Helmintholog

There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man; and by behaving in conformity with which, man enjoys his true freedom. This is what the Christian Church calls "the natural law". The more closely the moral code agrees with the natural law, the more it makes for freedom in human behaviour; the more widely it departs from the natural law, the more it tends to enslave mankind and to produce the catastrophes called "judgments of God".

Now this, I think, is a viewpoint that makes rational disagreement possible. I think it captures an important element of Christian or religious thought that is often ignored, partly because comes out at its most loathsome and degenerate form in the arguments over homosexuality. It’s better put as the slogan "truth is one"; and this is, I think, a good metaresearch programme. It says that Christian doctrine must be agreeable to what we see of the world around us. It’s not arbitrary and, though Christians would not stress this, it offers the means of correcting dogma when it is found not to correspond with the facts. Note that this is exactly the process we see happening when progressive Christians argue that St Paul didn’t know what we know about homosexuality. In other words, they claim that our understanding of human nature has changed, therefore St Paul must have meant something else. Now, a progressive atheist can claim that this is silly, and a long way round to the plain facts of modern scientific knowledge; what you can’t claim is that it doesn’t get there in the end, nor that it is not trying to.

With all that said,. I found, when I was composing this post, that I disagreed with almost all the concrete examples that Sayers went on to give; and I wish that she were still around so that I could argue about this. In any case, and for tidiness, I shall put the rest of this below the fold.

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My friend Jeremy, a biologist and proteome man, writes off list wrt Schönborn

Reality and truth. One of the things that struck me when I was taking a course at EDS is how core values and the words we use to refer to them have different valences in science and theology. For one community, reality means precisely that which we can measure, see and experience for the other it is precisely that which transcends experience and can not be measured and only hinted at. For the one truth derives from our investigation. For the other truth precedes and frames any discovery. These inversions almost make the words homophonic antonyms rather than a shared Rosetta stone.

PZ asks in comments whether "a disciplined adherence to a set of arbitrary rules" can be considered rational. But the whole point about Sayers’ argument, which I have never elsewhere seen so clearly put, is that she does not see the dogmas of Christianity as arbitrary. They correspond, she says, to the truth about human nature and the universe, and this correspondence becomes apparent when we test them. This isn’t, she says, an argument for the existence of God. What we say about God might simply be a way of describing the facts of human nature. But, either way, it would not be arbitrary. It could be tested – and it is.

This point matters because it strikes at what seems to me one of the central atheist misunderstandings of the religious, which is that their beliefs are arbitrary.

Sayers distinguished between the historical and theological assertions of Christianity. Theological assertions she regards as more testable, which, is counterintuitively true if they are assertions about the state of the universe, as she believed. The truth of an asserted one-off happening like the resurrection simply can’t be tested directly. In the end, we make up our minds by deciding how well it fits with the rest of the evidence. On the other hand, we can test the truth of an assertion like "to him that hath shall be given, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath" or "it must needs be that offences come, but woe unto that man by whom the offence cometh" and experience suggests that these are very often true. Indeed, the second is an excellent short definition of tragedy.

I repeat, the point here is not that saying them proved that Jesus was God or anything like that; what these statements disprove is the Pharyngular assertion that religious talk is by its nature arbitrary and untestable.

I am aware of the countermove that says these things aren’t really religious if they are reasonable and testable. I just think it’s disgraceful and indeed anti-scientific. We don’t distinguish between essences and accidents in biology. Why do so in sociology, which is what the scientific study of religion comes down to? So the objection that theological statements are not really theological if they turn out to be statements about the universe seems to me arbitrary and unwarranted. You have to ask first how these statements are intended, and, at least in the tradition of European Catholic philosophy, they seem to be intended and understood as statements of fact about the universe.

This is, I think, what Cardinal Schönborn was saying when he denied that the argument for a designer was a matter of faith and said it derived from a philosophical truth. But Sayers puts the point better. Her own words will be in the next post.

Though she is remembered for her detective stories. Dorothy L. Sayers was also a theologian, and some years ago, "a book of hers":http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0826476783/andrewbrownssite on the Trinity was reissued. I got a free copy, so I suppose this must have been at least ten years ago; but I have only now got round to reading it.

It has dated remarkably little, and as I read the opening chapters, I realised that it was all, in one sense, an argument with Pharyngular atheism, of the sort that maintains that religion must by its nature be irrational, and religious beliefs must by their nature be held without evidence.

She starts with a glorious denunciation of modern media and the sloppiness of modern thought, with which I am sure that Professor Myers would agree:

the popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling. Some time ago, the present writer, pardonably irritated by a very prevalent ignorance concerning the essentials of Christian doctrine, published a brief article in which those essentials were plainly set down in words that a child could understand. Every clause was preceded by some such phrase as: "the Church maintains", "the Church teaches", "if the Church is right", and so forth. The only personal opinion expressed was that, though the doctrine might be false, it could not very well be called dull.
Every newspaper that reviewed this article accepted it without question as a profession of faith—some (Heaven knows why) called it "a courageous profession of faith", as though professing Christians in this country were liable to instant persecution. One review, syndicated throughout the Empire, called it "a personal confession of faith by a woman who feels sure she is right".
Now, what the writer believes or does not believe is of little importance one way or the other. What is of great and disastrous importance is the proved inability of supposedly educated persons to read.

Testify, sister! Her brusque and angry dismissals aren’t just worth quoting in themselves.

The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns. They are literate in the merely formal sense—that is, they are capable of putting the symbols C, A, T together to produce the word CAT. But they are not literate in the sense of deriving from those letters any clear mental concept of the animal. Literacy in the formal sense is dangerous, since it lays the mind open to receive any mischievous nonsense about cats that an irresponsible writer may choose to print —nonsense which could never have entered the heads of plain illiterates who were familiar with an actual cat, even if unable to spell its name. … a great part of the nation subsists in an ignorance more barbarous than that of the dark ages, owing to this slatternly habit of illiterate reading. Words are understood in a wholly mistaken sense, statements of fact and opinion are misread and distorted in repetition, arguments founded in misapprehension are accepted without examination …

She’s writing, as it happens, about Christian doctrine, but nothing she says could not be applied to the difficulties of communicating science. But it will take a couple more posts to get that far. And you’re not going to get them tonight.