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.

Patronising the Paralympics

I watch sport to see other people doing things I can't do, so although I am not against the Paralympics I'm not specially for them either.  The media is however having a Paralympic love-in, thus giving the lie (in case you doubted it) to the idea that there is value-free news.  For the last fortnight or so there has been coverage of plucky Brits and plucky people generally, which is fair enough except it begs the question whether the spectacle of them competing against each other is one worth watching.  It may or may not be, but it would be nice to think that there was room for the view that it wasn't.

In case this seems a nasty way of looking at things, consider that in the run up to the Olympics the media gorged itself on stories of G4S's incompetence, legacy disputes, marketing crackdowns, unsold tickets, corporate graft, incompetent bus drivers and so on.  Where are those stories now?

This is the dog that didn't bark.  The stories are not there because journalists and their editors have decided the Paralympics are good and, let's be honest, it would not be politically correct to publish or broadcast anything which cast aspersions on them.

Good luck to the athletes - you are brave and driven beyond anything I could accomplish.  But you are all being thoroughly patronised.  That might be better than being abused, but I doubt somehow it's what you would want.

I told my daughter that I watched sport to see people doing things I couldn't do.  She said, "So you think you could win the Paralympic 100 metres?"

The realisation that I would be left standing by a double-amputee was a sobering one.

"Er, no", I said.

Perhaps I will watch a bit after all.

What George Osborne should really be doing

I have for a couple of years been arguing that George Osborne's economic policy might not be such a failure as his critics suggest.  Asking whether the economy is growing might not be the right question when countries are foundering across Europe but Britain can borrow at rock-bottom rates.  But I have always said that Osborne's position will get a lot more difficult if he doesn't bring the deficit down.

From memory, 2011-12's deficit was about 126 billion, down from about 136 billion in 2010-11 (In Labour's last year in office the shortfall was nearer 150 billion).  A couple of months' recent figures however show significantly higher borrowing than the Chancellor planned, raising the spectre that the 2012-13 deficit might start pushing back up again.  Of course what's important is the inflation-adjusted figure rather than the nominal one, or perhaps better still the deficit as a percentage of GDP.  But whichever way you look at it Osborne is sailing close to the wind, and the bond markets will take a dim view if it turns out his tenuous grip on the deficit is slipping.

Given circumstances in the Eurozone I can't see any British chancellor having a hope in hell of getting the economy to grow at the moment, but having flayed Osborne's critics, notably the clueless Aditya Chakrabortty, for failing to set out a coherent alternative strategy, here, at absolutely no cost, are my top tips for things an imaginative Chancellor could do to - I was going to write make things better, but let's restrict ourselves to not making things worse than they would have been otherwise.

1.  The much vaunted infrastructure projects.  The difficulty with using QE as helicopter money to shower on individuals is that they tend to spend it on imports.  Better use it to fund big projects that will help us in the future.  I don't much like the Heathrow Third Runway or new roads, but I quite fancy the Severn Barrage.  We are going to be woefully short of electricity generating capacity in the near future, and Blair should have been doing something about it in the Noughties instead of blathering on about Cool Britannia.  New nuclear power stations, preferably thorium-powered, wouldn't go amiss either.  If we still had anyone who knew how to build them.

2.  State run mortgage bank.  No, not like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (mortgage guarantee schemes thoroughly abused by commercial lenders), but a bank to allow existing mortgage holders to transfer at low rates of interest.  If the bank (we could call it RBS) were funded by means of QE, the Government would get the interest paid on the loans, and commercial lenders would have to do something else with their money to get a return - lend it to small businesses, perhaps.

3.  The nuclear option.  QE has been used thus far as a bond-buying scheme, with old bonds bought up by the Bank of England.  In theory that means HMG has to pay the BoE the coupon, or interest, on those bonds, and repay the capital sum when it falls due.  I'm guessing that's happening in practice too, only because if it weren't I'm sure we'd have been told about it.  But if it is, why is it?  The BoE dances to the Government's tune.  Or it should be doing.  Why can't it just tear up the bond and say, "Well we'll forget about that"?  That way the BoE could use QE quietly to buy up debt from banks and pension funds and just as quietly cancel it.  It wouldn't do much to cure the deficit (though it would reduce the burden of interest HMG pays daily in millions); it would however reduce the enormous debts HMG is currently amassing.  You issue debt, the central bank buys it using QE then quietly cancels it.  There must be a problem with this, but I can't see it.  City types should feel free to write in and note their objections.

As for what Osborne shouldn't be doing, I can only think of one thing.

1.  Borrow money and pump it into the economy.  Consider.  The Bank of England has over the last couple of years created about £375 billion by way of QE.  Now undoubtedly things would have been even worse if it hadn't, but even this enormous sum has not been sufficient to keep us out of recession.  Our current annual deficit is about £125 billion.  So even if HMG succeeded in borrowing double its current deficit (and we'll come to the size of that if in a moment), it would still be only half way to getting hold of the £375 billion that made no perceptable difference when it was bandied about by the BoE.  But actually there is no chance whatsoever of HMG succeeding in borrowing an additional £125 billion from the gilt markets (over and above the £125 billion or thereabouts it's likely to be borrowing anyway this year).  The markets would think the Chancellor had gone crazy.  Interest rates would go up.  The ratings agencies would downgrade the UK several notches.  Funds would be available if at all only at astronomic rates.  In a nutshell then, there is no sum the Chancellor can borrow big enough to do anything other than give a barely perceptable nudge to the UK economy.  The Balls and Chakraborttys of this world are guilty of a category error.  They think there is always a simple and painless solution to a problem.  Sometimes there is, but this isn't one of those times or one of those problems.

Kevin Pietersen's tattoos

At the time of writing this, England's attempt to score 340-odd in the fourth innings to beat South Africa and thus retain their status as the world's No. 1 Test nation is foundering under the pressure of both the Proteas' bowling and the stress inherent in chasing such a large total.  England might have had a bit more chance had Kevin Pietersen been playing, but KP, as he likes to be known, has been dropped following revelations that he had texted derogatory comments about his team-mates to his fellow South Africans.

To remind non-cricketers, Pietersen is a South African.  But he's playing for England.  How has that come about?  Because the ECB's rules allow naturalisation after four years' residence.  This is an aspect of the game's laws that has allowed a number of overseas cricketers, most recently Pietersen, Jonathan Trott and Craig Kieswetter, to turn out for England despite, in some cases, having represented their own countries at junior level.  South Africans have been particularly adept at shape-shifting in this way, firstly because for years the apartheid boycott kept their country out of international sport, latterly because the quota system has seen some of their most talented cricketers kept out of the international side in favour of non-whites.

My sympathy for them is limited.  Pietersen is an unattractively egotistical goon who has simply followed his ambition, which was to stride the big stage.  He has often been colossal, but although he had three lions tattooed on his shoulder, his loyalty to England is skin deep.  Why should we be so surprised to find that, come the crunch, his loyalties are not to his team mates but his fellow countrymen?  That is actually as it should be.  The whole point of international sport is that it should take place between the people of one country and another.

But that begs the question, what does "of one country" mean?  My personal preference would be for a birth qualification, but if it has to be residence then four years is way too short.  The ECB has recently recognised this and upped it to seven.  But that still means that a South African could represent his country at U-15 level and then play for England at 22.  Not good enough.

Monty Panesar, a Sikh from Luton, is English through and through.  So is Ravi Bopara and so was Mark Ramprakash.  But Pietersen, Kieswetter and Trott are South Africans and, wherever they live, should be playing for South Africa.  The present arrangements mock the rationale, such as it is, for competitive sport between nations (incidentally, Rugby Union is just as guilty of this too).

It's not often that I agree with Peter Oborne, but the journalist said that he would rather watch a proper England team lose than one stuffed with opportunists and mercenaries win.  This fact will be of little interest to the ECB.  But perhaps more pertinently, I'd be more likely to pay to go and watch a team full of Englishmen, no matter whether they won or lost.

New location for British capital

I was lucky enough to go to the Olympics, twice, mainly because my wife is adept at getting me to do things I’d never do if left to my own devices.  The atmosphere, as everyone keeps saying, was fantastic; in fact, feats on the track notwithstanding, it struck me as being our greatest achievement.  After all, if you take a medium-sized country with a sporting tradition of sorts and chuck money at it, common sense would suggest you’ll get a crop of Gold and other medals (I’d like to take this opportunity to thank people who have less money than me for buying all those Lottery tickets; even though it is depressing to see such a woeful collective misunderstanding of the way probability works).  Of course we were likely to do well.  And we duly did.

 But the volunteers were something else again.  I have heard people say that their conduct was a triumph of multiculturalism; actually I wonder whether the reverse is the case.  As I walked around the Olympic Park what struck me about the cheery, slightly self-conscious, self-deprecating humour emanating from the faces in the queasy taupe and magenta Games uniform was, notwithstanding their bewildering variety of colour and racial feature, how British they all were.

It’s rare for me nowadays to have the slightly welling-up feel-good surge that Liberals must have all the time when they consider immigration policy and its consequences, but I did last week.  Or nearly.  These people, or more likely their parents or grandparents, came to this country from all over the world.  But nevertheless their culture, expressed in their attitudes, demeanour and language, was palpably mine.

I am sceptical about most things, as befits a grumpy old man, and downright pessimistic about a world mired in consumerism and debt, complacent about population levels and at best only a stone's throw away from barbarism.  But within that pre-apocalyptic context I actually feel quite optimistic about Britain.  Our capital, it seemed to me walking round Stratford and Greenwich, was not in London; it lay, if you'll forgive the pun, in the culture which is all around us.

Philip Hensher, Pierre Boulez, Twitter and losing the plot.

Recently a friend sent me a link to a Philip Hensher article in the Independent entitled "Will nobody mourn the death of classical music?"  Google it if you're interested, but if time presses, Hensher concludes by writing, "...in a hundred years . . . it will be incomprehensible, dead, and gone, and very few people will care". You get the picture.

I was reminded of this when, driving up the M74 the other week to climb yet more grey Scottish mountains, I listened to Donald Macleod interviewing Pierre Boulez.  The East West Divan Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim was playing a series of Boulez pieces in its week-long programme of Beethoven symphonies at the Proms.

Macleod began by saying something rather daring.  A composer friend of his, on being told that Macleod was going to be interviewing Boulez, had remarked that the Frenchman’s music was “decadent”.  Boulez dealt with this observation graciously enough by not dealing with it at all, gently heading the discussion off in the direction of other less tendentious terms like “baroque” and “rococo”.  Macleod did not persist with the “decadent” line, leaving me to wonder exactly what his friend had meant, and whether there might be any sense in which the term was just.

That night’s Boulez piece had one of those titles beloved of late 20^th century composers, something like “Diversions II”.  It beebled and burbled, shrieked, twisted and turned.  For the first ten minutes at least.  Then I switched it off.  Feeling that I was going to be sitting in the car anyway, and I might learn something, I switched it back on.  The piece was doing pretty much the same thing as it had been when I switched it off.  I turned over to Radio 5 instead, with its inane chatter about the forthcoming Olympics and whether Brad Wiggins would win the Tour.  Eventually, tiring of that, I switched back to the Boulez.  It was still burbling and shrieking, only this time with a bit more cello.

I am well into the second half of my life now, and I do not want to spend any more than I have to of the years that remain listening to music I don’t enjoy, so I switched it off for the last time.

I have for years been arguing that there are precious few objective standards in art, and so I am not going to fall into the trap of saying that this Boulez piece (or the others I heard in the following days) was bad music.  I just don’t like it.  It might however be interesting to set out something of why I don’t like it, or to be more accurate, why I don’t think it works.

Deprived of the gravitational pull tonality affords at both the micro and macro levels, Boulez’s music lacks a sense of harmonic direction.  And writing in a language in which any combination of pitches (apart from the triad, of course) is permitted, it also - paradoxically - lacks harmonic variety.  After all, one atonal six note cluster is quite like another.  When regular rhythm is shunned, distinctions between fast and slow music disappear; the listener is left with a musical landscape which is, paradoxically, one-paced.  Because melodic ideas aren’t audibly repeated it’s very hard for the listener to get a hold of any structural features.  In short, I find it a language in which opportunities for variety and contrast seem to have been carefully excised, with tedious results.

But none of these things would matter if I liked the material from moment to moment, and I guess this is the key. There are plenty of composers who are not terribly interested in construction (or not very good at it), but whose material I find irresistible – Schubert, Rachmaninov, Mahler, Grieg, John Williams, amongst others – and it is a coincidence that the composer I most admired as a teenager – Sibelius – turns out not only to have written material I find deeply stirring but also to be one of the greatest constructors of any kind of music at any period.

We all know that most people who like classical music don’t like Boulez (read this sentence again carefully if you think you disagree with it).  Of those, I suspect that the overwhelming majority don’t give a fig for (and aren’t even aware of) the technical points I mentioned.  Like me, they just don’t like the material.

Back to Philip Hensher.  I have written before about the decline in classical music in Britain, but I don’t quite share Hensher's apocalyptic view.  I think classical music is rescuable given a sensible education policy and, just as crucial, a sensible programming policy.  We aren’t likely to get either any time soon, of course. 

In any other artistic discipline the idea that you might promote something audiences don’t like just for the sake of it would be laughed to oblivion.  Not so in classical music.  And this brings me to the question of Pierre Boulez’s decadence.

I don’t think Boulez is a decadent composer.  Not remotely.  One of the great things about being a composer (and I guess an artist of any kind), is that in contrast to the many constraints we all experience in our lives, in art we are, at present in the West, free to create whatever we want.  If Boulez likes writing his sort of stuff, good luck to him.

But I suppose you might argue that, in a context where the audience for classical music is ageing and declining, it is decadent to insist on performing music that people, on the whole, don’t like. 

And when opportunities for putting on new music before a mass audience are rare, you might argue that it was double-plus decadent to insist on performing Boulez, repeatedly, at a festival paid for, on the whole, by the general public, who like it even less. 

It might be laudable to play it a few times, to see how it goes down.  But when it becomes apparent that they don’t like it after, oh I don’t know, fifty years or so, you might also argue that it was decadent to keep on ramming it down the public’s throats, particularly when there exist reams of other new music that they might like and that could be put on instead.

You might further argue that, when it’s felt that a helpful moment-to-moment explanation on the Proms’ Twitter feed (and no, I am not making this up) is necessary while the beebling and burbling is going on, the plot – as well as an opportunity - has been well and truly lost.

For whatever else you can say about it, art whose advocates acknowledge the need for a written explanation while it's going on is palpably Not Working.

Questioning Aditya Chakrabortty

My favourite economics commentator, Aditya Chakrabortty, has provided some more innocent entertainment for the discerning.

Writing in G2 this morning, Chakrabortty has had another go at flaying George Osborne's economic policy.  To paraphrase, tomorrow's GDP figures will show the UK is still in recession, cuts are wicked, and there is "no real reason this unprecedented schedule of pain, imposed by a coalition with scant ministerial experience, should be taken as inevitable".

I read the article - more than a dozen paragraphs - hoping to see Chakrabortty setting out the alternative to the Chancellor's policy.  But there was nothing.  Nada.  Silence.  Osborne has got it wrong.  That's all.

To be fair to Chakrabortty, it's possible to infer from his previous outpourings that he sympathises with what might be called the Balls Position, namely that the government will be more successful in getting the deficit down if it spends more money.  He has however been slightly coy, unlike Balls, in what this will mean. More borrowing.

To summarise, the argument runs "In order to get out of a mess caused by too much borrowing, we need to borrow more".  I always hope that someone will utter this praece out loud so I can hear their voice tail off at the end of the sentence.

Actually Ed Balls is shameless enough to do something pretty close, although as a consummate politician he shows no sign of unease .  Again and again we hear him saying, "Government policy is not working because the economy isn't growing and, look, they are borrowing more than they said they would". Now the second part of this sentence is true, but, awkwardly for Labour, its own policy is to borrow more than the Tories.  And extra borrowing doesn't seem to be having the desired effect.

This is slightly embarrassing for the Tories too, because they said if we borrowed more the sky would fall in.  Bond yields would shoot up and we would rapidly do the Mediterranean shuffle toward the abyss.  Of course bond yields might well have been lower if we had borrowed less and reduced the deficit faster, but nevertheless they are quite staggeringly low.

If I were George Osborne I would, faced with this argument, point out that we have pumped well over £300 billion into the economy by way of QE and it has had no discernable effect.  Just how much extra do Balls and Chakrabortty want us to borrow? Last year's deficit was about £126 billion, down from about £140 billion at its peak.  Should we go back up to £140 billion?  Would the extra £14 billion make any difference? £300 billion didn't get things going again after all: what price the lesser sum? And what if the markets thought, "These people aren't serious about getting the deficit down. That makes lending to them riskier. Let's charge them a bit more."

But the point of this blog is not to focus on the flaws in the Balls Position, but rather in Chakrabortty's analysis. Firstly he has asked, "Is the economy growing?", to which the answer is of course "No."  QED, he says.

Well not so fast.  What if he has asked the wrong question?

In a context in which Europe's banking system is teetering on the edge, in which sovereign states are on the verge of collapse, in which I can get a mortgage at a cheaper interest rate than Spain (please read that clause, astonishing but true, again), a better test of whether Osborne's economic policy is working might be to ask, "Can we actually borrow money on the gilt markets at a rate we can afford?"  The answer to that is a ringing yes.  And if you want another question, how about this - "Is the deficit coming down?"  The answer to that is yes as well.  It's coming down in real terms, in nominal terms, and as a percentage of GDP.  That looks to me pretty much like success.

But what about the workers?  What about the people losing their jobs and houses because of the cuts?  What about the people whose lifelines from the state have been cut off?  In most cases that will be a tragedy.  But we have long passed the point at which fixing the problems with the UK's economy can be made without collateral damage.  There is simply no magic button which can be pressed which will take us back to dry land without pain.  This is particularly true as long as the Eurozone is paralysed by uncertainty and incompetence.

This is Chakrabortty's second conceptual mistake. Those like him who pretend that there is something dead easy the Government could do to make things right are not just mistaken, they are helping slow the process of dawning realisation that's required on a national scale.  We have been living on massive borrowing; it can't go on forever; and what can't go on forever must stop.

The credit crunch has made fools of us all, but the Guardian's Chief Economics Leader writer more than most.