bilblogz

(revised from an earlier blog on Facebook)

Earlier this year I went to a Humanist meeting, only the second time I’d been to one. These days I feel horribly uncomfortable at gatherings where I don’t know anyone, and this being at an unfamiliar pub added to my nervousness. Still, it would to be a meeting of people with a similar outlook on life, hopefully I’d feel at ease in such surroundings.
Once I’d found the place and spotted the discreetly labelled tables, I felt more relaxed. I bought a pint, and grinned sheepishly as I sat down in a vacant chair with three other earnest-looking people who were all drinking water. Awkward introductions over, we began tentative conversations : how had we all come to be humanists? had we started off as Christians? how had we heard about the meeting? etc.
Then suddenly, the mousy man sitting opposite me said : “So, do you know why you’re here?” 
All three of us looked a bit blank, the grey-haired woman laughed and asked if anyone really knew why they were here, she certainly didn’t. I remarked something similar.
The man smiled smugly, and retorted : “Oh, I know!”
“You do?” we all stared at him a little surprised. Warning bells chimed loudly in the back of my head.
“Oh yes,” he gushed, “I’m quite sure.”
“Pray tell us!” The woman had a slightly wicked twinkle in her eye.
I was wondering if he was some foolhardy Christian who’d dared to come in there to try and direct us onto the righteous path.
“You see,” he began, “we’re all Von Neumann machines, the universe is just maths, and the elementary particles which make up matter are nothing… nothing more than units of information…” 
He rambled on a bit, I’d read this sort of theory in the New Scientist before, and found it a bit far-fetched, and to me there seemed to be some very unsatisfactory gaps in the reasoning. The two women were looking completely lost, and at last one of them interrupted him, saying that she didn’t understand a word of what he was wittering on about. He smiled beatifically. 
At this point I told him that this was all just one fringe hypothesis, and that most scientists had other views, at which he bridled.
“Oh no, it’s Fact, it’s the Truth! Life is a Von Neumann machine in the universal computer, it’s been proved,” he asserted, fierce and wide-eyed, “all scientist are coming round to agreeing with it. You’ll see, in a few years it will be firmly established, and there’ll be no need for any more research!”
This was too much. 
“That’s what they said at the end of the nineteenth century,” I told him, “that’s what they believed until Einstien came along, then there was Quantum Physics, then String Theory - that’s the thing about science, something new is always being discovered, there are just no final answers.”
“Rubbish!” he snapped, “this is the Truth! This is Fact, you can’t argue with it!”
“Oh, but I do argue with it!” I challenged, feeling emboldened by his sheer arrogance. I noticed the woman next to him looking at his face with a worried expression. 
“Then you’re a fool!” he bawled at me.
I was taken aback at this - I’d only been there about fifteen minutes, and already I was being insulted by this monomaniac. Now I was angry.
“I think you’re the fool,” I blasted back, “you misunderstand the very nature of science!”
He was not to be put off. “I know the truth, I’m a mathematician, I have a degree, I’ve studied physics, don’t worry, you’ll come to learn in time that you were wrong.” 
He wore that ghastly self-satisfied expression which born-again Christians have.
“How dare you patronise me!” I barked, “no one knows these things for certain, it’s all just theory. You’re just as bad as the Jehovah’s Witnesses who come to the front door haranguing us about their Truth.”
“Oh you’re just an uneducated idiot,” he told me.
I wasn’t going to take that lying down, I let fly some four-letter words, then cursed myself for losing control.
“We haven’t come here to be preached at,” one of the women told him, “I think you should save your lectures for a different occasion.”
He eventually slunk off when he realized that he wasn’t going to have a group of fawning admirers at his prophetic feet gasping in wonder at his great revelations. He joined another table, where, from his gestures, it was clear he’d begun all over again with some more victims.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that on your first visit - rest assured, we don’t usually get that sort of thing,” the older woman said. 
I’ll probably go back to another of their meetings, and somehow I think I won’t need to beware of the born-again Von Neumann machine. 
He won’t be there.

I’ve recently had fairly shattering eye problem : after seeing spots and mistiness, I had laser treatment for a torn retina, then a few days later, without any further warning, the eye suddenly went blind: a retinal haemorrhage. It happened in a matter of seconds .

I have since learnt a lot about ocular anatomy, and the causes of my condition: as one gets older, the vitreous humour which fills the main cavity of the eyeball begins to shrink. As it shrinks, it can drag at the retina, tearing the blood-vessels and often pulling the retina away, and causing bleeding inside. This can usually be fixed with laser surgery, and the blood and humour removed and replaced with an inert saline of similar consistency.

But what a bad design! If an ‘intelligent creator’ invented this, then it did a very poor job. Why does the body not stop the vitreous humour from shrinking? If we can produce two litres of saliva every day, why can’t we keep the eye full of fluid? Why is my eye going to take months to clear away the blood that has accumulated inside?

One can ask similar questions about all the various flaws and weaknesses of the teeth, the spine, the kidneys, of childbirth, etc. - the things that go wrong through basic design faults. Logically, if the whole of life had really been designed intelligently, we wouldn’t need medics or medicine, everything would function properly - including the immune system.

On the other hand, evolution muddles along, producing its best efforts, which are inevitably imperfect. Medicine is where intelligence comes in - human, evolved intelligence - to correct nature’s clumsy mistakes.

Science essentially means doubt, it is a process of continual questioning, of testing new ideas to further knowledge on any given subject, then coming to a provisional conclusion. Proper science always leaves its ideas open to further research, and takes nothing as an ultimate Truth - all laws of nature are open to revision, all physics is constantly being re-thought, nothing is taken as gospel.

This is why creationism is not, and can never be, a science: its very basis is unscientific, in that it starts from a given invariable - the word of the Bible. If that part of the process is made unquestionable, then it is fraudulent to claim it as a science.

Of course, if creationism allowed the authority of the Bible to be questioned scientifically, it would immediately be revealed as nothing but primitive mumbo-jumbo, and this is why the fundamentalists have to try to denigrate real science, watering it down with their own pseudo-scientific charlatanism.

Science asks, creationism dictates.

Last week I noticed a foggy patch in the sight of my left eye, and I went to the nearest high-street opticians to get it checked out. They booked me in for a check the next day, Sunday. They were very thorough, and didn’t charge me a penny for the consultation, I simply had to sign an NHS form. They gave me a letter of referral with diagnosis, and I took this straight to Moorfields Eye Hospital - one of the best such places in the world, where (still Sunday afternoon) I was through triage in a few minutes, and seen by a consultant within an hour. I was told to come back the next day. So I was back there on the Monday morning at the Retinal Emergency Clinic and after more tests and careful inspection, received laser surgery to repair a torn retina. None of this cost me any money, no bills to have to worry about, and thanks to the British NHS system the whole thing was done straight away.

While I was sitting in the waiting room, I was thinking: “This kind of thing is amazing, and in in Britain we take it for granted, yet there are idiots in the USA who want to deprive themselves and the poorer people of their country of such a system for phoney ideological reasons.”

There is nothing ‘socialist’ about it, no more than the police force, or the military.

The ugly skeleton of Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy’ is, in fact, Eugenics. The basic thread of her fantasy novel ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is how a small, self-designated elite get together to decide who is fit to survive, then with the aid of magical inventions they eliminate the rest of humanity. Thus, the ugly masses are swept away leaving the world to a ‘higher’ breed of human – i.e. Nietsche’s Superman, Hitler’s Aryan.

This was typical thinking of an elitist movement in the early twentieth century, where intellectuals saw the ‘masses’ as a brutal sub-breed, at best a necessary evil, at worst a pestilence. Novels of the period often expose this prejudice; new forms of art and writing were created deliberately aimed at the ‘highest’ brains, full of references which only the classically trained would understand. Poems were larded with Greek and Latin, painters and sculptors devised abstract art, originally intended to be meaningless to all but the initiated, and scorn was poured upon figurative work as ‘lowbrow’. Only when the real, hideous face of eugenics was revealed at the end of WW2, did the movement begin to fade, although some of its ‘highbrow’ legacy lives on in the arts, where the esoteric and arcane are still venerated as superior to the less obscure.

Ayn Rand’s political idea, Objectivism,  was to achieve the same end as in her novel, but by less fantastic means: for the ‘elite’ to be utterly selfish, to keep their riches and the means of production, and not to distribute wealth, abolishing taxes, so that the poor and ‘unproductive’ eventually would die out through lack of medical care, proper food and bad living conditions.

The flaws in the theory are glaringly obvious.

Firstly, who decideds the choice of the elite? It may be very easy in the pages of a pulp novel, but in the real world, it is not nearly so simple. Those with wealth, but no brains, would get chosen – while many very intelligent, but less fortunate people would get left out. History shows that much of our great art and many great discoveries came from individuals who would never qualify for Rand’s super-race, while some of the most powerful men have been extremely stupid.

Without her fictional magical machines, the intellectuals would still need a workforce to build roads, planes, infrastructure. Or maybe they would have to manage without any kind of help – scarcely feasible, and not desirable in her world for the brains to turn themselves to hard labour. The jigsaw picture doesn’t fit together.

In the no-holds-barred non-society she envisages, everyone would be at the mercy of everyone else, one could never trust anyone, since imposed law and government are not permitted. Ninety percent of one’s time and energy would be spent in protecting oneself from others – an impossible situation in reality – because however clever all these elite people might be, they would not have any kind of moral standards. Morality is something Rand mocks as unnecessary.

The tragedy is that many, particularly in the USA, have taken Rand as a kind of prophet, and treat her words as a blueprint for a better society. The neo-con movement has lapped up her ideas, and it is the foundation of the so-called free-market and globalization. No wonder that, when right-wing forces allowed the economy to go unchecked to its logical, Objectivist extreme the world’s economy imploded in 2008.

I believe if we were to allow Objectivism to run the same wild course in society, civilization would plunge the same way into total anarchic chaos – an apocalyptic wasteland achieved wihout the aid of a nuclear war.

A few years ago I visited the Caribbean with a friend, and one evening met up with his very christian sister and her family. They knew he had become an unbeliever, but avoided the topic for most of the evening. I was relieved, I didn’t really want to ruin a relaxed holiday with serious, pointless discussions about their superstitious obsessions.

We had a pleasant meal, and I was about to heave a sigh of relief, when the husband turned to me and said earnestly: “I’d like to take a moment to chat to you properly.”

I thought: Oh no! I’m not to be spared the sermons, after all.

He began: “I just wanted to say that we live our life by the Scriptures, and I’d like to understand your position…”

This gave me the opening I needed. “What scriptures do you mean?” I asked.

He was slightly taken aback. “Why, THE Scriptures, the Bible.”

“Have you ever studied the origins of the Bible?” I inquired, “Who exactly wrote all the various books and parts of books?”

For a moment he was unable to answer - an intelligent man, but one who had clearly limited the scope of his reading. I told him about the First Council of Nicea, about the various editings, expurgations and additions to the corpus of what later became the Bible. I pointed out how St Paul, true founder of ‘Christianity’ inverts most of Jesus’ teachings, and how he is pretty much the Anti-Christ.

After about an hour, we had to take our leave, and I was flabberghasted when he stood up and shook my hand and thanked me for enlightening him! Had I actually converted him? I wondered for a moment.

Sadly it was not quite that simple - I learned later that the family had revised their hard-line attitudes somewhat, and stopped attending the local church, but were still having Bible-readings at home.

Well, I tried. A slight shift away from dogmatism is better than none at all, I guess.

Looking back to my time as a student, although we had no internet, no cellphones, and man had not yet set foot on the moon, the world seems to have been much more sophisticated then. Evolutionary theory was universally accepted, and science was universally respected. Religious belief was extremely rare amongst my fellow students. Apart from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, there was no one who believed in the medieval idea that the world was literally created 6000-odd years ago - we all laughed at their stupidity.

But something started to go badly wrong with education in the 1960s: new ideas came in, and traditional subjects were thrown out as well as traditional teaching methods. Some of this was beneficial, but much was lost, including, I believe, a basic grounding in science and the humanities.

I think creationism really started to get a foothold around that time, the lack of early commonsense science teaching created fertile ground to plant the seeds of their idiotic, unscientific evil. This is why they want to influence schools at the most basic level - if they corrupt children then, they’ve already won over all but the most intelligent. Only those who achieve highest grades may get the chance to revise the implanted falsehoods when they get to university.