The end of the wine

I apologise unreservedly for scaring anyone still following this self-absorbed monologue. You'll be relieved to hear that this is the very last post from LitS. I'm not keen on the idea of death, still less on dying and I would like my family and some semblance of a life back. So, as soon as I can find a clinic stupid enough to take me on, I'm off to rehab. It probably won't work. Part of me hopes it won't work. But perhaps it will. Anyway, if you don't hear from me for a while, that's where I'll be.

Thanks for listening.

Post mortem

There's an almost perfect negative correlation between the amount I write and the number of readers I get on this blog, which is bad news for one of my imagined futures, as a writer. Speaking of imagined futures, these are diminishing rapidly in number, seemingly by the minute. I am sitting in my knackered old armchair in my squalid little cottage, which I share with forms of microbial life that even David Bellamy would find disgusting. For months now I have slept in an unmade bed so foul that none of the tramps under Waterloo Bridge would wish to trade it for his cardboard box. I should be at Hampton Court, chatting about Veratrum to punters but I have been too depressed to leave the house for two days now. I have run out of toilet paper and cannot summon the energy to buy any more. I have run out of red wine but there are a few bottles of grappa left. I have run out of money and of the will to earn more.

When people leave the City, they usually send their colleagues a fantastically trite email saying how much they've enjoyed working at blah, blah, blah... I had the perfect exit email prepared, a misquotation of a line from Douglas Adams. "So long and thanks for all the cash." I never got to use it because I had a breakdown and ended up in hospital, where I really should have stayed. Too late for regrets now.

Goodbye from torquatus. I'd like to say it's been fun.

Is there a God?

"If Jesus was Jewish, how come he has a Mexican name?"

Anonymous

Since almost every adult I've ever counted as a friend is an atheist or agnostic, most of them are puzzled or frankly worried about my obsession with organised religion. Some seem to suspect that I'm a closet god botherer or at any rate a Moonie waiting to happen. Nothing could be further from the truth. My immunity to mumbo jumbo is industrial strength. Others fret that I am wasting what little energy I possess waging unwinnable war against a numberless enemy. These are usually the same people who patronise gyms and voluntarily train, like rats in a maze, to burn off the calories that they work, like rats in a maze, to earn enough money to purchase. A few agree in private with my view that organised religions, in particular Christianity, Islam and Judaism, are the most evil institutions human culture has ever spawned, but won't raise their heads above the parapet. Cowards.

The proximate explanation for my fascination with religion is mundane. My father's parents were both strict Christians. All his siblings were devout, in several cases to the point of insanity. Dad was also an active and practicing Christian as a young man and remained a deist all his life but abandoned early on belief in any of the specific Gods then swimming in their own shit in the meme pool. Religiosity, like most personality traits, is heritable and I appear to have inherited plenty of alleles that predispose me to think about god a lot. The only difference, in this respect, between my ancestors and me is that I received a first class scientific education. I also happen to have a brain that warms to scientific explanations for phenomena that generations as recent as Dad's attributed to ghosts, ghouls and gods.

Now I have two children, whom I adore and whom I wish to protect from evil for as long as possible. I would like to bequeath to them immunity from charlatanry. Since this is impossible I hope at least to innoculate them against the most monstrous of the various doctrines they will encounter far too soon. Since Elsje and Pieter have half my genes, there's not a bad chance that they've inherited the religiosity that runs in my father's side of the family, a legacy that could do them great harm, if left unchecked.

Earlier today, Elsje and I were walking through a graveyard on the way to her regular ballet lesson. She pointed to the crosses above some of the graves and told me that we mustn't touch them. "Why not?" I asked. Her answer wasn't very coherent but it involved bits of the bible story and culminated with her revelation that Jesus had been stuck on a cross. "And do you know what happened then, Daddy?" she asked. "What?" "He died." I presume the resurrection is introduced in Year Two because it's nearly the start of the summer holidays and Elsje is reassuringly still of the view that only a kiss from a bona fide Prince can bring about resurrection and a fairytale ending.

My wife (an atheist) has repeatedly insisted that this is all perfectly normal and OK. As I have said elsewhere, she believes that the kids will figure it all out for themselves and spontaneously undo the brain damage that she says it is fine for teachers to inflict on them while they are too young to argue. In almost every respect Corinne is wiser than I am and I'd trust her judgment over mine nine times out of ten. In this case, however, she is wrong and dangerously so. She is calculating without having taken into account the genetic millstone of my genes hanging around Elsje's and Pieter's necks.

I was in the local lending library with my children recently. I had said they could each choose a DVD and they were arguing about the relative merits of Fireman Sam and Angelina Ballerina. My eye was caught by "Is there a God?" by Richard Swinburne on the shelf of recent accessions. I had bought the first edition of this book a decade ago but never finished reading it (my vision was obscured by tears - of laughter - after a few pages). This was the second edition and I was curious to hear how god had been rendered more plausible in the preceding decade, not one obviously characterized by an outbreak of holiness on earth. I added it to the pile that Elsje and Pieter had accumulated and we left.

Is there a God? is a short book. The single syllable to which it could, without significant loss of explanatory firepower, have been reduced would probably not have been publishable, which is I assume why Oxford University Press insisted on some padding. In the first few pages the title is shown to be a misrepresentation of the contents, which in fact addresses the question "Is there one God and is he a Christian?" Indeed, only a hundred words or so in, Swinburne says:

" I am not directly concerned to assess the claim that there is a God, where 'God' is being understood in some quite different sense, as the name of a quite different sort of being from the one worshipped in Western religion."

Quite right. Those wogs can write their own books about the laughably implausible polytheistic deities they've invented. In the West we have educated ourselves out of such nonsense.

Swinburne's strategy involves taking the scientific method seriously. He argues that an omniscient, omnipotent god is in fact neutered when faced with the laws of logic (which for reasons that he might expand on in a third edition) are uniquely inviolable and cannot, for example, be suspended by a God who wants to make a man dead and alive at the same time. We are assured that the same God can allow a man to walk on water or lick his own balls (he didn't say that, but I'm extrapolating) at a snap of His fingers. Just as the reader is starting to smell a rat, Swinburne hits us with his central argument, Occam's Razor. Simple explanations are better than complicated ones. It's a superlatively useful principle and one that has served science very well. The core of the argument in Is there a God is that god is the ultimate first cause. He's the simplest possible explanation for everything. This argument is so facile, so infantile in its wide-eyed wonder at its own sophistication that one cannot help but be impressed that Swinburne persuaded the chaps at OUP to publish it. Replace the word 'God' wherever it appears in the book with the phrase 'fabulously complex black box full of very clever physics' and you'll see why it is cheating to describe a hypothesised entity of unimaginable complexity as 'simple'.

In the 1970s I enjoyed watching a science fiction series, Blake's Seven, then running on British TV. One of the most interesting characters was Orac, a supercomputer housed in a perspex box the size of a small aquarium. Orac knew everything, could predict the future and demanded fawning respect before he would intervene but could have rescued the crew of the Liberator from every disaster that befell them, had he not had a key, which was often conveniently missing during tense moments. Swinburne's God is neither more nor less interesting than Orac. He belongs in a low budget sci-fi series.

"It is a hallmark of a simple explanation to postulate few causes. There could in this respect be no simpler explanation than one which postulated only one cause. Theism is simpler than polytheism. And theism postulates for its cause, a person, infinite degrees of those properties are essential to persons - infinite power...infinite knowledge...and infinite freedom...zero limits."

Before setting out his stall, Swinburne is at pains to demonstrate his familiarity with science and mathematics and his appreciation of the enormity of the explanatory task he has laid at god's feet.

"Scientists have always been postulating infinite degrees of some quantity as simpler than postulating some very large finite degree of that quantity, and have always done the former when it predicted observations equally well."

"Zero and infinity are opposites."

"If the action of a person is to explain the existence and operation of the universe, he will need to be a very powerful person."

No shit? Fortunately Swinburne has just such a very powerful person to hand.

"God being omnipotent could bring about anything, and so showing that what we observe belongs to a kind of universe that, in virtue of his perfect goodness, God has reason to bring about. That does not guarantee that he will bring it about, but it makes it quite likely."

I'd have liked to see an estimate of p and confidence intervals here but perhaps that is mere pedantry.

If you've never witnessed a Christian stomping on a square peg positioned over a round hole, Chapter 4 - How the existence of God explains the world and its order - is a splendid example of the genre.

"The simple hypothesis of theism leads us to expect all [material phenomena] with some reasonable degree of probability. God being omnipotent is able to produce a world orderly in these respects. And he has good reason to do so: a world containing human persons is a good thing."

Swinburne doesn't say whether he ran this last sentence by the great apes or the whales but one assumes that they'd have a strong opinion on the subject. He does concede that "The suitability of the world as a theatre for humans is not the only reason for God to make an orderly world. The higher animals too are conscious, learn and plan..." so presumably he is concerned with their views.

Chapter 4 is essentially a rehearsal of the argument from design, which evolutionary biology and cosmology have trashed over the past century and a half.

Scientists regularly claim too much explanatory power for their theories and cosmologists are not among the most modest of scientists. Nevertheless, from the cloudy vantage point of our pale blue dot supplemented by data from a handful of satellites in orbit about it, they have inferred the age of our universe (12.7 billlion years) and its origin (in the Big Bang). They have understood in outline the way in which four fundamental forces (they are still working on unifying these into one) have resulted in the emergence of grand structures from infinitesimally small fluctuations in the distribution of energy in the early universe. They know how heavy chemical elements were formed in stars (nuclear furnaces) and how these elements are spread though the galaxies (by supernovae). All of these theories are materialistic. "God handled this step." is a sentence yet to make its first appearance in Physical Reviews. Perhaps cosmologists have reason to be a little arrogant.

Biological evolution by natural selection is, contrary to the view of most physicists, a much deeper theory than most in physics because it explains, rather than merely describing (as, say, general relativity does) reality. Natural selection is an algorithm that must result in the emergence of design given three starting conditions: variation, heritability and death caused by limited resources. There is absolutely nothing in the theory of evolution that leads us to believe that humans or 'higher' animals are an inevitable outcome of the process. Convergence (e.g. the similarity of mollusc and mammalian eyes, which evolved independently in the two phyla) teaches us that there is only a handful of solutions to the problems of life but we would be surprised indeed if we stepped out of our spaceship on another planet to be greeted in English by a bloke with pointy ears and Brylcreem in his hair.

Enter Swinburne, in triumphalist mood.

"So there is our universe (or multiverse). It is characterized by vast, all-pervasive temporal order, the conformity of nature to formula, recorded in the scientific laws formulated by humans. It started off in such a way...as to lead to the evolution of animals and humans. These phenomena are clearly things 'too big' for science to explain. They are where science stops...we should look for a personal explanation of the existence, conformity to law and evolutionary potential of the universe. Theism provides just such an explanation."

History is littered with embarrassing-in-hindsight claims for what science cannot do, most of them, let it be said, made by scientists ("Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible" Kelvin, 1895). I am reminded of a scene from the wonderful cartoon series Asterix, which I loved as a young boy. In Asterix the Gaul, Centurion Crismus Bonus believes he has coerced the druid Getafix into making a cauldron of magic potion, which confers superhuman strength on all who drink it. Eager to test his new powers he rushes outside and attempts unsuccessfully to lift a massive boulder. Undaunted he tries smaller and smaller rocks until, eventually, he succeeds with a stone half the size of his head.

"Yes!!!" he cries, "I'm superhuman!"

The story of god in the last five hundred years is much like the story of Crismus Bonus (Getafix had in fact made a potion that causes hair to grow unstoppably). From setting the earth and its cargo of god-like humans at the centre of the universe and keeping the sun and stars tinkling away in their crystal spheres, god has been reduced to the bloke who pressed the big green 'GO' button then sat back and watched. Of course it is lost on Swinburne that the go button will, in due course, turn out to be an illusion too and what will god do then?

Now, until this point in Is there a God, one might think that Swinburne is nothing more than an amiable cretin. Chapters 5 and 6, however, reveal him as something much more sinister. I am choosing my words carefully here. In these two chapters he not only justifies god's acquiescence in human evil but argues that it is morally obligatory for god to let his creations suffer. A recent attempt to justify and encourage genocide, Mein Kampf, acquired notoriety in the 20th century. The Bible and The Koran (I am unfamiliar with Jewish religious texts, other than the Old Testament) are similar to Hitler's magnum opus in design but far more ambitious in scope and they have made a deeper impression.

Chapter five is an attempt to defend dualism, the view that there are two kinds of stuff. One sort of stuff is the physical, material, ordinary stuff from which rocks, plants and 'lower' animals are made. The other sort is soul stuff, in which human and certain animal consciousnesses reside and which in principle can survive the death of their associated body. Swinburne thinks it self evident that there are bodies and there are souls and also that Darwinism is of no help here.

"Natural selection is a theory of elimination; it explains why so many of the variants thrown up by evolution were eliminated...but it does not explain why they were thrown up in the first place...our problem is to explain why some physical state caused the emergence of souls...Darwinism is of no use in solving this problem."

Wrong, right, incoherent, wrong. Natural selection is a theory of design, which it explains given the three conditions I described earlier. It does not explain those conditions. Genetics is the study of "why those variants were thrown up in the first place" and its answer is clear. Cosmic rays, mutagenic chemicals and transcription errors are some of the reasons why the variants arose. God is nowhere to be seen. Consciousness remains mysterious. It is not understood by any intelligent person, let alone Richard Swinburne. Dualism is no longer taken seriously by any of the neuroscientists, psychologists or philosophers who study brains and minds. The main reason for this is that selective brain damage reliably and predictably eliminates aspects of consciousness, strongly suggesting that brain and mind are identical. What is true beyond doubt is that, if consciousness is a natural phenomenon, encoded in genes or enabled by brains encoded in genes, natural selection will latch onto it and use it.

Merely because an idea is repugnant to human sensibilities, it is not necessarily a bad idea, one of the few sound points that Swinburne makes when he remarks "I would not...recommend that a pastor give this chapter to victims of sudden distress...to read for consolation" and one that is lost on idealists everywhere. In Chapter 6 - "this chapter" - he emphasises that he is not assuming god's existence, merely elucidating what sort of world it would be if the God of the Christians did in fact exist.

"...a generous God will seek to give deeper good things than [the thrills of pleasure and periods of contentment]. He will seek to give us great responsibility for ourselves, each other, and the world...And he will seek to make our lives valuable, of great use to ourselves and each other...God cannot give us these goods in full measure without allowing much evil on the way."

Why not? Isn't this hypothesised God omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good? Ah yes, but remember he cannot violate the laws of logic (see the chapter on miracles for arbitrary exceptions to this rule) - perhaps impotent would be a better term to describe his powers - so having given humans free will he cannot simultaneously intervene when we abuse it. A difficulty with this argument, as Swinburne is honest enough to recognise, is that God could have created us, free will and all, with the propensity to use our freedom only for good.

"It is good that the free choices of humans should include genuine responsibility for other humans, and that involves the opportunity to benefit or harm them."

"In order to have a choice between good and evil, agents need already a certain depravity."

And what about those who are denied the opportunity to exercise this great gift of free will, either because they are too young, because they are oppressed or because they are mentally disabled?

"...if I suffer the consequence of your freely chosen bad action, that is not by any means pure loss for me...Being allowed to suffer to make possible a great good is a privilege, even if the privilege is forced upon you."

Bear that in mind the next time some cunt in a keffiyeh tries to saw off your head with a bread knife. It's a privilege. In fact, according to Swinburne, death is god's built-in safety limit.

"Unending unchosen suffering would indeed to my mind provide a very strong argument against the existence of God. But that is not the human situation."

The reason I find these arguments - indeed the entire book - unconvincing is not that they lack a certain sick, internally consistent logic but because they are arguments towards a conclusion that is already set out in advance. Faced with the options available to a hypothesised omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good god, Swinburne could have gone down the route of allowing him to break the laws of logic along with those of physics and statistics but he couldn't because that route would have led inexorably to the conclusion that the Christian God is a hoax. Which, of course, he is. It is this failure to recognise a fraud, when one stares him in the face, that makes Swinburne despicable. He would rather abuse his talent for logical thinking to justify the monstrous claims of the doctrine he inherited from his parents than use it to help his stupid, ignorant readers escape from the clutches of centuries of dogma.

I am not in favour, personally, of censoring Mein Kampf, the Bible, the Koran or Is there a God? but I do believe that we ought to treat men like Swinburne, who publish theodicies and attempt to promulgate them, with the same contempt we otherwise reserve for neo-Nazis and those terrifying men in keffiyehs.

The final chapter of this revolting little tract concerns miracles. When god enacts a miracle, all previous arguments are declared off limits and god can do what the fuck He pleases. And we sceptics had better shut up if we doubt whether these miracles actually occurred.

"And it is another principle of rationality, which I call the principle of testimony, that those who do not have an experience of a certain type ought to believe any others when they say that they do."

I am not making this up. He actually wrote this and OUP actually published it.

Well, I'm almost done. Richard Swinburne is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford. Whereas Hitler is rightly reviled for promulgating ideas that are seductive but immensely dangerous and, more importantly, false, Swinburne dines at high table while promoting the same theories.

When I am gone, keep monsters like this man away from my children.

Flower rage

There were glum faces all round in the Plant Heritage Marquee at the Hampton Court Flower Show this morning, as we exhibitors surveyed the results of the previous afternoon's judging. The chairman of the panel gallantly visited each exhibitor to give 'feedback' (when and where did this loathsome term originate?). Medusa herself could not have gazed with greater malevolence at his broad departing shoulders than the man who grows auriculas - small, revolting plants like primroses on steroids - better than anyone else in the world, but whose efforts were deemed unworthy of a medal of any description.

I was in total agreement with the judges on the subject of my gong. I got a bronze medal, the horticultural equivalent of being the Norwegian entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest. All this came about because my dear friend Margaret Owen, with whom I share an unnatural enthusiasm for Veratrum, asked me whether I'd help her exhibit the genus at Hampton Court. I couldn't refuse, and didn't want to but, as the event approached, I realised that I hadn't paid enough attention to pampering the plants I was planning to show. I was trying to summon up the courage to suggest to Margaret that perhaps we should withdraw with as much grace as possible and try again another year when I received a phone call from her daughter-in-law. Margaret was in hospital, having developed arrhythmia during the night. In the circumstances pulling out was inconceivable.

Here is a picture of my losing entry, shortly before judging commenced.

Now I imagine that you are looking at this picture and thinking that the judges were generous but bear in mind that 24 hours earlier it looked like this.

About half a tonne of limestone went into making the cliff on the left and about 200 plants, from three continents. were incorporated into the display. One of the comments that the chairman made was that I had included too many plants, a little unjust I felt at the time, given that this was a flower show. In the film 'Amadaeus', Emperor Josef II, in discussion with the composer Salieri, is given the splendid line "My dear young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect." I know now how Salieri felt.

Today was fun. The other exhibitors in the Plant Heritage Marquee loved the display, which means a great deal more to me than the judges' verdict, and I've made some new friends. I was talking all day to interested punters, most of whom were fellow enthusiasts. I got slightly bored with answering the question: "Oooh, is that an orchid? (pointing to Lilium martagon)" with "No madam, its a lily." But then I have been known to ask friends "Who wrote this song?" while inadvertently tapping my feet to "Hey Jude".

Flowers are cool and so are flower people.