Frost Over The World - Ben Elton on Blind Faith - 09 Nov 07

'Blind Faith' book by Ben Elton (Comedian & Author) with David Frost. Ben Elton is wonderfully witty and talks about faith and reason.

• George Orwell 1984 feeling about 'Blind Faith' (BF)
• privacy has disappeared voluntarily in BF
• privacy was lost through 'Big Brother'
• We are giving our privacy away
• everyone is on Facebook
• Their is an obsession with Emoting.
• Concept of Faith - respect for faith can overide respect for intellectual vigour.
• Intellect is on the back foot - passions, faith and fealings are ascendant.

Young peoples No1 ambition is 'I want to be famous' (the book has a Law - everyone IS famous).

Defend the Individual and So the West

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Thanks to ItAintNecessarilySo for the link.

http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.28415/pub_detail.asp

Defend the Individual and So the West

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

ARTICLES
Sydney Morning Herald
Publication Date: August 4, 2008

Thinkers of the Enlightenment, a set of new intellectual attitudes that remade Western culture in the 17th and 18th centuries, set out to understand the world and themselves through reason rather than religion. Their ideas led to massive advances in science, economics and commerce, the arts and human liberty, which underpin our present prosperity and social freedoms.

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks, Islam has often been seen as the chief threat to the Enlightenment's legacy. But is there also something internal to Western intellectual history that leaves us vulnerable to the enemies of reason?

The West has cultivated an ethos of individualism, reason and tolerance, and an elaborate system in which every actor, from the individual to the nation-state, seeks to resolve conflict through words.

The entire system is built on the idea of self-interest. This ethos rejects fanaticism. The alpha male, in our societies, is pacified and groomed to study hard, find a good job, and plan prudently for retirement. "While we in America are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin," writes Lee Harris, author of The Suicide Of Reason, "the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive and ruthless."

By dulling its people's instincts to stand up in defence of their own society and its values, the West is committing itself to slow suicide.

Sometimes the response to attacks on Western societies is one of rapprochement, of softening our insistence on respect for the individual and the primacy of reason in public life. At others it is the reverse--a suspension of the civil liberties and normal legal processes that exemplify Western cultural achievements.

But the way to rescue Western civilisation from its present path of what looks like decline can never be to challenge its tradition of reason and individualism.

I was not born in the West. I was raised with the code of Islam, and from birth I was indoctrinated into a tribal mind-set. Yet I have changed: I have adopted the values of the Enlightenment, and as a result I have to live with the rejection of my native clan as well as the Islamic tribe.

Why have I done so? Because in a tribal society, life is cruel and terrible. And I am not alone. Muslims have been migrating to the West in droves for decades now. They are in search of a better life. Yet their tribal and cultural constraints have travelled with them. The multiculturalism and moral relativism that reign in the West have accommodated this.

Many Western leaders are terribly confused about the Islamic world. They are woefully uninformed and often unwilling to confront the tribal nature of Islam. The problem, however, is not too much reason, but too little. The enemies of reason within the West are religion and the Romantic movement. Both the Romantic movement and organised religion have contributed a great deal to the arts and to the spirituality of the Western mind, but they share a hostility to modernity.

It is not reason that accommodates and encourages the persistent segregation and tribalism of immigrant Muslim populations in the West. It is Romanticism and its descendants. Multiculturalism and moral relativism promote an idealisation of tribal life, and have shown themselves to be impervious to empirical criticism. I see today's Western leaders squandering a great and vital opportunity to compete with the agents of radical Islam for the minds of Muslims, especially those within their borders. But to do so, they must allow reason to prevail over sentiment.

To argue that children born and bred in superstitious cultures that value fanaticism are doomed to be governed by the law of the jungle is to ignore the lessons of the West's own past. There have been periods when the West was less than noble, when it engaged in crusades, inquisitions, witch-burnings, and genocides. Many of those now-Westerners who were born abroad into the law of the jungle, with its alpha males and submissive females, have since become acquainted with the culture of reason and have adopted it. They are even willing to die for it, perhaps with the same fanaticism as the jihadists willing to die for their tribe. While this conflict between Islam and the West is undeniably a deadly struggle between cultures, it is individuals who will determine the outcome.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a resident fellow at AEI. She is the author of Infidel.

John Polkinghorne on science and religion

reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1823,n,n
Chris Street comments are in bright green; highlights in blockquotes (yellow).

John Polkinghorne gave an lecture at Southampton University earlier this year on how science shows that god does exist. His science was impecable - his ideas on theology and religion were deeply flawed. My attempts to get him to debate Victor Stenger in August, were not successful.

The truth in religion

by REVEREND John Polkinghorne, Times Online

The Times Literary Supplement is less than frank about the credentials of John Polkinghorne, the reviewer. He is the REVEREND John Polkinghorne, an ordained Anglican priest, and they should have said so.

Reposted from:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article2778493.ece

Substituting science for religion is like swapping a series of case-notes on senile dementia for King Lear

John Cornwell
DARWIN'S ANGEL
An angelic riposte to The God Delusion
171pp. Profile Books. £10.99
978 1 84668 048 9

John Humphrys
IN GOD WE DOUBT
Confessions of a failed atheist
323pp. Hodder and Stoughton. £18.99.
978 0 340 95126 2

Religious belief is currently under heavy fire. Books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others tell us that religion is a corrupting delusion. Despite their assertions of the rationality of atheism, the style of their onslaughts has been strongly polemical and rhetorical, rather than reasonably argued. Historical evidence is selectively surveyed. Attention is focused on inquisitions and crusades, while the significance of Hitler and Stalin is downplayed. Believers in young-earth creationism are presented as if they were typical of religious people in general. The two books under review aim to make a more temperate contribution to the debate.

John Cornwell has hit on the amusing conceit of writing in the persona of Richard Dawkins's guardian angel, a being, moreover, who had earlier stood in the same relationship to Charles Darwin. The book's tone is gently ironic and its style that of modest discussion, which all makes for an enlightening read. The twenty-one short chapters each consider some claim made in Dawkins's book The God Delusion (reviewed in the TLS, January 19) and then subject it to reasoned questioning.

Cornwell begins by pointing out that Dawkins makes no serious attempt to engage with the academic discussion of religious thought and practice. His book is "as innocent of heavy scholarship as it is free from false modesty". When it asserts that Jesus' call to love our neighbour referred only to relations between Jews (despite this claim being in clear contradiction to the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan), the only support quoted for this highly questionable statement is a book written by an anaesthesiologist.

Over the centuries, theologians have wrestled with how human language can attempt to speak about the nature of God, emphatically rejecting the idea that the deity is simply an invisible object among the other objects of the world. Yet, as Cornwell points out, the God in whom Dawkins disbelieves is a kind of "Great Science Professor in the Sky", a simplistic notion that any thinking theist would be quick to reject. We are continually told that theology is no proper academic discipline, a conclusion that could only be reached by someone whose knowledge of the subject was comparable to the scientific knowledge displayed by those who write in green ink that "Einstein was wrong".

Dawkins is relentlessly rude about religious believers. They are said to be "malevolent, barking mad, mendacious, deluded" and much more. He cannot have the courtesy to take seriously those of us who are both scientists and believers. Religious education of the young is equated with child abuse. Darwin's angel pertinently asks, "Would you really trade child sexual abuse for being brought up in the religion of your parents?". The tone of contempt – one might almost say hatred – that characterizes many of the assertions in The God Delusion is one of the most disturbing aspects of the book.

In God We Doubt displays much more even-handedness. John Humphrys is respectful of religious belief and the kind of life that often, but not invariably, issues from it, while emphasizing that he is unable himself to accept such belief. His approach is that of one who remains open and questioning about these matters, as indicated by the subtitle of his book, Confessions of a failed atheist. Humphrys writes in the chirpy colloquial style one might expect from a presenter of the Today programme on Radio 4. In fact, the book originated partly from interviews he conducted with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi and Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim academic, for the radio, and from the deluge of correspondence that followed.

Humphrys takes very seriously the human experience of conscience, urging us to do some things and to refuse to do others. No doubt, evolutionary thinking offers us some partial understanding of this, with its concepts of kin altruism (protecting the family gene pool) and reciprocal altruism (I'll help you in the expectation that you will help me). Nevertheless, Humphrys rightly sees that these concepts fail to offer insight into the kind of radical altruism which, to use an example he discusses at some length, led Irena Sendlerova repeatedly to risk her life in saving 2,500 Jewish children who were trapped in the Warsaw ghetto.

Humphrys sees ethical intuition as the signal of a transcendent dimension in life, which he values but does not know how to explain from an atheist point of view.

Humphrys believes that the case for God made by the Abrahamic faiths is "riddled with holes". He fails to acknowledge the subtlety and truth-seeking character of theological thought, or to recognize that the care and discrimination exercised in serious biblical studies carries us well beyond a plodding, crypto-literalist approach to the interpretation of Scripture.

Both Dawkins and Humphrys rightly engage with the challenge to theism that is represented by the existence of a world claimed to be the creation of a good and powerful God, but which nevertheless contains so much evil and suffering. This is surely the greatest difficulty holding people back from religious belief, and it is one that continually troubles religious believers. One could not claim that there is a complete and straightforward answer available to remove the perplexity. Yet there are some arguments, not discussed by either Humphrys or by Dawkins, which offer modest help as theologians struggle with the problems of theodicy.

or should that be Idiocy?

Interestingly, science is of some assistance in this regard. Its understanding of how the world works shows that natural processes are inextricably entangled with each other. They cannot be separated out, so that those with good consequences could have been retained by a competent creator who, at the same time, eliminated those with bad consequences. The integrity of creation is a kind of package deal. For example, the process of genetic mutation produced new forms of life, but it has also resulted in malignancy. You cannot have the one without the other. Humphrys asks why there are not repeated divine interventions to avert evil consequences. Such things could only happen in a magical world, and that kind of world is not this one, because its creator is not a capricious magician. Only a world with sufficient reliability for deeds to have foreseeable consequences could be one in which moral responsibility was exercised. These insights do not dispose of all the anguish and anger that we feel in the face of individual human suffering, but they suggest that it is not simply gratuitous, easily removable by a God who was a bit less callous.

Fundamental to the discussion to which both books are seeking to contribute is the relationship between faith and reason. Too often the two have been pitted against each other, as if they were in necessary contradiction. Religious faith is not a matter of the unquestioning acceptance of unmotivated belief, demanded of us by some overriding authority. Quite the contrary. Faith is a commitment to a form of motivated belief, differing only from scientific reason in the nature of the subject of that belief and the kind of motivations appropriate to it. Science achieves its success by the modesty of its ambition, only considering impersonal experience open to repetition at will. Personal experience, let alone encounter with the transpersonal reality of God, does not fit within this limited protocol. The concept of reality offered by scientism is that of a world of metastable, replicating and information-processing systems, but it has no persons in it. Darwin's angel criticizes Dawkins for a lack of trust in the power of imagination to explore reality, such as we exercise through poetry. He is said to sound "as though he would substitute a series of case-notes on senile dementia for King Lear".

No progress will be made in the debate about religious belief unless participants are prepared to recognize that the issue of truth is as important to religion as it is to science. Dawkins invokes Bertrand Russell's parable of the teapot irrationally claimed to be in unobserved orbit in the solar system. Of course there are no grounds for belief in this piece of celestial crockery, but there are grounds offered for religious belief, though admittedly different people evaluate their persuasiveness differently.

Religion does not have access to absolute proof of its beliefs but, on careful analysis, nor does science.

In all realms of human inquiry, the interlacing of experience and interpretation introduces a degree of precariousness into the argument. Yet this does not mean that we cannot attain beliefs sufficiently well motivated to be the basis for rational commitment.

In his book on the philosophy of science, Personal Knowlege (1964), Michael Polanyi stated that he was writing in order to explain how (scientifically) he could commit himself to what he believed to be true, while knowing it might be false.

Science does not prove; Science shows relative degrees of proof - but never prooves anything 100%

That is the human epistemic condition. Recognizing this should encourage caution, but not induce intellectual paralysis. It is in this spirit that the dialogue between science and religion needs to be conducted.

John Polkinghorne was formerly Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, and President of Queens' College. His autobiography From Physicist to Priest was published this year.