My sense of awe and wonder at nature

 On most mornings I go for a walk with my dog, Priya in the parkland near my house. Originally this daily ritual had pragmatic motivations: exercising both me and the dog, clearing my head for the day ahead, and promoting good mental health. Over time this activity has been enriched by my observation and contemplation of the natural world. I see flowers, trees, a creek, birds, and water dragons. Two beautiful rainbow lorikeets emerge from their nest inside the trunk of a gum tree and fly off chirping. A large water dragon looks like a miniature dinosaur as it lumbers out of my path and plunges into the safety of the creek. Priya and I clamber down the banks of the creek and hop over it where it narrows and make our way through a grove of majestic bamboo trees that creak in the wind. I notice how the different trees near the creek produce an impressionist image of a range of shades of green. I am delighted to see how some of these trees have produced beautiful yellow flowers. I catch a glimpse of a kookaburra standing still contemplating its environment before it sleekly flies off in a straight line with a slightly undulating height, so unlike the random flight path of swallows.

And then there is Priya. Sometimes she walks faithfully by my side. Other times she passionately sprints in random directions, just for the sheer pleasure of it. She smells practically everything. She experiences a whole reality that I am oblivious to. These walks can be a source of joy, awe, and wonder. Nature is amazing.

If you did not grow up in Australia, you may think that some of our wildlife is weird, cute, and fascinating: kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, echidnas, wombats, and platypi. Even though they are very familiar to me, seeing a kangaroo hop along is still a delight. Until this year I had never seen a platypus in the wild. When I finally saw one from a viewing platform in a National Park I stood mesmerised as I watched this cute little creature swim and dive, while searching for food on the bottom of the creek. My heart sang. But, why?

While at university I began taking bushwalking trips in wilderness areas with friends. The trips lasted for three to fourteen days, camping and carrying all our supplies.  Within a few hours' drive of Canberra, there is a multitude of national parks, each with distinct landscapes and ecosystems. They range from stone-covered river beds at the bottom of deep canyons to alpine areas covered in fields of wildflowers. Why did I find it so enthralling? I encountered beauty. I had a sense of wonder how there was something here that stood outside the rapidly changing world of the city. Human history and personal achievements really did not matter in the wilderness. Looking over a grand vista there was a sense of our own smallness and insignificance. I had an insatiable desire for more and developed a mentality that bushwalking was my default method of relaxing and the only way I could recover from mental and emotional exhaustion.

What is it about our experiences of nature that are so special and significant? What is the origin of the awe and wonder? What produces feelings of resonance, joy, and delight? There is mystery. 

To me, speaking somewhat scientifically, the sound of a bubbling brook is "white noise" and not that different from the sound produced by a highway full of cars. But, the effect on me of the creek and the highway is very different. Walking beside a bubbling brook is delightful, calming, energising, and peaceful. Walking beside the road is stressful, tiring, and just plain yucky. Why the difference?

The mystery in my encounters with nature hints at something greater than me, something that may complete me, and something that might place my life in a grander story.

There are two things to make sense of here, nature and my response to it. How do we describe and interpret nature? How do we interpret our experience of it? There are a range of perspectives we can bring to bear. On nature, there are the perspectives of biology and ecology, ranging from genetics to how climate change affects individual species. At what scale we look at the phenomena is a matter of what questions we are asking. Our personal response to nature can be viewed through a kaleidoscope of perspectives: biological, psychological, sociological, experiential, aesthetic, and religious. The representation and communication of our experiences can be expressed in art, music, poetry, and literature. All of these may provide a window into the reality of the natural world and our relation to it.

Here, I want to explore hints of transcendence. There is something going on that is beyond DNA, physical appearances, ecology, biological evolution, and the social conditioning of aesthetics. 

Through the ages, human encounters with nature have produced rich and diverse perspectives. In reaction to the rise of scientific descriptions of natural phenomena: from Newtonian mechanics to Darwinian evolution, the eighteenth century, saw the rise of romanticism, which valued the intense emotional experience of individuals' encounters with nature.

Negative sentiments concerning natural philosophy (science) is captured in the poem, Lamia written by John Keats in 1819. 

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—

Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

This negative sentiment about science is countered by Richard Dawkins in his 1998 book, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. He contends that science reveals rather than conceals the true beauty of the natural world. A softer perspective is that of Ursula Goodenough, author of The Sacred Depths of Nature, and an advocate of religious naturalism.

For me, my experience of awe and wonder hints at transcendence. But this is not my only feeling. There is also a sense of violation and lament as I see natural beauty being defiled and destroyed. Last week, the creek I walk by each day was flooded by sewage and became black. It was so polluted that dead fish appeared on the banks. The creek smelled so bad I changed my walking route for a few days to avoid the stench. There are countless other violations that grieve me: ancient forests being felled, wilderness areas flooded, wildlife losing their home, and fields of alpine wildflowers killed by late snow dumps resulting from climate change. To me, this sense of violation has a transcendent dimension. It hints that there is intrinsic value in nature and that there is a morality associated with how humans interact with it.

Unexpected challenges to atheism

Chris Arnade has a Ph.D in physics and spent 20 years working as a trader on Wall Street [not an unusual career transition]. He lost faith in Wall Street and now photographs drug addicts in the poorest neighbourhood of Wall Street. He is an atheist and has an interesting article in the Guardian The people who challenged my atheism most were drug addicts and prostitutes. Here is the conclusion:

I want to go back to [my] 16-year-old self and tell him to shut up with the "see how clever I am attitude". I want to tell him to appreciate how easy he had it, with a path out. A path to riches.
I also see Richard Dawkins differently. I see him as a grown up version of that 16-year-old kid, proud of being smart, unable to understand why anyone would believe or think differently from himself. I see a person so removed from humanity and so removed from the ambiguity of life that he finds himself judging those who think differently.
I see someone doing what he claims to hate in others. Preaching from a selfish vantage point.

Did Jesus ever live?

There is a nice article The Irreligious assault on the historicity of Jesus by John Dickson on the ABC Religion and Ethics website. Here are a few extracts:

When Richard Dawkins says "a serious historical case" can be made that "Jesus never lived at all," he no doubt receives applause from his followers, ..., but in departments of Classics, Ancient History, New Testament, Jewish and Near Eastern Studies (the relevant disciplines) such a comment is entirely bemusing - all the more so when one discovers that Dawkins' sole example of this serious history is G.A. Wells. As is well known, Wells is a professor of German language at London University who, in any case, has publicly retracted his argument of the 1970s that Jesus was a myth. I have often wondered what Dawkins would say if I disputed biological evolution and cited a language professor as my sole authority (one that had changed his mind to boot)...... if anyone can find a full professor of Classics, Ancient History or New Testament in any accredited university in the world who thinks Jesus never lived, I will eat a page of my Bible, probably Matthew chapter 1. It's been a year since I first tweeted the challenge and religious critic John Safran retweeted it to his 60,000 followers. My Bible remains safe.

So the question is not, did Jesus ever live?

But, Who was he? How will I respond to him?

Scientist becomes insane following Christ?

The Economist has an interesting review of the new Oxford University Press book Nature's Oracle: The Life and Work of W.D. Hamilton by Ullica Segerstrale.
Hamilton is well known for his contributions to evolutionary theory, particularly its mathematical formulation. Some of his ideas were popularised by Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene.

The review says the book recounts

... the suicide of [Hamilton's] early collaborator, George Price (a mentally unstable individual, who was driven mad by his conversion from atheism to Christianity)

It is interesting to compare this claim to the account of Price's life on Wikipedia which is quite different. It suggests Price's depression and resulting suicide was due to discouragement about the failure of his efforts to help the homeless.

How are the New Atheists "fundamentalist"?

"Fundamentalist" is a loaded and mis-understood term. Several earlier posts considered the issue from several angles.
One caricature and criticism is that "fundamentalists" claim that no interpretation of scripture is necessary. There is only one correct reading of scripture, theirs. Anyone who disagrees is being ungodly.

This might be classified as the "no interpretation" interpretation.
In some ways this reminds me of the New Atheist [Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchins, Lawrence Krauss, ...] interpretation of science.

Science does not need interpretation. There is no need for a philosophy of science. It is "bleedingly obvious" that:

• science is true
• science is the only means to obtain truth
• the only meaninful and important questions are those which science can answer
• science provides a basis for ethics
• science shows the universe has no purpose
• science proves there is no god or creator

Anyone who denies these claims is just being irrational and unscientific and ignoring the evidence.

Is Dawkins a fundamentalist?

There is an interesting article in the Guardian Peter Higgs criticises Richard Dawkins over anti-religious 'fundamentalism'

Higgs [of Higgs boson fame] is an atheist, which he attributes to his upbringing. It is interesting that at Oxford Higgs was a Ph.D student of Charles Coulson, who I imagine would have been a great role model of a Christian intellectual.

I thank Matt Cardier for bringing the article to my attention.

Why atheists should respect Christian theology

This saturday at the Volfians we will discuss one of Terry Eagleton's critical reviews of Richard Dawkins The God Delusion. It is particularly interesting because Eagleton is an atheist and a world reknown literary critic.

Below is a key paragraph in the review. After extensively discussing the nuances of key Christian doctrines [from a somewhat liberal humanist point of view] and contrasting them to Dawkins' simplistic misrepresentations Eagleton states:

Now it may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism. Even moderate religious views, he insists, are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to fanaticism.

A common fallacy in arguments about the existence of God

Arguments for or against the existence of God seem to suffer from a common logical fallacy. It is important to remember that if A implies B then it does not follow that B implies A. It does follow that if B is not true then A cannot be true. But, if we disprove A we have not necessarily disproved B.
In different words, one must distinguish between the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be true.
Let me illustrate with a concrete example.
All German Shepherds are dogs. But not all dogs are German shepherds.
If we establish an animal is not a German shepherd we have not established that it is not a dog.

How does this play out in current debates about the existence of God?

Richard Dawkins destroys the argument from design which claims to establish the existence of God. Hence, he and many of his followers claim that he has shown that God does not exist. But, let us check the logic.
If the argument from design is valid then it follows that God exists.
Equivalently, if God does not exist then the argument cannot be valid.
However, the converse does not follow, i.e. if the argument is not valid it does not follow that God does not exist. All we can conclude is that the argument is not valid. This does NOT preclude the existence of God.

Now, let us look at some Christian responses to Dawkins.
If Dawkins is correct then God does not exist. Hence, if God exists Dawkins cannot be correct. Many flaws in Dawkins arguments have been pointed out. However, this does NOT establish that God exists. It just establishes that Dawkins arguments are weak.

A beautiful problem for atheism

The existence of evil and suffering present a problem for theism. How could a loving and benevolent God allow it? But, there is a flip side. Beauty presents a problem for atheism. Why do humans have such an affinity for and appreciation of beauty in both the natural world and human creations such as art and music?

John Horgan [best known as author of The End of Science] has an interesting blog post Can Science - Really Solve - the Problem of Beauty? on the Scientific American website. Aside: He has some amusing comments about Richard Dawkins' utilitarian view of these questions.

Questions for Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins in currently in Australia for the Global Atheist Convention, and so attracting some media attention. Last night he was on a popular public television (ABC) show, Q & A, where he debated the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney. There is a new website DoubtingDawkins.com which asks some questions to Dawkins. It includes a video interview with me.

Nothing to the argument

The New York Times Sunday Book Review has an excellent review of the book A Universe from Nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing by Lawrence Krauss.
He is a theoretical physicist who is an outspoken atheist, often claiming science and religion are incompatible. The book has a glowing afterword by Richard Dawkins claiming the argument in the book presents serious problems for religious belief.

The reviewer is David Albert, a Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He is scathing about the book, particularly for its philosophical naiveté. The book does not really solve any of the problems it claims to. Here is an extract where he points out how Krauss' notion of "nothing" and "something" in quantum physics is simplistic.

Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic-­quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all. And he has an argument — or thinks he does — that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing. 

But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-­theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.

The end of the review is interesting for its perspective on the superficiality of the New Atheism:

When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for every­thing essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.

A finely tuned argument

Victor Stenger has a new book, The Fallacy of Fine Tuning: Why the Universe is not Designed for Us. Stenger is a prominent atheist and author of the bestselling book, God: the Failed Hypothesis. [A detailed critique of that book was published in Science and Christian Belief by David Bartholomew, formerly Professor of Statistics at the London School of Economics.]

What is fine tuning? Basically it is the idea that the laws of physics and fundamental constants of nature [e.g. charge and mass of the electron] are "finely tuned" so that carbon based life can exist.  Some argue that this is evidence that we were meant to be and that God designed the universe accordingly. I believe that Stenger claims this argument is flawed because it is "carbon-centric" and that one can imagine alternative scenarios and universes where life is based on a different element (e.g. silicon, which is the basis of computer technology). Alternatively, one might even consider the possibility that life is not based on atoms and molecules but on the dark matter or dark energy which comprises most of the universe.

What do I think about these objections? First, we cannot completely rule out the existence of such alternative "templates" for life. But, these are just speculations and lack specificity. This is similar to the claim/argument that Richard Dawkins makes in The God Delusion that physicists will invent a theory [e.g. the multiverse] that will explain fine tuning, just as Darwin explained the emergence of "apparent design" in biological systems. Alternative new explanations of anything are always possible. But usually in science (and everyday life) we focus on the concrete possible explanations we have access to now and consider their relative merits.

How likely is an alternative chemistry for life? One reason we might be skeptical is that evolution has not produced it yet! Biomolecules do use a diversity of chemical reactions and different metal ions [iron, molybdenum, copper, zinc, manganese, vanadium, ...] are used for different purposes in metalloproteins. But, it seems the template in any and every species is still nucleic acids (for DNA and RNA) and amino acids (for proteins). If one could use silicon to perform some function then one might expect some part of nature to have discovered it. I am reminded of Richard Feynman who said:

'There is no such thing as polywater because if there were, there would also be an animal which didn't need to eat food. It would just drink water and excrete polywater'

Also, for the last 50 years chemists have been desperately trying [with minimal success] to come up with synthetic structures which can perform even the simplest functions [e.g. photosynthesis] that biomolecules do. Stenger is a physicist. But, I think most chemists would acknowledge that there is something very special about carbon based chemistry.

Having said all this, I think caution and caveats are in order. I do not think fine tuning proves that the universe is designed for life. Furthermore, I certainly do not think it proves that God exists. [See Tony Wright's cautionary comments on an earlier post]. To me it is just a fascinating observation which confronts us with questions of a non-scientific nature. Is there some greater meaning and purpose to the universe? The end of science is the beginning of theology.

I thank Stephen Driscoll for asking me some questions that stimulated this post

Christianity is not an explanation

The latest issue of Science and Christian Belief has a nice review by Denis Alexander of Terry Eagleton's book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution. The book is a robust critique of the 'New Atheists' Ditchkins [Dawkins+Hitchens] by another atheist, one of the world's leading literary critics [see my earlier post]. I particularly liked this quote from the book that the review mentions:

[Dawkins] also has an old-fashioned scientific notion of what constitutes evidence. Life for Dawkins would seem to divide neatly down the middle between things you can prove beyond all doubt, and blind faith. He fails to see that all the most interesting stuff goes on in neither of these places, Christopher Hitchens makes much the same crass error, claiming in God Is Not Great that “thanks to the telescope and the microscope, (religion) no longer offers an explanation of anything important.” But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.

Problems with logical positivism

Does Richard Dawkins implicitly assume some particular philosophy of science?

At the beginning of the 20th century logical positivism was one of the dominant views in philosophy.  Logical positivists claimed that real knowledge is only what can be measured and verified. A statement is meaningful only if it can be verified by observation.
But this verification principle cannot be verified. "Meaningful" is not a scientific category which is amenable to testing in the laboratory.
Karl Popper also exposed problems inherent in logical positivism even within philosophy of science. Popper emphasized that scientific theories cannot be verified but only be falsified.

Perhaps, the most visible proponent of logical positivism today is not any professional philosopher, but popular science author Richard Dawkins.

Before Darwin, even educated people who had abandoned "Why" questions for rocks, streams and eclipses still implicitly accepted the legitimacy of the "Why" question where living creatures were concerned. Now only the scientifically illiterate do. But only conceals the unpalatable truth that we are still talking about an absolute majority.

God's utility function, River out of Eden: A Darwinian view of life, 1995

Does Science Disprove God?

Here is the current draft version of the slides for my talk in The God Experiment series in Melbourne tomorrow.
Comments welcome.

Reviewing a book about the book of books

The Week summarises several positive reviews of The Book of Books: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible 1611-2011 by Melvyn Bragg. [One such review is from The Independent].

Robert Wilson in the Canberra Times [I could not find this review online] wrote on the chapter "The Matter of Richard Dawkins" that " Never have I encountered such a gentle and yet devastating intellectual critique of the author of The God Delusion."

In 2006 Bragg also published an interesting book Twelve books that changed the world. [It probably should be english-speaking world, except for the rules of football!]

The why question

"Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question 'How?' but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question 'Why?'."

Erwin Chargaff  [distinguished biochemist]

Before Darwin, even educated people who had abandoned “Why” questions for rocks, streams and eclipses still implicitly accepted the legitimacy of the “Why” question where living creatures were concerned. Now only the scientifically illiterate do. But“only” conceals the unpalatable truth that we are still talking about an absolute majority.

        Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden 

A secular education is an oxymoron

It is hard for me to believe that modern history and western literature can really be understood without a good knowledge of the Bible and the basics of theology; regardless of whether one believes it or not. I have even heard Richard Dawkins make this point! Alister McGrath has a relevant book, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and how it changed a Nation, a language, and a culture.

However, it seems the new national curriculum proposed for Australia claims otherwise, as discussed here. Just before Christian there was a good opinion piece in the Australian, Bible study opens door to mastering literature.

The picture is from the Gospel of John in the Lindisfarne Gospels.

An event I wish I could attend

On Friday 19th November The Faraday Institute at Cambridge has a  public lecture which will take the form of a Public Discussion between the literary writer and critic Professor Terry Eagleton and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, on the subject "Responses to the New Atheism."
Eagleton is a prominent atheist who has made stinging critics of the "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins. I wrote an earlier post about him recommending reading the New Testament.

A reasonable atheist

The New York Times has an interesting online Opinion piece, Mystery and Evidence, by Tim Crane, a Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. His comparison of science and religion is a refreshing change from the ill-informed rantings of Richard Dawkins.

Here is an extract:

None of these remarks are intended as being for or against religion. Rather, they are part of an attempt (by an atheist, from the outside) to understand what it is. Those who criticize religion should have an accurate understanding of what it is they are criticizing. But to understand a world view, or a philosophy or system of thought, it is not enough just to understand the propositions it contains. You also have to understand what is central and what is peripheral to the view. Religions do make factual and historical claims, and if these claims are false, then the religions fail. But this dependence on fact does not make religious claims anything like hypotheses in the scientific sense. Hypotheses are not central. Rather, what is central is the commitment to the meaningfulness (and therefore the mystery) of the world.