Sisyphus Happy

Criticism of David Papineau’s Paper on Karl Popper

2019-02-17T10:36:00.002+00:00

My responses to David Papineau are in RED.

Intellectual reputations are changeable. Thinkers who are revered during their lifetimes are often forgotten afterwards. In the late sixteeenth century the French philosopher Peter Ramus was widely acclaimed as the greatest logician since Aristotle, and most Victorians regarded the polymathic Herbert Spencer as the prime genius of their age. But now these two are now quite unread, and appear only as footnotes in historical surveys.

During his lifetime Sir Karl Popper was as revered it is possible for a philosopher to be. In addition to his many academic accolades, he was knighted in 1965 and made a Companion of Honour in 1982. He had the rare distinction of election as a Fellow both to the Royal Society and the British Academy.

Popper was always an outsider in academic philosophy and his contemporaries at Oxford and Cambridge actively opposed him being offered a post at either of those universities, even though Popper was by far the best philosopher of his generation.

However, there is room to doubt that this standing will long outlast him. Indeed, it is already becoming difficult to understand exactly how Popper acquired his renown.

In large part Popper's eminence as a public figure stems from his political works, The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (1957). These were passionate defences of social democracy against the twins threats of fascism and communism. For all the virtues of social democracy, it is not often associated with passion, and many middle-of-the-roaders in the Butskellite years found Popper's fervour a welcome source of excitement. Even so, few of his supporters would argue that that his political writings alone justify the stature of a major philosopher. If they are important, it is because they express the political credo of a philosopher of science who has shown us a new way to think about the relation between theory and reality.

Popper is usually described as an important philosopher of science but this neglects his equally significant contributions to political theory and epistemology as the solver of the problem of induction.

In The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1957, originally Logik der Forschung, 1934), Conjectures and Refutations (1963), and Objective Knowledge (1972), Popper develops an analysis of science which breaks radically with previous views. If this analysis were right, it would have significant implications for most aspects of our intellectual life. Unfortunately, it does not stand up to examination.

Popper’s ideas are as intellectually vibrant today as when he originally conceived them almost a hundred years ago. If anything, he was ahead of his time.

Popper's philosophy of science centres on his rejection of inductive reasoning. This is the kind of reasoning by which we judge that some hitherto observed pattern will continue to hold good in the future.

We should instead think that a hitherto observed pattern will continue to hold good if and only if we have a good explanatory theory of why it will continue to hold good.

Popper objects that all such inferences are logically flawed, since nothing guarantees that the future will be like the past.

A good explanatory theory is the only reason to think the future will resemble the past and it will never guarantee it.

Moreover, he argues that inductive reasoning is discredited by the history of science, since the characteristic fate of scientific theories, from Ptolemy to Newton, has been failure.

No he argues that inductive reasoning is logically invalid, not that failures in science show it is invalid.

For Popper, these failures of induction do not demean science itself.

…because induction plays no part in good science…

This is because he views science as an essentially conjectural activity. On the conventional view of science, theories are derived inductively from past observations. Popper turns this conventional view of science on its head. Rather than starting with past observations, scientists first propose their theories as conjectures, and then try to test them against experience. If the theories pass these tests, they survive as conjectures. But if they fail, they must be rejected, and replaced by new conjectures.

At first blush, this vision of science can seem attractive. Popperian science is dynamic, yet free from any taint of induction. However, there is an obvious flaw. Popper's falsificationist strategy of conjectures and refutations can only deliver negative knowledge. It shows certain scientific theories are false, but it never shows that any theory is true.

Why would that be a flaw if that is the only kind of scientific knowledge that has ever existed? Science has been spectacularly successful in creating good explanations and allowing fast technological progress but this hasn’t depended on the creation of certain knowledge.

Popper is driven to this denial of positive scientific knowledge by his rejection of induction. But the denial is hard to take seriously. Nobody properly acquainted with the evidence doubts that cigarettes cause lung cancer, or that matter is made of atoms.

It seems astonishing that a philosopher should think nobody could express doubt about these things when modern philosophy begins with Descartes. A modern take on such doubt would be to wonder if the physical world is a computer simulation – if it was then matter would not be made of atoms, nor could cigarettes be the cause of lung cancer. It is not the evidence that forces us to believe in these things but rather the success of the explanatory theory.

Science is a many-sided institution, and not all its deliverances deserve equal respect. But something is wrong with a philosophy that tells us that science can never yield any positive findings.

No good arguments have been given to show that this philosophy is wrong…

In retrospect, Popper's falsificationism can be seen as an over-reaction to the demise of classical physics at the turn of this century. The replacement of Newton's physics by Einstein's was a great surprise, and showed that the evidence underpinning the classical edifice was far less firm that everybody had supposed. Popper's mistake, however, was to condemn all inductive reasoning for this failure. Maybe inductive evidence will never suffice to lay bare the large-scale structure of space-time, or the other fundamental secrets of the cosmos. But this does not mean that it can never identify such more mundane facts as that cigarettes cause cancer.

The explanatory theory that cigarettes cause cancer is a good one and is open to falsification.

It is true that induction presents an abstract philosophical puzzle. Inductive inferences are not logically compelling, and because of this their ultimate authority is an issue of philosophical controversy. But this is a puzzle, not the start of a philosophical system. It is akin to the question "How do I know there is a table in front of me?" This is a good issue for first-year philosophy students to cut their teeth on. But outside the classroom nobody seriously doubts that we do know about tables, and it is just as unserious for Popper to doubt that we know that smoking causes cancer.

The reason I know that there is a table in front of me is that I have a good explanatory theory involving atoms coming together in a way that appears in my consciousness as a solid piece of furniture as a result of the way light is reflected off the table surface and in to the photosensitive cells at the back of my eyes. If I had good reason to doubt any of that, I would have good reason to doubt the table.

It is sometimes said that even if Popper is wrong about induction, he still does a good job of "demarcating" the difference between science and non-science. Popper's answer to this "problem of demarcation" is that proper sciences, unlike "pseudo-sciences" such as astrology or phrenology, are distinguished by their falsifiability. They are precisely enough formulated to yield definite predictions against which they can be tested.

However, this "problem of demarcation" is not a genuine problem, but entirely of Popper's own making. The real difference between the atomic theory of matter, say, and astrology, is that the atomic theory is firmly established by a large amount of evidence, whereas astrology is mere speculation.

If an astrologer were to accept an empirical test of whether their predictive theory was accurate, it would be a scientific theory, though a very bad one, because it would have low explanatory content. Atomic theory is a good scientific theory because it is hard to vary and has high explanatory content. It has also survived many empirical tests, but the number of empirical tests that it has survived does not increase the probability that it is a true theory.

This is what most non-philosophers would say, and they would be quite right. But Popper cannot say this, because he thinks that inductive evidence is impotent. So he is forced to regard the atomic theory as no less speculative than astrology, and is stuck with the non-problem of explaining why some speculations are better than others.

Popper would say both theories are speculative but that atomic theory is a better theory because it offers more scope for empirical falsification.

Despite these manifest failings, Popper's falsificationism is popular among practising scientists. The reason is probably that Popper's story best fits science at the cutting edge of research.

What makes your reason “probable” as opposed to just being true or false?

Most new ideas at the limits of knowledge do start life as pure speculations, and it is true that they are distinguished from the musings of madmen only by the precision which allows them to yield definite predictions.

All ideas start life as speculations, including the idea that there is a table in front of me. The musings of madmen are usually different to those of science and philosophy because the latter, if they are good, yield explanatory content. The precision with which a scientific theory yields predictions is not the only criteria on which to judge it – instrumentalism is false.

By focusing exclusively on this aspect of science, Popper creates the impression that all scientists, however workaday, are creative visionaries with minds of steel.

Popper makes no claim about the infallibility of scientists. Quite the contrary.

But speculative research is not the only kind of science, or even the most important kind. There would be no point to science unless its conjectures sometimes acquired enough inductive evidence to graduate to the status of established truths.

Progress does not depend on knowledge becoming certain truth and it never relies on “inductive evidence”.

This is the real reason for testing hypotheses against predictions. The aim is not to falsify them, but to identify those that can be turned into the kind of positive knowledge that enables us to build bridges and treat diseases.

Theories that are falsifiable but resist falsification and have high explanatory content are precisely those that allow us to build bridges and treat diseases. Finding more and more reasons to think a theory is true is unlikely to improve the theory but seeking to falsify a theory might result in a theory being discarded in favour of a better theory.

Scientists who follow Popper in emphasising speculation over evidence are like architects who admire the aesthetic use of new materials, but don't care if the building leaks.

Popper would be focussed on finding potential problems with a building and solving the problems.

We can see why they find innovation exciting. But they have lost their intellectual moorings if they think that originality for its own sake is the point of their profession.

Popper advocates progress through problem solving, not originality for its own sake.

None of these criticisms of Popper's philosophy of science are new. They have been well-known among professional philosophers for over half a century. However, Popper has never given straight answers to the objections.

Popper has given straight answers to the objections to anyone who has taken the time to read him.

Instead he reassures his readers of the importance of his views, while throwing up various smokescreens to hide their deficiencies.

This is ad-hominem attack on Popper.

One of Popper's strategies is to use words in a way which make his views seem far more sensible than they are. The Australian philosopher David Stove has pointed out (Popper and After, reviewed in the TLS, July 1 1983) that Popper characteristically talks about scientific "knowledge", "discovery" and "progress", even though his views imply there are no such things.

Popper’s views do not imply that knowledge, discovery and progress are impossible.

In the normal sense of these words, we can only know or discover what we have reason to believe is true.

Knowledge does not imply either belief (knowledge might be in a book) or certain truth (which is unobtainable).

Popper's official doctrine is that we never have any reason to believe that any scientific theory is true, but his non-standard usage often serves to obscure this from the less than fully attentive reader.

A scientist or philosopher does not have to believe that their own theories are true.

Another ploy is to refuse to engage with his critics.

Popper did engage with his critics, most famously with Wittgenstein who stormed off.

Throughout his career Popper belittled other professional philosophers for their finicky concern with definitions.

Popper was a methodological nominalist and recognised that no useful knowledge could come of arguing about the definition of words, for example, a puppy is what I call a young dog – don’t bother asking whether a puppy really is a young dog.

He was certainly right to condemn much modern academic philosophy for its scholastic introspection. But modern philosophy is not all bad, and in particular its criticisms of Popper deserve answers.

Ironically part of the reason that much academic philosophy is bad is that it lacks the error correcting mechanisms associated with science which is the core of Popper’s philosophy of science. Academic philosophers often compound the mistakes of their predecessors without realising that they are mistakes.

One unfortunate result of Popper's self-imposed intellectual quarantine is that the tradition in philosophy of science that he founded is slowly having to relearn many of the basic philosophical truths that were omitted from its curriculum.

When Popper does offer arguments, they are not always strong. One of his objections to inductive reasoning is that it militates against bold theories of wide scope, since a wide-ranging theory is harder to confirm inductively than a more cautious and limited one. This argument has often been repeated, even though it did not take his opponents long to respond that it mixes chalk with cheese. Boldness and inductive confirmation are both important desiderata, and the fact they pull against each other is not a good reason for discarding the one for the other.

Popper’s objection to inductive reasoning was that it was logically invalid, not that is militated again bold theories of wide scope. The reason a bold conjecture is better than a limited one is that it contains greater explanatory content and more opportunity for falsification.

Another favourite Popperian argument against induction reasoning is that it focuses on support for subjective psychological states like belief, and so is of no importance to the objective realm of scientific methodology. But once more the repetition of this argument owes more to Popper's personality than to reason. It is true that beliefs are subjective states, but questions about which beliefs ought to be held are as objective as any other normative questions.

Popper was an advocate of seeking objective moral truth in the same way as he advocated seeking objective scientific truth (though never being certain in either case). What people “ought” to believe is never logically derivable from what is the case, but there are good moral conjectures about the objective fact of how one should live and bad ones and only argument can distinguish between them. Whether someone subjectively believes or disbelieves a moral conjecture has no bearing whatsoever on whether a moral conjecture is a good one.

Towards the end of his career Popper inflated this jibe about the subjectivity of beliefs into an overarching metaphysical system. He postulated an interlinked universe of three worlds: the world of physics, the world of subjective psychological states, and the objective world of knowledge, theories, arguments, and problems. These three worlds are quite distinct, in that none reduces to any other, but at the same time each can influence the others.

Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem is largely concerned with this system of worlds. The book is a version of a lecture series delivered by Popper at Emory University in 1969, complete with a transcript of a question-and-answer session from the end of each lecture. If the transcripts are a fair sample, Popper's non-specialist audience let him off lightly. Even Popper's own followers regarded his three worlds as cranky. The discussion in this volume betrays some of the effects of his intellectual isolation. He does not seem to understand the workings of alternative views, and the arguments he gives in favour of the three-world system could be countered by nay well-trained philosophy undergraduate.

Why not give an example of a counter-argument?

Both of the books under review are derived from the archive of Popper's papers now held at Stanford University. The Myth of the Framework is a more substantial volume, gathering together nine essays, mostly first published in the 1970s and 80s. In the course of these essays, Popper touches on a number of topics, and his comments on biology, the social sciences and the history of philosophy are worth having. Most of these essays are not easily accessible in their original places of publication, and it is a service to have them gathered in one volume.

The overall impression created by this volume, however, is not entirely pleasing. A constant theme running through these papers is the importance of free discussion and open-mindedness. Popper is of course right to emphasize these matters. But he is wrong to suggest that they are the special property of his falsificationism.

Falsificationism is a methodological technique that demarcates science from non-science. He nowhere limits philosophical discussion to topics concerned with falsifiable statements and to think he did is to confuse his philosophy with logical positivism of which he was the leading critic.

Those who oppose Popper by seeking positive truths in science have just as much reason, If not more, to insist on the importance of critical discussion, and Popper has no basis for his accusation that these opponents are all dogmatic authoritarians.

To believe that the truth is manifest and that certainty is in human reach inevitably ends in authoritarianism.

The survival of critical standards in the modern academy is by no means assured, and the fight to preserve them needs every support. It does not help the defence of these standards if their most prominent twentieth-century proponent failed to uphold them in his own intellectual practice. Popper preached the importance of open debate and recognition of error, but throughout his intellectual career he fought to insulate a discredited idea against any possible criticism. Perhaps it would be best now if we remember what Popper preached, and lay the rest of his doctrines quietly to rest.

The whole point of Popper’s philosophy was to point the way to scientific, philosophical, political and ethical progress and to highlight the intellectual currents that prevent progress. He was the first to admit that the ideas we need to subject to critical rationalism included his own.

UK Census 2011: Religion and Belief

2012-12-14T21:54:00.000+00:00

Jacob Bronowski Plaque

2012-12-14T21:51:00.000+00:00

Covey, Heidegger and the Love of Wisdom

2012-07-20T20:56:00.002+01:00

On Monday evening the Hull and East Riding Humanist Group, to which I have been associated since its conception, hosted a talk by the soon to be faculty member of the University of Tokyo, Dr Michael Gillan Peckitt. Michael is something of an expert on the philosophy of the existentialist Martin Heidegger (a branch of philosophy popular in Japan due in part to a relationship between Heidegger and Buddhism/Taoism) and his talk was about Heidegger’s friendship with the existentialist Karl Jaspers. My interest in this subject was prompted in part by the fact that the founder of the British Humanist Association Harold J Blackham, who died three years ago at the grand old age of 105, wrote a book called “Six Existentialist Thinkers” which featured chapters on both Heidegger and Jaspers. I have been reading Heidegger all week and I have come to the conclusion that he wrote interminable nonsense. I have since found that I am in good company in thinking this, the once president of the BHA Bertrand Russell commenting on Heidegger’s book: “Highly eccentric in its terminology, his philosophy is extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot.” Freddie Ayer, another BHA president had a similar opinion. Besides talking much nonsense, Heidegger was a terrible fascist and Nazi until the end. It’s a shame that humanism is more closely linked to Nietzsche and Heidegger because of their atheism than the more religious Kierkegaard and Jaspers. It’s an association Heidegger himself renounced in his 1947 “Letter on Humanism”. Indeed Heidegger was an early expositor of anti-humanism as promoted in the latter day by thinkers such as John Gray (the professor of European Thought at the LSE, not he of “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” fame). Sartre was an atheist but a more positive influence on humanism than the rest.

I learnt today on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that the American business and “character ethic” guru Stephen Covey had died on Monday, the day of my Heidegger dicussion. I read a tribute from Covey’s fellow business guru Tom Peters in the Washington Post with great interest, especially since Covey’s famous second “habit of highly effective people” focused on imagining what people would say about us in our obituary. Peters said:

“Professionally, the term ‘humanist’ could have been invented to encapsulate Stephen’s work.”

and

“many with whom Stephen had direct or indirect contact surprised themselves as they marched forward with their own enhanced humanism, courtesy of his work and example”

Stephen Covey was well known for his Mormon faith, a religion I would usually take a critical stance on, but I can see why Peters calls him a humanist. Humanism in its true sense is philosophy in its true sense, from “philo” meaning "loving" and “sophia" meaning “wisdom". Covey had the gift of focussing on what kind of behaviour constitutes the life lived well. He didn’t write dense, incomprehensible "fashionable nonsense" in the style of Martin Heidegger or Jacques Derrida. If anything he was accused of stating the obvious, but I have long thought common sense not so common and Covey leaves a legacy of clear thought about habits of thought worth adopting, eminently more worth the effort of reading than the phoney continental philosophy of postmodernism all too prevalent in intellectual circles.

Higgs, the god particle and me...

2012-07-04T20:40:00.000+01:00

It has been reported in the media that the well-known TV comedian and actor Eric Sykes has died. I have always found the obsession with celebrity culture and the attention the media pay to the lives of celebrities vaguely embarrassing, but today will not go down in history as the day a TV personality died. No, the 4th July 2012 will be remembered for the announcement made by the scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) that after spending over six billion pounds on the largest scientific apparatus ever constructed, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the much discussed Higgs boson has finally been detected. Seeing the photos of the reclusive Peter Higgs breaking down in tears and seeking to turn attention away from himself took me back to 1988. I was then an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh and would sit in the common room of the James Clerk Maxwell Building each morning with my flat mate, who was studying physics and another friend I attended my mathematics lectures with, sipping coffee and chatting between lectures. Sometimes a middle aged academic who often wore a black polo neck top would sit across the table from us never speaking. I once asked my flatmate, “Who is that guy?” and was told it was Professor Higgs. Apparently, he had postulated the existence of a new particle sometime in the sixties. Twenty-four years have passed, my flatmate went on to do nuclear physics at CERN, my other friend dropped science and is now a top hedge fund manager and I…well, I didn’t go on to either of those things. Why should it be that I remember this as if it had some significance? Peter Higgs is now justly famous for his contribution to the scientific enterprise and I suppose me remembering being ignored by a famous physicist is even more ridiculous than people remembering seeing, speaking with or being sat next to any other celebrity, yet I do remember it. Does the fact that Higgs really is a great man whose name will live for centuries to come make any difference? Not at all. Ideas are sometimes much bigger than the people who have them and perhaps we should spend more time focusing on the development of our own ideas, however apparently insignificant, rather than try to live vicariously through some vague association with celebrity or someone else’s achievements.

Secular Monarchy or Republicanism?

2012-06-05T19:19:00.000+01:00

A recent Guardian/ICM poll found that the UK monarchy is enjoying record popularity with a 69% approval rating. The current diamond jubilee celebrations have prompted some prominent humanists such as Polly Toynbee to write on the republican cause in the national press. Perhaps now would be an appropriate time to discuss the relationship between monarchy, republicanism and humanism. It has to be said at the outset that as someone who dropped history in favour of sciences when choosing my GCEs, some may think me not a credible opponent of the learned President of the British Humanist Association whose illustrious family might be seen as left-wing royalty of sorts, her grandfather and great-grandfather being prominent historians and social reformers of their time, the former being an expert on the decline of imperial Rome due to the abandonment of the republican principles upon which it was founded . As a freethinker and humanist whose current beliefs are not founded on authority, whether hereditary, religious or academic, the truth is that I find little to agree with in Polly Toynbee’s journalistic output. I don’t like her constant and unjustified attacks on Nick Clegg, himself an active humanist in the past and the Liberal Democrat party he leads and I don’t like her petty killjoy attitude to the pleasure and security ordinary people, usually of conservative temperament feel in enjoying a national celebration centred on the royal family. Unlike the head of state, the presidency of the BHA is not for life and we have been expecting a new president for some time since the excellent A. C. Grayling felt he had to withdraw his acceptance of the role fearing reprisals from the unreasonable far left wing of the humanist cohort after he became the provost of a private university (staffed almost entirely by prominent humanists), perhaps the upcoming conference would be an opportune time to announce a change. Of course, the selection of the BHA president is not directly democratic but if I had a vote I would nominate the recently made Viscount Matt Ridley, the voice of reason incarnate. Immanuel Kant famously explained the meaning of “enlightenment” to be the willingness to use one’s own reason without the guidance of another. This freethinking attitude to life gives rise to contrarian spirits such as that of the late great humanist Christopher Hitchens who courted controversy by sometimes appearing to switch sides, for example in his much publicised support for the Iraq War and there is an irony in that I should choose defend the status quo and take a reactionary stance against the tide of humanistic republicanism, but I have my reasons which I hope to set down.

Polly is not the first president of the BHA to conflate humanism with republicanism and she won’t be the last. Shortly before her death, the erstwhile president of the BHA, Claire Rayner, who was also an active member of “Republic” – the organisation campaigning to make the UK a republic – said in response to an article linking humanism to republicanism that she couldn’t be a humanist and also support a monarchy and suggested that a humanist monarchy is an oxymoron and that the BHA should ally itself to the republican movement. On the contrary, what would be an oxymoron would be an "orthodox humanist" and the BHA campaign for constitutional reform does not mention republicanism at all. Virtually all of the humanists I know have echoed the sentiments of Toynbee and Rayner, pointing out that having a hereditary head of state is irrational since given the random nature of genetic inheritance there is no guarantee that a person born of royal lineage will be fit to be head of state. They point out that the monarchy is an anachronistic hangover from feudal times and doesn’t reflect the aspirations and values many of us hold, in relation to democracy, human rights, social mobility, etc. It simply establishes the permanent position of a particular social class with a particular political standpoint. I agree with this analysis for the most part – so what’s my problem?

Let me make an analogy. I don’t like soap operas. I think they are boring, tiresome and predictable – I have better things to do with my time. So in the unlikely event of me being made controller of the BBC, I am obviously going to cancel Eastenders and replace it with a new David Attenborough documentary, right? It’s only rational isn’t it – the UK population would gain great educational value from my decision and perhaps I could wean them off the rubbish. Many societies of the past, such as the former Soviet Union took just this paternalistic attitude. The problem is that such an attitude is in opposition to the humanist ideal of the “open and free society”. Eastenders is not for me, it is for other people who like that sort of thing and would feel outraged in being denied their weekly fix. If people want Eastenders and Eastenders does no real harm to anyone other than stultify their minds, they can have Eastenders and if they enjoy the pomp, ceremony, sense of continuity and security afforded by the British Royal family, that isn’t necessary a bad thing. Perhaps the comparison of the Royal Family to a popular soap opera is particularly apposite. The Queen is not a true autocrat, she does not really rule over us in the way that monarchs of the past did – crucially the period in history when the republican ideals were laid down. Nobody thinks of her as having a hot line to God or a divine right to rule. She “rules” if it can be called that by public ascent, something that looks likely to continue given the statistics showing support for the monarchy. She is a figure head for UK PLC, a popular focal point for national unity, a fixed point in these days of corrupt democratically elected politicians and has been very successful in that role given the current widespread support for the monarchy, despite the efforts of some members of her clan to tarnish the brand. Her success lies in her ability to project herself as the embodiment of civic duty upheld over an entire lifetime, the chief civil servant of the people. It is true that the royals are more of an extension of the media celebrity culture evident in seeing them posing with people like Cheryl Cole and Tom Jones at the end of the “star studded” concert held at Buckingham Palace. Is that a bad thing? It’s show business. Like Eastenders, the monarchy is not for progressive intellectual types, its part of the bread and circuses that constitute the meaning of life for many ordinary people and a humanism that seeks to despise and ridicule the very human predilection for nationalism combined with entertainment and the security of a strong establishment is less than human. It also fails to recognise the progressive nature of the monarchy itself, for example the recent changes to the rules of succession, replacing male preference primogeniture with absolute primogeniture, in which the first born child of a monarch is heir apparent regardless of gender and the end to the ban on marriage to Catholics, also the requirement for those in line to the throne to gain the permission of the sovereign to marry. This shows the kind of slow and piecemeal change those of us on the right of the humanist spectrum favour, following Karl Popper in his seminal work, “The Open Society and its Enemies”, in opposition to revolutionary fervour.

So am I in favour of the status quo simply because the monarchy is currently enjoying great popularity? The modern monarchy rightly relies on popular support. As a humanist I could hardly be said to be a follower of Edmund Burke, but as the late Christopher Hitchens quoted William Hazlitt in the collection of articles (“Arguably”) he wrote shortly before his death, the chapter “Edmund Burke: Reactionary Prophet; Reflections on the Revolution in France”:

“It has always been with me a test of the sense and candour of any one belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Burke to be a great man.”

This is in contrast to Paine's suggestion that in mourning the plumage he forgets the dying bird. As Hitchens points out a statement employed the world over by pitiless revolutionaries to justify unscrupulous actions. Hitchens goes on to quote Burke:

“It is known; that armies have hitherto yielded a very precarious and uncertain obedience to any senate, or popular authority; and they will least of all yield it to an assembly which is only to have a continuance of two years. The officers must totally lose the characteristic disposition of military men, if they see with perfect submission and due admiration, the dominion of pleaders; especially when they find that they have a new court to pay to an endless succession of those pleaders; whose military policy, and the genius of whose command (if they should have any) must be as uncertain as their duration is transient. In the weakness of one kind of authority and in the fluctuation of all, the officers in the army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things. But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master, the master (that is little) of your king, the master of your Assembly, the master of your whole republic.”

As Hitchens noted, this passage eerily prefigured the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte in the aftermath of the reign of terror and I would suggest that this unfolding of history would be the true enemy of humanism. The only time Britain had a republic it only lasted twenty years and was led by a man dismissed by the pre-eminent Scottish enlightenment philosopher, David Hume, as a regicidal dictator whose measures against Catholics in Scotland and Ireland have been characterised as near-genocidal. If we were creating a new country, with a new constitution, there is no doubt that I would be strongly in favour of a secular republic along the lines of the United States, but that is not where we are and it is churlish to deny that the pomp and ceremony associated with Royalty adds colour to the nations life. Thomas Paine excoriates his former friend Burke's refusal to criticize the crimes and cruelties of the "ancien regime" in his book "The Rights of Man" and perhaps I will receive the same response to this polemic, but in truth, the monarchy of the 21st century is not the monarchy of Paris 1789 and this is not the same quarrel. To think it is is to be out of touch with reality.

Is Happiness the only Good?

2012-06-01T19:28:00.000+01:00

This is a recording of my two minute broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Tuesday 17th April. I didn't intend it to sound so gloomy! Here is the script:

The humanist Robert Ingersoll once said “Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now and the way to be happy is to make others so.” But what do we really mean by happiness? Many of the most gifted writers, artists, scientists and philosophers have lived lives of great value whilst enduring neurotic misery day-to-day. Surely we must separate feeling joy in the moment from the idea of a life lived well. The scientific discipline of evolutionary psychology offers a fascinating insight in to the evolutionary function of happiness in the sense of subjective wellbeing and why finding lasting happiness is so elusive. Other emotions such as fear and disgust are easily explained in terms of an evolutionary pressure to avoid the things that would threaten our survival in the environment in which our brains evolved such as the venomous spiders and snakes that were plentiful in Palaeolithic Africa. They each prompt different reactions to specific threats. The function of happiness appears to be that it helps us to strive for the goals that evolution has built in to us, such as finding food, finding a mate and spending time with our children. There are fewer positive emotions because they prompt us to keep doing what we were doing and there is only one way of not changing anything. For this system to work, our feeling of happiness has to be reset each time we obtain the desired outcome, whether it is receiving a pay rise or promotion at work, winning the lottery or your football team gaining promotion to the premier league. The feeling of happiness soon wears off but natural selection has programmed us to still keep thinking that lasting happiness is in our reach. Thinking about this helps us to cherish the moments of joy experienced in life whilst accepting their transitory nature.

Is Nothing Sacred?

2012-01-08T20:37:00.003+00:00

This is a recording of my broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Friday 9th December 2011. This is what I originally wrote but I cut it down to fit within the 1 minute 30 seconds allowed:

Good morning. Is nothing sacred? The dictionary definitions of the word sacred include such ideas as “dedicated to a deity” and “religious respect”. A less dogmatic meaning of the word sacred is something especially worthy of awe and reverence. Can an atheist like me find anything to arouse this sense of the sacred in the world around them? We often read about pressing environmental concerns such as pollution. Would it help to view the natural world as something sacred? This is certainly how our pagan ancestors viewed nature but I don’t think that in our modern industrialised world it is helpful to see nature as in some way inviolable or something on which we should not intrude. I think a better approach is to use our scientific rationality to understand the causal relationships active in the natural world so that we can mitigate the negative consequences of our way of life. What else might people think of as sacred? What about a famous painting, or the fossilised remains of an early human ancestor, or even a football stadium or sports trophy? How about ideas such as freedom and liberty or even life itself? I think the value of human life is to some extent contingent on the quality of life experienced by the person living it and there are some circumstances where voluntary death can ease suffering. For me, the idea of liberty comes close to an idea I might think sacred which means that a just society is one in which basic liberties are available to everyone, but of course, even that idea comes with some caveats. Humanism is unjustly derided by the religious as representing a crassly materialistic attitude to life, but if it is about anything it is about thinking deeply about what gives value to human existence. Aside from the obvious religious associations, phrases such as “sacred cow” suggest ideas unreasonably held to be above questioning and beyond criticism. Perhaps contemplating what might be considered sacred in an open-minded and sceptical way is more fruitful than concluding that anything actually is.

The Value of Education

2011-09-09T23:14:00.003+01:00

This is a recording of my two minute broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Friday 9th September 2011. Here is the script:

Good morning. This week saw children across our region going back to school after the summer holidays. The two assumptions that often accompany thoughts about education are firstly, that it is just for children and young people and secondly that it has to happen in some formal institution such as a school, college or university. Why should we have this limiting view of the place and value of education? I think that education should be seen as a life long journey. Access to public libraries, books and the internet are available to everyone in our society. It is sometimes said that knowledge is power, but is learning only valuable to the extent that it can be put to some use? The Humanist philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote, “I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han Dynasty: that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kanishka introduced them into India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word 'apricot' is derived from the same Latin source as the word 'precocious', because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter." Did you know that the 9th September is Chrysanthemum Day in Japan, one of five seasonal feasts, associated with Japanese Royal family because the chrysanthemum is its emblem, representative of the sun? Learning something new every day of your life won’t necessarily make you rich financially; it cannot but make your life rich in other ways.

Leeds Perspective Citywide: Humanism

2011-08-12T19:26:00.001+01:00

This is a recording made by the Chris Workfolk Foundation of a talk on Humanism I gave in Leeds earlier this year. The talk was part of a series of talks given by people of different religions and beliefs. There is new website which collects all of the talks given as part of this Perspectives series which includes much better speakers than me and would recommend a visit to this excellent web resource:

http://www.worfolklectures.org/

Smug Atheists?

2010-11-14T08:28:00.003+00:00

This is the script for my two minute broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Friday 12th November 2010:

Good Morning. The American comedian Stephen Colbert recently defined Atheism as the religion devoted to the worship of one's own smug sense of superiority. Well, I hope that isn’t the impression I have given in my two minute tuppence worth every morning this week. The truth is that whatever your creed or belief, actually living up to a vision of what life should be about is easier said than done. We can’t all be Albert Einsteins and for most of us, just getting by, managing to hold on to our jobs and homes and families is an achievement in itself. The distinguished Humanist Richard Dawkins wrote in his book “Unweaving the Rainbow”, “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness that are here”. Viewed from this perspective, we are all lottery winners in being born at all. A Human life, with all its trials and tribulations is still worth living and we have but a short time to grasp an understanding and appreciation of this place in which we fleetingly find ourselves. It is an opportunity, an adventure that might never have been and the contemplation of this truth can surely be the basis for an exuberant and life affirming sense of self-worth.

Armistice Day

2010-11-13T09:15:00.004+00:00

This is the script for my two minute broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Thursday 11th November 2010:

Good Morning. Armistice Day has been an important day in our nation’s life since the 11th of November 1918, the end of the First World War, 92 years ago today. Over 70 million people were killed during the two World Wars. The scale of human suffering engendered by these two epoch defining events of the twentieth century continue to be a focus of remembrance and reflection on the human cost of war. The words of the poet Laurence Binyon have never been bettered, “They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old, age shall not weary them nor the years condemn, at the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.” We owe a debt of gratitude to the hundreds of thousands of service personnel who sacrificed themselves for the sake of their communities. There will be ceremonies to mark the occasion throughout the land but I am especially pleased to hear that humanists have been allowed to participate in the remembrance ceremonies in Edinburgh and Belfast for the first time this year and we are hopeful that Humanists will be allowed to take their place alongside the diverse religious groups represented at the ceremonies in London in future years. 12.6% of service personnel are listed by the MOD as having “no religion”, that’s 23,770 atheists and humanists risking their lives to safeguard our freedom and way of life. It’s certainly not true that there are no atheists in foxholes and it has been my pleasure to meet some of our brave service personnel who are also committed Humanists. David Brittain, the Armed Forces Humanist chaplain recently estimated that about 40 of those who have died in Afghanistan lived their lives as humanists. They deserve to be remembered just as much as their religious comrades and any ceremony should recognise that. Neither the bullet nor the bomb discriminates and it is inexplicable why our society should continue to do so when it comes to matters of personal philosophy.

The Festival of Reason

2010-11-12T21:48:00.003+00:00

This is the script for my two minute broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Wednesday 10th November 2010:

Good Morning. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." So wrote the English poet William Wordsworth, reflecting on his own youthful enthusiasm for the French Revolution. Yet what came to be known as the “Reign of Terror” was a travesty of the enlightenment hope of a better society founded on reason and liberty. On this day, the 10th November 1793, a “festival of reason” was established by the revolutionary government in Paris and the medieval cathedral of Notre Dame was transformed into a “Temple of Reason”. An altar to liberty was installed over the old one, and the inscription "To Philosophy" was carved into the church façade. They even had a goddess of reason. The goal of this “Cult of Reason”, the perfection of mankind, was short lived and their utopian vision would end in tyranny. I think this is likely to be true of all utopian visions. I’m a humanist and critics of Humanism often site the horrors of the two centuries since the French revolution as proof that the enlightenment project of the eighteenth century, the “age of reason” has been a failure and that to believe in human progress is naïve. I think that goes too far. I don’t think humanity is perfectible and science and reason are not my gods. Progress is always going to be three steps forward and two steps back. It is slow and piecemeal. Nevertheless, a quality of life known only to the aristocracy and senior clergy before the enlightenment is now available to all Europeans. This is progress and the improvement is almost entirely the result of the flowering of science and technology through free enquiry, liberal democracy, universal suffrage and human rights, secular government and the liberty which allows individuals to form and express their own opinions and to choose their own way in life, all fruits of the enlightenment.

Albert Einstein's Nobel Prize

2010-11-11T20:52:00.002+00:00

This is the script for my two minute broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Tuesday 9th November 2010:

Good Morning. On this day, the 9th November 1921, exactly 89 years ago, Albert Einstein, the most famous and celebrated physicist in the world was awarded the Nobel Prize for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. Einstein revolutionised our understanding of space and time and his theory of Relativity occupies a central position in our modern scientific understanding of the universe. His famous equation, e=mc squared is one of the few physics equations familiar to the general public. I even remember a song about it in the pop music charts of the 1980s. People often think of Einstein’s wild hair and eccentric appearance, the quintessential absent –minded professor and a gift to cartoonists throughout the world. What fewer people know about Einstein is that he was a Humanist and was one of the founder members of the first Humanist Society in New York in 1929. He was also an honorary associate of the British Humanist Association and of the Rationalist Press Association whose journal was among the items present on his desk at his death. It’s true that Einstein had an almost mystical appreciation for the lawful harmony of the universe revealed by science. He once said “I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” On another occasion he said “I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment”. I think Albert Einstein was probably the greatest genius who ever lived and was all the more remarkable for his compassion and commitment to ethical humanism.

The Return of the Jedi

2010-11-10T22:55:00.003+00:00

This is the script for my two minute broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Monday 8th November 2010:

Good Morning. Every ten years there is a census in the UK and in March next year we will all receive a paper questionnaire through the post. One of the questions on the 2011 Census will ask about religion. The last census in 2001 showed that 72% of the population of Hull and the East Riding said that they were Christians and 18% said they had no religion. 8% didn’t answer the question and all the other religions combined amounted to less than 2%. So according to the census data, most people are Christians, but what does this really mean? When someone ticks the Christian box, do they mean that they believe in God, spend a lot of their time going to church, praying or reading the Bible? Or do most of the people who tick the Christian box do so simply because they were christened in a church, had parents who were Christian or identify as a cultural Christian without any real religious belief. Why should it matter if people who are not religious tick one of the religious boxes? Well, the data from the last census was used to support all kinds of policies which non-religious people in particular might disapprove of such as the increase in the number of faith schools. Surveys which ask more detailed questions about people’s beliefs suggest that the number of non-religious people is more than 18%. The Church of England has just published figures which suggest that about 45,000 fewer people attend their church services now compared to a decade ago. In the last census over 390,000 people said that their religion was “Jedi” like Luke Skywalker from Star Wars. In fact, this is more than the number who said they were Sikhs, and more than Jews and Buddhists combined, although Jedi didn’t become recognised as an official religion. We are all free to put what we like on the census forms but it is important that the Census generates accurate figures because ultimately they will be used to legitimise resource allocation and policy.

The Gunpowder Plot

2010-11-07T08:45:00.003+00:00

This is the script of my 2 minute broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Sunday 7th November 2010:

Good Morning. Remember, remember the fifth of November. I’m sure that most of you heard or saw some fireworks on Friday night. Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night is of course the annual celebration to mark the failure of the Gunpowder plot on the 5th of November 1605 when Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. The gunpowder plot was an example of religiously inspired terrorism, something that has made an unwelcome return to these shores in the twenty-first century. The conspirators were Roman Catholics and their plan was to assassinate King James I and restore Catholicism to England. Until 1859 it was compulsory to celebrate the deliverance of the King on the 5th of November as the result of an Act of Parliament called “The Thanksgiving Act”. Prolonged war and bloodshed as a direct result of religious disagreements was a constant feature of life in the seventeenth century. The Thirty Years' War between 1618 and 1648 was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history, not to mention the English civil wars. Thanks to the enlightenment and the rise of secularism in the Eighteenth century, religious conflict has declined significantly, though conflict between Protestants and Catholics has continued in to modern times in places like Northern Ireland where traditional religion has remained a potent force. Religiously inspired violence in places such as India and Somalia is even worse. Today our society faces new threats from those bent on usurping our hard fought secular traditions, for example by advocating the introduction of religious laws such as the sharia which would inevitably come to rival the one secular law we live under at present. Bonfire night remains a perennial reminder that we should never again allow the explosive mix of religion and politics to dominate our society. To do so is playing with fire.

Larkin with Toads

2010-08-22T08:43:00.002+01:00

This is the script for my 2 minute "Pause for Thought" on the Blair Jacobs Sunday morning show on BBC Radio Humberside, 22nd August 2010:

This summer has seen the appearance of giant fibreglass Toad sculptures in Hull city centre to commemorate the death of the poet Philip Larkin twenty five years ago. If there ever was an atheist I might be tempted to describe as “spiritual” perhaps it would be Larkin. Poems such as “Church Going” express a kind of sadness and loss he felt as an atheist visiting an old church, “Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round.” At the same time poems such as High Windows spoke of the freedom of the young to break free from the shackles of religion, “No God anymore, or sweating in the dark about hell and that, or having to hide what you think of the priest”. Aubade spoke of the necessity of facing the reality of death without “that vast moth-eaten musical brocade created to pretend that we never die.”

Today is the anniversary of the death of another famous non-believer who once worked at the University of Hull and was known to write poetry, though he was better known as the writer and presenter of the BBC TV series “The Ascent of Man” in the 1970s. Jacob Bronowski died on the 22nd August 1973 and local Humanists have begun a campaign to celebrate his life and work, not with sculptures but with a commemorative plaque at one of the places he lived during his time in Hull in the 1940s. I would contrast Larkin’s gloomy fear about death with Bronowski’s exuberant Humanism and his Promethean spirit. Bronowski once said “It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it” and “knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty”. “Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.”

I'm an Afairyist

2010-07-23T19:11:00.003+01:00

This is the transcript of my 2 minute broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Friday 23rd July 2010:

Good morning. I am an afairyist. I’ll repeat that for clarity, I am an afairyist. Perhaps that is not what you expected me to describe myself as. An afairyist is someone who does not believe in fairies. That’s right; those dragonfly-winged little people who it is said live at the bottom of your garden. You might be thinking that the idea of a word to describe what nobody really believes in is ridiculous, but in fact belief in fairies was widespread until the beginning of the twentieth century. Fairies were believed to belong to a class of supernatural creatures which also included pixies, gnomes, elves, goblins, brownies, sprites and leprechauns. Fairies were blamed for stealing small objects such as pins when they went missing and all manner of mischief were ascribed to them. It was not only simple minded people who believed in fairies, for example, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer of Sherlock Holmes was a believer in fairies. Someone living in Victorian England might have been sceptical about someone claiming that one day almost nobody would believe in fairies. They might have thought that belief in fairies was sufficiently widespread that the belief would persist, perhaps fulfilling a psychological need in the fairy believer, but belief in fairies did die out and today most of us are afairyists. I doubt if you would describe yourself as afairyist because it would seem to put too much importance on the thing you are not believing in and there are an infinite number of things that you also don’t believe in. It would be better to find a word that properly described what you do believe in. I believe in science, democracy, an open society, secular ethics and a naturalistic view of the world in which fairies, ghosts, miracles and Gods play no part. I choose to describe myself as a Humanist. What word would you choose to describe what you believe in?

Miracles

2010-07-22T23:12:00.003+01:00

This is the transcript of my 2 minute broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Thursday 22nd July 2010:

Good morning. In 2001 a man from Massachusetts in the United States called Jack Sullivan knelt and prayed, asking for the nineteenth century English priest and Cardinal John Henry Newman, who died in 1890, to intercede to help the crippling spinal condition that he was suffering from. Sullivan subsequently made a recovery and medical experts convened by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which is the Vatican body responsible for investigating miracles, concluded that his recovery resulted from prayer. Now John Henry Newman is going to be made a saint by the Pope during his visit to the UK in September and Sullivan’s story is being cited as the requisite miracle. Sullivan said his own doctor could offer no medical explanation and said "Something very special has happened to me from a very special person. This thing is real, it's reality." Well, I’m a humanist and a sceptic which means that I agree with the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who taught that a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence and wrote that “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish”. In other words, what is more likely, that the ghost of a man who has been dead for over a hundred years was listening to the prayer and was somehow able to affect the medical problems Sullivan was suffering from, or that Sullivan underwent a spontaneous remission as a result of the healing mechanisms inherent in the human body. I wouldn’t want to single out Roman Catholics for their beliefs in miracles, because miracles are a feature of most of the religions of the world, for example, in 1995 there were claims of statues drinking milk in Hindu temples. In Islam, Sufi literature gives examples of holy men being able to become invisible or produce rain in seasons of drought. I’m sceptical of all claims of the miraculous and all religions equally.

Constantine

2010-07-21T19:56:00.004+01:00

This is the transcript of my 2 minute broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Wednesday 21st July 2010:

Good Morning. The Humanist Carl Sagan once said that “You have to know the past to understand the present”. It was on this day in the year 306 that Constantine was made Roman Emperor, here in the north of England, in York which was then called Eboracum. Constantine was stationed in York with his father, the Emperor Constantinus and was made Emperor when his father died. He is most famous for being the first Christian Roman Emperor. It is worth wondering how the history of western civilisation might have unfolded if Constantine had not embraced the Christian religion, which subsequently became the official religion of the Roman world. Up until then, the Christians had been a persecuted minority who were called “atheists” because of their refusal to worship the Roman Gods, such as Jupiter and Saturn. A Roman called Porphyry wrote “How can people not be in every way impious and atheistic who have apostatized from the customs of our ancestors through which every nation and city is sustained?” For the Romans, religion was first and foremost a social activity that promoted unity and loyalty to the state and there was a belief that if this was undermined by Christianity then social justice and unity would disappear. It seems ironic to me that modern day religious people sometimes suggest that our society might be damaged by the disappearance of relatively recent beliefs such as Christianity but there is little evidence of social disintegration in societies which have become less religious such as Sweden and Denmark. In fact greater levels of crime and disorder exist in the more religious societies. It’s true that Christianity has played a part in the formation of our national identity but in a multicultural society we should not turn a blind eye to the contribution of the non-religious member s of our country.

The Meaning of Life

2010-07-20T20:53:00.004+01:00

This is the transcript of my 2 minute broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Tuesday 20th July 2010:

Good morning. The poet T.S. Eliot was once recognised by a taxi driver as he stepped in to his cab. The taxi driver told him “I’ve got an eye for a celebrity. Only the other evening I picked up the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell and I said to him what’s it all about? And you know he couldn’t tell me.” Was it unreasonable for the taxi driver to expect that the greatest living philosopher of his time could have summarised the meaning of life for him during a taxi journey? I suppose it’s easy to say something trite and platitudinous about life and its meaning in a two minute radio slot such as this, some aphorism to inspire you all for the week ahead, Carpe Diem, seize the day. Life is what you make it. I’m a Humanist and we don’t believe that our lives come pre-packaged with an instruction manual and a set of unbending rules provided by some all knowing deity who has a plan for us. The fact is that much of what happens in life seems to be devoid of any ultimate meaning. Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth, “...out , out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot , full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Yes, life can sometimes seem both vacuous and transient but that is not the whole story. The view that I take, that the universe is not the product of intelligent design but of natural forces is called naturalism. This view might seem negative to some people but just because there appears to be no meaning or purpose in the origins of human life does not mean that we cannot create our own meaning and purpose. The discovery that life has no ultimate purpose leaves us free to make of it what we like. As for life’s brevity, I agree with the poet Emily Dickinson who wrote, "That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet".

Rational Optimism

2010-07-19T22:24:00.004+01:00

This is the transcript of my 2 minute broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Monday 19th July 2010:

Good morning. At the present time there seems to be an epidemic of pessimism about the future because of the state of the economy. I’m a Humanist and a rationalist which means that I base my beliefs on the available evidence. Is it rational to conclude that life is improving for the people of our planet? The science writer Matt Ridley recently published a book about the evolution of prosperity. In it he writes that since 1955 the population of the world has doubled, yet the average person on our planet earns nearly three times as much money, corrected for inflation, eats one third more calories of food, buries one third as many of their children and lives one third longer than they did in 1955. They are more likely to have flush toilets, refrigerators, bicycles, telephones, to be literate, to have had an education and the list goes on and on. They are much less likely to die as a result of cancer, heart disease, whooping cough, tuberculosis, malaria, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, measles, smallpox, scurvy, polio, war, murder, childbirth, accidents, tornadoes, flooding or famine. The percentage of people living in absolute poverty has dropped by more than half. It’s hard to imagine living in a world where artificial light was not so easily available, but the average Briton today consumes about 40,000 times as much artificial light as the average Briton 300 years ago. In the year 1700, Louis XIV, King of France, was fantastically wealthy and every evening he could choose what to eat from a selection of forty dishes prepared by an army of 500 servants, yet this is nothing compared to the vast array of food and drink available at relatively low cost at our nations supermarkets. In 1957, the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan said that you’ve never had it so good, yet the average British working man in 1957 was earning less in real terms than his modern equivalent could now receive in state benefit if unemployed with three children. Surely all of this evidence should lead anyone to rationally conclude that life is better now than ever before.

My Humanist Hero: Jacob Bronowski

2010-06-08T21:55:00.008+01:00

I have just submitted the following article for the BHA Humanist Heritage project which is being launched for Humanist Week which runs from 21st-28th June.

The Humanist, polymath and all round Renaissance man, Jacob Bronowski was born in Poland in 1908 to Jewish parents who moved to Germany during the first World War and then on to England in 1920. Bronowski won a scholarship to study Mathematics at Cambridge but was also involved with editing a literary periodical called “Experiment”. This was an early sign that he would be one of the extraordinary few thinkers to straddle the divide between the “two cultures” famously discussed by C.P. Snow in his 1959 lecture and paving the way to the “third culture”, a tradition continued by our current crop of Humanist grandees including Richard Dawkins and A.C. Grayling and by the British Humanist Association which is ending Humanist Week (21st – 28th June) with a conference on Humanism and the Arts, following last year’s conference on Humanism and Science. Bronowski’s interests ranged widely, from biology to poetry and from chess to Humanism, his commitment to which is evidenced in the following excerpt written in October 1968, the month of my birth:

The notion that a man shall judge for himself what he is told, sifting the evidence and weighing the conclusions, is of course implicit in the outlook of science. But it begins before that as a positive and active constituent of humanism. For evidently the notion implies not only that man is free to judge, but that he is able to judge. This is an assertion of confidence which goes back to a contemporary of Socrates, and claims (as Plato quotes him) that “man is the measure of all things”. In humanism, man is all things: he is both the expression and the master of the creation.[1]

Jacob Bronowski is best remembered for “The Ascent of Man”, a thirteen part TV series produced by the BBC in 1973, in which he explored the history of science and technology. It is said that it was this seminal TV series which inspired the late great American astronomer Carl Sagan to make his own documentary series, "Cosmos", which also inspired a generation of Humanists. Notwithstanding David Hume, Bronowski championed the idea that the ethical “ought” could be derived from the scientific exploration of what “is”[2]. A particularly poignant and moving part of the series was filmed at the Auschwitz concentration camp (search YouTube) and begins with the following:

"It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.”[3]

Bronowski taught mathematics at the University College Hull from 1934 to 1942. This might not be the best known fact about his life, but it is a salient one for me as Hull is my hometown. Surely Bronowski deserves recognition in any account of our local Humanist heritage. The economist Eric Roll who worked with Bronowski in Hull said of him:

"He was ... a warm and vibrant human being. Every encounter with him was a powerful tonic which left one feeling intellectually and emotionally stimulated and enhanced. He did not, however, suffer fools gladly and could be bitingly sardonic about human folly or about the glaring discrepancies so often to be found between public acclaim and true worth. But to his friends he was kind and affectionate, a companion whose gaiety and wit counterbalanced his serious approach to life."[4]

Given the stature and influence of Jacob Bronowski on the public understanding of science, it is perhaps surprising that his association with the city of Hull has not been honoured. Bronowski died in New York in 1974, a year after the completion of “The Ascent of Man”. Given this great Humanist’s legacy, I think that Jacob Bronowski deserves a commemorative plaque at the very least.

References:
[1] Science as a Humanistic Discipline, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, XXIV, no8, October 1968 (http://www.jstor.org/pss/1578078)
[2] Positivists and analysts alike believe that the words is and ought belong to different worlds, so that sentences which are constructed with is usually have verifiable meaning, but sentences constructed with ought never have.....The question of how man ought to behave is a social question, which always involves several people; and if he accepts no evidence and no judgment except his own, he has no tools with which to frame an answer.
"The Sense of Human Dignity”, part 3 (p. 56)
(Wikiquote: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jacob_Bronowski)
[3] The Ascent of Man, BBC, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mIfatdNqBA
[4] http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Bronowski.html

Humanism, Politics and The Blank Pamphlet

2010-05-08T12:03:00.012+01:00

This has been a bad election for Humanists. Two prominent members of the 110 strong All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group (secretary of the group Paul Holmes and Evan Harris pictured above) lost their seats. Dr Evan Harris, a medical doctor, is particularly well known as an advocate of science and secularism. Unfortunately he lost his Oxford seat by a few hundred votes. I can only hope that he can find some way to continue being a strong advocate for Humanism in some other way. Indeed, Dr Harris is going to be a speaker at the upcoming Enquiry Conference in Birmingham in June, along with other notable Humanists such as A.C. Grayling and Andrew Copson.

I find it puzzling that I still come across the perception of Humanists depicted in the cartoon above. The assumption is that Humanism is like a religion with no core beliefs and values. Most Humanists don’t want to go door-to-door Jehovah’s Witness style to talk about their beliefs (though you will find the odd person who does). The truth is that we Humanists have very definite ideas about the open society, democracy, ethics, secularism, free speech, human rights and the value of science and education, even when we differ on other views such as taxation or the desirable size of government, which is why there are Humanists in most of the major parties (UKIP, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Labour and Green). We have plenty of pamphlets and books and they are not blank, but our ideas are not dogmatic. Humanism is more of a method, involving the weighing of evidence when deciding on any matter. It’s about asking the question, “What sort of reasons do you have for holding the position you hold” or “What evidence is there that what you say is true”. It is a rejection of arguments based on authority or faith. It promotes engagement with political life through democratic processes; it does not dictate any party political allegiance.

Euthyphro

2010-04-26T19:48:00.004+01:00

This is the transcript of my 2 minute Pause for Thought on BBC Radio Humberside on Sunday 25th April 2010:

On what basis do people decide what is good and what is bad? Many people think that our ideas about justice, goodness and the right way to live can only have come to us through the commandments of an almighty and perfectly good God. In 380 BC, the philosopher Plato wrote a dialogue called Euthyphro which highlights a problem with this way of looking at things. In the dialogue, Plato’s teacher Socrates asks his friend Euthyphro this question. “Is that which the gods love good because they love it, or do they love it because it is good?” If the former is true, then the gods could choose to love anything they want, whether or not we humans would consider it good. A god could decide that something we think of as bad was good and vice versa. Alternatively, if the gods love the good simply because it is good, then what is good and bad must exist independently of any God. So whether there is or is not a God, I don’t think that believing in God or following the teachings of ancient scripture can absolve us of the responsibility of deciding which values and ideas are going to govern our lives. I think we have to discern these values using experience and an understanding of human nature, and whatever creed you believe in, deciding what is good and true is ultimately a judgement you make yourself. The fact that we have decided to think one thing or another does not necessarily make us right, but carefully thinking about our actions and there likely consequences has to be a better foundation for the good life than blindly following the rules laid down in ages past by people whose understanding of life was limited.