Daddy's gonna pay for your crashed car

People interested in U2's prophetic engagement with the world might enjoy this post about the US government giving away over a hundred billion dollars to the population.

(H/T U2 Sermons)

The naturalists' leap of faith

Reacting to David Heddle's post (see my previous post), Rob commented that there was at best nothing to choose between the theist blind leap of faith regarding their presuppositions, and the atheist/naturalist blind leap of faith regarding theirs (namely that empirical observation will be a reliable guide to the universe).

In a sense, there is some mileage in this. I accept that it is the case that ultimately presuppositions are not provable, and indeed I've spent lots of time at least trying to get atheists to recognise that they have presuppositions as much as theists do.

And yet ....

I have quoted Schaeffer's essay on the difference between postmodern faith and Christian faith here. It is worth considering how this relates to science. I would argue that the atheist approach to science is effectively a postmodern leap. In effect, philosophically, they are saying, "I believe that the universe is rational, tractable and comprehensible," in the same way that a person lost in the fog on a mountain might say, "I believe that if I step off this ledge, I will drop onto another ledge a few feet below and there I'll be able to shelter for the night." The theist says, "I believe that the universe is rational, tractable and comprehensible, because it is the product of a creator who is able to express rationality and tractability. Furthermore, I believe in this creator because he has spoken." This isn't a "leap in the dark" in the same way - this is the acceptance of an external witness, one which the atheist claims doesn't exist.

How come the "leap in the dark" atheist approach to science is so effective? I would argue that it is because the atheists are "stepping off the ledge" following theists who have stepped off not with blind faith, but in confidence of the outcome, thanks to their theistic presuppositions. Many great feats of technology, engineering and philosophy were achieved in different cultures throughout human history. But as I have suggested before, modern science - which has incredible levels of abstraction, and has transformed the world in which we live - grew specifically out of the Reformation, where the scientists believed that it was possible to study the universe because God had made it comprehensible. They may have had kooky beliefs in many areas - but the key presupposition that underlay their beliefs concerning science was that the existence of a creator and sustainer God made the pursuit of knowledge about the universe reasonable.

Atheist scientists have continued to follow them onto the safety of the ledge below, even though they have forgotten what it was that led their antecedents to believe the ledge might be there.

Science versus faith or ....

David Heddle suggests otherwise here. And I agree.

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can? Yoko Ono apparently can't. She is slighted by the use of something she feels she possesses - exclusive rights to the words and music "Imagine" (she doesn't even want a few seconds or words shown in the film, "Expelled").

In terms of irony, this ranks alongside the reported account of her musing, on collecting a posthumous award for John Lennon's "Imagine" (Channel 4's "Favourite Song of all time", or some such), that she liked to think he would be pleased as he looked down from somewhere.

Imagine there's no heaven? Doh!

I understand that John Lennon was a bit more realistic about things like this. When asked to comment on whether "all you need is love", he wryly said that they did have a lot of money at the time ....

Primary orchestra - help!

What Britten never mentioned in the "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" is that frankly it's a miracle that the orchestra was ever invented, as the instruments are fundamentally incompatible. With string instruments whose natural key is something around D or A major (2-3 sharps), and wind instruments transposing in B flat and F (clarinet, French horn) and C (oboe, flute), it's almost inevitable that some part of the orchestra will be playing with a scarily large number of fingers not where they are most comfortable. Perhaps string teachers should go against the habits of centuries and teach players first finger back to start with ....

We're trying to start a mini-orchestra in a primary school, and there is not much music available for a mixed group of instruments where the players are generally pre-grade 1. If anybody knows of any, then please post a comment!

Apocryphal story...

... that somebody wrote in an essay:

Beethoven wrote four symphonies - the third, the fifth, the sixth and the ninth ....

The Birth of Freedom

This looks interesting.

Will it make it to the UK?

richarddawkins.net

Amazing.

How can he take himself so seriously? A column on the right pretty much dedicated to the books he has published. His photo featuring heavily. A column on the left full of quotes, largely by him. And such quotes!

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.

Well, actually, we are regularly told that we are apes, but the people who tell us seldom seem to realise that apes don't have the United Nations, architects, literature, music, a space program, VLSI, weapons of mass destruction, pornography, Wikipedia, Tesco's, Oxford University or religion. Biologically we may be apes, but since biology tells us nothing about anything that makes us unusual as a species, it is hardly useful in helping us to understand our identity.

I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat...

How does he know? When has Dawkins ever interacted with any serious theology?! Certainly not in anything he's published. Certainly not in his TV show.

How can he say these absurd things and expect to be taken seriously? How can people take him seriously? Has he never heard of the phrase "cult of personality"? Or just "cult"?

Give me Mike Gene and Telic Thoughts, any day.

Faith schools: a law unto themselves?

Here's a link to an article in the Independent, concerning breaches of the code relating to admission of pupils.

Now firstly, let me say that there is no justification for breaking the code on admissions. Looked-after children should have highest priority; there should be no subtle exclusions on the basis of wealth ("Do you have a place for independent study in your house?" is not a permissible question); there should be no unreasonable refusal to accept special needs children (although I believe ALL schools still can refuse to accept a child if accepting him or her would mean that they were required to make large scale changes to the premises); there should be no hint that parents have to make a donation to be offered a place.

However, this report - or at least, the Independent version of it - to me looks like a witch hunt or mischief-making. Firstly, for most VA schools, the amount of money sought in voluntary donations isn't large, and it is needed for the running of the school. One thing missing from the article is what VA schools are doing with these donations. The answer is that VA schools have to find 10% of the cost of capital works - unlike LEA schools. This money has to be found basically from voluntary donations. In addition, much of the cost of maintaining the school also has to be found by the governors - unlike LEA schools. Again, this money has to be found from voluntary donations. That is how they work. The advantage for parents and children is they get a foundation school. The advantage for the state is that they don't have to pay as much for the school's upkeep. But the upkeep still has to be paid, and effectively by the parents. If the roof falls in at an LEA school, the LEA has to find the money to keep the children in school. Not so at a VA school - it's down to the governors and the foundation body. So for all of the insistence that the donation is voluntary (and we do insist this, in our school), the fact is that if the money doesn't come in, the school can't operate.

I am a governor of a VA school, and we continue to struggle with this issue. The contribution from the parents to the governors' fund is voluntary. However, the governors have to pay the diocese per child for maintenance costs, and if capital works are to be carried out, they have to find 10% of the cost of those works. In the past, the parish church has made up a shortfall - it has been able to carry the financial burden for the most needy children. But parish churches are themselves short of money. We have to think very hard about how we comply with the law concerning the voluntary nature of this donation - but the fact is that if people don't make those donations, the school can't survive. And whilst the school may have been great in terms of facilities in the past, it is now considered barely fit for purpose. The playground and classrooms are too small, and since we have combined an infant and junior school on the same site, we really ought to have one central staff room and admin section, whereas we have two in separate buildings. This is going to require major capital works at some stage - of which we have to find 10% - and the only way we can find it is from those voluntary donations.

In addition to which, don't tell me that the state sector isn't immune from manipulation - and by all sorts of agencies. We managed to get our oldest daughter into our preferred school. Had we applied the following year, we would not have managed to get her into any of the three nearest schools. (We go to the wrong sort of church for her to get into the local VA secondary school!) The LEA offered parents in our road places in a school with a bad reputation 11 miles away. No, we don't live in the middle of the countryside - the three nearest schools are 3, 4 and 5 miles away respectively. The same thing happened this year, in a neighbouring village. The reason? The LEA knows that if it gets concerned parents involved in a school, they will make sure their own children do well, and will hold the staff to account for its failures - resulting in improvements in the apparent standard of the school.

Now, is this parental choice? Is this a fair admissions policy at work? Of course not. It's political manipulation on the part of the LEA. And yet I haven't seen a front page article in the Independent about this.

And then you've got the fact that good schools push up house prices in the vicinity. Which means that only rich parents can live nearby. Which means that the school only ends up having to accept privileged children, because the poor parents don't end up living in the catchment area. Whilst a fair admissions policy may apparently be at work here, the fact is that people have already been excluded, by virtue of economics.

And - back to VA schools - there are the people who manipulate the system. There are the people who rent a house close to their "target" school for six months, or say that they are living at their parents address. There are the people who are "dedicated" enough to go to church every month (!) for two years, or who can talk the vicar into writing a nice letter for them. I think it's fascinating that, although I am a lay preacher, and we get to church 1.5 times a week as a family, and so on, I can't get a foundation place at various local VA schools, when people who are blatantly manipulating the system can.

There may be injustices perpetrated by VA schools, and these need to be rectified. But the fact is that the entire admissions system is a mess, and it is being manipulated by all sorts of individuals and organisations. The Independent is kidding itself if it thinks that VA schools are more guilty than anybody else.

Expelled from Expelled

Richard Dawkins gatecrashed a preview of the movie "Expelled", which apparently features ... er, Richard Dawkins ... and is about the thought control being exercised in US universities. P.Z. Myers didn't manage to.

These two facts have set the blogosphere ablaze over the last week or so, apparently.

I have nothing really to add other than "Why?", so here's a quote from the "Evolution News and Views" commentary instead.

... is limiting the attendance at the pre-screening of an admittedly partisan movie by its creators to invitees only really the same thing as throwing professors out of their academic jobs for having beliefs at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy in their particular discipline--particularly when the institutions engaging in the heave-ho make so much of their respect for academic freedom?

Let's just say the question answers itself

Too many books to read

(dare I say it). Since Christmas, I seem to have acquired several thousand pages of books, and I am just not keeping up. Here are the books outstanding:

Desiring God, by John Piper
A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz (to review)
The Design Matrix, by Mike Gene (to finish - about half way through)
Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, by Mark Dever (to finish - about half way through)
Shakespeare's Plays (think it's about time I worked my way through those that I haven't read - which is most)
The third and fourth volumes of the "Ender's Game" series, by Orson Scott Card
1 Out Of 10 by Peter Hyman
The Heart of Evangelism, by Jerram Barrs
A couple of books by Alvin Plantinga that I've had since the previous Christmas!
One Step Closer: Why U2 Matters to those Seeking God, by Christian Scharen

The Design Matrix - First Post

It must be a nervy time to be a thinking ateleologist. It might have seemed as though the anti-ID brigade had successfully fended off their challenge - proponents of ID in general could be dismissed as creationists in a cheap tuxedo (although they weren't, in general); an apparent counter-example had been found for Behe's irreducible complexity (although it wasn't one); Dembski had failed to successfully apply Complex Specified Information to real life; the Privileged Planet had been dismissed as the Weak Anthropic Principle (although it wasn't). And yet ...

A Meaningful World showed how narrowly you need to look at the world to regard it as having no meaning. There is also still the unsettling fact, pointed out early in The Design Matrix, that biology works using engineering and design terminology, rather than physics or chemistry terminology. There's still the fact that, setting aside the genetic code, every example of encoded information that we know about has come about through intelligent agency. And whilst the ateleologist may feel that the explanations offered are making great inroads into understanding the world from a naturalistic perspective, teleologists looking on are becoming increasingly confident that the darwinist explanation is not satisfactory on its own as a comprehensive description of the progress from the earliest life to today, but is perhaps no more than a special case. In fact, Mike Gene, the pseudonymous author of The Design Matrix, makes the point that had crossed my mind some years ago, that a good designer allows his or her designs to adapt to changing environments, otherwise they risk an early obsolescence.

The purpose of the book is not to "prove" that there is a designer - the author points out early on that much of the debate has foundered because both sides assume they can either prove or refute design in one easy step. The God Delusion is an example of that. So rather than trying to do that, Mike Gene is seeking to come to a conclusion firstly as to whether design is possible, and from there whether it is plausible, and then whether it is probable.

I haven't got a long way into his arguments, yet, although it is a good read. As with many other of the best books, The Design Matrix is too full of good quotations to meaningfully pick just one or two. But I intend to post again on it.

Telebid - don't do it!

Telebid have significant amounts of advertising on Facebook, promoting the auction of new items at apparently very good prices, so I thought I'd go and see how it worked.

Here's their guide for new people.

Here's some commentary on how the whole thing actually works.

Effectively, it is bidding with added gambling. Unlike eBay, a late bid can extend the auction - that's a feature that would probably improve eBay. Unlike eBay, each bid only adds a few pence to the price - again, no problem with that. But most significantly, unlike eBay, you pay Telebid (50p!) for each bid that you make. It is this radical difference that makes Telebid gambling.

So supposing an item - let's say a mobile phone worth £100 - is sold for £20. To get to £20 from the starting price of 10p, there will have been about 200 bids, each of which cost 50p. The "lucky winner" may have only bid once, and only pay 50p for that bid, and the £20 closing price. However, to get to that price, another 199 bids will have been made and been unsuccessful. And the total income Telebid gets from those bids is about £100 on its own. Whoever made those bids gets nothing for them. So the person getting the phone for £20 may have done well. Telebid have certainly done well. But all the other bidders have done very badly.

Bids cost 50p each, even when they are unsuccessful. To highlight the fact that the real winner here will be Telebid, it is even possible to bid on "FreeBid vouchers". As I write, a bidding war is going on for a 300 FreeBid voucher. The price has reached £22.19, and the auction is continuing. So, with an increment on this auction of 7p per bid, 315 bids have been made for the right to make 300 bids. The "winner" may end up with the right to make 300 bids. But the real winner is Telebid, which will have already received over 300 bids as payment for the voucher. (An auction for just 150 FreeBids has reached over £41. That's £205 in bids for £75 worth of bids.)

If you are the sort of person who thinks, "It might be me" - as the National Lottery campaign used to suggest - this might be your cup of tea. Or if you are prepared to work out a system and cynically apply it, exploiting all the other suckers on the site, you might enjoy it. For the rest of the world, I would strongly suggest leaving well alone.

Another couple of photos

Here is a house in Levi. Notice balconies on different levels. Many houses also have ladders on the outside. I guess this is really to allow access if the doors on the ground floor are blocked. In addition, the "ground" floor of many houses is often several feet above the level of the ground around.

Timber was the dominant material used, although a new hotel being built in Levi was the usual concrete box structure. Rooves are often flattish, and the snow tends to sit on it - adding a layer of insulation in the winter.
This is a through road in a town in Levi, Northern Finland - notice the signpost at the junction. Also notice that it is basically covered in compacted ice and snow. Even the main roads don't have ice and snow completely removed. And gritting/salting doesn't really clear snow if the temperature is too low, as it often will be here.

Snow is cleared after it falls - we heard snowploughs working through the night. It is often banked up between the road and the pavement - which has the effect of both providing a protective wall for pedestrians, and also providing a buffer for cars that lose traction (though I didn't notice that happening very often). In between significant snowfalls, the layers of snow get dirty - the places where dogs have weed marked until the next snow! (We didn't take a photo of this....). You can see layers in the snow by the road, like geological strata, marking the course of the season.

So the locals simply get used to driving on icy roads. I wonder if the fact that you psychologically get used to being slightly wary of your footing/roadholding is linked to the general cautiousness of the Scandinavian temperament.

Photos from Lapland again

The traditional Lappish accommodation is the kota, a kind of teepee. The ones we saw were made from wood, and shaped like teepees familiar from Westerns. In the centre would be an open fire, with a supply of wood. In addition to keeping the teepee warm, this would be used for heating drinks and cooking.

The "traditional" fare offered was warmed berry juice (think hot Ribena) and grilled pancakes, with berry jam or sugar, served in carved wooden cups and bowls. Around the edge of the kota would be wooden benches, covered in reindeer fur.

John Piper and the Prosperity Gospel

A bit of hyperbole for a Wednesday morning?

From here.

Altenberg! The Woodstock of Evolution? By Suzan Mazur

It's not Yasgur's Farm, but what happens at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria this July promises to be far more transforming for the world than Woodstock. What it amounts to is a gathering of 16 biologists and philosophers of rock star stature – let's call them "the Altenberg 16" – who recognize that the theory of evolution which most practicing biologists accept and which is taught in classrooms today, is inadequate in explaining our existence. It's pre the discovery of DNA, lacks a theory for body form and does not accomodate "other" new phenomena. So the theory Charles Darwin gave us, which was dusted off and repackaged 70 years ago, seems about to be reborn as the "Extended Evolutionary Synthesis".

Incidentally, although I've gone quiet on ID for now, this is basically because I didn't feel the discussions here were adding anything to what had gone before. I am still not convinced that mutations in DNA can generally be an engine of selection for structures on a completely different scale; I still don't think that there is evidence that evolutionary processes can move smoothly over biological quantum leaps (eg. changes in numbers of chromosomes, addition of new structures); I'm still not convinced by "selfish-gene" type explanations of behavioural phenomena, which seem like post-hoc rationalisation. And I still think that The God Delusion is the laziest bit of scientific/philosophical writing I've read in 20 years.

More photos from Lapland

Reindeer! In the wild, on top of Levi Fell. It must be a pretty marginal existence for a grazing animal at this time of the year. These were in a group of five, apparently grazing through the snow on the top. The temperature was about -16C, and with windchill probably down to around -25C or so.
The previous day, there had been pretty steady, wet snow, and in the wind, the snow had stuck to everything, particularly on top of the fell (and under our ski boots). The combination of wind and driving wet snow made these remarkable snow sculptures on top of the fell, from the stunted conifers there.

Photos from Lapland

One of the reasons for the recent dearth of posts is that we've been away in Lapland for a week. Those people who are Facebook friends (and I suspect that is a substantially larger number than those people who read this blog!) have already had the opportunity to browse an album of 49 photos. But since they were well-received there, I thought I'd post some of them here as well.

We stayed in Levi, which is about 67.7 degrees North and 24.9 degrees East. Yes, that's inside the Arctic Circle. Yes, it is February. At this time of year, the length of day is not that different to here - and because the sun is so flat in the sky, twilight at dawn and sunset are both pretty long. The temperature varied, from just below freezing on one day - a really unpleasant day, with pretty continuous snow and wind, the snow sticking to everything - to -27C on the morning of the day we left. Below about -12C (-17F), you start to feel ice crystals forming in your nose and on your eyelashes - a clue early in the week that the temperature had dropped substantially from the previous day!

We managed both a ride in a husky-drawn sledge and in a snowmobile. We didn't manage to get close to reindeer (except to eat reindeer meat - very similar to beef) and we didn't see the Aurora Borealis. So I suppose we'll just have to go back sometime!
This photo was taken on that snowy, misty day on top of the fell. There was nothing to see except snow, mist and snow-covered trees. It felt completely arctic.

Most people assume that Lapland would be nothing but snow and ice - and that snow would be falling continually. We had no snowfall on about five of the seven days that we were there for, and steady snow only on one. On the days when the weather was clear, the visibility was amazing. The second photo was taken from the top of Levi Fell, looking (I think) to the southwest (towards Yllas). I think the visibility must have been several hundred miles ....

Sharia law in the UK?

The Archbishop of Canterbury has stirred up the biggest religious controversy in the UK for a long time. From the BBC News website:

Dr Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion.

For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court.

He says Muslims should not have to choose between "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty"....

... Dr Williams said an approach to law which simply said "there's one law for everybody and that's all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts - I think that's a bit of a danger".

Dr Williams is a thoughtful person, and I imagine that this proposal is because he sees religious and ethnic groups regarding themselves as culturally isolated from society. Unsurprisingly, this has led to vocal objections from people in society who already think that the cultural isolation of different ethnic and religious groups has gone far enough, and what is needed is greater integration.

I share the concern that people who have chosen to make their home here don't feel as though UK culture is relevant for them, and as a Christian, I also feel that the values of society are increasingly adrift from those values that I would regard as ideal. However, I don't think that the correct answer is to allow them - or me - to opt out of society. In fact, I am told in the Bible that I should expect to feel like a stranger in a foreign country - I'm not supposed to feel that I belong here.

What else does the Bible have to say about this? The teaching to Christians in the book of Romans is:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.

This certainly wasn't written in an era where the authorities shared the values of the Christians. The Roman emperor was regarded as a God, and Christian monotheism led to a direct clash between them and the authorities. The first day of the week was the day when Christians met - but they didn't have a special holiday at this stage: Christians would gather at dawn or after dark, since they had no specific entitlement to a day off. And Christians at this stage weren't in positions of authority - they had no way of securing any sort of privilege. So instructing Christians that it was right for them to submit to authorities was not an easy teaching for them to accept.

Jesus' attitude was the same. The nation of Israel was under occupation. When challenged by Jews as to whether it was appropriate, in these circumstances, to pay taxes to the occupying nation, Jesus said, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and give to God what is God's." On another occasion, he went even further. One of the Roman laws was that Roman soldiers were entitled to demand that locals carry their equipment for one mile. Jesus said, "If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles."

My understanding is that this doesn't mean that you do what "the authorities" say, right or wrong. Your allegiance to God does override your obedience to "the authorities". But submitting to the authorities does mean that if your conscience leads you to disobey the authorities, you accept that they have the right to punish. This has been the attitude of Christians where there has been a clash with the authorities on many occasions since the New Testament era. For example, in the civil disobedience led by Martin Luther King, the protesters sought to behave in a way that was above reproach, but they accepted the authority of the state where their actions had led them to break the law. In the communist era behind the Iron Curtain, Christians were not prepared to obey the state and cease meeting together - or even only meet in a state-approved way - and this led to many Christians being imprisoned for their faith.

At the moment, UK law contains a great deal of religious tolerance. People of many different religions are allowed freedom of practice, and there are few points at which religious practice is constrained by national law. Whilst there is a danger when people feel that society has little to do with them, I think it is considerably more dangerous to allow cultural loyalty to transcend - not what I would consider "state loyalty" (as Williams put it) - but the order of the state, particularly in liberal democracies, where such order is effectively a social contract. You don't have to be loyal to the state to accept its authority. If you feel so strongly that the laws of the state clash with your conscience, you always have the option to move to somewhere more congenial to your beliefs.

Another issue, of course, is where lines are drawn. It is all very well to grant privileges to Islamic religious law - but why just Islamic law? Already the sensitivities of Hindus have been disturbed by the killing of a cow in Hertfordshire - surely this is a classic example of a case where religious sensitivities ought to be considered alongside state law? But why draw the line at the traditional religions? Isn't that discriminating against those people in non-traditional religions? My suspicion is that this sort of precedent will just lead to the breakdown of any sort of coherence in society, and any real regard for the structures of civil society. It is inevitable that the dominant culture will end up in a privileged position - I can't see that societies can work in any other way, and this is the case around the world. What is most important in a liberal society is that those cultures that aren't dominant are allowed the freedom to express themselves, where possible. This doesn't mean that the whole concept of society is undermined, with everybody doing their own thing. It does mean that there is a definite national or societal identity, and this is borne in mind as people of different cultures adopt that nation or society.