe our brains are a bit more flexible than you think.” It is hard to imagine our taking the biologists’ word as final on such matters, for that would amount to giving them a veto over utopian moral initiatives. The humanities and the social sciences have, over the centuries, done a great deal to encourage such initiatives. They have helped us better to distinguish right from wrong. Reading histories, novels, philosophical treatises and ethnographies has helped us to reprogram ourselves — to update our moral software. Maybe someday biology will do the same. But Hauser has given us little reason to believe that day is near at hand.’

Richard Rorty recently retired from teaching at Stanford. He is the author of “Philosophy and Social Hope.”

Jonathan Derbyshire’s Review

‘According to Marc Hauser, “morality is grounded in our biology”. We’ve heard this sort of thing before, of course – from evolutionary biologists, for instance, who claim that natural selection favours altruistic behaviour, since acting benevolently towards other people is a way of securing our genetic posterity. Some proponents of the evolutionary explanation go further, and infer from this that what seem to be our moral concerns aren’t our real concerns at all, and that what looks like altruism is in fact just a disguise for the operation of selfish genes.

Though Hauser himself believes that the moral machinery of human brains has been designed by the “blind hand” of Darwinian selection, he rejects such extreme interpretations. There’s no gene for altruism, he says, so we can’t derive specific rules for conduct from the structure of our DNA. And for that reason, we shouldn’t worry that our genetic inheritance leaves us trapped in an unchanging set of moral beliefs or judgments. On the contrary, our biology does not fix the range of possible moral systems, which is constrained only by history and culture. What that biology gives us is a set of very general principles on the basis of which we are able to develop one system of moral beliefs or another.

These general principles are at the heart of Hauser’s argument in Moral Minds. His contention, which he thinks amounts to nothing less than a “radical rethinking” of the nature of morality, is that human beings are creatures born with innate “moral instincts”. Because Homo sapiens is the only species to construct complex moral systems, morality has to be grounded in some distinctive property of the human brain – what Hauser calls a “moral organ” or “moral grammar”.

As the latter description suggests, Hauser’s inspiration here is the work done in theoretical linguistics by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky argues that the ability of children to learn to talk, which involves mastering highly complex rules of grammar, couldn’t simply be acquired by listening to competent adult speakers. There must be an innate “universal grammar” underlying different languages, deep structures that can be uncovered through painstaking comparative study.

Hauser builds on the “linguistic analogy” suggested by the philosopher John Rawls, who thought that a satisfactory account of our moral capacities would involve appealing to intuitive principles that we aren’t necessarily capable of articulating for ourselves. Just as we generate different, and mutually unintelligible, languages on the basis of universal grammatical principles, so, Hauser argues, there are deep moral “intuitions” that underlie cultural variations in social norms.

In order to uncover this “universal moral grammar”, Hauser devised a “moral sense test”. The test presented subjects with a number of so-called “trolley” problems, imaginary dilemmas dreamt up by philosophers and designed to tease out people’s moral intuitions. Imagine, for example, that you’re standing on a footbridge from which you can see a driverless tram hurtling in the direction of five people stranded on the track. The only way of stopping the tram and saving the lives of those people is to drop a heavy weight in its path. As it happens, a fat man is also standing on the bridge. Should you push the fat man to his death in order to stop the tram or leave him unmolested, in which case those on the track will die?

Hauser reports that only 10% of respondents said it was morally permissible to push the fat man from the bridge. From this and similar results, he deduces a universal “intention principle”, according to which intended harm is morally worse than harm that is foreseen but not directly intended. What is unclear, however, is why Hauser thinks data like these also license claims about the existence of a discrete moral faculty or “organ”. It is one thing to articulate principles that help to make sense of our intuitive responses to moral dilemmas, but quite another to conclude from this that such principles must belong to a particular region of the brain.

Moral Minds is full of fascinating reports on psychological experiments, few of which offer any obvious support for Hauser’s ambitious claims about moral grammar. This accounts, in part, for the book’s longueurs – that and the fact that Hauser’s rather colourless prose style is no match for that of scientific popularisers such as Steven Pinker or Richard Dawkins.

Hauser’s extravagant promise, in the prologue, to “explain how an unconscious and universal grammar underlies our judgments of right and wrong” is therefore not fulfilled. In fact, he comes close to acknowledging this in a somewhat deflating conclusion when he concedes that the “science of morality” is still in its infancy. And there is nothing here to suggest that this nascent discipline will conquer the “proprietary province of the humanities” any time soon.’

Jonathan Derbyshire is a philosopher and blogger

I am a little late in getting around to reading this book, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction when it was published in 2005. I had heard that it was about a mother writing about her son, a “Columbine High School” type killer, and thought it would make for rather grim reading. I wasn’t wrong, it is a very dark book, but it does ask (and doesn’t really ever answer) some difficult questions.
  It’s the old nature/nurture debate explored from the point of view of the mother of a child who nobody would want to claim as theirs. We hear everything from one voice, that of the mother, as she struggles to make sense of what appears to be a senseless act, and traces back through time events that may or may not have bearing on her son’s future behaviour.
  Eva Khatchadourian is searingly frank in her account, but it is only her account, her emotions and feelings that we get to hear about. We are left to a large amount to infer what is going on in the emotional lives of others in the story.
  Eva is not sure if she wants a child until one night when her husband is very late home and she panics that if he is dead then she will have nothing of him left in her life. It is clear she loves her husband dearly, but she has already made her first mistake. There are no guarantees that a child will be anything like either of its parents, in looks, temperament or interests. Eva draws a short straw and gets a son who has nothing of him that reminds her of her husband, Franklin, but a whole load, including looks, that is uncomfortably close to herself.
  By the time she goes through a difficult birth with her son she is already resentful in small ways of the loss of freedoms that she has experienced and this is further compounded by the fact that she feels nothing on meeting her son for the first time. There is no rush of emotion or maternal feelings, which must seem to her to be reciprocated when her newborn refuses to feed from her. This bad start never seems to be overcome.
  Eva documents events from Kevin’s early childhood in which she apportions motives that are hard to reconcile with his developmental stage. We are asked to believe that he is capable of a high degree of manipulative behaviour and that this is planned solely to irritate and confound his mother. Sometimes we can see that she may possibly be right, but in other scenarios it seems unclear. Eva admits “To me he was never “the baby”. He was a singular, unusually cunning individual who had arrived to stay with us and just happened to be very small.” Perhaps through these lenses there is much that will be distorted.
  Franklin, in Eva’s account, can see no wrong in their son and will support him over her at every opportunity. Eva believes that Kevin puts on an act with his father, that he never gets to see “the real Kevin”, but it seems that his mother is also never seeing “the real Kevin” either, and that maybe this is what Kevin wants the most of all. When a child can do no right in the eyes of his own mother there may be very little to gain through revealing all.
  There are points where Eva tries very hard to get the relationship with her son back on track. She gives up her job to stay at home with him but this only brings more opportunities for Kevin to show that all of her motherly efforts are futile. He will not appreciate her handcrafted story books, he refuses to be taught anything by her, preferring to pick up knowledge “on the sly” so that he can show her just how redundant she is.
  Eva questions her own behaviour throughout the retelling of the history in an attempt to tease out who exactly is to blame for the horror of Thursday (the day Kevin goes on a killing spree at his school) when the lives of her family are turned upside down. There are some shocking revelations of cruelty from two of the main parties in the equation (Kevin and Eva) and some questionable decisions on Franklin’s part (he buys Kevin a crossbow for a Christmas present). At various times it is easy to feel sorry for each family member, at others it is all too easy to begin to point the finger of blame. The reader is left wondering every bit as much as Eva herself how much responsibility lies with her and how much with her son. Was Kevin born bad or did he turn out bad? If he was born bad then Eva cannot blame herself. If he turned out bad that means there were reasons and that it was preventable. Is Eva remembering events clearly, or does she retell them with a slant that makes the “born bad” scenario seem more compelling? The reader is left to decide.
    The book is an intelligent and challenging exploration of what appears to be a particularly American phenomenon  – the high school massacre. Nature, nuture, the working mother, the cold distant mother, the non-supportive parenting relationship between Eva and Franklin, sibling rivalry – all are thrown into the blame pot. When it comes to talking about Kevin we are all probably like Eva and see him through our own set of lenses and in relation to our own life choices.
  I find it hard to accept that Kevin was “born bad” and events at the end of the book suggest to me that Kevin always desired to be known and loved by his mother but was aware that his mother did not love or seek him out. His father, a model dad from the outside, whilst loving his son did not ever truly know him either. Kevin is never loved for simply who he is, which I believe makes him all the more likely to turn out unlovable.
  The book is an uncomfortable read for parents and (I imagine) non-parents to read. For a parent it is a jolting reminder that we are shaping our children’s future selves (a huge responsibility). Non-parents may read it and understand more clearly why they never wanted to have children (too risky? too uncertain? too much like hard work?) or seriously consider their motives for wanting them. Which is a shame, for the chances of raising a Kevin can surely be made very small indeed.
 
I’m happy to mail the book to anyone who would like to read it.

This is a short book (170 pp) by one of the foremost Jesus scholars of today. He is Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at Oxford University and is probably most famous for his work on the Dead Sea scrolls in the 1950s and 60s. His other published works on the historical character of Jesus include, ‘Jesus the Jew,’ ‘The Changing Faces of Jesus,’ ‘The Authentic Gospel of Jesus,’ and, ’The Passion.’ In each of these he examines such evidence as there is to uncover the possible events that led to the creation of the New Testament. His conclusion is that Jesus was a charismatic, eschatological preacher from rural Galilee who so upset the Roman Governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, on a visit to Jerusalem at the highly charged holiday time of Passover that he was crucified as a dangerous troublemaker.

This book seeks to sift the evidence from the New Testament, Jewish scripture, contemporary Jewish beliefs, other near contemporary writers and what we know of Jewish society at the time to create some possible scenarios for why the Resurrection became such a central belief, firstly for the Jewish Jesus movement and then for the early church. He then examines each of these in some detail before identifying the most likely sequence of events which provided the basis for it. He dismisses the two extreme positions of the non-existence of the historical Jesus (which, he says, creates more problems than it solves) and the supernatural explanation of Christians that the Resurrection and Ascension actually occurred.

The book begins by examining the development of Jewish post-death beliefs through a critical analysis of the Torah, later scriptural writings in the Old Testament, other biblical period sources, and later (post-biblical) rabbinical texts. Judaism has little to say about an afterlife until the rise of the Pharisees in late biblical times. Almost all biblical literature was concerned with living a good and pious life on earth. Vermes does, however, acknowledge the tensions that this caused as some impious wrongdoers prospered whilst good people suffered. This, ‘Injustice,’ is starkly illustrated in the book of Job. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the author of Ecclesiates and one or two others highlight and rail against this seeming anomaly.

By the time of Jesus there were (at least) three distinct traditions of Jewish religious thought: The Sadducees (orthodox); Essenes (an ascetic sect that had largely withdrawn from the world and whose writings are contained within the Dead Sea scrolls); and the Pharisees. Pharisees were thought to number about 6,000 at the time of Jesus and were mainly confined to urban areas, particularly towns in Judea. Their distinctive beliefs included a conviction that the good would be rewarded in the afterlife. It is unlikely that there were Pharisees preaching in Galilee at the time of Jesus.

The author then turns his attention to resurrection references in the Bible and post-biblical literature. He includes here references to resuscitations performed by Jesus and his disciples. There are some examples of restoring people to life prior to Jesus such as those credited to the prophets Elijah and Elisha but full blown resurrection and ascension was confined to Enoch and Elijah, with Jewish tradition adding Moses and Isaiah to the list.

The idea of resurrection began to take hold during the mid 2^nd century BC in the Book of Daniel (160BC) and 1 and 2 Maccabees (100BC). This followed the massacre and displacement of Jews, and the suppression of Judaism by the Seleucid king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, in 168 BC. The resurrection belief took two forms; Palestinian Jews thought that bodily resurrection would take place and those in the Greek speaking Diaspora leaned more towards the Platonic concept of immortality of the soul once it had been liberated from its corruptible body. Martyrdom became common at this time: many devout Jews would rather suffer death than deny their religion. Josephus claims that Essenes believed in spiritual resurrection, although there is scant evidence for this in the Dead Sea scrolls. So, at the time of Jesus there are three views on the afterlife: the aristocratic and orthodox Sadducees thought that bodily and spiritual expiration happened at the time of death; the Pharisaic belief of bodily resurrection and the immortality of the soul supported by most (but not all) Jews of the Diaspora.

The second part of the book deals with accounts of resurrection and the afterlife in the New Testament, concluding with some possible scenarios explaining the Resurrection of Jesus. Jesus himself refers to the afterlife hardly at all in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) and those few turn out to be inauthentic. There are more references in John but some of those are clearly post hoc such as 6:24 which invites his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood – a nauseating thought for a first century Palestinian Jew. If the search is widened to include references to eternal life the synoptics still provide few examples. John, on the other hand, contains 25 references attributed to Jesus. The synoptics (not John) have Jesus repeatedly referring to his own resurrection, which makes it so odd that the disciples were taken aback by the event when it occurred.

Vermes then sets out in some detail the varying accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus in each of the Gospels. Whichever way one interprets these they are irreconcilable and some are flatly contradictory. The author’s view is that the afterlife did not figure largely in the words of Jesus because he fully expected the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God. When it did not occur the Gospel writers had a problem of how to explain the cross and the belief of Jesus as Messiah, which is why there is such a diversity of explanations. It must not be forgotten that the Gospels were written between 40 and 70 years after the death of Jesus.

It was Paul (writing in the mid 50s AD, 20 odd years after the events) who made the Resurrection of Jesus the centrepiece of Christianity. He does not dwell on the events but just states it as fact. It is the author’s contention that the references in Paul’s letters arose from debates within the Jesus movement on the forthcoming Parousia (the return of Christ). A lot of the debate centred around what would happen to believers who had died before He returned. Paul reassured them that they also would be revived. There is little reference to the Resurrection in other parts of the New Testament.

He ends the book with six theories that might explain the events at the end of the life of Jesus. These are:

The body was removed from the tomb by somebody unconnected with Jesus. Objection: those who buried Jesus were well known and could have easily furnished an explanation as to why the body had been moved.

The body was stolen by his disciples. Objection: his followers did not expect Him to reappear, so why would they pretend that he had? The author suggests that this was a rumour spread by the Jewish religious hierarchy to discredit the incipient Jesus movement.

The empty tomb was not the tomb of Jesus. This is possible but unlikely given that everybody involved knew where it was.

Buried alive, Jesus later left the tomb. Objection: what happened to Him afterwards?

The migrant Jesus – he revived from his coma and left Judea. Objection: a lack of evidence.

Spiritual, rather than bodily resurrection. He only appeared to his adherents after death and so it is possible that a vision came to one or more of His followers (not an uncommon phenomenon in a more credulous age) and that became the basis of the story. Again, the objection is that there is no tangible evidence that this is what occurred.

This leaves us with an Epilogue where he speculates that without Jesus the movement must die and so He lived on in the hearts of His followers. This wish then might have become father to the thought and the tale then became one of actual (rather than metaphorical) resurrection. It was Paul who first latched on to this and made it the focal point of the teachings of the early church.

My own view is that this explanation seems to be in the right area. There might also have been some guilt, anger and grief mixed in with desire to preserve the memory of their leader. We can see today how people will strive to preserve the memory of departed loved ones as vividly as they can and how often devotees will fervently continue to believe that their hero is not really dead, despite the evidence.

The 20 novels in the series (and one must read them in order) are predominantly concerned with describing life at sea during the time of ‘Nelson’s Navy’ in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. The first, ‘Master and Commander,’ commences in the late 1790s and the final book concludes following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo with, ‘Blue at the Mizzen.’ Although the main characters are fictitious the actions described are based on verifiable historical events . He advises the reader where facts have been elided to condense the action for dramatic purposes or for reasons of clarity.

The twin heroes of the series are very different characters in almost every respect. Jack Aubrey is a bluff naval officer with a burning desire to rise up the ranks and emulate his hero, Nelson, as far as possible. Although he is a first class seaman and renowned fighting captain he is a child, a simpleton almost, ashore. His element is the sea. Not the least of his accomplishments is his expertise as a self-taught mathematician and on more than one occasion was invited to give a lecture to the Royal Society on nutation. It has been said that the Aubrey character was based loosely on that of Lord Cochrane, although that gentleman was an ardent Whig, whereas Aubrey is a died-in-the-wool Tory. His (Aubrey’s) father, who is a considerable embarrassment to him (and a hindrance in his naval ambitions) was MP for a rotten borough firstly as a Tory and then for the radical interest.

Aubrey’s particular friend and co-hero of the books is an Irish/Catalan polyglot called Stephen Maturin (full name, Esteban Maturin y Domanova). He is a physician, naturalist, and Roman Catholic – he is also illegitimate. He acts as an intelligence agent for the British government and so it suits his purpose to act as the ship’s surgeon under Aubrey’s command as a cover for his deeper purposes. He has other reasons to stay afloat, not least to satisfy his obsessive interest in the natural world, which often leads to tensions when Aubrey needs to ‘Crack on’ and Maturin (who is also a member of the Royal Society) would like to linger, spending time ‘Philosophising,’ as Aubrey puts it, in some remote part of the world.

What can two such disparate characters have in common that leads to a strong and enduring friendship based on mutual respect and admiration? Well, they both share a passion for music and spend many hours playing pieces together in Aubrey’s cabin. Aubrey plays the violin (and is the more proficient player) and Maturin the ‘Cello. They both also hate Napoleon, viewing him as a threat to their respective nations’ freedoms. Whilst Maturin has no love for the British government (and particularly its endemic anti-Catholic culture) he does acknowledge it as the least bad political system around, which is why he supports its fight against the Napoleonic tyranny. Finally, they both admire moral and physical courage in others, which each possesses in abundance.

There are many other characters to savour, some appearing for one book only and others enduring for large chunks of the series. Yet others flit in and out throughout the period, giving a real feeling of the complexity and multifarious nature of lived life. Some worthy of mention are: Barrett Bonden (Aubrey’s coxswain); Preserved Killick (his steward); ‘Awkward’ Davies (a foremast hand whom Aubrey once saved from drowning and has since followed him from command to command); Padeen (a monoglot Irishman who acts as Maturin’s sometime loblolly boy); Diana Villiers (a beautiful and dashing lady who features strongly in many of the books); Clarissa Oakes (the eponymous heroine of one volume); the egregious Mrs Williams and her beautiful daughter, Sophie; two Melanesian girls rescued from a smallpox infested island in the Pacific; Sir Joseph Blaine (Maturin’s intelligence boss in London, who is also a collector and classifier of beetles); Andrew Wray (a civil servant); Pullings, Babington, Reade, and Mowett (all officers under Aubrey’s command at various times), and so on.

The books are not simply adventure stories, although O’Brian is a superb storyteller, they also explore politics, Maturin was once a supporter of the United Irishmen until they began to develop links with Napoleon’s France; the natural world (O’Brian is also the biographer of Sir Joseph Banks); the role the Royal Navy played in suppressing the slave trade; the movements for independence in Chile and Peru (which the British government surreptitiously supported); relationships with the Ottoman Empire and Muslim/Christian sensitivities etc.

But the most compelling element of the series for me is his vivid depiction of life on board a British Man o’ War (the wooden world) during this time. He gives a real feeling for the long periods of boredom interspersed with short bursts of sometimes brutal activity. The overcrowding, the harsh environment and tough working conditions are all faithfully re-created from Admiralty records and captains’ logs. He is also a master at capturing the sometimes childish and occasionally witty humour that peppers any group of people thrown together for long periods. One trait of sailors that he really brings home is how they can endure almost any hardship afloat but one thing they cannot handle is sudden wealth ashore. They all (including Aubrey) love taking a prize (the resulting prize money was shared out in strictly laid down proportions) but few contrive to hang on to their new found riches for longer than a few days ashore. Maturin’s usual first job on leaving port is to treat those who have contracted the pox or have injured themselves in some drunken escapade or other.

The most daunting aspect of the books for me on first reading (I have just finished the whole series for the second time) was the naval jargon. O’Brian solves this gradually and brilliantly. Maturin is a confirmed and lifelong land-lubber who never gets the hang of naval terms – the hands are not even convinced he knows his Larboard from his Starboard. This allows Aubrey patiently to explain the terminology (oft repeated), so eventually even the most lubberly reader (of which I include myself) begins slowly to understand how a ship functions and gets efficiently from A to B. He also uses this method to explain fighting terms and tactics. It works in reverse too, when Maturin tries to describe to Aubrey some natural wonder (a tortoise, insect or bird) that has not yet been catalogued or investigated by science. He also explains the medical science and surgical techniques of the period in this way.

I learned much from the series – naval and historical facts, of course (O’Brian is a scrupulous researcher) but much more than that. There is a great deal of social commentary with a sympathetic perspective on the manners and mores of the time, and there are also some real insights into human relationships. He exposes that most destructive tendency of all relationships – the striving for moral superiority. On one occasion Maturin listens to Jack, who thinks he is alone, playing the violin and realises that he is far, far more talented a musician than he shows when they play together. In other words, he deliberately plays down to Stephen’s level and he wonders to himself how he will ever overcome this moral deficit. O’Brian knows that successful friendships depend on moral equilibrium. Without this the relationship quickly descends into jealousy, rivalry, contempt and indifference.

Women are necessarily few in such a male-oriented world but those who appear are real and fully developed characters. This lack of a large female cast is often cited as a weakness with the accusation that they are really adventure books for boys but I know women who have become just as addicted to this world as I have. Even the children (not numerous, of course) are three dimensional and interesting. It should also be remembered that the youngsters on board ship are little more than children themselves – Aubrey, for example, was 12 when he first sailed. What sets these books apart from, say, the Hornblower series more than anything for me is the humour. It runs through the books like a golden thread, giving them a lightness and a realism that some historical novels lack.

I have deliberately steered away from describing individual passages or actions here because I would not like to spoil the plots for you, although they are all a matter of historical record.

As an afterthought, I saw the film, ‘Master and Commander; the Far Side of the World,’ for the second time the other night. The first time I saw it I was incensed at the solecisms and liberties with the plot but having now read the whole series for a second time and then watched the film again I am not so sure. Of course there was some serious miscasting, particularly (and ludicrously) Bonden who, incidentally, was called more than once by Aubrey, ‘Barrett,’ which would never have occurred. The plot seemed to be a mish-mash of several of the books (none of which was Master and Commander) along with various inventions, such as the chase, which was a French ship in the film but an American in the book (and in reality). I suppose this was done to appease American audiences. Having said all this, however, on second viewing it did capture something of the atmosphere of Nelson’s navy and the sometimes tense, sometimes loving and always respectful nature of Aubrey and Maturin’s relationship. One could see how two such seeming opposites might have forged an enduring friendship. The musical sequences were particularly moving in this respect. I also liked the hands’ banter and their fervently held superstitions.

In 1600, the former Dominican monk and philosopher Giordano Bruno was burnt alive in the streets of Rome. To humiliate him, the Church first hung him upside down and stripped him naked. What made the teachings of Bruno so dangerous? He had asked a simple question: is there life in outer space? Rather than entertain the possibility of billions of saints, popes, churches, and Jesus Christs in outer space, it was more convenient for the Church simply to burn him.

For 400 years the memory of Bruno has haunted the historians of science. But Bruno has his revenge every few weeks: about twice a month a new extrasolar planet is discovered orbiting a star: more than 250 such planets have now been documented. Bruno’s prediction of extrasolar planets has been vindicated. But one question lingers. Although the Milky Way may be teaming with extrasolar planets, how many of them can support life? And if intelligent life does exist, what can science say about it?

Some people claim that extraterrestrials have already visited Earth in the form of UFOs. Scientists usually dismiss the possibility of UFOs because the distances between stars are so vast. But last year the French government released a report by the French National Centre for Space Studies, which included 1,600 UFO sightings spanning 50 years, including 100,000 pages of eyewitness accounts, films and audiotapes. The French government stated that nine per cent of these sightings could be fully explained, that 33 per cent had likely explanations, but that it was unable to follow up on the rest.

The most credible cases of UFOs involve a) multiple sightings by independent, credible eyewitnesses and b) evidence from multiple sources, such as eyesight and radar. For example, in 1986 there was a sighting of a UFO by JAL flight 1628 over Alaska, which was investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration. The UFO was seen by the passengers of the JAL flight and was also tracked by ground radar. Similarly, there were mass radar sightings of black triangles over Belgium in 1989-90 that were tracked by Nato radar and jet interceptors. In 1976, there was a sighting over Tehran, that resulted in multiple systems failures in an F-4 jet interceptor. But what is frustrating to scientists is that, of the thousands of recorded sightings, none has produced hard physical evidence that can lead to reproducible results in the laboratory. No alien DNA, alien computer chip or physical evidence of a landing has ever been retrieved.

We might ask ourselves what kind of spacecraft they would be. Here are some of the characteristics that have been recorded by observers.

a) They are known to zig-zag in midair;

b) They have been known to stop car ignitions and disrupt electrical power;

c) They hover silently.

None of these characteristics fits the description of the rockets we have developed on Earth. For example, all known rockets depend on Newton’s third law of motion (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction); yet the UFOs cited do not seem to have any exhaust. And the g-forces created by zig-zagging flying saucers would exceed 100 times the gravitational force on Earth – the g-forces would be enough to flatten any creature on Earth.

Can such UFO characteristics be explained using modern science? In movies it is always assumed that alien beings pilot these craft. More likely, however, if such craft exist, they are unmanned (or are manned by a being that is part organic and part mechanical). This would explain how the craft could execute patterns generating g-forces that would normally crush a living being.

Any alien civilisation advanced enough to send starships throughout the universe has certainly mastered nanotechnology. This would mean that their starships do not have to be very large; they could be sent by the millions to explore inhabited planets. Desolate moons would perhaps be the best bases for such nanoships. If so, then perhaps our own moon has been visited in the past by a civilisation similar to the scenario depicted in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is perhaps the most realistic depiction of an encounter with an extraterrestrial civilisation.

Some scientists have scoffed at UFOs because they don’t fit any of the gigantic propulsion designs being considered by engineers today, such as ramjet fusion engines, huge laser-powered sails and nuclear pulsed engines, which might be miles across. But UFOs can be as small as a jet aeroplane, and can refuel from a nearby moon base. So sightings may correspond to unmanned reconnaissance ships.

Time is one of the great mysteries of the universe. We are all swept up in the river of time against our will. Around AD400, Saint Augustine wrote extensively about the paradoxical nature of time: ‘How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.’ If we take Saint Augustine’s logic further, we see that time is not possible, since the past is gone, the future does not exist, and the present exists only for an instant.

In 1990, Stephen Hawking read papers of his colleagues proposing their version of a time machine, and he was sceptical. His intuition told him that time travel was not possible because there were no tourists from the future. If time travel were as common as taking a Sunday picnic in the park, then time travellers from the future should be pestering us with their cameras. There ought to be a law, he proclaimed, making time travel impossible. He proposed a ‘Chronology Protection Conjecture’ to ban time travel from the laws of physics in order to ‘make history safe for historians’.

The embarrassing thing, however, was that no matter how hard physicists tried, they could not find a law to prevent time travel. Apparently, time travel seems to be consistent with the known laws of physics. Unable to find any physical law that makes time travel impossible, Hawking recently changed his mind. He made headlines when he said, ‘Time travel may be possible, but it is not practical.’

Time travel to the future is possible and has been experimentally verified millions of times. If an astronaut were to travel near the speed of light, it might take him, say, one minute to reach the nearest stars. Four years would have elapsed on Earth, but for him only one minute would have passed, because time would have slowed down inside the rocket ship. Hence he would have travelled four years into the future, as experienced here on Earth. (Our astronauts actually take a short trip into the future every time they go into outer space. As they travel at 18,000 miles per hour above the Earth, their clocks beat a tiny bit slower than clocks on Earth. The world record for travelling into the future is held by the Russian cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev, who orbited for 748 days and was hence hurled .02 seconds into the future.) So a time machine that can take us into the future is consistent with Einstein’s special theory of relativity. But what about going backwards in time?

If we could journey back into the past, history would be impossible to write. As soon as a historian recorded the history of the past, someone could go back into the past and rewrite it. Not only would time machines put historians out of business, but they would enable us to alter the course of time at will. If, for example, we were to go back to the era of the dinosaurs and accidentally step on a mammal that happened to be our ancestor, perhaps we would accidentally wipe out the entire human race. History would become an unending, madcap Monty Python episode, as tourists from the future trampled over historic events while trying to get the best camera angle.

But perhaps the thorniest problems are the logical paradoxes raised by time travel. For example, what happens if we kill our parents before we are born? This is a logical impossibility. It is sometimes called the ‘grandfather paradox’.

There are three ways to resolve these paradoxes. First, perhaps you simply repeat past history when you go back in time, therefore fulfilling the past. In this case, you have no free will. You are forced to complete the past as it was written. Thus, if you go back into the past to give the secret of time travel to your younger self, then it was meant to happen that way. The secret of time travel came from the future. It was destiny. (But this does not tell us where the original idea came from.)

Second, you have free will, so you can change the past, but within limits. Your free will is not allowed to create a time paradox. Whenever you try to kill your parents before you are born, a mysterious force prevents you from pulling the trigger. This position has been advocated by the Russian physicist Igor Novikov. He argues that there is a law preventing us from walking on the ceiling, although we might want to. Hence, there might be a law preventing us from killing our parents before we are born.

Third, the universe splits into two. On one timeline the people whom you killed look just like your parents, but they are different, because you are now in a parallel universe. This latter possibility seems to be the one consistent with the quantum theory.

The film Back to the Future explored the third possibility. Doc Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) invents a plutonium-fired DeLorean car, which is actually a time-machine for travelling to the past. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) enters the machine and goes back and meets his teenage mother, who then falls in love with him. This poses a sticky problem. If Marty’s teenage mother spurns his future father, then they never would have married, and he would never have been born.

The problem is clarified a bit by Doc Brown. He goes to the blackboard and draws a horizontal line, representing the timeline of our universe. Then he draws a second line, which branches off the first line, representing a parallel universe that opens up when you change the past. Thus, whenever we go back into the river of time, the river forks into two, and one timeline becomes two timelines, or what is called the ‘many worlds’ approach.

This means that all time-travel paradoxes can be solved. If you have killed your parents before you were born, it simply means you have killed some people who are genetically identical to your parents, with the same memories and personalities, but they are not your true parents.

Bipedalism is a rare characteristic in the animal kingdom and humans are the only mammals to walk and run on two legs habitually. There must have been very strong selection pressures for it to have evolved. Many theories have been put forward to try to explain how this might have come about.
Darwin was one of the first commentators on human bipedalism in 1871. He believed that the freeing of the hands for tool use could be the explanation. However, this theory has been discredited by the discovery that bipedalism predates the earliest found tools by about one million years. Bipedalism also predates the significant increase in brain size that was most likely needed for the manufacture of tools. The regular use of stone tools and the increase in brain capacity are believed to first appear with the species Homo Habilis 2.4 million years ago.
Bipedalism in the human lineage has been dated to roughly four million years ago. This antiquity was not widely appreciated until the 1960s. The discovery of the “Lucy” skeleton in 1974 helped to dispel any remaining doubts. Although Lucy does not show all the adaptations to bipedalism that modern humans do, such as the lockable knee, it is accepted that she could and did walk bipedally. She belongs to the species Australopithicus afarensis and her skeleton is dated at 3.2 million years ago. Further evidence for early bipedalism comes from the track of hominid footprints found at Laetoli, thought to have been made by a member of the species A. afarensis about 3.7 million years ago.
Fifer (1987) proposed that bipedalism arose so that our ancestors could be good stone throwers so as to ward off predators. Kortland’s similar theory (1980) is that it evolved from the use of forelimbs to brandish thornbush branches to ward off attack by carnivores. Both of these theories overlook the obvious disadvantages of standing upright in these situations: namely that bipeds are easier to knock over, are more conspicious and less agile when dodging, feinting and other escape tactics.
Hewes (1961,1964) and Lovejoy (1981) believed that advantages of being able to carry meat and other food items back to a home base was the driving evolutionary force behind bipedalism. Hewes thought that only by the freeing of the arms and hands could “maximal transportational efficiency” be achieved. Meat would need to be carried and would require picking, gnawing and chewing slowly. This would be much safer to do at a home base than out on the savannah.
Meat eating and hunting proper are now generally considered to have become established far later in our evolution, about the time of Homo habilis. Lovejoy therefore proposes that vegetable foodstuffs would be collected and brought back to the camp. There would be division of labour with the females staying at home to care for offspring. Lovejoy proposes that this happened in a forest environment before the move onto the savannah. This scenario assumes that pair-bonding was established, however there are no documented examples of this type of behaviour among non-human primates. The gibbon is the only known pair-bonded primate and the males have not been observed offering food to the females. Primates are also far more likey to run on three legs when carrying objects. We need to consider if this version of events would lead to males being far more efficient at bipedal locomotion than females.
Rodman and McHenry (1980) suggest that bipedalism arose because at normal walking speeds it is more efficient than quadrepedalism. This was enlarged on by Shipman (1984) who believed that this was an adaptation to a meat-scavenging life-style where long distances would be travelled at relatively slow speeds. However, many other animals need to travel long distances at slow speeds eg when searching for food and water or when migrating and they all do so on four legs. If a higher level of efficiency is required then it is far more likely that refinements and improvements will occur on the original system rather than a wholly new one emerging. A considerable rearrangement is necessary in the structure of the body for a quadruped to become an adept biped.
Another savannah theory has a thermoregulatory basis. This idea proposes that a bipedal hominid has an advantge over a quadrupedal one in that it will receive less radiation from the sun when it is in an overhead position. This “sunshine theory” was first touched on by R W Newman in 1970 and later elaborated on by Pete Wheeler (1984). In the midday sun a bipedal hominid would present 40% of the area that a quaduped would expose to the sun’s rays. It is an intricate theory linked to loss of body hair and involving considerations such as water and energy budgets. Critics argue that alternative effective methods of dealing with overheating are more likely to have evolved, ones which did not require such extensive skeletal rearrangements. Also, no other savannah animal, living under the same conditions, has gone down the same evolutionary path as we have.
Many who study human evolution believe that none of the “savannah theories” provide sufficiently strong selection pressures to outweigh the many disadvantages of bipedalism in the savannah environment. As well as all the muscular remodelling that was necessary, the change to bipedalism altered the angle of the birth canal in females resulting in a more difficult mode of giving birth. Even now, possibly 4 million years later, we are paying the price. More days are taken off work due to back pain than to any other complaint. Our hearts work harder to pump blood around our bodies due to the enhanced gravitational pull on blood returning from the legs. The extra strain on our hearts may cause high blood pressure and we may suffer from varicose veins due to valves failing in over-worked veins (Morgan, 1990). These are sometimes referred to as our “scars of evolution”. Because we are not currently perfectly adapted to our present environment we should perhaps question whether we were at one point in our evolution better adapted to a wholly different environment.
In 1960 Professor Sir Alister Hardy proposed that we must have had an aquatic phase in our evolution. He suggests that at an early stage of hominid evolution, early in the fossil gap, the area of land inhabited by a group of hominids became flooded. Morgan later suggested that this area was the Afar triangle/Danakil desert, which is a low lying area known to have been flooded at this time. This flooding would have lead to an environment of flooded forests, islands and mangrove swamps. Hominids living here would have spent a lot of time in the water, probably coming to rely on it for the abundant and nutritious food sources it contained.
When wading in water there are obvious advantages to being bipedal, the major one being that one can walk further in without drowning. A bipedal posture also presents less resistance when walking through water and means that one can look down to the ground for food without needing to be completely submerged.
Swimming is far easier with a steamlined bipedal shape. There would be strong selection pressure for legs in line with the body. There are many compelling feautres of a study of comparative anatomy that support the aquatic ape theory.
Characteristics Humans Apes Savannah Aquatics
bipedalism yes
loss of body hair yes yes yes
subcutaneous fat yes yes
ventro-ventral
copulation yes yes yes
loss of apocrine
glands yes yes
hymen yes yes
sebaceous glands yes yes
tears yes yes
loss of vibrissae yes yes
(whiskers)
breath control yes yes
eccrine thermoreg. yes yes
descended larynx yes yes
(Elaine Morgan)
There is some evidence from the behaviour of the probocis monkey that water tends to promote bipedalism. They live in the mangrove swamps of Borneo, are good swimmers and walk into water on two legs. They have even been observed walking bipedally when on land.
For further reading see:
Morgan, E (1984) “The aquatic hypothesis”, New Scientist, 12th April, 11-13
Morgan, E (1990) “The Scars of Evolution: What our bodies tell us about human origins”. London, Souvenir Press

I recently came across the article below and wanted to share it with you. The article, originally published in Thinking Faith, the online journal of the British Jesuits under the title, “Dawkins: what he, and we, need to learn” is re-published here with kind permission from Dr Gerard J Hughes S.J.

Oxford philosopher, Gerard J Hughes SJ, takes a critical look at the views of the ‘arch-enemy of religion’, Richard Dawkins, but also notes how the attitudes and behaviour of some Christians play into his hands.

How do you react to Professor Richard Dawkins’ views on the pernicious nature of all religion and of Christianity in particular? A mixture of outrage, a certain sneaking sympathy, and a desire to hear what might be said by way of serious reply? All three responses are fair enough, I think. In the following brief reflections, I am not going to have much to say about what is outrageous in Dawkins. For detailed, measured and trenchant responses, I would thoroughly recommend the books by Alistair McGrath and Keith Ward. What I want to do here is to suggest what Christians might have to learn from the fact that some of his criticisms do strike a sympathetic chord in many of his readers, and even in many of his Christian readers. In so doing, I hope to show why it is that his many valid points do not in the end succeed in making his overall case.

Dawkins returns time and again to the same basic points. The first is that Christians, in their belief that the bible is an inspired book, are committed either to believing many things which are scientifically indefensible, or to adopting various dishonest evasive manoeuvres to try to deny that the most absurd of these statements are in the bible at all. His second point is that Christians hold a view of faith which places religious faith completely beyond reasonable discussion or scientific counter-argument. In our modern world, such unsupported prejudices deserve no credence, and can be positively damaging. Any beliefs worthy of respect must stand up to scientific criticism. Science is the gold standard for all truth.

I shall argue that we Christians have ourselves unfortunately provided some grounds for each of the two main criticisms: I shall further argue that there is no need for us to do anything of the kind; and I shall conclude with some brief thoughts about Dawkins’ views of science.

What the Bible actually claims to be true

It seems undeniable that most Christians, or at least those in the West, have gradually over the centuries lost touch with the languages and cultures in which the biblical texts, both Jewish and Christian, were written. The result is that Christian tradition generally has tended more and more to take all narrative passages in the biblical books as if they were descriptions of historical events, often entirely missing the crucial theological messages which those passages contained.

How do we typically try to express truths? Our normal style is to try to formulate straightforward predominantly factual statements, shorn of metaphor, lacking in poetic charm, but making the most of clarity and precision. I say that predominantly we express ourselves like that; but even we do other things as well. Contemporary scientists, at least when they are working at the limits of our understanding, themselves have to use metaphors and models – black holes, tiny strings vibrating in ten dimensions, particles with spin and charm, selfish genes. And more broadly, we might wish to insist that there are many truths about ourselves and our world which cannot be properly captured other than in poetry. Still, in our post-Enlightenment culture we do tend to focus primarily on the straight, unvarnished, precise facts. It was not always thus, however. The emphasis on metaphor and models played a larger role in civilisations which were less able to conduct precise measurements, less interested, perhaps, in purely mechanical facts. In understanding what was written in distant civilisations we need constantly to bear in mind what were their interests, and how their linguistic conventions worked in the expression of truth.

In some future era, even our own culture could be open to much misunderstanding. Imagine a future generation which no longer realised that Dad’s Army or Yes, Minister are sitcoms, and took the first as a documentary on the Home Guard, and the second as the video-records of meetings in the conclaves of Whitehall; or did not realise that Animal Farm is an allegorical novel, and read it as a description of some extraordinary episode in evolutionary history. Such mistakes simply could not be made by our contemporaries, because we are all well aware of the conventions and concerns of our culture; we effortlessly pick up the relevant cues in the sitcoms, we promptly see the point of the details in the allegorical narrative. All three make comments on our world, comments which may or may not give a fair picture of how things are: but they do not say what they say in straightforward factual ways. Failure to grasp that is a fundamental misunderstanding. But mistakes of just those kinds have frequently been made by Christians who took the opening chapters of the book of Genesis as a factual description of the stages in which the matter in the universe was organised into the cosmos as we know it. Later Christians were insufficiently attuned to the concerns of the author to see that those chapters are above all a monotheistic manifesto, a theological counterblast to those contemporary polytheist accounts which explained the conflict of good and evil in our world as the result of quarrels between good and bad gods. The writer of these chapters of Genesis is making an important statement, indeed; the claim is that there is but one God, that he made everything, and that everything he made was good. If there is suffering and death in our world, that explanation has to be sought elsewhere, in human failures but not in polytheism. Those, rather than truths about astrophysics, are the truths upon which the texts are focussed.

Similarly, the narratives of the conception, birth and infancy of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are theological prefaces to the description of Jesus’ ministry, with which all four Gospels begin their more straightforward account of what Jesus said and did. The aim of the infancy narratives is to give an imaginative presentation of some profound theological truths – that Jesus is more than a prophet, that he is messiah, sent directly from God; that his ministry is that of a second Moses; that he fulfils the expectations of Jewish tradition despite his sufferings and his apparent powerlessness. The Fourth Gospel in its opening chapter makes just the same points, only this time they are couched in abstract rather than imaginative language. In all four gospels the aim is that the reader should come to the account of the ministry of Jesus with the theological stage well and truly set. It is a mistake to read them as giving a chronological history of the events in Jesus’ early years, just as it is to read Animal Farm as recounting what really happened in some part of rural Sussex or wherever, or Yes, Minister as the tape of actual Whitehall conversations. Yet the novel is offering insights into the historical appeal of Marxist totalitarianism and the corruption to which it leads, and the sitcom is laughing at the delusions which politicians actually have about their own power. Just so, the infancy narratives are concerned with the true significance of Jesus’ life, but what they have to say does not depend on their being a factual record of Jesus’ early years; they prepare the reader to grasp the true significance of the two or three years during which Jesus lived, preached and died.

Dawkins, frequently treats these and other parts of the Bible in a way in which he would never dream of treating Dad’s Army, Yes, Minister or Animal Farm. But he has been given considerable encouragement to do so by the way in which Christians themselves have misread the bible and in so doing have failed to see which are the truths which the biblical texts convey. Thus, some Christians have responded to his misdirected criticisms by trying to defend creationism, or the moving star of Bethlehem, as though the bible is trying to make truth claims about cosmogony or astronomy, rather than about monotheism and Christology. The bible, so far as I know, says nothing which is either directly compatible or in any way incompatible with evolution, for the simple reason that nothing the Bible claims to be true relates to that topic at all. Space does not here permit me to make similar points about many other biblical passages, where theological argument is all too frequently mistaken for scientific or historical description.

I am not in any sense, as Dawkins often hints, advocating some kind of devious evasiveness, ’sophisticated’ Christianity in some pejorative sense, any more than I am being devious in my reading of Animal Farm. There is plenty of evidence – as Dawkins rightly insists we look for, and would, I hope, himself be ready to consider – to show that these ancient texts would have been immediately understood by their authors and original audiences in the ways I have suggested. That evidence is to be found by understanding the cultures in which those texts arose – what they were concerned with, what they took to be controversial and important to get right, and what literary devices they had at their disposal to get their points across. To varying degrees, all the Christian churches have, sadly, been nervous and slow to see the importance and true value of such evidence, and have for too long behaved as if a simple list of events were the most or the only important things which the biblical books had to give us. It is to a considerable extent our own fault that Christianity has been so misunderstood. In a strange way, many Christians and Dawkins start from the same mistaken views about what the biblical writers actually claim to be true. Both sides need radical re-education before any debate between Dawkins and Christians can be at all useful to anyone interested in the truth.

The perils of blind faith

The other constant theme in Dawkins’ criticism of religions, or at any rate of Christianity, is what he takes to be the way in which faith is promoted as a virtue; for, he argues, to do that is to imply that it is positively admirable to hold beliefs for which there is no good evidence. Once again, it seems to me that in Christian history there has been at least some basis for this criticism. This can be seen in the ways in which Christian authorities have responded when anything comes up which even appears to provide good grounds for questioning what is authoritatively taught. The basis of the authority can vary considerably: it might be what is taken to be the clear teaching of the bible; or some position to which a Christian church has been committed for a long time and perhaps has never questioned at all; it might be what is insisted upon by legitimate church authority at some particular time of crisis or dispute. If reasons for questioning such a position are advanced, they may be moral, or philosophical, or scientific – consider disputes about contraception, or homosexuality; or disputes about the ordination of women based upon a philosophical doctrine of non-discrimination; or about whether it is essential to Christianity to hold that we are all descended from just one pair of humans, or whether it makes sense to speak of an immortal soul. One possible religious response to any of these issues is to appeal to the status of the authority in question – the bible, or the bishops, or the pope, or the general assembly, claiming that such an authority cannot be vulnerable to attacks based on purely secular considerations. The bible is divinely inspired, the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit, what is taught is therefore to be believed without question by the faithful.

Very few Christians, and certainly very few Catholics, have seriously maintained that anyone has to believe, in faith, something which is contrary to what can be rationally established. Even the classical American Fundamentalists in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in their various ways held that science could indeed support what they believed to be the truths taught by the bible. They thought there was, or could be found, archaeological evidence for the age of the earth which would match calculations made from biblical data on the ages of the patriarchs, or would demonstrate the universality of the Flood, or the existence of leviathans capable of giving hospitality to Jonah. Whatever one might think about the reasonableness of such expectations, they were part of an overall view that faith and human reason could not in the end conflict.

That overall view is clear in theory: reason and faith cannot ultimately conflict, since truth is one. But there are two important points which need to be made. The first is to do with ‘mysteries’. Dawkins in one place suggests that religion does not want to solve mysteries. In one sense I think this is true. The nature of God is, I would suggest, irreducibly mysterious beyond our comprehension. To recognise this is no more than to acknowledge the limits of the human mind. What we can truly say about God is limited: and even what we believe about God in the light of revelation is limited by the fact that revelation itself is unavoidably restricted to what we can to some extent understand. Since we cannot comprehend the nature of God, neither can we fully comprehend what it means to say of a man that he is God. But we can realise that to say that Jesus is both God and man is not at all the same kind of assertion as, for instance,that a centaur is both horse and man. In the centaur case, we are dealing with two created, and therefore limited, kinds of thing, and we are trying to add them together as best we may. We have all seen statues of centaurs. But the divine nature and human nature are not two kinds of thing at all. God is transcendent; that is to say, God is not a kind of thing, nor a member of a kind, which can in any sense be ‘added’ to something else which is a member of another, human, kind. The unity of God and man in Jesus is in the strictest sense a mystery; trying to ’solve it’ by any kind of cut and paste technique is almost certainly going to lead either to a damaging kind of ‘dumbing down’, or else to a denial that Jesus is fully human, ‘like us in everything apart from sin.’ The Arian and the Docetist heresies are examples of the dangers of trying to understand: the first ‘dumbs down’ by denying that there is anything more to be said of the earthly Jesus of Nazareth than can be said of any human being: the second tries to say so much more (about what Jesus knew, or his relationship to the Father, or his inability to sin, to take some examples) that in the end Jesus ends up simply as God appearing in some ways to be human. In the end we have to believe, but not understand, that Jesus is fully God and fully human; and we must explain why there are good reasons for not expecting to be able to say more. Saying too much about mysteries is almost always ill advised.

But Dawkins’ main complaint is that believers prefer unsolved ‘mysteries’ even when dealing with perfectly ordinary this-world realities. If someone dies a mysterious death, the true believer, he suggests, must prefer to say that God struck them down than to try to learn more about the medical condition from which the person died. Dawkins strongly disapproves of appealing to faith when there appear to be perfectly good rational ways of trying to reach conclusions about something. This seems to me to be a perfectly proper approach to take. Certainly in the Catholic tradition, in which the importance of reason in both theology and in ethics is emphasised, there is no disagreement in principle with what Dawkins says on this point. But of course that does not settle everything, for two reasons:

First, it is not always clear whether the issue is one which involves faith or one which can and should be settled on rational grounds; the legitimacy of the ordination of women would be one such example. The Pontifical Biblical commission concluded that there were no strictly biblical arguments against the ordination of women; and it is not entirely clear from the way the topic is currently discussed in Catholic or in Anglican circles whether the main dispute is a rational one about the status of women and the suitability of women acting in a role which is intended to symbolise what a man, Jesus of Nazareth, once did. It has also been argued that the issue is to be settled on strictly theological grounds.

Secondly, in ethics, the general view that ethical requirements derive from the nature of human beings does indeed leave room for dispute on what conclusions can be drawn from that statement; but it does not sit at all easily with the claim that there can be good theological reasons for going against what might be thought to be the balance of reasonable opinion. Nor does it remotely suggest that Christians should regard as especially important those ethical issues which are immediately connected to sexual conduct. Dawkins all too often has a point. An eminent Christian moral philosopher once remarked to me how distressed he was to see how often the Christian churches produce arguments in ethics which he would not have accepted from a second year philosophy undergraduate. Ethics is, and should be, a complex subject, because human beings are complex creatures, and the ways in which they are capable of interacting with one another and with their environments are likewise complex and very varied. How any of these considerations in the end affects human fulfilment is not always at all easy to determine – as current discussions about the environment, or genetic engineering, or the global economy, or developmental psychology amply demonstrate. There is nothing in Christianity which suggests that these issues ought to be at once simple and clear, much as we might wish that they were; and nothing that would justify the claim to settle them by appeal to revelation when the empirical facts would support more than one reasonable conclusion.

Science in its place

Where I think Dawkins is at his weakest is in what I would term his ’scientism’. This is disguised by the fact that he at every turn insists upon the importance of evidence, as indeed he should (though it must be said that he does not in this respect always practise what he preaches). The claim that every question about ourselves and our world can in principle be settled by methods which can ultimately be reduced to those of physics is a highly disputable claim, disputable for reasons which have nothing to do with religion. The debates in neuroscience, for instance, reveal a near-deadlock, with some neuroscientists and some philosophers on each side, about whether the phenomenon of consciousness, or the content of concepts and beliefs, can be explained simply in terms of neuro-electronics; indeed there is not even agreement on what will count as an explanation. Again, suppose the universe of space-time to have had a beginning, it is plain enough that its appearance is not going to be explicable simply by appeal to the laws of physics, whose truth is contingent upon the existence of the universe which they describe. If the coming-to-be of the universe is to be explained, then both the sense of ‘explain’ and the type of explanation are not going to be scientific. Nor can God be described, as Dawkins often does, as ‘improbable’; for he intends that term to be understood at least vaguely in the same sense in which it might appear in a scientific argument. But he gives absolutely no account of what the basis for the calculation of probability might be based upon in the case of God; nor indeed whether it makes any sense at all to require that God’s existence be probable in a scientific sense. Whether there are good reasons for holding that God exists is indeed a controversial question; but it is not, nor is it reducible to, a scientific question. And even Dawkins, in his rather confused studies of moral issues, while rightly insisting that there might be scientific evidence which is relevant to those issues (for instance, the rate and causes of global warming), has nothing coherent to say to support his extraordinary claim that ethical argument is no more than a sub-section of scientific argument.

I cannot comment on how good a biologist Dawkins is: but it seems to me that there are good reasons for saying that his claim that all arguments must in the end be settled by appeal to physical evidence is itself quite unproven – and that it does not even remotely sound like the kind of claim that could be proved on Dawkins’ own terms.

Summing it all up

To conclude, then. Dawkins does indeed provide a useful wake-up call to make the accepted conclusions of most biblical scholars and most theologians much more widely known and accepted in the Christian churches. Believers have on the whole a bad record in the way we respond to the advancement of science and the growing complexity of morality in our technologically and environmentally ever more complex world. We have tended to sound, and often to be, reluctant to accept undisputed scientific findings so that we can try to work out how they can be integrated into our overall picture of our world as God’s creation. The lessons of Galileo, biblical criticism, evolutionary biology, contemporary physics, psychology and medicine forever seem to catch believers unprepared, nervous, and defensive. At his best, Dawkins calls attention to that fact. At his worst, the exaggerations which he has to make serve only to indicate why such nervous reluctance on the part of believers is ultimately unnecessary.Gerry J Hughes SJ was head of the philosophy department at Heythrop College, University of London, and is currently tutor in philosophy at Campion Hall, Oxford. He is the author of “Aristotle on Ethics” and “Is God to Blame?”

   This article was originally published in Thinking Faith, the online journal of the British Jesuits

‘The Road’ is a short novel set in a ravaged America. An unspecified catastrophe has killed off most signs of visible life. The landscape is barren and teems only with dead trees and ubiquitous gray ash, which blocks the sunlight and forces the few scattered survivors to don makeshift masks. A father and his young son walk along a road, wheeling a small cart of ragged clothes and scavenged tins of food. Their only defence is a pistol with two bullets. They are heading south, towards the coast, though, like the father, we aren’t entirely sure why it’s so important they make it to the sea.

I should mention a quick caveat. The precise cause of this disaster is not clear. Neither character mentions it much. Indeed, we soon find out that the young boy was only born a few days after the catastrophe set in (and the father still remembers the precise time the clocks stopped: 1.17am). One of the bits of rather effusive blurb on the back casts McCarthy’s novel as ‘the first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation’. But I think this is wide of the mark. The novel is not resonant in the slightest with a hortatory message about climate change. (One needn’t be a climate change sceptic to have misgivings about righteous climate change novels). Rather, the focus is on the symbiotic relation between the (anonymous) father and son, as they trudge along the road with no ostensibly clear end in sight, and the existential stasis of this endlessness.

The desolation is suitably embodied in the structure and style. McCarthy gives a single paragraph to each incident or event, whether a mundane early morning sunrise or occasional, dreamlike remembrances. He writes tersely, with only occasional flourishes enlivening the barren vocabulary. It’s as if words themselves have become as half-forgotten as the old world: ‘the sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality’. McCarthy only occasionally breaks out and widens the verbal breadth. The first meeting with another character introduces a menace which retains a frightening, shadowy presence throughout: gangs of cannibalistic wanderers with troupes of raped women and enslaved catamites in tow. As one of these gray devils stumbles across the pair, the father pulls out a pistol and explains to their would be assailant, in a rare elaboration upon his customary single sentence replies to his son’s questions, that the bullet from his gun, ‘will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They’ll just be soup.’

But, in the main, the dialogue between father and son is almost brusque. (Are we going to die? | No. Do you want to ride in the cart? | It’s okay). The son has a redolent innocence in his queries. He regularly seeks reassurance from his father that they are, indeed, ‘the good guys’, that they’ve ‘got the fire’, and his father – never wholly convincingly – insists that they are. The boy’s vulnerability is underlined by his father’s constant vigilance, looking out for food and firewood, rubbing his son warm in the bitter chill under a makeshift tarpaulin tent. This contrasts strongly with the occasionally sickening vignettes which emphasise, if the unceasing battle against hunger and cold didn’t already, their pathetic, fragile predicament. Only occasionally do we catch glimpses of the horror from which the father aches to protect his son by constantly fingering the pistol in his pocket. At one point, walking into yet another deserted house, they break open a padlocked trapdoor and encounter a basement of naked, limbless people being harvested for food. The details McCarthy provides in this and a handful of other sequences are brief but painfully precise. And this shadowy terror animates the atmosphere of the novel in an arresting way.

But, at root, the novel is symbolized by the dilemma of the pistol. After the afore-mentioned encounter, they are left with just one bullet. We also learn that at one point, there were three bullets. The mother and wife figure, we learn, had turned the gun on herself, soon after giving birth, seeking the release into nothingness instead of numbering among the ‘walking dead’. Ostensibly, the father’s predicament revolves around keeping his son alive by scavenging for provisions. His son appears to be helpless and dependent. But, in another sense, it is the son who is keeping his father alive through a naïve goodness. Upon encountering the poor souls in the basement or a stinking old man, the son is repulsed by their inability and his father’s unwillingness to help others, at risk to themselves, the father keeps emphasising. And the father’s dilemma revolves around whether he may have to turn this pistol, which he clings onto to protect his son (his ‘god’), onto his boy. (There is a chilling scene when it emerges that the father has already explained to the son how to turn a gun on himself if ever he was ‘caught’). In part, then, the novel reads like a meditation on Camus’ famous question. I couldn’t possibly reveal how this tension ultimately plays out, but it is gripping.

I hadn’t read anything by Cormac McCarthy before. Some people have raved about him to me. In truth, I’m not sure how representative ‘The Road’ is of his work in general. But, I found it thoroughly captivating. It’s a terrible cliché, but I rarely devour novels: I read this one in the obligatory day (though, admittedly, it is rather short). Not so long ago, I read Viktor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, in the main a reflection upon his time in Dachau. And this novel reminded me of some of the existential questions Frankl considers to be an essential – perhaps the essential – aspect of being human. It also illuminates in spite of or perhaps even through its bleakness how our existence can only begin to make sense relationally. I was left profoundly moved and yet this is not simply some mawkish response. To my mind, the novel offers – and I’m not sure how this relates to McCarthy’s thought in general – an aching hint at what we might mean when we speak of love, not as a sloppy sentiment but as a true passion, embodied in the smallest of acts and quietest of gestures, in enduring silence and seeming futility: this question of futility may be something worth pursuing if anyone has read it and knows how the narrative pans out. Anyhow, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

(I borrowed the book from the shop, but will be on the lookout for a suitable second hand copy: will gladly pass it onto anyone interested when – not if – I pick a copy up).

Dennett approaches the subject from a deterministic stance, and his thesis is to convince the reader that determinism provides ‘The Varieties of Free Will Worth Having’, (which is the book’s subtitle). In fact, he attempts to convince us that under determinism one can have an almost perfect simulation of absolute free will, and to demonstrate that the last step between that simulation and the absolute thing is, in fact, meaningless. He has little time for absolutist philosophers or philosophies.

His is a purely materialistic determinism. He dismisses dualism in one phrase, as ‘a desperate vision which richly deserves its current disfavour’. He makes no mention at all of non-dualistic idealism in the Eastern tradition, that of spirit subtending matter. I rather feel his thoughts on that would scorch the paper. However he quotes lengthily Paul Jennings’ ‘Resistentialism’ in a footnote, and charmingly refers to Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’, so he must be a Good Thing.

He is something of a compatibilist, with the limitation that the free will he proposes as compatible with determinism is not absolute.

In style he likens his approach to that of the sculptor he once thought to be : circling his material, chipping here and there, roughing out the overall shape from all sides, rather than going in a straight line from A to B. This can make him a bit repetitive, and a second reading is sometimes necessary to see where he was going in any particular passage. For Dennett the role of philosophy is to enlarge our vision of the possible, and to break bad habits of thought. A last general comment : throughout this book Dennett dances round the question of what determinism means in a world having quantum indeterminacy, without realy facing it, IMO. He does however, make use of the concept of determined chaotic pseudo-randomness to get him out of tight determined corners once or twice. ‘With one bound, Dan was free !’.

He starts with an entertaining section on all the bugbears and bogeymen that have been created by philosophical thought experiments or metaphors, all intending to illustrate our plight in having the illusion of free will if the world is deterministic ‘and so we don’t in fact have any free will at all’, but by their construction and orientation all tending to frighten us into wanting absolute free will or nothing. These include such terrors as :

• The Invisible Jailor (the illusion of free will, when in fact we don’t have any, likened to being in a prison which prevents our freedom, only we can’t see the bars. Shudder and beat your heads against the wall)
• The Nefarious Neurosurgeon (we think we have free will, but imagine an entity which seizes control of your physical, and perhaps mental, activities without you knowing it, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.. Wouldn’t that be awful ?)
• The Cosmic Child whose Toy We Are (if we don’t have free will we’re the playthings of the Universe. How diminished and undignified, how cruel a fate would that be..)
• ‘Sphexishness’ : Sphex ichneumoneus is a wasp which seems to behave very intelligently in some respects, until you alter its surroundings, when all its thoughtfulness is shown up as mere non-adapting mechanical behaviour. How would we feel if at some superior level it were as laughably evident that all our efforts are mere automatisms ?
• The Dread Secret : OK, so we don’t have free will. Wouldn’t it be terrible if people found out ? Moral responsibility goes down the drain and life reverts to being Hobbesian, nasty, British, and short. (PS, the typo is dredged up from my memory of a perhaps apocryphal journalistic howler).

All these bugbears are highly emotional, and a constant concern of the book is to dedramatise.

The real question for Dennett is :

Free will is usually defined in terms of ‘might have done otherwise’. Why should anyone care about the ‘might have’ ?

His next section looks at reason and meaning.

In the beginning, there were only ’causes’. The first ‘reasons’ were created with the first self replicationg proto-organisms, which came to respond to stimuli to preserve their entropy-decreasing replicative behaviour. These were genetically controlled reasons. Now read on.

Reason, it is said, is not a physical property of the world. Therefore a rational will must be exempt from physical causality (the major currents of thinking on free will suppose it to be rational). A decision moved by reason cannot be a decision moved by causes.

A related argument concerns meaning. Meaning is not a physical property of the world. Therefore a physical mind can only be a syntactic engine (concerned with the structure of information) and not a semantic engine (concerned with meaning).

Dennett proposes to bridge the gap between the syntactic engine and the semantic engine by introducing the first of his proposed ‘very good approximations’ The brain only approximates the behaviour of a semantic engine, in fact, we are super-sphexish. He then proceeds to soften the blow and sugar the pill. Most of the descriptions of our state under determinism suffer from drastic oversimplification. They ignore our sophisticated sensory array and our ability to notice things. This is what distinguishes our ’caused’ behaviour from the simpler kind. Having a ‘reason’ presented to your understanding is, however, no different in kind from any other cause, just different in level.

He gives a lengthy review of his ideas on consciousness, including a convincing ‘just so story’ of how consciousness can arise deterministically. For him consciousness is ‘at the reachable top of the pyramid of natural, physical, processes’. No ‘Chalmers Hard Problem’ for Dennett.

He subscribes to a form of Hobbes ’social contract’ theory of morality.

Finally, self-reflective consciousness plus a Hobbesian, deterministic morality permit the acquiring of non-genetically determined reasons (including e.g. altruism, or the desire to do something crazy just because you can, or any other test case you can come up with to demonstrate your absolute existential freedom).

His third section is on control and self-control. If we don’t have free will, we’re not in control. We’re not free agents or unmoved movers. That could mean (shock horror) that we are, in fact controlled (he notes the semantic slide from ‘determined’ to ‘controlled’).

He discusses different types of control, from the rigid control of a thermostat over a heater, through the limited autonomy of a robot space probe, where the external controlling agent just sets the overall goals and parameters, but is precluded by communication lags from having total hands-on control, to the example of the pilot of an airplane and the control he exercises. The pilot is warned of a thunderstorm ahead. He decides to change course to avoid it. Why ? Because in doing so he recognises the limitations of those aspects of the plane’s behaviour he actually can control, and the limitations of his skill to control them. The two elements, forewarning of a random event coming up, and self-knowledge, combine to lead him to conclude that to maintain his margin for manouevre, his ‘elbow room’, he’d do better to steer round. None of that is incompatible with the behaviour of a multi-level , self reflecting, deliberation engine. And who could ask for more ? As for the emotional content, the pilot’s emotions at hearing of the storm are a real and important part of the causal chain.

Dennett also rather cheekily reviews the gradation between (a) brute force control of one’s actions by an external agent, through (b) influence by sweet reason causing a change in one’s actions, to (c) influence by pure provision of correct forecasting data affecting one’s actions. Hey, it’s all an external agent modifying one’s behaviour.

He concludes that under determinism we are not controlled by the past, as there is no feedback loop to the past reporting on our behaviour. Determination is not control.

My first reaction was indignation : this is just sleight of hand, begging the question of in what way is it better to be determined than to be controlled ? However, more thought failed to come up with an answer to the question : who could ask for more ?

Dennett’s fourth section is on the Self, and its relationship to moral responsibility. For me the latter element, on moral responsibility, is the least convincing part of the book..

First he notes the extreme position that the self is absolute agent, and unmoved mover. Its actions are not caused by anything external. He counters with the suggestion that this is an illusion, caused by :

• the amplifying effect of minute neural triggers causing massive action effects
• the inscrutability of neural causal paths
• preoccupations with responsibility, moral, artistic, and intellectual.

He casts doubt on the reality of willed choice, citing the difficulty of pinning down the ‘moment of decision’ by introspection, and instances when we will one thing and do another.

Dennett notes that the self develops, it is not inborn. It develops through social interactions, from genetic dispositions. There is no ‘tabula rasa’, which for us is obvious, but which for the absolutist philosophers was unthinkable. The absolutist position is roughly « unless one is absolutely responsible for oneself, one is not responsible at all ». On the other extreme, hard determinists negate responsibility.

Dennett claims a middle ground. He claims a responsible self can develop for the individual, deterministically, from non-responsible beginnings « like mammals can evolve from non-mammals ». He notes that it is silly to claim that one is not responsible for something unless one is completely responsible for it, as no-one is ever completely responsible for anything.

Reverting to self-creation, he believes it to be largely heuristic. The essence of heuristic processing is to involve ‘leaps in the dark’, and arbitrary cut-off of deliberation, in situations where rational processing of all the data would be impractical. Such an approach is required for a sophisticated self-controlling agent faced with meta-level questions to which there are no obvious answers. Heuristic processing is time efficient but imperfect.

The shortcuts our minds take to arrive at solutions faced with time pressure will be a central theme for the rest of the book.

Finally, the complex and multi-layered process by which we arrive at self-formation, while being caused and determined, is just an awful lot grander than your simple formation process, such as crystal formation. Isn’t it ?

Dennett here goes through a lengthy, and IMO odd and flawed, development on the concept of luck as it relates to moral responsibility. He points out the difference between the concept of luck as in : I just flipped a coin 30 times and it came down heads all 30 (luck-a), and as in : I’m lucky to be here typing on this computer, ‘cos it means that none of my forebears died before the relevant reproductive act, and the transmitted intelligence level cumulated in my ability to handle Windows XP(tm) (luck-b). Coin tosses don’t have a memory, genes do. He refers to the argument that it’s ‘just luck’ if Yer Honour the Judge had the predispositions to be on one side of the bench and Crestfallen Criminal had the predisposition to be on the other side, which, if it were true, would be an argument against moral responsibility. Having very succinctly outlined it, he doesn’t refute it, deferring that to later chapters, just calling it ‘a petulant little argument’. He continues by claiming that we are all genetically endowed with such a high skill level in the cognitive areas enabling the deliberative processes relating to moral responsibility, compared to say a cat, that we all reach the same plateau of awareness of moral responsibility sooner or later. (purely false, IMO, and the only reference he quotes is another philosopher, not an evolutionary or genetic psychologist). Finally he concludes that the ‘just luck’ evens out, so we’re left with skill, and so we can be held responsible for our acts, citing the example of the NBA player who is held responsible for missing an easy shot, whereas for an amateur we’d have said that make it or miss it, it was just luck. My reaction : having created the distinction between luck-a and luck-b (my terms), he’s then completely failed to use them consistently, and in fact our ‘moral responsibility’ depends on luck-b, which only evens out after we’re all dead. Case for moral responsibility under determinism not proven, m’lud.

Chapter 5 is on action under the idea of freedom, and the idea of ‘opportunity’.

Dennett makes what for him is a vital distinction between determinism and fatalism. Fatalism supposes you go through foreseeably predetermined hoops. Determinism, given the chaotic pseudo-randomness around us, gives us hoops that are not foreseeable. See bottom of the discussion of Chap.5 for an example. Dennett has a beautiful phrase for the believer in absolute free will, speaking of ‘the now, zipping up the spreading future into the thin line of the past’. Well, no, he says. From the god’s eye view, the timeline is singular. The singular timeline the hypothetical god would see is exactly that which we determine by our actions in the present. There is no ‘meta-time’ (my words) in which to say with Freddie Mercury ‘it’s all (already) decided for us’.

Coming back to the comparison between a conscious human being and a designed deliberation engine, he points out that the deliberation engine would have some pseudo-random process for cutting short to deliberation, to be able to act in useful time. In starting its deliberations, it would have whole classes of possible outcomes not foreseeable to it. This is what gives us the illusion that things are ‘up to us’.

He notes, however, that as self reflecting deliberators, we can perceive our heuristics, and if required modify the cut off points, giving another dimension to the illusion.

He considers : Is it rational to maintain the illusion that the future contains real ‘opportunities’ ? It depends what you mean by opportunity.

Here Dennett goes off into the continuation of his unsatisfactory development on chance, introducing the notions of real randomness (quantum indeterminacy) and determined pseudo-randomness (chaotic processes) as determinants of the outcome of a heuristic process. Does the one mean it ‘had a chance’ and the other, being deterministic, mean it never did ? He posits that ‘opportunity’ under determinism is comparable to a lottery, for which the winning stub had been drawn and kept in a sealed envelope before the tickets were sold, which most people think is just fine. He seems to slide from the idea that it is determined that someone will win such a lottery, to the idea that it is determined that a particular individual will win it. Then, Dennett indulges in some heavy moralising about the socio-political necessity for believing in opportunity, and the importance of keeping one’s options open. Great language for talking to one’s teenage children, but moralising is something of an admission of defeat for a philosopher.

Finally, he tackles ‘avoidance’, as the opposite of ‘opportunity’, noting that in the god’s eye view nothing is avoidable. The ideas of ‘making a difference’, or ‘changing the course of history’ are illusions coming from false expectations. He uses the question ‘Why do you put a lock on your door, if whether or not someone will break in is already determined ?’ as an illustration of the absurdity of using fatalistic arguments instead of deterministic ones. ‘Unavoidable’, or ‘inevitable’, correctly understood, mean ‘outside the influence of our deliberations’.

Chapter 6 finally addresses the central question of ‘could have done otherwise’, or in technical language, the ‘counterfactuals’. Moral responsibility depends on ‘could I have done otherwise ?’, which is also the touchstone of free will.

Dennett distinguishes between ‘could have done otherwise’ in ‘exactly the same circumstances’ and in ’slightly different circumstances’. He points out that ‘could have done otherwise in exactly the same circumstances’ has no useful meaning : the same set of micro-states, ignoring quantum fluctuations, will always give the same outcome. Including for arbitrary or mad acts. Further, given quantum indeterminacy, ‘exactly the same circumstances’ can never hold, so if moral responsibility rests on our asking could we have done differently, the question is unanswerable, so no-one would be able to determine moral responsibility. Thus, what we mean when we talk about ‘could have done otherwise’ is typically : « if the same general set of circumstances arose in the future, would my experience of the past situation prompt me to behave differently ? »

Finally he discusses the words ‘I can’. He concludes that ‘I can’ refers to the combination of two elements : my general potentials, skills, abilities, and possible states on the one hand, and epistemic possibility (i.e. what is possible as far as I know, given the limits of my knowledge in a chaotic pseudo-random environment) on the other. It does not refer to my hypothetical absolute freedom of action in a particular situation, nor to absolute logical or physical possibility.

Bottom line, the perceived importance of the question ‘Could I have done otherwise ?’ results from mistaking a practical question about my future behaviour for a metaphysical one about my past. The interface with moral responsibility is where you learn from the past to influence your future behaviour or you don’t (can the programming of the deliberation engine be improved or can’t it ?).

Dennett concludes his book by considering why it seems so important for (some of) us to have free will. He centres his thinking around the notion of moral responsibility, and asks, with false naiveté, why on Earth would we want all that responsibility ? He answers that the only useful notion of morality is social usefulness. The complex, sophisticated, multi-layered, reflexive, deliberating engine Mark III that we are takes in as one of its inputs that act (A) will have a probability (P) of consequence (C), and takes its heuristic, sub-optimised decisions appropriately. Acting morally becomes a bet on the consequences, whether they be the satisfaction of love or the expectation of punishment. Finally, to have free will, you must believe in it. The alternative is your (freely chosen) nihilism, apathy, and inaction, always assuming that our genetic makeup would ever let us get that far.

The book is dense, and the above does desperately little justice to it. My hope would be that I’ve made you curious to read Dennett. Despite my disappointment at some aspects of the book, I’m much the richer for having read it. All I have to do now is reconcile the aspects of his thinking which do convince me with the set of beliefs I brought to the party, those of non-dualistic Idealism !

Eeyore.