nameandnature

I'm giving a talk to the Cambridge University Atheist and Agnostic Society tomorrow, Monday 19th October, at 7.30 pm in the Union Society building (the one behind the Round Church). Apparently it's £1 for non-members, a bargain if ever I saw one.

I'll cover some of the ground covered by my Losing My Religion essay, with a bit more of a Cambridge focus. I think they're hoping for some dark secrets about CICCU, which is unfortunate, because as far as I know there aren't any (anyone who knows different is invited to leave a comment below), but I'll do my best.

Edited: I've blogged my notes and what I remember of the Q&A after the talk.

I recently happened across lumpley's Mormon gunslingers game Dogs in the Vineyard. This description from the author and this review give a flavour of the thing, and some details of the poker-like conflict resolution rules. It looks fun, very different from the mechanics-heavy stuff (D&D and friends) and focused on helping the group create a compelling story by pitching the characters into conflicts with no easy answers. Playing the eponymous dogs, you're in a game world where the religion really is true and your job is to defend it, bringing the towns you visit back onto the straight and narrow, using words, ritual and, when all else fails, a six-shooter.

scribb1e found a bunch of alternate settings for it, all based on the playing characters sworn to defend an ideology the players probably disagree with. My favourite is Fashion Experts on a Reality TV Show, mainly for the fashion version of the game's "Something's wrong", X leads to Y progression.

Following scribb1e's further suggestion that there should be a CICCU version, I've come up with Staff Workers in the UCCF, in which our intrepid players are running characters who are the paid staff sent to help university Christian Unions. In the game, they'd deal with CUs who've strayed from the Doctrinal Basis, so the equivalent to a town in Dogs is a university CU (or possibly a college CU in the Reps in the CICCU variant). The Desert People are the liberal Christians, maybe the SCM (they might also be the other religions evangelising on campus, if there are any). Actually, it might make sense for the Desert People to be Fusion and the SCM represent the corrupt religion of the Territorial Authority, I suppose.

I've not quite worked out what the CU equivalent of shooting someone is, any ideas?

Here's the Something's Wrong progression:

Pride (manifests as self-righteousness)
-leads to->
Sin (manifests as demons outside, e.g. the Student Union refuses to let you book rooms, the student newspaper writes nasty things about you)
-leads to->
False Doctrine (manifests as corrupt religious practices and heresy, e.g. charismatic stuff like speaking in tongues and falling over; rejection of Biblical inerrancy; rejection of penal substitutionary atonement; acceptance of homosexuality)
-leads to->
False Priesthood (manifests as demons inside, like like CU members going out with non-Christians, sleeping with their boy/girlfriends (esp. if they're the same sex, obviously), getting drunk)
-leads to->
Hate (manifests as apostasy (defection to Fusion, the SCM or to atheism), schism)

I probably will pay up for the PDF of the Dogs rules, so I'll have to see how far I can go with this, but it might actually be a fun variant of the game.

Evangelicals like to quote scary (to them) statistics about how many teenage Christians will "fall away" (Christian jargon for leaving the faith) on going to university, or how many student Christians will no longer be Christians 5 or 10 years later.

P Z Myers over at Pharyngula pointed to a recent press release from US evangelicals who were worried about their teenagers going astray, quoting surveys which said over 50% would fall away at university. It's not clear who did the surveys, so atheists should probably find that out before joining Myers in jumping for joy. As one of the commenters at Pharyngula says, moral panic is a great way to raise funds for your organisation.

When I was a lad, CICCU liked to quote similarly hopeful surveys about the perseverance of their graduates. In an old post of mine you can see my notes from a leavers' talk given by the students' curate at my old church. She quoted a UCCF survey which gave an attrition rate of over 50% after 5 years. It turns out that UCCF have never heard of such a survey. The link to the UCCF web forum where they said this is now defunct (presumably as part of the UCCF's goal of ruthlessly suppressing open discussion), but you can see what Dave Bish, one of their staff workers, has to say about it. As well as saying there is no such survery, he writes that Christians should be careful of the post-hoc fallacy if they are tempted to blame university Christian Unions for their apostates. After saying that, he replies to a comment saying that someone should get some real statistics (which must include appropriate controls for non-CU Christians, and non-Christians, I think) by saying that such statistics are irrelevant because God has already told us in the Bible what causes people to fall away. Phew! I'm glad we sorted that one out.

Back here in the reality-based community, though, I'd be very interested in the results of such a survey. I know lots of people like me, and another LJer has said that "to say that I keep stumbling upon people with similar experiences is an understatement". But the plural of anecdote is not data. Such a survey wouldn't prove anything about the truth or otherwise of Christianity, of course, but that's not why it's interesting.

The discussion on Pharyngula turned up something which struck a chord with me. In the past, when talking about other post-university ex-evangelicals, many of whom studied science, I've spoken about them as seeing evangelicalism as a spiritual analogue of science. Is it science students that fall into evangelicalism and then fall out again? Perhaps that's a bit too simple. A commenter on Myer's posting quotes The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer, a free book about the state of politics in the USA. Chapter 4 discusses evangelicalism. The author writes about ex-evangelical apostates, and completely nails it:

What then gnawed away so mercilessly at the apostates that they could no longer overpower doubt with faith?

Their families will say it was Satan. But we thought, after interviewing dozens of "amazing apostates," that (most ironically) their religious training had made them leave. Their church had told them it was God's true religion. That's what made it so right, so much better than all the others. It had the truth, it spoke the truth, it was The Truth. But that emphasis can create in some people a tremendous valuing of truth per se, especially among highly intelligent youth who have been rewarded all their lives for getting "the right answer." So if the religion itself begins making less and less sense, it fails by the very criterion that it set up to show its superiority.

Similarly, pretending to believe the unbelievable violated the integrity that had brought praise to the amazing apostates as children. Their consciences, thoroughly developed by their upbringing, made it hard for them to bear false witness. So again they were essentially trapped by their religious training. It had worked too well for them to stay in the home religion, given the problems they saw with it.

The truth will make you free, as someone once said.

I've been listening to more of those CICCU talks.

Tues 13th Loving God, Broken World: Has God Lost Control?

Bloody theodicy, as some on my friends list might say. Simon Scott approaches the issue of suffering sensitively, as one who has experienced it himself (an illness 7 years ago, he says: I think I remember praying for him at church. I don't know what was wrong with him, but his description of makes it sound awful).

His points are familiar to anyone who's looked into Christian responses to the Problem of Evil. God created a good world, but human disobedience made it go wrong. God is absolved of blame for this, even natural disasters are somehow our fault (perhaps, like Mr Deity, God was worried it'd be too easy to believe in him otherwise). Perhaps intentionally, given Scott's audience, it's not clear whether he's advocating creationism. It's possible to read the Genesis story as applying to Everyman and Everywoman, but hard to see how that interpretation has the cosmological implications that Scott outlines: once the entire world was good, now it is fallen, even in the impersonal, non-human parts. I was a theistic evolutionist once, and it involved a lot of hand-waving.

So, the world has gone bad. But, says Scott, God will fix this (unfortunately, not for everyone, as some people will go to Hell). We might call that pie in the sky when you die and wish for a better world now, but we shouldn't. After all, if God were to judge sin now, where would he stop? The implication is, as usual, that everyone is guilty, and we'd better be careful when we wish for divine intervention, as we may get it.

This argument fails because it assumes that God's way of making the world better would be to obliterate everything that displeases him. I can think of more subtle ways of doing it than that. It's odd that God apparently can't.

Scott acknowledges that his explanation is incomplete, but implies it's best not worry why that is, just ensure that you aren't excluded from the perfect world which will be re-created at the end of time. He tells a parable of a cyclist hit by a bus (this is Cambridge, after all), and a passerby who gives a precise explanation of his body's pain response rather than helping him to a hospital. There's certainly a pragmatism to this, which echoes the Buddhist story of Malunkyaputta and the man shot by an arrow: it's pointless to tell someone who is suffering about eternal verities rather than how to end their suffering. That said, there's no suggestion in Malunkyaputta's story that the world is watched by someone who could intervene, but chooses not to. In the meantime, Christians had better not pass by on the other side, but God is at liberty to do so.

Wed 14th Jesus Asked, "Who do you say I am?" (Mark 8v29)
The Profit Motive in Religion

After a good start in which he advises Christians to read The God Delusion and atheists to read Alister McGrath, Phillip Jensen plays religion's trump card. You're all going to die, he says, and what are you going to do then?

We've all woken at 4 am and realised we shall one day die (unless that's just me and Larkin). Religion deals in the certainties we want when uncertainty is too terrible. Speaking of creationism, I often see Christians who pounce on any scientific uncertainty, eager to pull God out of the gap. This is a different degree of seriousness. We needn't face where we came from, but we must all face where we're going.

I'd call it a trick, except I don't doubt the sincerity of Jensen's pleas not to let worldly distractions keep us from eternal life. Still, again, how can they? Who would turn down such a thing, if they woke after their own death to find it on offer? The trick belongs to religions themselves, not consciously to their adherents. It is that we're told we must act before death, and each religion claims that their way is the way to get there, other ways being uncertain at worst and a broad road to hell at worst. Even if we wanted to take up Pascal's wager, where shall we place our stake? Again, it's odd that Jensen's God hasn't thought of universalism, but rather, insists on the eternal torture or final obliteration of everyone who bet wrong.

It seems there's been a spot of bother recently between some students' unions and some university Christian Unions.

Most university CUs in the UK are affiliated to the UCCF, an avowedly evangelical organisation which sprang out of our old friend, CICCU, in 1836 (or something). Exeter's SU apparently wants the CU to stop making members sign up to the UCCF doctrinal basis. This is clearly the right thing to do, as the part about imputed righteousness is nonsense, as N.T. Wright (no relation) argues cogently in What St Paul Really Said (gjm11 also won this argument a while ago, if anyone like nlj21 is interested).

Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, the University and the SU denied the use of campus facilities for the CU to run Pure, a course for Christians teaching typically evangelical attitudes to sex, because they didn't like the bit about gays (this appears to be an illustration of the power of Facebook, by the way). Legal action has been threatened by the CUs.

It's nice to see the young people enjoying themselves, I suppose. I'm reminded of the saying that academic politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low.

There are lots of people squealing about persecution, but I also read some of the more balanced views of the recent controversy. Cartoon Church has a good set of links to other thoughtful postings.

Christians are not being persecuted by not getting free or cheap rooms via the SU, any more than gays are by a course run by evangelicals for evangelicals which, as an aside to the main topic of "Evangelical Guilt 101: Wanking and how to avoid it" (link to a hilarious Pure session plan, mildly NSFW), says what Christianity always has pretty much always said about homosexuality. Both sides look petty and keen to be perceived as persecuted.

Some SUs and CUs have come to an understanding without turning the whole thing into a culture war. CUs can disaffiliate from the SU and maintain their oligarchy (I recall being delighted to learn, while I was a member of CICCU, that this was the correct term for their method of government). SUs can stop their extreme sports version of being Gruaniad readers. Everyone wins.

Alas, one troublesome priest has rumbled the fact that CUs are actually part of our plan to turn middle-of-the-road Christians into atheists. Sometimes it's a protracted process, to be sure, but our mills also grind exceeding small. Look everyone, over there: a lawsuit! (That ought to do it).

Premier Christian Radio have put up the audio of the Unbelievable discussion programme I was on. You can download the MP3 from archive.org.

Here's my director's commentary track (except I wasn't a director, but you get the idea).

The first phone-in question from Steven Carr is a hard one for Christians. In Matthew's gospel, Jesus talks of God being like a shepherd who seeks each lost sheep. Steven said "a good shepherd is not one who says 'I have given the lost sheep enough evidence to find its way home'", provoking laughter in the studio because we all realised how Steven had struck home, I think. Some people (St Paul, for example) seem to get dramatic experiences, whereas some don't. This is inconsistent with a God who we're told seeks out everyone. The usual Christian defence is to say that God cannot over-ride our free-will and make us believe (C.S. Lewis says "he cannot rape; he must woo"). But God wasn't so concerned with St Paul's free-will and autonomy that he could not knock him off his horse on the way to Damascus, yet St Paul's sort of experience is rare.

Marvin's call was interesting, and all of us in the studio regretted that we didn't get the chance to discuss all his points. His first point was that to accept the existence of evil one has to accept the existence of God who creates good and evil. I didn't really follow that argument. The existence of evil seems to be merely a matter of people doing stuff I consider bad, and I don't need to suppose that God made them do it. It's possible he was arguing that without God we have no moral basis to call something evil, something which I've touched on before.

Marvin mentioned Anselm's Ontological Argument, but Paul Clarke agreed that he'd concede that one.

Marvin's second point was that we accept the truth of other classical writings, so why not the Bible? This argument fails because we're not asked to live according to the teaching of those other classical writings. Something which we're told to base our lives on should be held to a higher standard. But there are already many excellent arguments against Biblical inerrancy, so I'm not going to rehearse them all again here, but I will talk about the specific example I mentioned.

I don't think that Paul Clarke's response to my killer argument against inerrancy holds up. To say that the "we" of St Paul's "we who are still alive" in 1 Thess 4 could encompass later Christians presupposes that St Paul knew he was writing to such people. My understanding of inerrancy was always that it did not and should not require such an assumption. At the Square Church they taught that the beginning of biblical interpretation was to work out what a passage meant to those who originally heard it (in this case, the people in Thessalonica, as is clear from 1 Thess 5:27). The method of interpretation where you read something like an epistle as if it's personally addressed to you was right out, in fact.

Secondly, Paul Clarke's defence of the inerrancy of 1 Corinthians 7 relies on some ambiguity about what the "present crisis" (verse 26) is. Paul Clarke suggested its a some local trouble affecting the Corinthian Christians. But St Paul himself spells this out in verses 29-31, ending with "for this world in its present form is passing away". Something more than local trouble is being spoken of.

As I said to triphicus, it's perfectly acceptable to concede the point (as she sort of does) but then look for what a Christian might take from that passage anyway (in this case, that the glories of this world are fleeting, and that Jesus could be back at any time so Christians should look busy). But to maintain that this sort of interpretation is what Paul actually meant to say in the first place, as Paul Clarke seemed to, seems like making work for yourself. It's only the extra-Biblical assumption of inerrancy that requires evangelicals to go through these contortions when faced with texts like these. Removing that assumption cuts the knot. I'm reminded of the Washington Post's description of Bart Erhman's tortured paper defending some passage in Mark, and of the revelation Ehrman had when his tutor wrote a note in the margin saying "Maybe Mark just made a mistake".

I stumbled a bit when I mentioned Occam's Razor because Paul Clarke rightly jumped on the fact that in some sense God's miraculous healing of someone's fibroids is a simpler explanation than them getting better naturally by some unknown mechanism. Edited to add: what I should have said was that this sense of simple isn't the one Occam's Razor applies to.

scribb1e points out that this doesn't address those people who pray and don't get better. She also says that unexpected stuff does happen in medicine but it's not proof of anything very much more than the ignorance of doctors. If a Christian gets ill they will almost certainly pray about it, and some of the people who pray will get better (along with some of those who don't). You can't say it wasn't God's doing, but you have to wonder about his inconsistency. Edited to add: scribb1e elaborates in this comment.

nlj21 kindly batted off a question to both the Paul's in the studio. Paul Clarke was right in saying that the fact that some people leave Christianity doesn't prove it's wrong, but it does make you wonder about CICCU and similar organisations, doesn't it? cathedral_life's comments on this discussion (where she signs herself as "AR") seem apposite.

I hope I gave a reasonable answer to nlj21's question to me, although I'm sure he'll be along to disagree.

I loved the question about "a god that suits your lifestyle", because lifestyle is a Christian code-word for "having sex in a way we don't like".

I was expecting someone to try the No True Scotsman argument about me leaving Christianity ("no True Christian leaves Christianity") so Narna came up trumps and I delivered my prepared answer. Go me.

I found Paul Clarke's summing up quite affecting, because it was clear that he genuinely was concerned about my welfare. In the end, though, as I said, you can only follow the truth as best you can.

challenging_god is having a Biblical contradictions thread. For people unfamiliar with how this works, here's my step-by-step guide:

First, a nutty creationist rants about the atheistic cult of humanism, and throws out a challenge to prove that the Bible contains errors, contradictions or what-have-you.

Next, bitter atheists descend upon the thread and interpret single verses as free-standing statements of propositional logic, and show how they contradict each other.

Occasionally, someone makes a valid point, like the differing genealogies of Jesus in Matthew's and Luke's gospels (both designed to show Jesus as the Jewish Messiah; both, alas, different). When this happens, the inerrantists trot out their standard counter-argument, which involves relying on things the text does not, in fact, say, or on ignoring the hard bits in favour of what is actually a more liberal Christian interpretation. I've not seen the one where they say "Hmmm... yes, this is a difficult passage[this being the approved terminology], but I'm still going to be an inerrantist, if it's all the same to you". I feel that it can't be long in coming, though.

Anyhow, I have a favourite contradiction (a contradiction with external reality, rather than an internal contradiction, but still, it about waps it up for that wascally inewancy). I successfully used my contradiction to "turn" robhu (note: sarcasm). It has not yet been banned for its mind-melting power, so I've given it another outing on this thread of the discussion. Unfortunately, I've not been able to engage ikefriday, the original poster, in debate. Instead, triphicus has turned up, and insists on being sane and reasonable. Standards are falling in evangelicalism, let me tell you.

I've also e-friended mr_ricarno after an interesting conversation about CICCU.

And so to bed.

It seems someone from CICCU (or at least, someone from a Cambridge IP address) posted an advert for this year's CICCU Convert-a-thon to my last entry. You've got to admire the brass neck of that: it seems vaguely reminiscent of something old JC himself might have done. I replied in kind, and so The Great God Debate thread was begun. It's mostly me and robhu vs nlj21 right now. Feel free to join us, as long as you can spell and punctuate and are not any sort of nutter.

( Dancing and that )

You can't have one of these updates without mentioning religion, so I thought I'd point out an interesting article on Ship of Fools about university CU missions (like CICCU's Promise this year). There's a link at the top of the article to a longer PDF version, which is worth a read.

The author talks about most students being apathetic toward religion and student politics as if this were a recent change. I'm not sure I believe this, though. Kate Fox's Watching the English mentions "The Importance of Not Being Earnest" as a general rule of Englishness: we're naturally suspicious of anyone who appears too keen on anything. When she talks about religion, she also notes that while many people will say they're C of E on census forms, few people actually care about religion enough to bother arguing about it. The hothouse environment of the vast Cambridge friends-of-friends web magnifies the importance of religion, since it is full of people who have thought about it and decided one way or the other.

This is probably a good thing, since it means that there is no political capital in placating the fundamentalists in this country. No Bush for us: Tony keeps quiet about his (quite serious, by all accounts) Christian faith. We're far more interested in class war: witness the way that, as shreena pointed out, the ban on foxhunting got far more press coverage than the introduction of civil partnerships for gay people.