There has been much written over the last few days in reaction to the news coming out of CERN that some neutrinos may have been observed breaking the “cosmic speed barrier.” I won’t go into too much detail here, as there is plenty to be found elsewhere on the web, though of varying qualities. One of the things that has bothered me is that many of the news sources refer to c as “the speed of light.” This is incorrect as the c which is used in relativistic notation is specifically “the speed of light in a vacuum.” Everyday experience tells us that the speed of light varies in different media. When you’ve seen a straw or stick in water appear to be bent, this is due to refraction. Refraction occurs because the light has a slower speed in water than it does in air.
My second slight gripe is over the fact that the result has not been confirmed. At the time of writing (Friday night/Saturday morning) the results are still subject to further scrutiny. For me, I wonder if the experiment which produced the result has been repeated. The best science must always be reproducible, given the same setup. This, of course, does assume invariance under time translation. Now *THAT* would shatter the scientific paradigm, if it were falsified.
There is also a slight laxity when discussing the idea of neutrinos breaking the speed barrier. The special theory of relativity doesn’t actually prohibit faster than light travel. If you actually work through the equations, what you end with is that you cannot accelerate a massive particle (that is, a particle that has mass, it’s nothing to do with it being exceptionally large) to c or beyond, from a speed which is less than c. The reason being that as it accelerates, it actually gains mass. The more mass it has, the harder it is to accelerate and you end up that as the speed approached c, the mass is unbounded (or in other words, it tends to infinity) and so cannot be accelerated any further. In theory, if a particle, at the point of its creation, travels faster than c, then it will remain faster, though it does throw out a whole host of other problems which I shan’t go into here.
So what if Einstein was wrong? He was still a hell of a lot smarter than I am. He wrote the paper “On the electrodynamics of moving bodies” when he was 26, younger than I am now. I still find it amazing at how much others achieve at a comparatively young age, and to be honest I find it quite depressing at how little I have achieved given that I am fast approaching 30.
If Einstein’s theory does need to be superseded, you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You have to remember the historical context in which he worked. The Michelson-Morley experiment had falsified the idea of the ether, so something new was needed. Building on the work of Lorentz, Einstein’s view not only needed to be radically different from the prevailing Newtonian viewpoint that had dominated physics (or natural philosophy as it was originally known) for the previous few hundred years, but it also had to incorporate the well-tested Newtonian model in the vast majority of cases. In other words, for massive particles travelling at significantly less than c, the theoretical predictions between Newtonian and Einsteinian dynamics should differ by an unobservably small amount.
If Einstein now needs to be revised by another paradigm shift, any new model will also have to incorporate the results that have supported Einstein’s work over the last hundred years. Einstein’s remains a very accurate model of reality. Had it been a poor model, it might have been found out much sooner.
All this points me towards falsification. I think I have mentioned in another recent post that I am currently reading through Popper’s The Logic Of Scientific Discovery. Towards the start, he makes a very good demolition of positivism, and makes his proposal that scientific theories ought be falsifiable, rather than be built up via a kind of inductive method based on verification.
While this is my first time reading it, the general philosophy is very familiar, having been woven into the fabric of my scientific education.
All of science is provisional. The work of the great scientists represents our current and best understanding of the universe we live in. As Richard Feynman put it, “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” Nothing is to be deemed unquestionable, whether it be the work of Newton, Rutherford, Dalton, Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, Feynman, Witten or Hawking. All are fair game.
To claim that to challenge any scientist or any theory is a kind “heresy” is a claim that could only be made by someone who has little to no understanding of the spirit of science. No theory of nature should be beyond question, even if we don’t have the answer. In fact, the nature of science is to state that there we don’t have the answer. All we can come up with are models of how the universe works that line up as closely as possible with reality. Of course, not everyone holds this view, as was demonstrated by Hawking & Mlodinow last year when they published The Grand Design in which they proposed a bizarre model of “model-dependent realism” though, thankfully, this seems not to have caught on. Yet I applaud them for at least challenging the spirit, which in itself is a spirit to challenge. A merry-go round of Russian dolls, perplexities and unknowns, and so the confidence of an earlier generation may be shown to be no more than hubris, and the quest for truth continues.
Showing posts with label truth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label truth. Show all posts
26 September 2011
12 July 2011
Did you know that there was an 19-digit number that has never been spoken by any human ever?
Well, it’s true. I want to show you why it is true. Before I do that though, I have to explain why I am writing this. During my time studying maths at university, I was never particularly impressed by most “existence theorems.” On the whole, I don’t find it particularly exciting or helpful to set about proving the existence of something without any prospect of actually calculating it (Examples of these include the Ham Sandwich Theorem and the Hairy Ball Theorem). The exception to this is the pigeonhole principle, which I first came across on an open day at Leicester University. The day sticks in my mind because it was pouring down with rain and one of the first guys we spoke to said that he didn’t expect many of the applicants present to go on there, on the basis of the poor weather. His idea was the first impressions were lasting and that bad weather left an overall bad impression, in spite of whatever efforts made by the university staff on the day, the applications would likely think of Leicester as a rainy place, compared to another university they may have visited on a sunny day.
I did not end up going to Leicester University.
But in their open day they did introduce me to the pigeonhole principle, by which one may prove all sorts of odd things. One of these, for example, is that there are at least two people in Newcastle with the exact same number of hairs on their head.
You can look up more details of the pigeonhole principle here, as I would rather assume it is known and then use it rather than recapitulate the whole thing.
A while ago I came across a number called Graham’s number, which was a peculiar for the fact that it was immensely large, no one has calculated it, but we do not that it ends in a 7 (when written in base 10, at least), which is the kind of quirky thing that really piques my interest. [I ought here to note that the episode of QI on which I first saw this was repeated on Monday night, after I wrote most of this, but before I put it online]
So I got thinking what is the potentially the smallest number that no person has ever written down, spoken aloud or actually even thought about. I wanted to ensure that I would be right so where I have had to make estimations, I have erred on the side of caution, leading me to suspect that though I am convinced I am right, I have over-shot the mark in at least one respect.
The first trouble was to estimate how many people have ever lived. Here, we are instantly presented with a problem of trying to define the demarcation of the first homo sapiens as opposed to an earlier ancestor and to then consider at what point in human evolution numeracy developed. As I had no idea I resorted to Wikipedia, who gave a statistic cited from an American study that estimated there had been between 100,000,000,000 and 115,000,000,000 people who have ever lived. So naturally, I added on a bit (just to be on the safe side) and assumed for the purpose of my calculation 120,000,000,000.
Next, I had to estimate how long they live for. Again, without any detailed research to hand, I made a guess by using the current average age of around 80 years. I suspect that over the course of human history, it has not been less than this, so my estimate is suitably conservative (if that phrase is not an oxymoron).
Of this, there are likely to be times (such as childhood and old age) when the ability to count to large numbers will not be present. So I took off 10 years, which I think is not unreasonable.
Next, how much of that time is spent asleep. I have heard that people spend a third of their lives asleep, and that the average person gets 8 hours sleep a night. Personally, I don’t know where these people get the time from. I get 6 hours a night, so I estimated that each person was only awake for 52.5 years.
Of course, most people do not spend every waking moment thinking about numbers. As a mathematician by training and an accountant by profession, I probably do it more than most, although even then I would estimate that I don’t spend more than 5% of my waking time thinking about numbers. There are far more everyday concerns that take up much of my thinking time. Again, erring on the side of caution, I plumped for 10%.
This means that on my grossly optimistic assumptions, the average human can spend 165,672,864 seconds in their lifetime thinking about numbers. Given our earlier estimate of the number of people, this gives the total thinking time to date as somewhere in the region of 19,880,743,680,000,000,000 seconds.
Now, even though it can be very quick to count to 10, the numbers we are interested are not likely to be small. So how long does it take to say them? Of course, this will depend on language, so I admit my figure is a plucked out of thin air. I would opt for 2 seconds. I think when you get the scale of the hundreds of thousands, that’s not unreasonable. Order of magnitude higher than that will probably take considerably longer, so 2 is a fair estimate to use for a conservative guess.
So what’s the answer then? I believe that there is a number which is less than 9,940,371,840,000,000,000 which no person in human history has ever spoken, written or thought about.
I am sure that this is far too high an estimate, as we have considered numbers like a googol and googolplex which are many orders of magnitude larger and I haven’t taken into account repetition. Goodness knows how many times the number 100 has been considered by humans over the years!
I know for certain that the number in question cannot be 4,724,557,109,087,242 because I just thought about it. In fact, any number I think about is, by definition, the wrong answer, because as soon as I think of it, it can no longer remain “un-thought-of.” I’d love to think that I “discovered” a number by being the first one to think about it. Of course, by continuity, we know that it must have existed, but I have no way of verifying if I was the first one to think of it.
It strikes me a little bit of quantum mechanics where a system will collapse into its eigenstates as soon as it is observed. Truly fascinating and enjoyable.
That’s why I love science!
I did not end up going to Leicester University.
But in their open day they did introduce me to the pigeonhole principle, by which one may prove all sorts of odd things. One of these, for example, is that there are at least two people in Newcastle with the exact same number of hairs on their head.
You can look up more details of the pigeonhole principle here, as I would rather assume it is known and then use it rather than recapitulate the whole thing.
A while ago I came across a number called Graham’s number, which was a peculiar for the fact that it was immensely large, no one has calculated it, but we do not that it ends in a 7 (when written in base 10, at least), which is the kind of quirky thing that really piques my interest. [I ought here to note that the episode of QI on which I first saw this was repeated on Monday night, after I wrote most of this, but before I put it online]
So I got thinking what is the potentially the smallest number that no person has ever written down, spoken aloud or actually even thought about. I wanted to ensure that I would be right so where I have had to make estimations, I have erred on the side of caution, leading me to suspect that though I am convinced I am right, I have over-shot the mark in at least one respect.
The first trouble was to estimate how many people have ever lived. Here, we are instantly presented with a problem of trying to define the demarcation of the first homo sapiens as opposed to an earlier ancestor and to then consider at what point in human evolution numeracy developed. As I had no idea I resorted to Wikipedia, who gave a statistic cited from an American study that estimated there had been between 100,000,000,000 and 115,000,000,000 people who have ever lived. So naturally, I added on a bit (just to be on the safe side) and assumed for the purpose of my calculation 120,000,000,000.
Next, I had to estimate how long they live for. Again, without any detailed research to hand, I made a guess by using the current average age of around 80 years. I suspect that over the course of human history, it has not been less than this, so my estimate is suitably conservative (if that phrase is not an oxymoron).
Of this, there are likely to be times (such as childhood and old age) when the ability to count to large numbers will not be present. So I took off 10 years, which I think is not unreasonable.
Next, how much of that time is spent asleep. I have heard that people spend a third of their lives asleep, and that the average person gets 8 hours sleep a night. Personally, I don’t know where these people get the time from. I get 6 hours a night, so I estimated that each person was only awake for 52.5 years.
Of course, most people do not spend every waking moment thinking about numbers. As a mathematician by training and an accountant by profession, I probably do it more than most, although even then I would estimate that I don’t spend more than 5% of my waking time thinking about numbers. There are far more everyday concerns that take up much of my thinking time. Again, erring on the side of caution, I plumped for 10%.
This means that on my grossly optimistic assumptions, the average human can spend 165,672,864 seconds in their lifetime thinking about numbers. Given our earlier estimate of the number of people, this gives the total thinking time to date as somewhere in the region of 19,880,743,680,000,000,000 seconds.
Now, even though it can be very quick to count to 10, the numbers we are interested are not likely to be small. So how long does it take to say them? Of course, this will depend on language, so I admit my figure is a plucked out of thin air. I would opt for 2 seconds. I think when you get the scale of the hundreds of thousands, that’s not unreasonable. Order of magnitude higher than that will probably take considerably longer, so 2 is a fair estimate to use for a conservative guess.
So what’s the answer then? I believe that there is a number which is less than 9,940,371,840,000,000,000 which no person in human history has ever spoken, written or thought about.
I am sure that this is far too high an estimate, as we have considered numbers like a googol and googolplex which are many orders of magnitude larger and I haven’t taken into account repetition. Goodness knows how many times the number 100 has been considered by humans over the years!
I know for certain that the number in question cannot be 4,724,557,109,087,242 because I just thought about it. In fact, any number I think about is, by definition, the wrong answer, because as soon as I think of it, it can no longer remain “un-thought-of.” I’d love to think that I “discovered” a number by being the first one to think about it. Of course, by continuity, we know that it must have existed, but I have no way of verifying if I was the first one to think of it.
It strikes me a little bit of quantum mechanics where a system will collapse into its eigenstates as soon as it is observed. Truly fascinating and enjoyable.
That’s why I love science!
20 April 2011
A summary of Easter
My aim here is to summarise the case for Easter and to give a rough appraisal of its meaning and importance for me as a Christian. This is not a complete exegesis, as when I started to write this it just longer and longer and longer; which I think goes someway to demonstrating why Easter is at the heart of Christianity. So what follows is a brief overview and as such I have had to omit much detail and nuanced arguments, so I admit from the start that this is incomplete and full of holes. There are then two main ways to look at this: one is to look at the holes and dismiss the whole discussion as fraudulent, the other is to gloss over the holes and accept everything on face value. I would hope that you do not adopt either of these simplistic views, but that you can read and assess the whole thing as it stands, both in substance and in what it lacks. I ought to say from the outset that this subject has been on my mind much over the last few months and to that end my main text (other than the various books that make up the compendium known as the Bible) has been N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. I also followed this up with Jurgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God. Though I do not agree 100% with the conclusions of either, I think they are well worth following up for anyone who is serious about examining the ideas around Easter.
Each of these books deals with a different aspect of Easter. It’s not hard to tell from the titles that one relates to the crucifixion and the other to the resurrection. Yet in my readings of each of these, as well the biblical texts, it struck me that you can’t really have an Easter theology with considering both aspects. In my opinion, and this is all I am stating here, the crucifixion without the resurrection would leave us without hope, while the resurrection without the crucifixion leaves us unjustified. But for me, with the events of that particular weekend upon which the history of the world hinged, the doctrines of hope and justification are intimately entwined, like the weft and warp of the fabric of faith. Having one without the other leaves everything in pieces. However, I find that it is actually easier (accuse me of laziness, by all means!) to consider the resurrection before the crucifixion.
So then, we need to find out what happened over the course of the Easter weekend, some 2 centuries ago. As this was an historical event, we cannot rely on any notion of repeatable experiment, test groups or empirical measurement as would be the case if we wanted to employ a scientific scrutiny to the claims. It simply falls outside the scope of scientific investigation, so instead the most appropriate methodology to adopt is that of the historian. The best history is constructed by using the widest array of contemporary sources. The most obvious of these are the 4 gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke & John) though it may surprise some to hear that these are not in fact the earliest accounts we have of Jesus’ resurrection. The earliest (that I know of, anyway) is actually Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. But here we have a snag. Was Paul an eyewitness to the death and resurrection of Jesus? Well, it seems that the answer is ‘no’ – so does that discount his testimony? We also have the problem of the apparent differences between the 4 gospels. Do inconsistencies in detail prove that the event did not take place?
To answer these questions, I think it helps to think in terms of journalism. Say, for example, an event happens for which there are various witnesses but which is not recorded by technology. i.e. there were a few people who saw it, but it wasn’t captured on CCTV or on a mobile phone. None of these people are professional journalists, but they describe what they saw to a several journalists. Is it likely that they would all report exactly the same thing? I think it’s pretty unlikely. If you pick up a copy each of the Guardian, The Times, The Daily Mail and The Sun, do a side-by-side comparison of them and what you will find is this:
a) They will not all report on exactly the same set of stories; some will include articles that others leave out
b) On those articles relating to the same event, the reporting will be quite different.
There are a couple of more modern takes on this phenomenon of differences relating to the same event. One of these is known as “Wittgenstein’s poker.” If you haven’t heard of it, I don’t blame you. I only came across it for the first time a couple of years ago. There was a debate which took place at which several highly noted philosophers were having a discussion on the philosophy of science. On one side of the debate was Karl Popper. In the audience were Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. As the story goes, at some point during the evening, Popper said something that incensed Wittgenstein who grabbed a hot poker from the fire and brandished it at Popper, before storming out of the room. But later on, when asked to recount the details, no one could quite agree. In truth, the fact that there was so much disagreement about the fine details, in spite of a broad agreement on the core of the story, was testament to something extraordinary having happened.
More recently, there was a tv programme broadcast on terrestrial tv (though I admit I have struggled to find reference to it – if someone knows, please help me with this). What he did was to take a group of volunteers (who had volunteered for a different kind of experiment) and he set up a fake stabbing while they were out at lunch. From my memory, there were about 20 or so volunteers, one of whom was a ‘mole’ and had been asked to insert a red herring – with one of the aims of the experiment to find out how many of the other volunteers included this red herring into their testimony. Each of the volunteers were then subject to a police interrogation as to what happened. Everyone gave different accounts; some omitted some details, whilst others were influenced by the mole and reported seeing something which they did not see. So how does this influence our take on the gospel writers? Does the fact that people can report seeing something which they have not mean that the gospels must be wrong? Well, I don’t think so. The casting of doubt on something is very different from outright dismissal, and I would regard anyone as foolish who, on this count, is led to think that the gospel writers must have all been mistaken or were in cahoots with one another to make it up. Instead, what the programme showed was that after the interrogations, the police were able to piece together an accurate picture of what happened, corroborating various witness statements, weeding out the incorrect information and getting to the heart of the matter. And so it is, I believe, mirrored in the gospels, and with particular reference here to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, although the same holds for the rest of the gospel narratives. The fact that they have slight differences between them, but that from looking at them collectively, it is evident that there is a consistent narrative implies that they are reviewing a real, historical event. I read recently somewhere that the slightly confused language that they use was indicative of someone writing about what they can see, but which they don’t understand.
Now let’s suppose for a moment that Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead. What if it was a metaphor or, worse, an elaborate fabrication? Do you think the gospels would have continued to be copied and passed on by the contemporaries of the early Christian movement if they had known it was false? It strikes me as quite unreasonable that one would suppose this. There were enough eye-witnesses around at the time who would have been able to quash this early movement, known as The Way had its basis been historically and accurately incorrect. Without the historical reality of the resurrection, the task of explaining the origins of Christianity becomes very difficult.
One of the most obvious objections to the resurrection is the simple observation, known throughout history, that dead people don’t rise up from the dead. While to some it may appear that Christians are therefore going against common sense, this fact is in fact crucial: dead people, on the whole, don’t rise from the dead. That’s what makes the resurrection such an important event. The falsehood in this argument is one of induction, which the philosopher of science Karl Popper has opposed. He argued that simply because every adult swan you may observe is white cannot logically rule out the possibility that there is at least one black swan in the world. Applying that here, just because everyone you observe dying is not resurrected does not mean you can a priori discount the possibility of the resurrection by inductance. As Conan Doyle put it, via the mouth of Sherlock Holmes: “Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The sticking point here on which Christians and atheists disagree is the definition of impossible. To the atheist, the possibility of resurrection is ruled out from the very beginning and so they immediately start to look elsewhere for their explanations of the rise of Christianity and its belief in the resurrection (if they can be bothered to think that far). However, if we are open-minded to admit the possibility of Jesus having been resurrected then the evidence we are presented with gives good reason to believe that this one-off event was an historical reality.
Are you still with me? If you disagree with me but have kept on reading then I tip my hat to you.
Something this extraordinary then merits further discussion. What does it mean? The Jewish hope, and hence the Christian hope too, is for all to be resurrected. The thing that caught the first century Jews off guard was that it was expected to happen to everyone at once at the end of time. It was not meant to happen to one person before all else. But then this is exactly what John says in Revelation when he calls Jesus “the firstborn from among the dead.” There is a popular myth the surrounds and pervades Christianity that the ultimate hope for the future is to live in heaven. No matter how often you hear this, it is not what is actually what the Bible says. (I hope to be writing a short series on this if and when I eventually finish my series on morality). If you disagree, go find the references and send them over to me. Rather, the hope is of a resurrection en masse and that in new, incorruptible bodies we will inhabit the new earth. So in order to understand what his resurrection meant, we must look back at what his death meant. Of course, for a complete argument, we would need to then go back further and give an account as to his life. But that I do not have space for that here.
We then switch our focus onto to the crucifixion, which need some preliminary remarks. First of all, crucifixion was a Roman punishment, not a Jewish one. So even though Jesus was accused of blasphemy by the Jewish authorities, the punishment for that was stoning (cf. The death of Stephen in Acts). Rather, it was the political aspect of Jesus’ following was more likely the reason for why he was executed. Yet we should not confuse the reason for why he was executed with the purpose of his dying. This tends to be another sticking point at which many people find Christianity unpalatable. But then who said the truth was ever easy to accept? As a Christian, I believe that God is just (in the legal sense of the word); that is, his judgement is fair and he cannot be unjust. It also very true to say that God is loving. The fundamental problem of mankind is what the Bible refers to as ‘sin.’ Now this has become a pejorative term these days, though I do not use it as such. It is the state of separation of mankind from God. Therefore, you sin because you are a sinner; not the other way around. Yet because God is just, it would against its nature (to use a non-gender specific pronoun) to, as many suggest, merely let it slide. To forgive without sacrifice. This is what Bonhoeffer refers to as “cheap grace.” Rather, a debt is owed, but God, in his love, chose to take that debt upon himself through the sacrifice of Jesus as a substitute for the whole of mankind.
To many Christians, the idea of God’s punishment is for us to be separated from his love; in other words to be completely separated from him. What makes this different from the separation of sin is that while we are sinners we are loved from afar. There is no intimate relationship, it is only one-sided from God to us. But its desire is to restore that relationship. But if we reject the evidence of God’s love as manifest through the ultimate sacrifice and continue in a state of self-deifying pride then what each of us deserves (as is only just) is for God to abandon us. I don’t subscribe to the notion of fire and brimstone being literal, but rather that there is no worse state to be in that that of being unloved. And when Jesus was on his crucifix, he was unloved by God. Not only had he been rejected by his people (the Jews), convicted as a criminal (by the Romans) and disowned by those closest to him (the disciples) but he was rejected by God in our place. So Jesus’ death was far more than a simple, if brutal execution. It was God abandoning itself.
We do not and, I believe, cannot know what happened on the silent Saturday. There are some early writings which suggest that Jesus preached to the dead, though I am not convinced of this. What we do know, as the best available historical evidence shows, is that on the Sunday morning he was resurrected with a new body which was still physical, bore the wounds which he had inflicted and yet was incorruptible – a resurrection body which each of us has set aside for us. So his death was not final, we are not without hope. By his dying we were justified and by his rising again we are given the hope of the future. That’s what I understand as the core message of Easter.
Each of these books deals with a different aspect of Easter. It’s not hard to tell from the titles that one relates to the crucifixion and the other to the resurrection. Yet in my readings of each of these, as well the biblical texts, it struck me that you can’t really have an Easter theology with considering both aspects. In my opinion, and this is all I am stating here, the crucifixion without the resurrection would leave us without hope, while the resurrection without the crucifixion leaves us unjustified. But for me, with the events of that particular weekend upon which the history of the world hinged, the doctrines of hope and justification are intimately entwined, like the weft and warp of the fabric of faith. Having one without the other leaves everything in pieces. However, I find that it is actually easier (accuse me of laziness, by all means!) to consider the resurrection before the crucifixion.
So then, we need to find out what happened over the course of the Easter weekend, some 2 centuries ago. As this was an historical event, we cannot rely on any notion of repeatable experiment, test groups or empirical measurement as would be the case if we wanted to employ a scientific scrutiny to the claims. It simply falls outside the scope of scientific investigation, so instead the most appropriate methodology to adopt is that of the historian. The best history is constructed by using the widest array of contemporary sources. The most obvious of these are the 4 gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke & John) though it may surprise some to hear that these are not in fact the earliest accounts we have of Jesus’ resurrection. The earliest (that I know of, anyway) is actually Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. But here we have a snag. Was Paul an eyewitness to the death and resurrection of Jesus? Well, it seems that the answer is ‘no’ – so does that discount his testimony? We also have the problem of the apparent differences between the 4 gospels. Do inconsistencies in detail prove that the event did not take place?
To answer these questions, I think it helps to think in terms of journalism. Say, for example, an event happens for which there are various witnesses but which is not recorded by technology. i.e. there were a few people who saw it, but it wasn’t captured on CCTV or on a mobile phone. None of these people are professional journalists, but they describe what they saw to a several journalists. Is it likely that they would all report exactly the same thing? I think it’s pretty unlikely. If you pick up a copy each of the Guardian, The Times, The Daily Mail and The Sun, do a side-by-side comparison of them and what you will find is this:
a) They will not all report on exactly the same set of stories; some will include articles that others leave out
b) On those articles relating to the same event, the reporting will be quite different.
There are a couple of more modern takes on this phenomenon of differences relating to the same event. One of these is known as “Wittgenstein’s poker.” If you haven’t heard of it, I don’t blame you. I only came across it for the first time a couple of years ago. There was a debate which took place at which several highly noted philosophers were having a discussion on the philosophy of science. On one side of the debate was Karl Popper. In the audience were Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. As the story goes, at some point during the evening, Popper said something that incensed Wittgenstein who grabbed a hot poker from the fire and brandished it at Popper, before storming out of the room. But later on, when asked to recount the details, no one could quite agree. In truth, the fact that there was so much disagreement about the fine details, in spite of a broad agreement on the core of the story, was testament to something extraordinary having happened.
More recently, there was a tv programme broadcast on terrestrial tv (though I admit I have struggled to find reference to it – if someone knows, please help me with this). What he did was to take a group of volunteers (who had volunteered for a different kind of experiment) and he set up a fake stabbing while they were out at lunch. From my memory, there were about 20 or so volunteers, one of whom was a ‘mole’ and had been asked to insert a red herring – with one of the aims of the experiment to find out how many of the other volunteers included this red herring into their testimony. Each of the volunteers were then subject to a police interrogation as to what happened. Everyone gave different accounts; some omitted some details, whilst others were influenced by the mole and reported seeing something which they did not see. So how does this influence our take on the gospel writers? Does the fact that people can report seeing something which they have not mean that the gospels must be wrong? Well, I don’t think so. The casting of doubt on something is very different from outright dismissal, and I would regard anyone as foolish who, on this count, is led to think that the gospel writers must have all been mistaken or were in cahoots with one another to make it up. Instead, what the programme showed was that after the interrogations, the police were able to piece together an accurate picture of what happened, corroborating various witness statements, weeding out the incorrect information and getting to the heart of the matter. And so it is, I believe, mirrored in the gospels, and with particular reference here to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, although the same holds for the rest of the gospel narratives. The fact that they have slight differences between them, but that from looking at them collectively, it is evident that there is a consistent narrative implies that they are reviewing a real, historical event. I read recently somewhere that the slightly confused language that they use was indicative of someone writing about what they can see, but which they don’t understand.
Now let’s suppose for a moment that Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead. What if it was a metaphor or, worse, an elaborate fabrication? Do you think the gospels would have continued to be copied and passed on by the contemporaries of the early Christian movement if they had known it was false? It strikes me as quite unreasonable that one would suppose this. There were enough eye-witnesses around at the time who would have been able to quash this early movement, known as The Way had its basis been historically and accurately incorrect. Without the historical reality of the resurrection, the task of explaining the origins of Christianity becomes very difficult.
One of the most obvious objections to the resurrection is the simple observation, known throughout history, that dead people don’t rise up from the dead. While to some it may appear that Christians are therefore going against common sense, this fact is in fact crucial: dead people, on the whole, don’t rise from the dead. That’s what makes the resurrection such an important event. The falsehood in this argument is one of induction, which the philosopher of science Karl Popper has opposed. He argued that simply because every adult swan you may observe is white cannot logically rule out the possibility that there is at least one black swan in the world. Applying that here, just because everyone you observe dying is not resurrected does not mean you can a priori discount the possibility of the resurrection by inductance. As Conan Doyle put it, via the mouth of Sherlock Holmes: “Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The sticking point here on which Christians and atheists disagree is the definition of impossible. To the atheist, the possibility of resurrection is ruled out from the very beginning and so they immediately start to look elsewhere for their explanations of the rise of Christianity and its belief in the resurrection (if they can be bothered to think that far). However, if we are open-minded to admit the possibility of Jesus having been resurrected then the evidence we are presented with gives good reason to believe that this one-off event was an historical reality.
Are you still with me? If you disagree with me but have kept on reading then I tip my hat to you.
Something this extraordinary then merits further discussion. What does it mean? The Jewish hope, and hence the Christian hope too, is for all to be resurrected. The thing that caught the first century Jews off guard was that it was expected to happen to everyone at once at the end of time. It was not meant to happen to one person before all else. But then this is exactly what John says in Revelation when he calls Jesus “the firstborn from among the dead.” There is a popular myth the surrounds and pervades Christianity that the ultimate hope for the future is to live in heaven. No matter how often you hear this, it is not what is actually what the Bible says. (I hope to be writing a short series on this if and when I eventually finish my series on morality). If you disagree, go find the references and send them over to me. Rather, the hope is of a resurrection en masse and that in new, incorruptible bodies we will inhabit the new earth. So in order to understand what his resurrection meant, we must look back at what his death meant. Of course, for a complete argument, we would need to then go back further and give an account as to his life. But that I do not have space for that here.
We then switch our focus onto to the crucifixion, which need some preliminary remarks. First of all, crucifixion was a Roman punishment, not a Jewish one. So even though Jesus was accused of blasphemy by the Jewish authorities, the punishment for that was stoning (cf. The death of Stephen in Acts). Rather, it was the political aspect of Jesus’ following was more likely the reason for why he was executed. Yet we should not confuse the reason for why he was executed with the purpose of his dying. This tends to be another sticking point at which many people find Christianity unpalatable. But then who said the truth was ever easy to accept? As a Christian, I believe that God is just (in the legal sense of the word); that is, his judgement is fair and he cannot be unjust. It also very true to say that God is loving. The fundamental problem of mankind is what the Bible refers to as ‘sin.’ Now this has become a pejorative term these days, though I do not use it as such. It is the state of separation of mankind from God. Therefore, you sin because you are a sinner; not the other way around. Yet because God is just, it would against its nature (to use a non-gender specific pronoun) to, as many suggest, merely let it slide. To forgive without sacrifice. This is what Bonhoeffer refers to as “cheap grace.” Rather, a debt is owed, but God, in his love, chose to take that debt upon himself through the sacrifice of Jesus as a substitute for the whole of mankind.
To many Christians, the idea of God’s punishment is for us to be separated from his love; in other words to be completely separated from him. What makes this different from the separation of sin is that while we are sinners we are loved from afar. There is no intimate relationship, it is only one-sided from God to us. But its desire is to restore that relationship. But if we reject the evidence of God’s love as manifest through the ultimate sacrifice and continue in a state of self-deifying pride then what each of us deserves (as is only just) is for God to abandon us. I don’t subscribe to the notion of fire and brimstone being literal, but rather that there is no worse state to be in that that of being unloved. And when Jesus was on his crucifix, he was unloved by God. Not only had he been rejected by his people (the Jews), convicted as a criminal (by the Romans) and disowned by those closest to him (the disciples) but he was rejected by God in our place. So Jesus’ death was far more than a simple, if brutal execution. It was God abandoning itself.
We do not and, I believe, cannot know what happened on the silent Saturday. There are some early writings which suggest that Jesus preached to the dead, though I am not convinced of this. What we do know, as the best available historical evidence shows, is that on the Sunday morning he was resurrected with a new body which was still physical, bore the wounds which he had inflicted and yet was incorruptible – a resurrection body which each of us has set aside for us. So his death was not final, we are not without hope. By his dying we were justified and by his rising again we are given the hope of the future. That’s what I understand as the core message of Easter.
25 March 2011
Book Review: The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright
At the outset, Wright declares that “Our target is to investigate the claim of the earliest Christians, that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead.” He then takes us under his wing and guides along a journey of scholarship of the highest order. Leaving no stone unturned, he first of all investigates the idea of resurrection, first of all being extremely precise about what he means by resurrection. We then review resurrection traditions in pre-christian paganism and of judaism, constantly asking the question “is it probable that the early christians adapted an earlier tradition to suit their own story, or did something really happen that was of major significance.” Towards the end of the first section, one can become bogged down in the detail. I think this section can be skipped over with little loss overall, but it is was necessary in order for Wright to be thorough in his work, so that any accusations of taking shortcuts or ignoring certain schools of thought would be unfounded.
Having finished his survey of Pagan and Jewish beliefs, he then moves on to look at the early Christian beliefs into resurrection, attempting to chart the writings in a roughly chronological order, thus analysing the writings of Paul before those of the gospel writers. The aim here is to contrast the views of this emerging religion with those of the old and ask what could have prompted the transformation. Then, having seen the changes, the inevitable question that must then be asked is this: what caused the change? Wright is not presumptive in his answer, as I can tell a great many christians would at this point be jumping up and down saying “I know the answer.” But Wright is far more considerate and gives due care and attention to his scholarship. This level of detail may frustrate some readers, as much of the early part of the book discusses resurrection in general, with very little mention of Jesus who only starts to come into the picture after about page 200; even then, much of the focus is really on the hope of a resurrection for all, rather than focussing on the resurrection of Jesus. So in that respect, those expecting a detailed analysis of Easter will have to get through several hundred pages of background before getting what they are looking for.
But it is certainly worth the effort of getting to, once his analysis of the gospel accounts finally begin at page 587. But once he gets under way with it, there seems to be no stopping him. Wright is in his element, giving well-considered, evidenced and thoughtful consideration to the claims and counter-claims that have surrounded Easter for many years. Here, as throughout the book, he uses footnotes to acknowledge and counteract the conclusions of many other theologians, whilst agreeing with some. Foremost in his crosshairs is Rudolph Bultmann. Because much of the groundwork had already been laid, the gospel accounts may appear to be a little short. But do not be deceived; these chapters are immensely rich and in order to take them in I have had to go over them in conjunction with several translations a few times, which takes a fair while to do.
Having finished his survey of beliefs and narratives, the question is then asked: So what? Even if you skip over the first 600 pages and jump straight to last section (though you will be missing out) what you will find is the work of an honest historian who, having looked at the best available evidence, concludes that Jesus of Nazareth was bodily raised from the dead. Not only is this a striking conclusion, but the consequences of it, as expounded in the theology of the earlier sections (most notably Wright's exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15) demand careful consideration by everyone.
In his final flourish, Wright looks at the reasons for calling Jesus the Son of God and what this means both in terms of direct referent and its implications, though the latter part is the lead on to part 4 in his series which, at the time of writing this review, is currently due sometime in 2012.
This is certainly a ‘meaty’ book and though at times you may need a dictionary on hand, it is written in an accessible way and is an immense joy to work through. I would heartily recommend it to anyone interested in resurrection theology and of the future hope (either in heaven or a new earth) for christians.
Having finished his survey of Pagan and Jewish beliefs, he then moves on to look at the early Christian beliefs into resurrection, attempting to chart the writings in a roughly chronological order, thus analysing the writings of Paul before those of the gospel writers. The aim here is to contrast the views of this emerging religion with those of the old and ask what could have prompted the transformation. Then, having seen the changes, the inevitable question that must then be asked is this: what caused the change? Wright is not presumptive in his answer, as I can tell a great many christians would at this point be jumping up and down saying “I know the answer.” But Wright is far more considerate and gives due care and attention to his scholarship. This level of detail may frustrate some readers, as much of the early part of the book discusses resurrection in general, with very little mention of Jesus who only starts to come into the picture after about page 200; even then, much of the focus is really on the hope of a resurrection for all, rather than focussing on the resurrection of Jesus. So in that respect, those expecting a detailed analysis of Easter will have to get through several hundred pages of background before getting what they are looking for.
But it is certainly worth the effort of getting to, once his analysis of the gospel accounts finally begin at page 587. But once he gets under way with it, there seems to be no stopping him. Wright is in his element, giving well-considered, evidenced and thoughtful consideration to the claims and counter-claims that have surrounded Easter for many years. Here, as throughout the book, he uses footnotes to acknowledge and counteract the conclusions of many other theologians, whilst agreeing with some. Foremost in his crosshairs is Rudolph Bultmann. Because much of the groundwork had already been laid, the gospel accounts may appear to be a little short. But do not be deceived; these chapters are immensely rich and in order to take them in I have had to go over them in conjunction with several translations a few times, which takes a fair while to do.
Having finished his survey of beliefs and narratives, the question is then asked: So what? Even if you skip over the first 600 pages and jump straight to last section (though you will be missing out) what you will find is the work of an honest historian who, having looked at the best available evidence, concludes that Jesus of Nazareth was bodily raised from the dead. Not only is this a striking conclusion, but the consequences of it, as expounded in the theology of the earlier sections (most notably Wright's exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15) demand careful consideration by everyone.
In his final flourish, Wright looks at the reasons for calling Jesus the Son of God and what this means both in terms of direct referent and its implications, though the latter part is the lead on to part 4 in his series which, at the time of writing this review, is currently due sometime in 2012.
This is certainly a ‘meaty’ book and though at times you may need a dictionary on hand, it is written in an accessible way and is an immense joy to work through. I would heartily recommend it to anyone interested in resurrection theology and of the future hope (either in heaven or a new earth) for christians.
21 March 2011
Book Review: A Place For Truth ed. by Dallas Willard
This is a fascinating, thought-provoking and highly enlightening collection from some highly notable thinkers and authors. I won't go through all 15 chapters, but will highlight a few. These are all taken from lectures and discussions which have been presented at the Veritas Forums over the course of several years. They do seem to have been copied verbatim, which does mean that some slips of the tongue or mishearings have crept into the text, though this is a minor point that could be addressed by a second issue.
The start of the book is saturated with the idea of truth. In fact the word itself is used so many times, the reader can start to feel as though they are beaten over the head with it. However, the discussions do widen out and cover various topics such as, inter alia, science, morality, theodicy, ontology and philosophy.
The reason I chose this book was because of a few particular names that jumped out at me; my having been impressed by other works of theirs which I have read: Francis Collins, Alister McGrath and N.T. Wright. Now the contributions by these particular individuals is pretty much taken from their other works which I have already read. So for example, if you have read Francis Collins' The Language of God, then his chapter will contain little that is new to you. So the most novel chapters were those from whom I had not come across before.
There is a distinct Christian bias to the book, though there are some discussions which put across alternative views which help to add some amount of balance to the proceedings.
As with the nature of any composite work such as this, the contributions do vary in quality and style. There will be some that you agree with and some that you disagree with. The one disappointment I had was with the chapter by Hugh Ross, whose arguments appeared very weak and insubstantial, particularly given the high quality of thinking and delivery that was evident elsewhere. On a few occasions, there was also a bit of a bias towards the american education system, which distances a few of the speakers from the non-american audience.
This is very much a book of the current time with the issues being discussed and the other recent writings referred to being very much focused on issues that have come to the fore in only the last decade or so. So as a comment on the status of truth and various related issues, this is a very good guide on the modern thought, though I suspect that it will not have a shelf life of more than 10 years, as by then discussions will have moved on and some of the contributions may appear outdated.
The start of the book is saturated with the idea of truth. In fact the word itself is used so many times, the reader can start to feel as though they are beaten over the head with it. However, the discussions do widen out and cover various topics such as, inter alia, science, morality, theodicy, ontology and philosophy.
The reason I chose this book was because of a few particular names that jumped out at me; my having been impressed by other works of theirs which I have read: Francis Collins, Alister McGrath and N.T. Wright. Now the contributions by these particular individuals is pretty much taken from their other works which I have already read. So for example, if you have read Francis Collins' The Language of God, then his chapter will contain little that is new to you. So the most novel chapters were those from whom I had not come across before.
There is a distinct Christian bias to the book, though there are some discussions which put across alternative views which help to add some amount of balance to the proceedings.
As with the nature of any composite work such as this, the contributions do vary in quality and style. There will be some that you agree with and some that you disagree with. The one disappointment I had was with the chapter by Hugh Ross, whose arguments appeared very weak and insubstantial, particularly given the high quality of thinking and delivery that was evident elsewhere. On a few occasions, there was also a bit of a bias towards the american education system, which distances a few of the speakers from the non-american audience.
This is very much a book of the current time with the issues being discussed and the other recent writings referred to being very much focused on issues that have come to the fore in only the last decade or so. So as a comment on the status of truth and various related issues, this is a very good guide on the modern thought, though I suspect that it will not have a shelf life of more than 10 years, as by then discussions will have moved on and some of the contributions may appear outdated.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)