The Dawkins Delusion #2

Here's the second part of an article I wrote in 2006 about Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion.

In the first, posted a few weeks ago, I set out the problems Dawkins faced when writing it. To summarise, firstly, he didn't know enough about theology to do a decent demolition job.  Secondly, for someone who sets himself up as a rationalist, Dawkins’ own reasoning was often slipshod.  Thirdly, Dawkins made assumptions about the value of scientific truth which didn't seem to me to be warranted, and which he doesn't question.

In particular I tried to show how Dawkins failed to grasp the implications for religious people of the physical nature of the universe - broadly, it's a mistake to invoke the laws of physics to cast doubt on an entity that many religious people believe doesn't take physical form.

In this second part I want to look at Dawkins' treatment of the curious fact of the universe and of our presence within it.

This has been seized on by Theists keen to support the idea of a God.   Isn’t it funny, the argument runs, that conditions in the universe are just right for us?  How amazing that if the laws of physics were just slightly different then we wouldn't be here! This is an argument which is not perhaps as shaken as it should be by the thought that “we could only be discussing this question in the kind of universe that was capable of producing us" (The God Delusion, p.144), but nevertheless Dawkins seems uneasy here, and if there is only one universe then he evidently feels he has some refuting to do.

Dawkins suggests that the “Goldilocks” (ie just right for us) universe theory could be undermined by the suggestion that there are many universes “co-existing like bubbles of foam”, as he puts it.  This is not his field of expertise, and he can do little (p.145) except outline the theories of Martin Rees, Leonard Susskind and others about these multi or mega-verses.

Obviously if there were more than one universe, Theists would no longer be able to claim that the existence of one which included us must be part of God’s master plan, to design intelligent beings capable of appreciating Him (or other pronoun of choice).

It’s worth pausing here to consider how Dawkins’s intellectual stance sits alongside his rhetorical means.  Religion, The God Delusion tells us, is a lingering superstition, whereas Dawkins is a scientific rationalist, using only the tools of pure reason to demolish quasi-mediaeval faith.

But what tools is he relying on here?  The “suggestion” that there are many universes.  The multiverse "theory".  Our universe "may" this, "may" that, "may reverse itself".  "It is conceivable that" followed by "if" the other.  This on p.145, whilst over on p.146 someone else “has developed a tantalizingly Darwinian variant on the multiverse theory”; but don’t worry, it’s not a religious nut, it’s a respectable theoretical physicist, one Lee Smolin.

So let’s get this straight.  When Theists rely on unproven theories, they’re taking us back to the Dark Ages.  But when theoretical physicists do, they’re wheeled out to provide support for Prof Dawkins’ attempt to demolish the “Goldilocks” universe argument.

There’s more of the same double standards, incidentally, elsewhere in the book - look at p.155/6.

“May” and “if”, “theory” and “suggestion”, are deluded fantasies when they are part of the belief systems of the religious, but put them in the hands of Professor Dawkins and they become glinting forensic tools.

There is a powerful whiff of hypocrisy here.  The application of rigorous and fair premise-and-conclusion logic is the cornerstone of science, and something with which Dawkins explicitly associates himself.  He is a scientist after all.  But instead of examining the subject in a dispassionate and even-handed way, Dawkins buttresses his arguments with the same rhetorical bluster and flabby ratiocination he derides in his opponents.

The temptation to chuck the book in the bin was pretty strong, but my wife had paid fifteen quid for it, so I carried on reading.

However things got worse.

I'll post the gory details in a couple of weeks.

About as good as Mendelssohn

"I don't know why we have so many third rate foreign conductors", harrumphed Sir Thomas Beecham, "when we have so many second rate ones of our own".

The notion that the British prefer their glamorous Guiseppi Verdis to their prosaic home-grown Joe Greens is a persistent one amongst musicians, and although I've never knowingly experienced it, I've met a lot of musicians who swear they have.  Certainly plenty of them have tried to make their names more interesting in order to make themselves seem more interesting.  Albert Kettleby, himself a third rater, whose In A Monastery Garden is credited to the much more exotic sounding Albert Ketelby, also wrote under the pseudonym Anton Vodorinski.

Another favourite ploy is to utilise the middle name, which would make me Owen Nicholas Simpson (I could have been Wales's national composer, instead of merely being the best - possibly: I don't know all my neighbours - in my street).  It worked for Mark Turnage.  And for Richard Bennett.

As it happens, I'm not sure what Beecham has got against being second rate.  It's a condition I've aspired to through most of my compositional life.  That's why I was delighted by the following remarks by a horn playing colleague.  "That piece of yours we played a few years back", he said, "that was excellent.  Not as good as Beethoven, maybe.  About as good as Mendelssohn.  Not first rate, but maybe second rate".

Not as good as Beethoven.  But better than Kettleby.  I'll settle for that.

Meanwhile in Trinity Church Cemetery, Berlin, the composer of Midsummer Night's Dream, the Octet for Strings, Fingal's Cave and the E minor violin concerto is quietly turning in his grave.

Mario Draghi and the Guardian

The Guardian had some interesting things to say the other day following the launch of Mario Draghi's Outright Monetary Transaction scheme for buying up the bonds of Southern European economies.  Its admirable Economics Editor Larry Elliott summed up the drawback of the scheme in one sentence: "The rescue plan involves Governments in Rome and Madrid driving their economies deeper into depression to reduce interest rates they pay on their borrowing".  Quite right.

But here is the Leader column, taking much the same tone but with some interesting details which throw light on the Left of centre take on UK economic policy.

"The debt problems for Spain and Italy have worsened partly as a result of their economies slowing down: so strong-arming them into making ever more spending cuts will just intensify the death spiral. If you want a parallel, just look at George Osborne's double-dip recession, created with a very similar mix of "fiscal conservatism and monetary activism". As the chancellor has found, even after Mervyn King has thrown the best part of £400bn at the economy, a recovery can't be rustled up to order."

Firstly, the parallels with the UK are misconceived.  The UK has its own central bank which can set interest rates at a level suitable for this country.  EMU countries don't.  The UK's central bank can use QE to inject liquidity into the economy and keep its bond rates down.  Until now, EMU countries couldn't.  The UK can allow its currency to devalue to make its exports more competitive.  Individual EMU countries can't.

Actually the UK's position is not that much like the EMU countries'.  If we are sinking in recession it is partly because of the stasis across the Channel.

Secondly, the Graun's assertion that a recovery can't be rustled up to order, not even when its central bank has "thrown the best part of £400bn at the economy" blows a hole in its own criticism of George Osborne.  I'm sorry for labouring the following point, and I only do it because I don't hear it said anywhere else.

The Left has generally criticised Osborne for cutting too far and too fast.  If Osborne had cut more quickly (actually he has scarcely cut at all: public spending is still rising in nominal terms) he would have ended up borrowing more money.  This is the implicit consequence of Labour's policy, even if it is very rarely stated.  If Osborne cut less quickly and deeply, we are invited to believe, the economy would still be growing.

Now read the last sentence of the Leader again: "As the chancellor has found, even after Mervyn King has thrown the best part of £400bn at the economy, a recovery can't be rustled up to order."  But where even throwing £400 bn at the economy won't make it grow, why does the Guardian believe that the bit of extra borrowing we might be able to do - far less than £400 bn - would get us out of recession?

After all, we can all agree that "the best part of £400bn" didn't work, can't we?

OMT? OMG! It's the zombie continent!

I am not a gambler.  I won 14 new pence on a fruit machine in a Pontefract pub in about 1975, and decided to quit while I was ahead.  But six months or so ago I had a bet with a friend, my contention being that either the Germans would have to start paying to keep the Southern European economies afloat, or the ECB would have to start a QE programme; his that neither of these things would happen.

In middle age, these are the kinds of things you find exciting.

With the news yesterday that the ECB chief Mario Draghi is proposing what he calls the OMT, or Outright Monetary Transaction, a mechanism whereby the ECB can buy bonds of the Southern Europeans, I feel a phone call to my friend is in order.  I am trying to remember if any money was at stake.

Will the OMT save the Euro?  No.  Why?  Because, in a sop to the Germans, whose nominee at the ECB Jens Weidemann appears to have voted against the scheme, there will be strings attached for participating countries.  That's to say countries whose economies are failing, cutting spending in a tail-chasing death spiral of austerity, are going to have to cut further and faster in order to please the ECB and the IMF.  That would be counterproductive in a country that was doing well.  But in a country like Spain, with a headline rate of unemployment at 25% and youth unemployment at 50%, it will be a disaster.  The Spanish economy will get weaker, not stronger, making the argument for leaving the Euro altogether more attractive.

Moreover, being a can-kicking gesture even more expansive than Draghi's effort earlier this year (the Long Term Refinancing Operation), it will guarantee to make the patient's death throes more rather than less protracted, condemning those of us standing round the bedside to an even longer vigil.

We have had zombie banks and zombie economies.  Welcome to the zombie continent.

Four Lions at the gym

One of the depressing things about going to the gym, other than it being boring and painful, is the exposure it brings to the world of TV. Obviously it is worse in the daytime than at night, and no doubt worse after the morning news programmes have finished and the stuff that follows has begun: re-runs of lower league Spanish soccer, pyjama cricket, Loose Women, antiques shows, soaps, aggressive rappers, singing strippers, then, as lunchtime approaches, news-lite. Physical exercise is supposed to be morally uplifting - mens sana and all that.  It leaves me feeling somewhat defiled.

I was reminded of this, vaguely, when watching Chris Morris's Four Lions the other night. Omar, a young would-be terrorist, rants at his co-conspirators - "We have instructions to bring havoc to this bullshit, consumerist, godless, paki-bashing, Gordon Ramsay, Taste the Difference Speciality Cheddar, torture-endorsing, massacre-sponsoring, look-at-me-dancing-pissed-with-me-Knob-out, Sky One Uncovered, who gives a fuck about dead Afghanis Disneyland!" I sort of know how he feels.

I loved Four Lions.  It is, apparently, a particularly difficult aspect of the novelist's art to combine in the same narrative elements of comedy and tragedy without perceptible change of tone. The greats can manage it - Dostoevsky, Anthony Powell, Waugh - but others struggle. Graham Greene said he spent hours reading Dickens to try and work out how it was done. In this film Morris makes it look easy.

There are obvious bits of knockabout - the scene where Omar fires an RPG the wrong way round in an attempt to destroy a US drone is pure Laurel and Hardy - and some terrific verbal invention in a real or imaginary British Pakistani patois; but while I sat there hoping things weren't going to work out as badly as I feared they might, the terrible denouement seemed properly to belong to the events leading up to it; even the funny ones.

More than this though, Morris has put together a satire in which pretty much everyone gets a kicking.  The terrorists are stupid and callous. Special Branch close in on them but end up arresting the wrong man. Police marksmen shoot someone dressed as the honey monster and argue whether the honey monster is a bear or not. Omar's brother, a Muslim cleric who tells him what he is planning is wrong, nevertheless locks his wife in her room. There is a scene in which Omar and his wife tenderly discuss the suicide bomb plot, played painfully straight; I was thinking how acidic was Morris's attack when it occurred to me that things like this must have actually happened, and he was making us watch them.

The best British film I've seen in ages. It makes The King's Speech look bland and unambitious. As Omar's dim sidekick might Waj might have said, proper good art.

Classical music: genre fatigue?

I've written here previously about genre fatigue, that's to say the idea that an art form - in this case the Piano Quartet - can outlive its usefulness.  Let's apply the same idea for a moment to classical music generally.

The heyday of our art might be said to have come in the 18th and 19th centuries, when people flocked to concert halls to hear famous virtuosi and burgeoning orchestras.  Both were symptoms of growing prosperity and an increasingly organised society.  Individuals could devote their young lives to mastering an instrument, and as adults could make a reasonable living writing music, playing it and teaching it.  The economic model worked because enough people were willing to pay to hear them play or to play themselves as amateurs.

We take the continuation of this infrastructure for granted.  I think that's a mistake.  Young people are willing to devote hours of their time (10,000, the theory goes) and pursue classical music as a career because they think that there is a reasonable prospect of success.  In fact most of them don't make a career as performers, and you could argue that the conservatoires are in fact exploiting their students' naivety, peddling the dream of a stellar career which in most cases won't happen.

My contemporaries at College struggled to get into the profession in the UK, and the best oboist and horn player in my year now play professionally in Spain.  Others are in non music-related jobs.  More recently another friend who is a brilliant all-round musician finally got an orchestral job here when on the verge of packing it in.  Two flautists I know worked busily for years as freelances in the North West; one is now retraining as an IFA, another persists in the hope of getting a seat.  My heart goes out to both.  A violinist friend, trying to set up a chamber orchestra, tells me that he is going to work in a call centre, "until the music thing takes off".  I wonder whether he really believes that it will.

Despite these difficulties there is actually no shortage of young people wanting to become musicians.  Even if that changes in the UK, and it might, our conservatoires are full of talented players from Europe and the Far East who could do the job instead.

What there definitely is a shortage of however is people willing to come and hear them play.  And this is where things get serious.  The income of professional classical ensembles comes partly from bums on seats, partly from sponsorships and partly from subsidy administered by the Arts Council but funded by taxpayers.  In very difficult economic times (and times likely to get harder still) the argument for taxpayer subsidy of any art is more difficult to sustain.  An art like classical music, with a dwindling and ageing audience, is likely to be viewed as less rather than more of a priority and less attractive to sponsors.  How long before we see some professional orchestras close down?  I think it will happen in the next twenty years.

Part of the problem with the symphony orchestra is that it is essentially a nineteenth century invention.  A hundred years ago, it represented the flowering not just of prosperous industrial society, but also the apogee, or close to it, of technological possibility.  If you doubt this, just look at the key mechanism on any woodwind instrument.  But the electronic age quickly burst in, the developments in communication (the telephone, radio, TV) between the wars still dwarfing the achievements of the post-internet world, and the symphony orchestra became what it still is, a glorious antique.  Attempts to change it have been modest and largely unsuccessful.  Perhaps a modern orchestra will have a bit more percussion, but that's all.

The orchestra can still produce art of the greatest refinement and depth, but what it lacks is the sense of belonging to now, and while this is not the only cause of its peril it is a significant one.  Whilst it may be true that its range and variety are infinite, we now know that, paradoxically, it is infinite only within certain constrained parameters.  The average teenager can spend a couple of hundred quid on a PC and soundcard then download programs for free which will enable him or her to produce sounds you could never get out of a symphony orchestra in a million years.  Moreover whilst it takes years to learn how to play an instrument really well, years to learn how to write for orchestra, and a long time to write sustained pieces of music which you will be lucky to get put on, an intelligent person can get started on a computer in an afternoon, burn a CD before teatime and have his music played in a club before midnight.

The banishment of tonality and regular rhythm in the latter half of the 20th century led classical composers to concentrate increasingly on timbre as a constructive device; I have often thought this inherently superficial, but the dazzling sophistication of computer Digital Signal Processing has made their efforts lame.  There is more sonic invention in the average hip-hop track than in most modern scores.  There's a limited amount an orchestra can do.

Many composers don't think it matters if most people don't like their music, and in a way they're right. It only matters if they expect the professional institutions which perform it to carry on existing.  Then it matters very much indeed.  The failure of modern composers as a group to write music which can enthuse an audience is another key element of classical music's decline.

So is classical music suffering from genre fatigue?  The history of art is littered with examples of genres that have withered and died.  The magic lantern.  The Victorian ballad.  Melodrama.  It took me fifteen seconds to think of these.  There must be dozens more.  Why shouldn't classical music be one of them?  When I was young I assumed it would go on forever, but there is no reason why it should.

I want to raise the possibility that, like other genres, classical music, for all its longevity and flexibility, has certain limits beyond which it cannot function.  That is to say, it has developed in the last hundred years in a way which is possible within the technical constraints of the instruments which play it, but which may not be able to command the attention of a paying audience big enough to sustain it.

There would be no shame in this.  I think it is only because classical music has over the centuries attracted such extraordinary prestige and cultural impact that adherents like me expect it to continue all-powerful.  But it ain't necessarily so.  Perhaps it is a genre with limitations.  Bluegrass music, for example, tends to feature the banjo.  Symphonic bluegrass played on synthesisers and theremins (I just made that up) might be interesting, but it might not attract an audience and it wouldn't be bluegrass any more.

Perhaps we have to accept that, like bluegrass, classical music also has limitations, and that once we go beyond them it may not be classical music any more, or at least not in a way which has mass appeal and is sustainable.  The pursuit of originality has taken us a long way, but it hasn't taken a mass audience along with it.

The composer Nicholas Maw once gave an interview in which he was taxed on his lack of radicalism.  I paraphrase, but Maw's reply was to this effect: "I see myself as the inheritor of a tradition and I don't want to depart too far from it".  I would add that in my own work, such as it is, I feel a responsibility to pass that tradition on so that it survives the present century.  At this stage that seems like quite an ambition.

There's a story to the effect that Rabbis in Auschwitz held a debate about the existence of God.  Unsurprisingly, given their plight, they voted against.  After the vote, the most senior Rabbi said, "Thank you, gentlemen, for an interesting evening.  We will end as usual with prayers".

And so back to work.

The Dawkins Delusion #1

In 2006 I read – most of – Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion.  I didn't read it all because I found it so infuriating.  Why?  Broadly for three reasons.  Firstly, I don’t think Dawkins knows enough about theology to do a decent demolition job.  Secondly, for someone who sets himself up as a rationalist, Dawkins’ own reasoning is often – and I'm being as charitable as I can – slipshod.  Thirdly, Dawkins makes assumptions about the value of scientific truth which don't seem to me to be warranted, and which he doesn't question.

To get my own position out of the way, I am not a Christian.  Or a Jew or a Muslim.  But I am interested in these things, as I think everyone should be, and I hate the vanity and hypocrisy which The God Delusion exudes.  The following is an extract from a long article I wrote at the time.  In the coming weeks I'll post further parts of it.

In writing TGD Dawkins faced a mammoth task.  It's notoriously difficult to prove a negative - that God doesn't exist, for example - and moreover to take only the three Abrahamic religions is to confront a bewildering variety of doctrines and sub-doctrines even within one of them.  Many religious people, when asked “Does God exist?” would reply, “It depends what you mean by ‘God’ and what you mean by ‘exist’ “.  

This is not nitpicking - it goes to the heart of what religion is about, and has preoccupied religious scholars for thousands of years.  That so many different answers have been given presents problems for Dawkins, who plainly dislikes religion thoroughly and moreover has a day job as a teacher of science: the idea of spending so much free time immersing himself in these ideologies must have seemed anathema.  Moreover the effort would hardly seem worthwhile since the task of attacking each strand of religious thought in detail would be a lifetime's work.  

If the question “Does God exist?” were expanded thus – “To what extent was God responsible for Creation?  To what extent does God intervene in our lives?” - the scale of the ensuing theological complexities becomes all the more dauntingly apparent.

That Dawkins can't resist dipping his toe into theology unfortunately leaves him open to the charge of ignorantly misrepresenting the beliefs he is attacking, and, more seriously, attacking only those that are easy to knock down.  Terry Eagleton’s notorious review of TGD in the London Review of Books described the experience as rather like reading a book on biology by someone whose knowledge of the subject is confined to having studied the Book of British Birds.  There's an element of comic exaggeration about this, but a grain of truth too.

Perhaps recognizing that dealing with all these varied beliefs in detail is not going to be possible, Dawkins spends a great deal of the early part of the TGD explaining why it is very unlikely that God was responsible for creation.  After all, if God can be shown not to have done the things religion seems to say He did, then that in itself might be strong grounds for his non-existence.

Chapter 4 of the book, Why There Almost Certainly Is No God, contains what Dawkins describes as its “central argument”.  He explains (p.141 of the hardback) that physicists “have calculated that, if the laws and constants of physics had been even slightly different, the universe would have developed in such a way that life would have been impossible”.  How could it be that the universe is fine-tuned to allow chemicals to form and life to flourish?  

Theists, Dawkins writes, say that God tuned the fundamental constants of the universe so that each one lay in the ideal range for the production of life.  But “As ever (p.143) the theist’s answer is deeply unsatisfying, because it leaves the existence of God unexplained …. A God capable of (fine-tuning the universe in this way) would have to be at least as improbable as the finely tuned combination of numbers itself, and that’s very improbable indeed…  It follows that the theist’s answer has utterly failed to make any headway towards solving the problem at hand”. 

This is an interesting paragraph.  One, it’s fairly typical of Dawkins’ rhetorical style.  The theist’s answer is “deeply unsatisfying” and has “utterly failed”.  Apparently being unsatisfying and having failed alone would not have been enough.  On the following page Dawkins describes the theistic response as not just an “evasion”, but an evasion “of stupendous proportions”, and not just a restatement of the problem but a “grotesque” amplification of it.  There are many other instances of this sort of hyperbole, rather as if Dawkins felt he hadn't quite been persuasive enough and needed to stick in a few more adjectives.

Secondly, for Dawkins, the existence or otherwise of God is a “problem” which needs to be solved.  Reading the book I found sometimes found myself wondering, Could Dawkins not just relax a bit?  On p.155 he writes, “To suggest that the first cause, the great unknown which is responsible for something existing rather than nothing, is a being capable of designing the universe and of talking to a million people simultaneously, is a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation”.  Responsibility?  Really?  Why?  And instead of finding an explanation, couldn’t we just make one up?  I'll return to this idea of making things up later, because it has a bearing on what all of us, but particularly artists, do.

Thirdly and more pertinently, Dawkins seems to be suggesting that there can be no God because “a God capable of (fine-tuning the universe in this way) would have to be at least as improbable as the finely tuned combination of numbers itself”.

But this is a shoddy argument. It doesn't follow that something even more improbable than the extraordinary improbability of the universe must be impossible merely on the grounds of that extra bit of improbability.  After all, if the extraordinarily improbable universe exists, why should we baulk at the extra bit of improbability that God – according to Dawkins – would require?

Fourthly, the universe is a physical phenomenon, and in these pages Dawkins is assuming that religious people believe it was physically created by a physically capable God.  But whilst some undoubtedly do, many religious people don’t believe in the designer hypothesis at all (another example of the structural defect in the book I referred to at the start).  Even many Church-going Bible-reading Christians don’t believe that God designed and created the universe and everything in it. 

But Dawkins makes an even more fundamental mistake.  On p.158 he writes of the universe, “the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.”  Well perhaps, but only if the designer were a physical entity.  

The universe and the living creatures within it are physical things, and the processes of coming-into-being Dawkins describes are physical processes.  If the designer were not a physical entity but instead a universal being as many religious people believe (whatever that might be), he (she/it) wouldn’t have needed designing.  

A universal being doesn’t have a beginning or end.  He/she/it just is.  Sure, most Christians believe that God is capable of making himself flesh, and did so in Jesus’ case; but they don’t believe God has breakfast.  They believe instead that God is everywhere and all around us, always has been, always will be.  They believe God is in the room with them. 

This may be a laughably vague belief, but it isn't refuted by the (mistaken) assumption Dawkins makes.  If you don't believe that God takes a physical form, a demonstration that God has failed to accord with the laws concerning physical creation is irrelevant.

Thus far, Dawkins isn't coming across as the hot-shot ratiocinator.  More on his failings later on in the Autumn.