One of the reasons I am not a Christian is that I speak theology quite well. I am naturally gifted in seeing the world that way, so much so that I can never be certain whether I mean or believe the eleoquent things I sometimes say. And if I don’t know, then why should I suppose that anyone else does, when they speak?<\/p>\n\n
None the less, some of the facts that Christianity tries to explain, and some of its assumptions, seem to me as close to axiomatic as an empirical fact can be. And I am always surprised that people misunderstand — for example — original sin as being a doctrine that sex is dirty. But when Augustine thought it was transmitted at the moment of conception, I don’t think he meant that we wouldn’t get it if our parents didn’t fuck; or, if he did, he shouldn’t have. He meant, surely, something much more like one of the central insights of Darwinism: that individual life necessarily involves differential survival, failure, great pain, and injustice. Conception in that sense is important as the moment of individuation, not the one connected to fucking. Otherwise, identical twins would have identical sins.<\/p>\n\n
[Of course this is compatible with both evolutionary and non-evolutionary world views. That’s another I was put in mind of this by Nature’s<\/em> admirable rss service<\/a> this morning, which carries a report<\/a> on MS research1<\/a><\/sup> using mice:<\/p>\n\n Experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) models demyelinating autoimmune diseases, like multiple sclerosis. Researchers induce EAE <\/span>by injecting animals with myelin components. These animals subsequently develop autoimmune responses to myelinated axons. Like multiple sclerosis, EAE <\/span>induces demyelination, inflammation, neural death and paralysis. EAE <\/span>severity is scored on a numerical scale, with higher numbers indicating increased severity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n I know enough about MS — and I have seen a friend die of a related disease — to be entirely in favour of animal experimentation as the lesser evil. But it remains lesser<\/em> — it doesn’t lose an evil quality. “Original Sin”, for me, has a lot to do with the fact that we can only cure humans by caging and then torturing mice, not as some kind of voodoo ritual, but because that is the very best way to understand and then change the evils of the world.<\/p>\n\n Having got that far, a new thought occurs: suppose our understanding of mice grows so great that we can build a silicon mouse, like the virtual worm of which c. elegans<\/em> researchers dreamed? Would that remove the stain? No. It would not. The only model on which we could rely would be one which told us little we had not already found out by other means and nothing which we could not check. I think. A computer model on which we had to rely and whose outcome we could never check against reality — well that would have free will, which is another theological conundrum.<\/p>\n\n\n 1<\/sup> (there is a similar one which involves provoking variously aggressive lung cancers in mice)<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the reasons I am not a Christian is that I speak theology quite well. I am naturally gifted in seeing the world that way, so much so that I can never be certain whether I mean or believe … Continue reading question<\/del> set of possible answers]<\/p>\n\n