Mind Space

Mathematical Ignorance (ii)

Andrew asked a pertinent question in response to my previous post,  and has helped me realise that I was trying to say two different things. I started writing a comment, but thought this deserved to be a further post.
Andrew's question is as follows;

...just what *is* the desirable level of mathematical understanding for someone, like me, who likes to know a bit about the world, but has always focused on the humanities?

The first point I was trying to make is about scientific education. Science at degree level is a set of subjects in decline. Despite the massive increase in university student numbers over the last few years, 'hard' scientific subjects are out of favour, and softer subjects like media studies (which I'm not taking an easy pop at, since I think it's a worthwhile and academic discipline) are in the ascedant. In the past Britain has been among the world leaders in science and technology, but now we are dropping behind fast. The science education of countries like China would seem to be far in advance of ours, if the problem on the Royal Society of Chemistry site is anything to go by. We are dropping behind as a centre of technological innovation, and unless we do something about it fast, we are unlikely to remain a player. The RSC  argue that this is, in part, an unintended consequence of the school league table system.

But in part it's due to a cultural move, and that's my second point. I think ignorance about science is becoming more culturally acceptable. Sure, us mathematicians have always been thought of as a slightly strange breed (even before the widespread use of the term 'geek'), but I think ignorance of science is becoming deeper and more accepted. This is mostly my own opinion, but I would cite some of the daft pronouncements made about scientific subjects such as climate change as evidence that most people are increasingly unable to evaluate scientific arguments. Spin is replacing argument in the public reporting of science. We can't all be scientists, but most of us need the ability to lift the lid on a scientific argument to decide whether it has any obvious flaws. We need experts to offer advice, but experts cannot absolve us from our responsibility for following their pronouncements uncritically.

So to answer (at last) Andrew's question about the desirable level of science education, there isn't a right answer for everyone. There will always be people who are good at science, and those whose skills lie elsewhere. My concern is that we are creating a cultural environment that doesn't encourage people either to pursue a career in science, or to develop a working but non-specialist knowledge of the subject. I wonder if future generations will struggle with the question on the BBC site, let alone the Chinese problem.

Mathematical ignorance

England's future prosperity is being threatened by our obsession with school league tables, says the Royal Society of Chemistry, and I'm sure they are right. The number of students taking 'hard' subjects like chemistry, physics and especially maths has declined significantly in recent years. The society argues that one of the reasons for this is that students taking these subjects are a threat to a school's place in the league tables. This is a plausible hypothesis, and they are calling for a study into the issue, and inspirational research that will turn the problem around.

Bemoaning the poor standard of mathematical and scientific understanding in this country is like taking sweets from a baby; too easy to be worth the effort. I was talking with some friends last week  who were proud of the fact that they were ignorant about science. Few of us admit that we don't know the first thing about the plays of Shakespeare or the paintings of Turner; even if it's true we tend to draw a veil of silence over the subject. Whereas scienctific ignorance is a badge of honour for the middle classes.

To highlight the gulf between Britain and China in mathematical expertise, the Royal Society has placed on their website a sample Chinese university entrance test, and the BBC news site has compared this with a British first-year diagnostic test. The former is very difficult, the latter trivial to anyone who can remember two facts from school geometry. If we want to maintain a future in science and engineering, we'd better do something about it now, before we turn into a nation of advertising executives and web programmers. What happened to our victorian spirit of industry and innovation?

Technorati tags: maths, mathematics, chemistry, science, ignorance, league tables, england, school, education, woeful mess

Creationism Disneyworld

America is about to gain a new tourist attraction;  'Embark on the adventure of a lifetime where the past comes alive and ancient mysteries are solved' runs the marketing blurb. It all sounds rather Indiana Jones, but in fact it's a theme park dedicated to seven-day creationism. The park features include;

•  a 'stargazers room' where spectators are invited to view evidence that "the latest images of the stars confirm an all powerful creator, not a random bang",
• Adam and Eve living in paradise alongside a big friendly animatronic T. Rex,
• A chance to experience what life was really like on the ark,
• a 'Bible Authority Room' where you can discover that "the Bible is true. No doubt about it!' I bet God's relieved.

The group behind this nonsense (lest you have any doubt of my opinion) is 'Answers in Genesis', a fundamentalist group dedicated to affirming the literal truth of every word of the Bible. I had the dubious privilege of discovering their magazine when, after a lecture I gave on evolution and Christianity a few years ago, someone felt that my soul needed saving, and signed me up for a year's free subscription. I was about to cancel it when I concluded that if they wanted to waste their resources on sending me their magazine, the least I could do was to lovingly compost it for them. Clearly they didn't squander enough of their resources on me, for they've raised the money to build a theme park.

Why do they hold such views, and why do they want a theme park? It seems to me that the issues at stake are truth and authority.

Authority will have to wait for a future article; I'll  just talk about truth here. Creationists view the Bible as a logical proposition that is either all true or all false. In the face of literary criticism and scientific knowledge that they believe erodes the authority and simplicity of the Bible, they have taken an entrenched position that the Bible is very simple, and that it is true in the plainest, most literal way possible. An example of this can be found in the conclusion of an article about sauropods on the Answers in Genesis website;

While some scientists study sauropods and make evolutionary conclusions as to the origin and probable extinction of these majestic creatures, Christians must never compromise the clear teaching found in the history book of the universe, the Bible.

This sentence contains four assumptions that I want to challenge. They are;

1. The Bible is incredibly straightforward, and Christians are under seige from people who want to complicate things for us.
2. God has communicated the full truth about how the universe was created to a pre-literate, pre-scientific people without simplification or generalisation.
3. Those same people were able to transmit this truth faithfully, even if they did not undersatnd it.
4. The questions we bring to the ancient Biblical texts are the same as the questions the ancient authors had in mind when they wrote or recorded it.

To our modern understanding, historical enquiry is about recording chains of events and understanding the causal factors that link them. We must ask if the original authors of the Old Testament intended to write history as we now understand it, or if they had a different intention.

Some parts of the Old testament are clearly recognisable to us as history. Most obvious are the accounts of the kings of Israel and Judah in the books of Samuel and Kings, but even there, the formulaic structure of the narrative suggests that these accounts are not intended as a dispassionate recording of facts but rather of the presentation of a theological interpretation of events. When we turn to the first 11 chapters of Genesis, it is rather harder to identify the texts as historical writing in the modern sense. There is little concern for accurate dating, and the motivation of the actors is sublimated to the theological interests of the narrator.

Creationists deal with these issues by saying that either the text is truthful as a modern historical account, or it is false. The latter possibility is hardly an option, and so the text is read as if it were modern history. This is a fallacy of restricting the options. It discounts the possibility that the text doesn't fit neatly into a modern literary category, but is a product of its time. Rowan Williams calls this a category mistake.

Treating a biblical text as if it were a modern literary form such as history writing is like putting a jigsaw piece into hole in the puzzle where it doesn't belong. You may force it into place, but you'll damage it in doing so, and it won't help you to understand the complete picture. Worse still, forcing it into the wrong place makes it much harder to see where it properly belongs. Similarly, forcing an ancient text into a modern category of writing in which it doesn't belong restricts the ways we can understand it, quite possibly leading us to an interpretation that was quite alien to the original author.

What happens if we liberate Genesis 1 from the category of modern history writing? There are signs in the text that suggest it might be read as a story told to illustrate a set of theological truths rather than historical facts. So here's what I read these truths to be;

God, and God alone, created the world, and created it to be good. He made it out of nothing, thus refuting the Babylonian creation myth in which the good creator god made the earth out of contaminated matter that was made by another god. He made lights in the night sky (which the narrative doesn't even dignify with the usual Hebrew names for moon and stars), thus refuting a Caananite creation myth in which they are gods in their own right.

Admitting the option that Genesis 1 is not history as we know it, but a story told to convey theological truths allows the possibility that scientific theories of the big bang and evolution are true, and they do not compromise the truthfulness of the Bible. It allows us to put aside the contorted linguistic and logical manoevers that creationists go through in order to make something approiaching a self-consistent creation narrative that has some vague grounding in modern science.

It also places an extra burden on readers of the Bible. Every text has to be read with one eye on what it meant to the original hearers, and the other on how we might understand it today. This burden is to recognise that the truth of the Bible is more complex and subtle than that offered by fundamentalists. They sometimes claim that this is a slippery slope that leads to the rejection of the truth of the Bible. It doesn't. It treats the Bible with deep respect, and opens it as a rich source of wisdom and truth for the complexities of life.

 

Technorati tags: creationism, theme park, museum, truth, authority, Genesis, creation, hermeneutics, text, Bible

Mere messengers?

I've just got around to listening to a few selected science stories from last Thursday's Today Programme on Radio 4, broadcast from the Royal Society in London. (The programme was broadcast on Thursday 30th November; it hasn't got a  permanent listen again page, but you can find a link to the page here.)

As well as an interview with Stephen Hawking and a piece about science ethics, the programme included a discussion on the trustworthiness of scientific claims. In his introduction, John Humphries set the parameters of the discussion as being about the trustworthiness of the claims of scientists and the possible manipulation of those claims by politicians, who serve their own ends. Baroness Susan Greenfieldstepped into the fray by bringing journalists  into the frame.

"We're mere messengers" spluttered Humphries, but Greenfield was not dissuaded. She summarised the situation as this; the agenda of scientists is to get funding for their research, that of politicians is to stay in power, and the agenda of journalists is to maximise their audiences. These agendas are not necessarily congruent, but we need to find a way forward so that these three groups can serve their agendas, but above all the public good.

Two observations;

1. It's refreshing to see a scientist recognising that the scientific enterprise isn't motivated just by the unbiased pursuit of objective truth, but has its own agendas and axes to grind. Sociological studies of science have long recognised this, but scientists have been slower to catch on.
2. It was amusing to hear the hermeneutic of suspicion John Humphries applies to his interviewees being so notably absent in his consideration of his own profession. We don't have an agenda. We just tell it like it is! The man doth protest too much.

Skating over the top of the world

On Tuesday evening I went to the third and final event in the St. Paul's Institute event series Costing the earth? the quest for sustainability. In it Tim Smit, founder of the Eden Project said this (taken from the transcript, which can be downloaded here );

...we're being peddled a world of rapid consumption, and told that the world is incredibly fast today. And I've done a test on this on my staff. I take them to the pub and I slam my fist on the table. I spill their beer and I say close your eyes. Tell me the colour of your beer. Tell me where the bubbles rise. Is it in the middle or along the side? What's the person next to you wearing? Hardly anybody except those who
are mostly silent can tell you the answer. The world's no faster than it ever was. It's just that we skate really fast over the top.

This hit me between the eyes. I don't look, listen and enjoy each moment nearly enough. Perhaps my resolution for next year should be to stop skating.

The theme that Smit and others on the panel were bringing out was that our rapacious appetite for speed is doing terrible damage to the planet. Another panellist, Satish Kumar, suggested that we need to divert our lust for economic and technological into a lust for growth in art, spirituality, poetry and ethics, and rediscover  poverty as a virtue in the monastic tradition, the voluntary acceptance of limit. When he first said all this it sounded naive, but on reflection, Kumar and Smit were saying something profound, that in order to save the planet, we must change our idea of what constitutes the good life. It's relationships and time that are important, not wealth and speed.

The Bishop of London advanced the idea that we should rediscover Sunday as a day for not working, shopping or traveling. If we could stop burning carbon on Sundays, it would cut carbon emissions by a seventh. A great idea, but for most people, friends and family are too geographically distant.

Ghost Town; Chernobyl 20 years on

So it's 20 years since reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. Like most people at the time, I thought that Russia was a world away, and failed to grasp the enormity of what had happened, perhaps because the USSR worked hard to keep the disaster a secret for as long as possible. The magnitude and environmental impact of the explosion only really hit home in the early 1990's, when I worked for the UK Atomic Energy Authority alongside colleagues who were making regular visits to Chernobyl to advise on the clear up.

Two or three years ago I discovered the web journal of  Elena Filatova (link below). Elena is a writer, historian, biker, and Kiev resident. Her journal includes writings and photographs from a bike ride around Chernobyl. It's a terrific read, and, since she's given permission for it to be reproduced freely, I'll quote an extract;

Dad is nuclear physicist, and he has educated me about many things. He is much more worried about the speed my bike travels than about the direction I point it.

My trips to Chernobyl are not like a walk in the park, but the risk can be managed. Sometimes I go for rides alone, sometimes with pillion passenger, but never in company with any other vehicle, because I do not want anyone to raise dust in front of me.

I was a schoolgirl back in 1986 and as soon as radiation level began to rise in Kiev, dad put all of us on the train to grandma's house. Granny lives 800 kms from here and dad wasn't sure if it was far enough away to keep us out of reach of the big bad wolf of a nuclear meltdown.

The Communist government that was in power then kept silent about this accident. In Kiev, they forced people to take part in their preciously stupid labor day parade and it was then that ordinary people began hearing the news of the accident from foreign radio stations and relatives of those who died. The real panic began 7-10 days after accident. Those who were exposed to the exceedingly high levels of nuclear radiation in the first 10 days when it was still a state secret, including unsuspecting visitors to the area, either died or have serious health problems.

Link: Ghost Town

Three Cheers for the Archbishop of Canterbury!

Yesterday's Guardian featured a lengthy article with Rowan Williams. When asked whether creationism should be taught in schools, he said,

I don't think it should, actually. No, no. And that's different from saying - different from discussing, teaching about what creation means. For that matter, it's not even the same as saying that Darwinism is - is the only thing that ought to be taught. My worry is creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it.

He explained that creationism is a 'category mistake'. Darwinian evolution and creationism are portrayed as alternative theories, as if either evolutionary theory is true or God created the universe. We don't need to take Genesis 1 literally to hold on to the idea that God creates and upholds the universe ('provides the potentiality of change' in Dr Williams' language) through uncertain means. This gives scope for Darwinian evolution as the means by which God creates.

Good on Rowan for speaking out so clearly on the issue!

He also had interesting things to say about clergy and moral leadership, homosexuality, and the danmger that he could become the 'comic vicar' to the nation. An interesting and thoughtful interview.

Link: Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Interview: Rowan Williams.

The god I don’t believe in

As I threatened in a previous post, I have written an article for the Church magazine on the new series by Richard Dawkins. Here's the article;

Atheism is getting a good airing this month. Evolutionary Biologist Richard Dawkins’ new series,
Root of all evil? has been showing on Channel 4, and on Radio 4, historian David Starkey has a series called Who killed Christianity? Both men pose some important questions for thinking Christians, and I’d like to use this letter to look at some of the things they have to say.

Starkey first. He’s an entertaining and erudite presenter, whose central theme is that Christ’s followers down the ages have altered Jesus’ message to the extent that Christianity and the church as we know them today would hardly be recognisable to our founder. The first two programmes looked at Paul, who took the gospel to the gentiles, and Emperor Constantine, who made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. Amidst lively debate with Christians and academics, Starkey describes how the message was changed and damaged by these people. Now Starkey knows that good radio requires controversy, and that at times he is playing devil’s advocate for the sake of entertainment and education. Yet it seems to me that change, far from killing Christianity off, has been vital to its relevance and vitality in new situations. Jesus never gave his followers a manual for how to organise the church, nor a fully-worked out code of ethics for handling imperial roman power, let alone the world of the internet. Jesus trusted that his followers would use their creative ingenuity, guided by his own teachings, the indwelling Spirit, and the traditions of the faith, to ensure that the timeless Good News of the Kingdom would be proclaimed afresh in every age. It will be very interesting to see if Starkey recognises this in future programmes.

Richard Dawkins is a remarkable scientist and communicator of science. His writing conveys a sense of awe and beauty at the world, and at the explanative power of science. I was sad, but not surprised, that his new series is a vicious attack on faith. He visits Lourdes, and comments that the pilgrims in torchlight procession are on the slippery slope that leads to bombs in rucksacks. Interviewing a pilgrim, his style is kindly, but ridiculing as the woman explains that her pilgrimage has deepened her faith.

Though scenes such as this show Dawkins in a poor light, he says much that I agree with. He points up the poor grasp of science of an American preacher, and is treated very nastily in return. Visiting a fundamentalist convert to Islam in Jerusalem, Dawkins is told that atheists can have no morality, that 9/11 is a legitimate response to Israeli incursions against Arab territory, that Islam will one day take over the world, and that we should prepare for it by ‘fixing’ the way ‘our’ women dress. Dawkins’ interviewees present appalling views, and Dawkins wants us to be appalled. The vast majority of Moslems are moderate, prayerful, and deeply opposed to violence. Of course, Dawkins didn’t interview one of the majority, because that wouldn’t suit his argument. He fails to recognise that poverty, injustice and oppression provide the conditions in which religion becomes a vehicle for protest. His argument is akin to asking us to reject all science because some science was used in the service of Nazi eugenics, or the construction of the atom bomb.

All areas of human life can be used for evil as well as good. Dawkins rightly condemns faith that is violent, bigoted, or closed to alternative views. But babies and bathwater spring to mind. The god he rails against isn’t the God I believe in.

Whilst Starkey presents an informative, thoughtful debate, the vitriolic plausibility of Dawkins will probably sway many viewers who have never thought about the issues before. Atheists deserve the same respect and attentiveness that we afford to people of any faith. But when they engage in arguments such as these, we need to respond.

So watch the programmes if you get the chance! Talk to your friends about them, and don’t let Dawkins’ views be accepted uncritically. Instead, let’s remind ourselves, and others, that God leads us to seek peace, reject violence, and listen attentively to people of other faiths, to science, and to the Bible.

Root of all Evil?

I've just watched the first part of Richard Dawkins' new series for Channel 4, 'Root of all Evil?'. In it, Dawkins argues that faith has no place in a reasonable, rational world. I disagree, as you would expect of an Anglican priest, but I welcome the chance to think about and debate the issue. Sadly, Dawkins brooks no debate, and offers no careful consideration. He shows images of pilgrims at Lourdes, and suggests thay are a small step away from carrying bombs in rucksack. He talks kindly to one of the pilgrims, who describes how the experience has deepened her faith in God and offered her hope. He's kind, but his expression and tone invite the viewer to pity this poor simpleton, rather than engage with what she is saying.

After an unpleasant brush with an American fundamentalist preacher, he goes to see a 'free thinking group', who offer a critique of American fundamentalist christianity that I agree with, but he uses their comments to mount an attack on all religion. He doesn't recognise that the faith of many people is open to rational enquiry, skepticism and testing. Nor does he recognise the factors of injustice, poverty and opression that turn a person of faith into a violent fundamentalist. The faith he lampoons is an Aunt Sally that he dresses up as representative of all faith

Dawkins is a brilliant evolutionary biologist, whose popular science works convey a sense of awe and wonder at the world we live in. His explanations are clear and lucid, and he renders complex subjects intelligible to lay people, without diminishing their complexity. But he singularly fails to direct his rational faculties in the direction of religion, preferring instead to indulge in emotive language and blind polemic in support of his own belief system, for that is what it is.

I've no doubt that atheists will love his series, and a fair number of uninformed or unsure people will be swayed by it. But thoughtful people, whether scientists or religious, will see his polemic for what it is. I was hoping to listen to some thoughtful, respectful debate from a learned atheist, but I don't think Dawkins is willing to extend the same courtesies to others.

Root of All Evil? is showing in two parts on Channel 4, starting on Monday 9th January at 8pm. Later this month I will write an article on it for my church magazine, which I'll also post here.