I’m glad Christmas is over. This year seems to have been particularly awful in its encouragement of theological drivel, perhaps because the forces of churchy darkness are feeling increasingly desperate and irrelevant…so they marshal their paladins to go forth and wallop us with nonsense, in the hopes that we’ll become stupid enough to believe them. Unfortunately for them, the best they can do for paladins is that drone with all the expressivity of a dead mackerel, Alister McGrath, and the jolly old elf with dementia, John Lennox. I’m going to address their last-minute eructations of Christmas apologetics, but be warned — they’ll be back next year, like the hauntings of ghosts of Christmases Imaginary.
Let’s start with Lennox — he’s battier so he’s most entertaining. He’s written what is supposedly a review of Dawkins’ Magic of Reality, although the connection to the book is about as solid as Lennox’s mooring to reality, and he affects a clownish fantasist style, which I think is how he imagines Dawkins wrote, but only reveals that he hasn’t actually read the book.
Christmas is real magic – not the magic of wizards, wands and wishes, not the stage-magic of illusion, but the poetic magic that derives from supernatural reality. What could be more awe-inspiring and worthy of celebration than that unique turning point in history when supernature invaded nature, the creator entered his creation, the Word became flesh, God became man? What story could be more suitable to tell to every generation of children? Magic because it’s true.
Oh. It’s true? How do you know? Right away we see a major difference between Dawkins and Lennox: when Dawkins tells you something, he goes on to explain the evidence and how we know it’s true. When Lennox says something, all that evidential frippery is unnecessary — just believe. Or rather, believe because it is awesome.
Using that logic, though, leads to other conclusions about which Lennox might be less sanguine. For example, Zeus had sex with Metis, the goddess of wisdom, and she conceived. Afraid that her child would be greater than he was, he ate her, but to no avail: later, the goddess Athena erupted out of his forehead “and pealed to the broad sky her clarion cry of war”.
Now that is awe-inspiring. And unique. And worthy of celebration. So when’s Athena’s holy day? For that matter, swarms of gods and goddesses are unique and have imaginative origins. It’s just that pretty poetry and grand fables don’t make the stories true.
Lennox then proceeds to drive his allegorical conceit about magic right into the ground. Seriously, John, read Dawkins’ book — he takes his audience seriously and does not play the game you think he does.
But now a mighty wizard has arisen who wishes by his own magic (what he calls The Magic of Reality) to rob the world of Christmas. Standing on Mount Improbable, he waves his wand at the sun, at earth and living things. He summons lofty words to describe all these in wondrous detail so that all are caught in his spell and sense not the sleight of hand when he then tells them that this is all there is – no transcendence, no supernature, no Creator, no God.
The spell is strong, for nature is wonderful indeed and many of the wizard’s words are true. And yet the mighty wand of science that he waves did not create the sun, the earth and living things. That wand of science was forged long before the wizard’s day by those who believed that the universe was worthy of attention because God had created it. The wizard tells us of the greatness of Newton, but not about the God of Newton. He dares not disclose that his chosen weapon is borrowed from his enemy.
I don’t recall that Dawkins even mentions Christmas in The Magic of Reality, let alone is playing the grinchy game of trying to “rob the world of Christmas”. No one claims that science created the universe — science is a tool we humans use to overcome the failings of our minds to see and understand the world with greater clarity.
And no, this nonsense that religion is responsible for creating science is a damnable lie. In a culture saturated with religion, where everyone was a believer by tradition and lifelong indoctrination, where apostasy was punishable by death, some people came to the realization that the best way to understand the world was to study the world, rather than the sacred texts. Science was born out of an awareness of the inadequacy of faith; that some people early on thought it would be a way to glorify a god by studying his works is an artifact of cultural bias, not a consequence of science. What has happened in the centuries since is that an honest appraisal of the nature of reality has led to the understanding that the early fumblings at comprehension were wrong in many ways, and that one of the ways in which they were most wrong was the god assumption. There is no sign of it anywhere.
After torturing the history of science, Lennox moves on to butchering the philosophy of science even further. He has a weirdly tangled argument in which the scientists’ understanding of nature as a consequence of natural laws is not incompatible with his belief in miracles — they wouldn’t be special miracles, after all, if there wasn’t a pedestrian reality to contrast with them. And here come the analogies:
Miracles violate the laws of nature and so they cannot occur– his wand forbids it. This, too, is false. For these laws, what are they? Our descriptions of what normally happens. Indeed, from the theistic perspective, the laws of nature predict what is bound to happen if God does not intervene; though, of course, it is no act of theft, if the Creator intervenes in his own creation. To argue that the laws of nature make it impossible for us to believe in the existence of God, and the possibility of his intervention in the universe, is plainly fallacious. It would be like claiming that an understanding of the laws of internal combustion makes it impossible to believe that the designer of a car could or would intervene and remove the cylinder head. Of course he could intervene. Moreover, this intervention would not destroy those laws. The very same laws that explained why the engine worked with the cylinder head on, would now explain why it does not work with the head removed.
Uh, right. When was the last time you heard a scientist claim that auto mechanics violate the laws of physics? Or that opening up the cylinder in an engine leads to a suspension of thermodynamics? We’re not the ones making silly arguments that require violations of these laws: theologians are the people looking at the internal combustion engine and suggesting that there must be little angels inside, pushing on the pistons. We don’t argue that the laws of nature make it impossible to believe in gods. We argue that there is no evidence of the manifestation of any of these gods. Really, if mechanics popped off a cylinder head and spotted a wheezing, soot-covered, exhausted angel taking a nap on the piston head, then we’d have to rethink everything.
We’re not rejecting Lennox’s miracles a priori. We’re saying that a) the natural laws seem to be sufficient to explain many phenomena, and b) there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of these supernatural forces Lennox insists are there.
Also, I must say that anyone who cites C.S. Lewis as evidence of anything is a clown. This paragraph is absurd:
It is, therefore, inaccurate and misleading to say with Hume that miracles ‘violate’ the laws of nature. C. S. Lewis writes: “If God annihilates or creates or deflects a unit of matter, He has created a new situation at that point. Immediately all nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born”.
When you mix the mundane with the miraculous, I’m afraid the miraculous becomes ridiculous. Here is the birth of a god: most of it is human physiology, fetus in an amniotic bag, oxytocin in mom’s circulatory system, cervical dilation, uterine contractions, expulsion through the vaginal canal. Before that, it was developmental biology, regulatory genes ticking through their pathways, cells condensing into bone and muscle, gut and brain, fibers and tissues gradually differentiating. But the most amazing, miraculous event of all was an ineffable invisible being suddenly magically poofing a blob of sticky spooge into a teenage girl’s vagina; the transcendental moment was the manifestation of semen. Behold, world, ME: I am like unto a god, with astonishing godly powers. But then, so is every post-pubescent boy on the planet.
Lennox is a kind of ebullient idiot, babbling cheerfully and with absolute certainty about total nonsense. It makes him entertaining, in a court-jesterish sort of way. I’m afraid no such humor lightens up the equivalent stupidities of Alister McGrath, who has a real talent for writing words that simultaneously clunk and drone. Don’t ask how he does that; perhaps it’s a miracle. He also uses Christmas and Dawkins’ Magic of Reality as a pretext to lecture us, badly, about how science works.
Some atheist scientists ridicule Christians for believing in a God whose existence cannot be proved. Yet science regularly posits the existence of things whose existence cannot be proved to make sense of our observations.
Thus we infer the existence of dark matter from observations that would otherwise be puzzling. We can’t see it, and we can’t prove it’s there. Yet this doesn’t stop most leading astronomers from accepting its existence.
We can’t see it; we can’t touch it; we can’t smell it; and we can’t hear it. Yet many scientists argue that it’s the only meaningful explanation of observed gravitational effects. Where the naive demand proof, the wise realise that this is limited to logic and mathematics.
Some things – though fewer than many realise – can indeed be proved. But we mostly judge theories by how much sense they make of observations. Power to explain is widely regarded as an indicator of truth. Observations don’t prove theories; rather, theories explain observations, and are judged on the quality of those explanations.
As is usual, he gets it wrong. We don’t mock Christians for believing in an unproved god; as McGrath notes, science isn’t about finding proof. We mock Christians for believing in a god with no evidence, and in contradiction to reason and evidence. The analogy with dark matter is interesting: we don’t believe in dark matter because our holy book says so, or because we would really, really like it to be true, but because we have a body of observations — testable, reproducible, empirical, quantified observations — that indicate its existence. There is no comparable collection of data that suggests the necessity of recognizing Jesus’ existence. There are no observations that require the theory of Christian supernaturalism for their explanation.
Also, I have a particular peeve with the morons who babble about seeing, touching, smelling, hearing things as somehow better evidence. It’s a stunt the gang at Answers in Genesis like to pull, too, so McGrath shares something else in common with the rank ignorance of biblical literalists. You can’t see a kinase, a dinosaur, the core of the earth, an ion flitting across a nerve membrane, but those things exist or existed — we have measured them, analyzed them, or manipulated them in ways that are far more convincing of their existence than if some photons were sprayed across my retina. What my eyes can detect is irrelevant, especially since those eyes are limited to such a narrow spectral range and such a feeble range of energies.
To my amusement, McGrath closes his homily on a note that must be illuminated by our previous reading of Lennox.
The Christian vision, enacted and proclaimed in the Christmas story, is that of a God whose tender affection for humanity led him to enter our history as one of us.
Specifically, as jism, spunk, love goo, a pizzle spurt, a squirt from the ol’ tallywhacker, pecker juice, twinkie filling, baby batter, dick dribble. “Tender affection” is such a nice euphemism for “bust a nut”. New bar pickup line: “Hey, baby, I’d like to enter your history.”
And you know, even if we were to believe in his god, by what reasonable moral foundation could we regard the impregnation of a young girl without consent as an expression of “tender affection for humanity”? This is another pathology of religion: when you’re imagining the grand cosmic significance of your mythology, you find it awfully easy to ignore the people affected by it.