93 – Science and Religion Making Meaning

Sofia Editor Dinah Livingstone, 10 St Martin’s Close London NW1 0HR editor@sofn.org.uk Degrees of Freedom What do young people – or any people – need? I’d say – serious discussion concerning degrees of freedom.

If I believed in a realist God, I would thank it for the 1970s Women’s Movement – (something with which the Churches have not yet caught up). It can be seen, now, to what extent the movement was Marxist-derived, in so far as it stressed that, given consciousness raising, an understanding of one’s situation, a degree of freedom might be possible. Some of the good results of all this are still with us. However, since then, what with the genome project, a general interest in genetics, and developments in endocrinology, we may suspect that we are more determined than we thought or hoped.

It is important at this juncture not to lose concern with degrees of freedom. After all, there are parts of the world into which the idea that women might be anything other than creatures determined to fulfil one animalistic role has not entered. I believe that the novelist Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, will be speaking at the Manchester Literature Festival (October 15-25). Creative people may be better at testing the wind than most.

When I was 13, I decided to bunk off from the Congregational chapel. Then I read Brave New World, and scuttled back because at least the church seemed to care about individual conscience. You’ll recall that the novel is about a (fabulous) society in which people are entirely determined by their origin in test tubes, according to grades of intelligence. The implied discussion is – might such a society flourish, without certain evils, given that everybody has a nice time according to his or her ‘manufactured’ nature? In such a society there is no room for a rift in the lute. Forty years later, as I was learning the profession, the students at Leeds Metro as is now, were protesting against a proposed talk by a genetic determinist, horrified by such a creed. Bliss was it, in that dawn. I, of course, was against them, because they were using their right to protest to prevent free speech!

What can we do now? Stress the importance of benevolence, but not lose sight of the idea of degrees of freedom? Unfortunately the fascists may succeed whilst we are slaking our fears with anything from Britain’s Got Talent to the interesting circus over MP’s expenses. Am I saying the SOF should be a bit more concerned with political philosophy and less bothered as to whether or not the world started in 4000 BC? Probably.

— Anna Sutcliffe, Leeds

Anna Sutcliffe 14 Drummond Court, Leeds LS165QE George Matheson I was delighted to read Anna Sutcliffe’s article in the June 2009 issue of Sofia. It so happens that the Edinburgh church – now Stockbridge Parish Church – associated with George Matheson, is the one I attend today. He is still remembered there: the church office is called the Matheson Room, and his portrait is displayed on a stairway. George Matheson was blind, yet performed his duties without complaint. Apart from the hymn mentioned in the article, he wrote others. Although he lived a hundred years ago he was what we would now call an interfaith enthusiast, at a time when such views would not have been considered by most Christians.

One of his hymns that we still sing is Gather us in. Its last verse reads:

Some seek a Father in the heavens above, Some ask a human image to adore, Some crave a spirit vast as life and love; Within thy mansions we have all and more; Gather us in.

His lines may not constitute the greatest poetry, as Anna Sutcliffe says, but it does have one of the main elements of poetry: it touches the deep emotional ‘presence’ at the heart of things.

— William G. Harrison, Edinburgh

William G. Harrison 4, Lampacre Road, Edinburgh, EH127HT wgharrisonl 925@googlemail.com Jennifer Jeynes – A Response In response to Jennifer Jeynes’s review of my book Progressive Secular Society and other Essays (Sofia, March 2009), I wish to express my appreciation of the positive points she made. However, I would also like to take issue with two negative points, as follows:

Firstly, she claims that my use of the ontological term ‘energy’ was chosen for metaphorical effect by a ‘basically arts-based writer’. Arts-based I may be, but in fact I use the term exactly in the way it is deployed by Werner Heisenberg, the leading modern physicist, letters whom no one can accuse of using scientific language to achieve metaphorical effects. My reference to Heisenberg is made completely clear in the substantial quotation from him given on page 13 of the text. Incidentally, in this quotation Heisenberg speaks of the identity of energy with mass –a point to which Jennifer refers.

Secondly, regarding the essay ‘Do Humanists Need the Concept of Evil?’ Jennifer speaks of my references to Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. She says I do ‘not delve deep enough into the aetiology’ of their actions. This point is connected with a subsequent one: that ‘we need to study behaviour at the edges of a human psychological continuum.’ Manifestly, this is a psychological issue she is raising. Now while it is true that I do not go into extensive psychological detail on Hitler etc., I do say that humanists, while having a concept of evil, should at the same time be scientific, and consider the causes of the actions which they deem evil. So, the psychological sphere is not ignored. I do not use the term ‘evil’ in some non-psychological and therefore metaphysical sense, which omits considerations of causality. Thus it is not deployed as, in Jennifer’s words, ‘a Christian term impervious to useful analysis’ . In fact, I repeatedly say that a humanist concept of evil must be absolutely independent of religious notions.

Finally on this point, usage of the term is not confined to Christianity, contrary to what Jennifer’s words imply, or indeed to the religious sphere as a whole. On page 71 I refer to its deployment by Sartre, whom no one could describe as a religious believer! As a matter of interest, other atheistic philosophers who have deployed it are Schopenhauer and Santayana.

Here are a handful of examples of what I have in mind: • The transformation of our understanding from a static, hierarchical and mechanical view of everything to an active, developmental and complexly interactive view, a transformation which we associate with the name of Charles Darwin. • The work of Piaget, Kohlberg and especially James Fowler on human development and how moral standards and religious faith (may) change as humans age. • Matters of the environment, climate change and the recent credit and financial crisis are, I suspect, not only political, ethical and or economic concerns.

They may be marginal or irrelevant to those forms of religion that are so heavenly minded they are very little earthly use, but that cannot settle the matter for readers of Sofia. Have we, or should we have, something to say about these matters?

I would also like to see Sofia become wider-ranging and more ambitious in its book reviews. But having said all that, I want to affirm that Sofia is a magazine I look forward to and read with enjoyment and enlightenment.

— Tom Rubens, London

Tom Rubens, 94 St. John’s Court, Queen’s Drive, London N4 2HN Disappointed, Down Under I always read Sofia with interest and appreciation. But Hershey Julien’s letter in Sofia 92 has brought up to consciousness an underlying disappointment. I don’t expect a magazine that takes religious faith seriously to manage without the concept of the supernatural 100 percent of the time, but I do think Sofia could do more to challenge contributors, or to ask them to be more self-aware and self-critical about writing in dualistic and supernatural terms. I find also that I regret that Sofia has not been grappling with some of the big issues that follow either from purposefully choosing to operate without ‘the supernatural’, or from some of the major developments of the last few centuries, wilful blindness to which has contributed to the increasing irrelevance to 21st Century life of most of mainstream Christianity.

— Donald Feist, Dunedin, New Zealand