A/theism: -isms are not the point

I like this because it's good to find an atheist who recognises that behind some of the crassness of the New Atheism there lie some methodological problems. But before looking at that, there's a look at what is faith is about, quoting Giles Fraser:

 “Theology is faith seeking understanding. Understanding is not the basis on which one has faith but it is what one does to try to understand the faith one has.”

I think that's pretty much where I'm at. I was introduced to the Latin tag fides quaerens intellectum when I was studying postgraduate theology under Dick McKinney in Nottingham. It's worth listening to Giles' bit on the podcast, because it helps to grasp what that might mean in a human life. It's an important starting place in the sense that it enables us to notice something that is fundamental, it seems, to human being; we all believe stuff and much of our beliefs are not directly empirically-based but there is a much more complex arrangement of assumptions, tested hypotheses, assessments of plausibility and implausibility, trust in coherences and lines of deduction and socially-recognised investment in the positions held. The problem is that too many New Atheists are too naive about this complex, deluded by thinking that the part of their world view that they think is empirically based is the whole or at least the most significant AND they do not notice how their own thinking has many beliefs entwined in it that are not empirically based (whatever that means -and not noticing that it is a problem is part of their issue).

Anyway, Dominic Lukes notes that in practice those who are becoming scientists operate rather similarly to religious believers:

... Graduate students are told to question everything but they soon learn that this questioning is only good as long as it doesn’t disrupt the research paradigm. Their careers and livelihoods depend on not questioning much of anything. In practice, this is not very different from the personal reading of the Bible

That at least recognises something of the complexity I mentioned above.
There is some useful noting of the way that stories function also for atheists and a note that, in effect,

John Gray can provide a useful perspective: “The ‘essence’ is an apologetic invention that someone comes up with later to try and preserve the core of an idea [like Christianity or Marxism] from criticism.”

What this is implying strongly, of course, is the epistemological, observation that for anyone to 'know' something, they first have to 'believe' something; everything we know is faith-based in the end.
Gray's bit of the conversation referred to, points out that the history of atheism is quite messy and convoluted in respect of relationship to political ideas and projects and even to humanism (which started out as a Christian project).

Who-knows-what-how stories: The scientific and religious knowledge paradox | Metaphor Hacker - Hacking Metaphors, Frames and Other Ideas

Israeli MP publically tore out NT

The fuller story is here: Israel MPs sent Bibles as gifts, one official publically tore out the New Testament. Apparently the Bible Society sent Hebrew Bibles with NT to all the members of the Israeli Knesset (that's the parliament, in case the word's new to you). One of the MK's, Ben-Ari, reportedly tore out the NT section and spoke about it in a way that even had the Anti-Defamation League backing away.

While Bible Society officials reportedly said they did not distribute the Bibles as a way to evangelize, Ben-Ari and other Knesset Members think they did.
"This horrible book caused the murder of millions of Jews in the Inquisition and the auto-da-fe's," said Ben-Ari, according to INN. He also said sending the book was "ugly, provocative missionizing," and while most of his government colleagues agree, they don't like the way he expressed his disapproval.

To be honest, I feel that he's way over-stated it and is arguably guilty of what in many parts of the world might be regarded as a hate crime. Fortunately he's dealing with Christians who -ironically because of the teachings of the book he maligned- are mostly likely to do some version of turning the other cheek. I'm not sure that some other faith communities would be quite so tolerant of their scriptures being treated in this way and spoken of thus. And even if Christians don't 'turn the other cheek', then they would be failing to live by the teaching of the NT. Teaching which, recall, includes 'Love your neighbour as yourself' and 'love is patient ... kind ... is not arrogant ... rude ... does not rejoice over wrong ...' and 'do not return evil for evil' etc. I find it perverse that the NT should be written off so glibly and referred to as 'horrible' (that's not to say it doesn't contain disturbing imagery and some passages that are difficult and needing glossing by reference to more mainstream themes and threads).

Doubly ironic is that the book concerned is a book about a Rabbi much of it by another rabbi, written by Jews for Jews, mostly.

I do take the point that the book concerned, does lie somewhere in the genealogy of the Inquisition and pogroms. However, we should recall that in order for those things to have happened, some quite vital pieces of its message were forgotten or ignored or casuistically circumvented for extrinsic political or inter-communal purposes. The reaction of Ben-Ari, in a further irony, is an additional reason why he should actually read it: it would provide him with a critique of sub-Christian behaviour and enable him to hold Christians accountable to their best lights.

But there is another issue lurking here: even if the Bible Society did have an evangelistic hope for their action, is that so terrible? Surely, provided people have a choice, can say 'no' and are not being harassed or bullied or pressured by extrinsic inducements why can Christians or any other group, not give up time, money and/or effort to encourage understanding and perhaps a change of heart and mind? I really cannot see, in principle, why that is wrong. I can understand that there may be sensitivities involved, but that is hardly the same thing.

University as corporation

In my university, Northumbria, the VC (who also bears, significantly, the title Chief Executive) has just completed a round of staff briefings to present 'Vision 2025'. I was intrigued to not that he and the governors have clearly been considering things in the kind of way that this article
Focusing a Corporate Lens on Global Universities - Planet Academe - The Chronicle of Higher Education envisages:

when universities overcome their natural resistance to comparing themselves to multinational corporations, they can think in new and useful ways. And learning to think differently is, after all, what universities are all about.

In particular these things from the article resonate:

Universities need to make it someone’s job to manage international partnerships, to sustain relationships, to make sure the institution and its partners are getting what they want from relationships

I think that 'we' can tick that box: over the last couple of years or so there have been appointments in this area in its various dimensions. Or at least so it seems to me.
And how about this? 

Universities, like companies, may need to make the transformation from being a national brand to being a global one.

This was, essentially, one of the big themes in the VC's briefing. Except that, perhaps, the leap is even bigger: from a regional to a global 'brand'. The demographics are a clear indicator of what needs to happen: today's 1-5 year olds will only number about 3.5 million in 2025, which is not a lot to share between 140 or so institutions as they exist today in GB. But look at the comparable figures for China, India, Indonesia and you'll see which are the big markets to reach for. Go figure...
And I think I discern the basis in the way that I hear university managers talking for this being taken seriously, especially as the university already has very good employability ratings and a big focus on professional education.

An organization, whether it is a company or a university, can identify two arrows. One is what people are looking for in jobs, and the other is what the institution has to offer. An organization that can find the intersection of those arrows can build powerful, long-term success.

And I suspect that the recent de-merging of Careers from Student Support and Wellbeing in the University -and it seems to be a very good careers service- may be about freeing them up to help in this process, but I may be over-interpretnig. If so, then it certainly won't harm the Uni to be doing this in the light of this remark.


Of course, the wider issue is how far we 'like' the idea of university as corporation, but it does seem that survival and thriving have a financial dimension and this does indicate that attention to matters that enable thriving in financial terms. The problems with the model are not at that level, but whether the mentality associated with the business model is compatible with or noxious to the main 'missions' of a university. I think that this is analogous to individual human beings experiencing some tension between various aims in life. We sometimes express this in phrases such as 'Am I eating to live or living to eat?" or 'Are we working to live or living to work?'. For a university, I suspect,  this may be something like 'Are we making money to learn and teach or are we teaching and learning to make money?' And, as with human individuals, it is easy to slip from the healthy  '-ing to live' to the soul-destroying 'living to -', so it may be be universities, I would suggest.


With human individuals we know or suspect that they/we have veered into the unhealthy relationship with work or money when relationships are damaged, physical health is compromised and mood falls into depression and irritability which may also show up in poor decision-making.


I would suggest that similarly with universities. Relationships with partners, employees, government and the environment are damaged (and this may involve fraudulent and abusive patterns of behaviour); organisational dysfunction becomes prevalent; employee satisfaction falls and morale plummets. Now those things need to be read off in terms of people being part of the enterprise of HE because they believe in something of the 'mission' of a university (and, theologically, I'd say that has something to do with the providential purposes 'under God' which is strongly related, I would suggest, to the vocation of an HEI) and that would have a relation to the issue of morale.


Hmmm. It'd be great if there were comments on what other uni's are doing, but I' don't know how many of my readers are likely to be in a position to do so...

Shaping, Being Shaped and Hypertextual argumentation

I've been considering that something I'm working on writing might be best produced in its primary form as an e-book with hypertextual intertextuality quite prominent. This is because it is attempting to bring together two or three normally separate disciplines and the nature of the argumentation is such that one could usefully start in several places and give more or less attention to certain parts according to what one already knows or where the primary interest might lie for any particular reader.

I happened upon something that seems to give a sense of this way of writing here: CMC Magazine: Shaping and Being Shaped. It starts with an introductiory statement with hypertext follow-throughs -the links aren't reproduced below but if you go to the link in the last sentence you'll see that this co-ordinating paragraph branches out to further resources:

Modern social scientists have widely critiqued technological determinism and have come to occupy four primary stances with respect to it. In this article, I examine the tone of technological determinism and the corresponding attitudes towards technology these stances imply.
I use a framework which is broadly applicable to both the macrosocial and microsocial levels. The selectivity of media shifts the purposes that a user originally had in using it. This transformation gives rise to resonances which can best be understood from a perspective which acknowledges interacting frames.

Art sculpts science ... and faith?

I find myself recently both helping to set up a Christians in Science group and to facilitate Christians working in the Arts who are in the University. I find myself, not unnaturally, considering matters that relate the two areas of endeavour. So, this article grabs interest, Can art shape scientific thought? : RSA blogs, in it the author says something intriguing:

What really fascinates me, though, is the idea that collaboration between artists and scientists might move to the level where it actually affects working practice. Scientific breakthroughs radically overhauling art are everywhere (the effect of photographic film on painting is a good example), but this relationship is largely seen as a one-way street. Imagine, instead, a scientific breakthrough that happened because of art.

And it seems to me that the science-to-art traffic has been at a more subtle level latterly: the discovery and popularisation of fractals  and chaos and complexity seemed to inspire art  which reflected those discoveries; organic, random and unpredictable forms became prominent.

But it's right that it'd be great if things could go the other way. However, I think that there is already a way in which the art-to-science dynamic occurs: it's a bit conceptual, but it is aesthetic. I'm talking about the elegance of the mathematics of sub-atomic particles which has inspired the discovery of particles that had been unknown but predicted by the symmetry of the equations. It seems to me that this aesthetic sense has been something of an art-to-science thing.

The author mentions the issue of religion, though somewhat unsatisfactorily. I have written and spoken  elsewhere of how it seems to me that Adam naming the animals helps me, at least, to see a certain commonality between the enterprises of art and science. Both involve 'naming' in the broader sense of conceptualising in order to give expression. In one case for purposes of technical understanding and application, in the other case for purposes of affective understanding and aesthetic appreciation. Both involve perceiving similarities and differences and representing them; in one case in theories and formulae and in the other through aesthetic media (for want of a better term).


The article mentions Kuhn's insight about paradigm shifts, and this is indeed relevant. To put it in terms of 'naming', a paradigm shift involves re-viewing things with a different set of similarities and differences picked out. The trick of an art-to-science influence would be, I suspect, in the presentation of information in such a way as to make plain the metaphoric bases of the thinking and to enable meta-thinking, or at least for new connections and re-constellations of data. For that, we need artists who can grasp something of the science and scientists who are able to mentor the artists so inclined.


I wonder whether this is the way being opened up by Information is Beautiful?

Linguistic prejudice in editing copy for publication

This is fascinating. Okay some of it is about housestyle and some of it is about readability, but some of it is sheer linguistic prejudice where recognition of a certain diversity in dialect or register should be given. Check out The Most Common Edits and note that while there are three or four fair-enough comments, there are also two or three well-dodgy ones.

In fact it's faintly amusing that the way this one is introduced actually needed editing by me and I'm still not sure it makes sense (phrase containing word 'petard' comes to mind).

the writer putsneither or not only before a verb, and then fails to supply a verb for the matching nor orbut also: “The investigation could neither account for the missing cupcakes nor for the fact that there was a secret door in the back of the manager’s office.” Some readers can skim right past a sentence like that; others will shudder

In fact, not only do I skim past it, I can't even see what the issue is. I think I'm a pretty good user of English, I therefore think that this level of pernickety-ness is OTT: the shudderers should get a life and learn that a vast swathe of English-speakers, natives at that, don't speak/write their variety and don't see why they should have to learn to. Give a little, guys.

Then there is this little gem:

pronouns sometimes fail to match the referent and its verb, especially when a collective noun is involved: “The restaurant continues to advertise their cupcakes.”

This is not a failure to match referent and verb: it's a variety of English usage whereby a third person singular following a gender-indefinite antecedent  may use 'their' or 'they'. It's perfectly respectable: Shakespeare and Jane Austen did it, it was only Victorian grammar Nazis who disallowed it on spurious pseudo-logical grounds.

People who edit: it's about time you recognised that you are ill served by some of this grammer Nazi prejudice: lighten up.
People who suck their teeth when someone uses, for example, 'their' for an indefinite though singular antecedant (sic): other people have to learn to recognise and put up with your English usage when it differs from theirs: do the decent thing and reciprocate.
People who write: by all means learn to shorten sentences, keep phrasing closer together and recognise that punctuation is to help your readers compensate for the lack of intonation and body language. But you are entitled to your own variety of English and to challenge the prejudices of those who claim they don't like any variety but their own. They need to loosen up; why should putting up with different varieties be a one way traffic in their favour.

Future church

I've blogged myself about what may need to happen with the dear old CofE as the next few decades unfold. Probably best to look at this one or this one, if you're interested in checking it out. So I had a sense of fellow feeling with Doug's post here; especially when I read this:

 There are now so few stipendiary clergy that it might be time to ask

• whether we should plan for non-stipendiary ministry being the normal exercise of a priestly vocation and see stipendiary ministry as more strategic, focused on big churches (e.g. minsters, church-planting and mission centres and cathedrals) as area deans, as some specialist ministries and so on

• whether that means seeing stipendiary and non-stipendiary ministries alike as something people can move in and out of (often from one to the other), and change the stipend to a salary which allows either the purchase of housing, or (as appropriate) the paying of rent for church owned property.

I'm also minded that some of this is not so dissimilar to the thrust of the Tiller report back in the early 1980's ... We know what we should do, we just haven't got the courage to do it until we're forced to. At best it's a triumph of hope (wishful thinking, more like) over sense.
Five conversations for a declining church � iconotype: