Rooney – the managers speak

Reflections from some of Europe’s top managers on the Wayne Rooney ban for swearing.



With apologies to a certain Archdruid who can't cope with watching videos.

A city united

Manchester may be a city with two football teams vying for power at the top of the Premier League but we supporters seem to share something in common, a problem with spelling.



Above a banner displayed as Manchester United played Chel$ki in the Champions League. Below a rather less sophisticated offering from a Manchester City fan during an F.A. Cup match.



I post this as a Manchester United fan.

h/t Off The Post.

Arrogance and ignorance

Martin Rees, theoretical astrophysicist and Master of Trinity College Cambridge, has been awarded this year’s Templeton Prize. The award has caused something of a stir in certain sections of the scientific community because the Templeton Prize describes itself in these terms:

The Templeton Prize honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works. Established in 1972 by the late Sir John Templeton, the Prize aims, in his words, to identify “entrepreneurs of the spirit”—outstanding individuals who have devoted their talents to expanding our vision of human purpose and ultimate reality. The Prize celebrates no particular faith tradition or notion of God, but rather the quest for progress in humanity’s efforts to comprehend the many and diverse manifestations of the Divine.

In other words, in the eyes of some, the prize is tainted by faith and religion. Martin Rees is clear that he holds no religious beliefs and yet he has been happy to accept the prize and is quoted in The Independent as saying:

‘I would see no reason to be concerned because they (Templeton Prize) support a variety of interesting and worthwhile research projects in Cambridge University and many other places,". "The fact they have given this award to me, someone who has no religious beliefs at all, shows they are not too narrow in their sympathies. I feel very surprised because I really thought that I didn't have the credentials, but obviously I'm extremely pleased because I'm joining a roll call of distinguished previous winners, including six members of the Royal Society."

Others do not share Rees’s view and the usual suspects have lined up to express their dismay at his willingness to receive the award. Richard Dawkins declared:

‘That will look great on Templeton's CV. Not so good on Martin's’.

Others have been even more scathing. Harry Kroto, a British Nobel laureate at Florida State University in Tallahassee, is quoted as saying:

‘There's a distinct feeling in the research community that Templeton just gives the award to the most senior scientists they can find who's willing to say something nice about religion.’

Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, said the Templeton Foundation is "sneakier than the creationists" by introducing the idea of faith into a discipline where faith is anathema.

‘Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning. In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice.’

I never cease to be amazed at the arrogance and ignorance displayed by some supposedly intelligent people. Coyne is clearly ignorant if he thinks that doubt and questioning do not play a part in religion. Does he know anything about Theology? If I dismissed the work of these men and the disciplines they study with the same banal generalities that they bandy around about faith and religion I would rightly be criticised or probably ignored.

There is something else I’ve noticed about these men, I say men because the people quoted are usually men; they seem to have a very narrow view of who makes up the scientific community. For them there is no place for the scientist who has a religious faith and so they dismiss a great tradition of scientists who were not only people of faith but inspired in their scientific endeavours by their faith. Even more damning is their dismissal of contemporaries around the world who are scientists and hold religious beliefs.

Maggi Dawn has mentioned a meeting with Martin Rees on her blog and it is well worth a look. There was one thing that made me uneasy and reinforced my concern about the blinkered views expressed by some scientists. Maggi quotes from an interview given by Rees in The Guardian today where he says this:

IS: Do you see an importance in trying to diffuse some of the conflict that sometimes gets stoked up between science and religion?
MR: I think they can co-exist. They are very different activities. Obviously one opposes Creationism and such-like, but it’s fairly clear that there are some scientists for whom religion is important and most of us for whom it isn’t, but again I think they can be co-existent.

‘Most of us for whom it isn’t’. Who is the most of us? The world wide scientific community? Is Rees saying that when one looks around the world the large majority of scientists do not regard religion as being important? I would like to see the evidence for this, but I suspect that Rees falls into the all too common trap of generalising from his own particular experience. I would be interested to know what the proportion of scientists with religious convictions is in, for example, Asia or the Middle East.

It is predictable and depressing to see the bitchiness of some of the comments that have greeted the news of Rees’s award. I have no problem with people who do not believe in God expressing their views. When the views expressed are founded on arrogance and ignorance then they deserve to be challenged as robustly as they would challenge the views of those who believe in God.

Route 66 #SH2011

Apart from being the title of one of the first songs I learnt on the guitar as a teenager, Route 66 is the title of Spring Harvest 2011. We’ve been going as a family for quite a few years and there is much I enjoy about the event. It’s a good family break, always a joy to spend time with friends and there is an excellent programme for the kids. There is usually something on the teaching side of the programme that I find refreshing and challenging, and plenty of time for good conversation.

Of late there have been a few SH developments I have not been so keen on: the worship has become more focused around the performance of the worship leader/band; the Bible readings have drifted from exposition to talk, becoming more like the evening celebration addresses, and there is still too much of the old pals act between the leadership team up front. I blogged about some of these concerns last year on a post titled Feast or Famine.

This year the Spring Harvest focus is firmly back on the Bible, hence the Route 66 title, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the team encourage us to engage with scripture. Gerard Kelly has been heavily involved in developing the material and his Bible Readings a few years ago, taking a multi-arts approach to help explore the text, were excellent. What I am not looking forward to is the Skegness climate as the last time we forsook Minehead for the East Coast it snowed.

I shall attempt to blog during the event and the Twitter hashtag is #SH2011 for those who want to follow. No news about a Tweetup yet but where two or three Twitterati gather…

Here’s Gerard Kelly explaining the idea behind Route 66.

The Good Book

You have to hand it to the philosopher A.C. Grayling, if you are going to make a statement about your work then you might as well aim high. Grayling has produced The Good Book which is described as A Secular Bible. Here is what the blurb about The Good Book says on Amazon:

Drawing on the wisdom of 2,500 years of contemplative non-religious writing on all that it means to be human - from the origins of the universe to small matters of courtesy and kindness in everyday life - A.C. Grayling, Britain's most popular and widely read philosopher, has created a secular bible. Designed to be read as narrative and also to be dipped into for inspiration, encouragement and consolation, "The Good Book" offers a thoughtful, non-religious alternative to the many people who do not follow one of the world's great religions.

Instead, going back to traditions older than Christianity, and far richer and more various, including the non-theistic philosophical and literary schools of the great civilisations of both West and East, from the Greek philosophy of classical antiquity and its contemporaneous Confucian, Mencian and Mohist schools in China, down through classical Rome, the flourishing of Indian and Arab worlds, the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, the worldwide scientific discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries to the present, Grayling collects, edits, rearranges and organises the collective secular wisdom of the world in one highly readable volume. Contents of this title  include: "Genesis"; "Proverbs"; "Histories"; "Songs"; "Wisdom Acts"; "The Lawgiver Lamentations"; "Concord Consolations"; "Sages"; and, "The Good Parables".

This morning Grayling and Giles Fraser, Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, discussed the book on Radio 4’s Today programme and it made for an interesting debate. Grayling describes his work as declaring: ‘There are as many good lives as people who have the talent to live them.’  Grayling sees the Bible as being about a deity handing down commands about how to live a good life and he argues there are many other sources and traditions to inspire the moral life. Fraser rightly agreed with Grayling that you don’t need to be religious to be moral, but he then went on to say of the Bible ‘It’s not about being good… it’s about being saved.’ In other words the problem of the human condition, which the Bible addresses, is much deeper than our ability to follow sets of rules. Earlier Fraser had explained that it is the full blooded account of human life, set in the deep complexity of the world, which attracts him to the Bible, and this aspect has been stripped out in Grayling’s work. Fraser contrasts the Bible with what he describes as the tame stoicism and easy going morality of The Good Book.

The Good Book looks like an interesting synthesis of some of the great works of moral philosophy but does it offer an answer for Everyman? I suspect it may be fine for the Oxford don relaxing in his bath while reading Aristotle, however, I prefer a book which is more than a moral self-improvement manual. My problem is not knowing what is right. My problem is doing what is right and in that the Bible seems a bit more realistic, even if it can be dismissed as ‘foolishness to the Greeks’.

Shelley was wrong: a response to Andrew Copson.

Andrew Copson the chief executive of the British Humanist Association has written a piece in The Guardian in praise of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Copson draws attention to Shelley’s argument for the non-existence of God put forward in The Necessity of Atheism. The conclusion of Copson’s article I wholeheartedly agree with, as he calls for his readers to challenge the persecution of people in different parts of the world for thinking and speaking freely. Copson has in mind the non-religious but the argument applies to all, religious and non-religious alike.

In support of his case, Copson cites the case of a young man in Saudi Arabia facing persecution.

One of the most upsetting stories I was ever told was by a young humanist from Saudi Arabia who grew up so frightened of what would happen if he spoke out loud about his beliefs to another person that the only outlet for his thoughts was to go on long walks away from all people, and speak his mind only to the air. In fact, he never spoke to another human being about his most fundamental beliefs until coming to Britain in his late 20s, and experiencing then for the first time what those of us who live in freedom take for granted: the joyful dynamic of testing and developing our own ideas in conversation and dialogue with others.

It is a terrible story and I am pleased to hear the young man now enjoys the freedom to express his beliefs. I use the word ‘beliefs’ because that is the word Copson uses twice in recounting the story and the second time he refers to ‘fundamental beliefs’. Is Copson now accepting what many of us have been arguing for a long time, that Humanism and Atheism are belief systems? And if Humanism and Atheism are beliefs then why should they be considered any more rational than religious beliefs?

This brings me to the problem with Shelley’s argument or at least with Copson’s brief summary of his argument about the non-existence of God. Here is how Copson describes Shelley’s thesis:

The argument itself is simple. If you have seen or heard God, then you must believe in God. If you haven't, then the only possible reasons to believe in God are reasonable argument or the testimony of others. The main argument given for believing in a deity – that the universe must have had a first cause – is not persuasive because there is no reason to believe either that the universe must have had a first cause or that this cause, if it existed, was a deity. The testimony of others – a third-rate source of knowledge in any case – is invariably contrary to reason. This is not least because it reports God as commanding belief, which would be irrational of God, given that belief is involuntary and not an act of will. So there is no reason to believe in God.

The first part of the argument is to dismiss the necessity of belief in God as the first cause of the Universe. Given that everything else we observe in our universe seems to have a cause why should the Universe be any different? I would suggest it is as much a matter of belief to say the Universe has no first cause or creator as to argue that it does, given that we have no other examples of anything not having a cause. I am no cosmologist but my reading of the latest debates about the origins of the Universe suggest that at best the jury is out on this one.

However, my faith is not primarily based on belief in a first cause / creator God. This brings me to the second part of Shelley’s argument, the testimony of others, which is described as a third-rate source of knowledge contrary to reason. Testimony may be a third-rate source of knowledge but most of us live our lives depending on it otherwise we might never try anything new. Or is he only saving this judgement for testimony regarding belief in God.

Is it irrational to take the testimony of others to find out if something is true and finding it is true to believe in it? It strikes me we do this all the time in our lives. Was Shelley and is Copson seriously suggesting that it is irrational to believe anything on the basis of testimony, for that would seriously undermine most scientific endeavour which builds on the testimony of others. I fly in aeroplanes not because I know how they fly but because I have trusted the testimony of others  who have flown and then discovered it to be true for myself. Scientists would be required to keep repeating the same experiments if they didn’t trust the testimony of others. 

Or is Shelley arguing that it is only testimony about belief in God that is third-rate and irrational? I presume he is as it would be irrational to dismiss all testimony as third-rate and irrational. How does Shelley’s claim stand up?

The claim is that testimony to belief in God is irrational because God demands belief and such belief would not really be belief because it would be involuntary, forced on us, and not a decision of our free will. It would therefore be irrational of God to demand we believe in him. Testimony to such a demand of God would also be irrational. Now this might be true if that is what testimony about God is like but is it? It certainly doesn’t sound like the God I was invited to consider believing in by the witness of others. The God I was invited to consider was the God of Jesus Christ who called me to join with him in the great adventure of the Kingdom of God. No one demanded that I believe, no one forced me to believe, no one asked me to abandon my reason or free will in deciding to become a follower of Christ.

I came to faith as the result of the testimony or witness of my parents and other Christians I knew. I was brought up to believe but there came a point when I had to decide whether this belief was actually true or simply something I was conditioned to believe by my upbringing. The point about testimony is that it points to something else and we only discover if that testimony is true when we begin to live as if what that testimony points to is true. This is how I define faith; living as if what I say I believe in is true. Having committed myself to living in this way I find it to be true. I can’t convince or compel others to believe, all I can do is invite them to try it for themselves.

If Shelley’s caricature about Christian witness and the God of that witness were true then he would be right and belief in such a God would be irrational. However, this is not the God I believe in and it is not the testimony of the vast majority of the Christians I know.

In his article Copson asks that we stop caricaturing humanists and atheists and he is right to make that plea. As Copson says:

The works of Shelley join the novels, poems, songs, sculptures, paintings, architecture and plays of generations of godless artists in exposing the straw man of the desiccated rationalist for what it is, and showcasing a humanist vision of life.

I’d be grateful if Copson would return the courtesy and stop caricaturing the God that I believe in and the testimony of others to that God in order to dismiss my faith as irrational.

Beer glass Jesus

Confirmation, if confirmation were needed, that the Lord is blessing Beer and Bible, a Chelmsford Diocese initiative to promote the public reading of scripture. During a reading of the Good Book in an Essex pub, drinkers noticed an extraordinary phenomenon as the face of Jesus appeared in the froth of a beer glass. Encouraged by the manifestation, punters drank more and more pints in an attempt to replicate the experience. The landlord of The Punchdrunk Monk described the occasion in the hostelry as ‘spirit filled’ and others claimed that this was affirmation of the local church’s venture into Liquid Church. There is some debate as to which beer produced the froth, some are arguing for Abbot Ale while others maintain it was Bishop’s Finger, however, all are agreed that it wasn’t lager. The passage of scripture being read at the time of the appearance is believed to have been Revelation 22:17. It all adds new meaning to the song ‘As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord’.

There is a great report about Beer and Bible recently published in an Essex newspaper and further information about the initiative can be found here.