Helmintholog

The first conversation I ever had with him, he seemed nostalgic for the Orthodox church. He was, as a young man, attracted to Catholicism. Now he believes in the Anglican Communion: he has told the synod that he cannot give up this belief. What all these things have in common is a negative. He doesn’t believe in the Church of England. He doesn’t believe that a national Christianity is possible or right.

Some years ago, I made a joke about how, at the end of a century when intellectuals had sold their souls to every conceivable totalitarian ideology, he was the first to sell his to the Anglican Consultative Council. But I think we misunderstand his Christianity if we don’t see that it requires some kind of supranational body to make sense. American, liberal Christianity doesn’t. At least, for them, the USA is a supranational body. This is at the root of +RW’s policy towards them.

Tom Butler calls for the dissolution of the Anglican Communion (and I am rude about sundry primates) in this World Service programme. Bloody Realplayer, I’m afraid. Shortwave listeners can probably get it on their real radios some time today, but it has already run in the UK.

I know haven’t been blogging much. I’ve been busy, and will be at least until Easter, with bookish things, earning a living, and so forth. I’ll try to manage little bursts of entertaining procrastination from time to time. Here’s one.

I spotted an important mistake in the First Things review of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. I’m not a big fan of American right-wing Catholic intellectuals, and their tone of pompous weary condescending omniscience but this makes some decent points and, as I said, one instructive mistake:

The social and personal effects of religion, even if they could be proved to be uniform from society to society or person to person, may simply be accidental or epiphenomenal to religion. And even if one could actually discover some sort of clear connection between religious adherence and, say, social cohesion or personal happiness, one still would have no reason to assume the causal priority of those benefits; to do so would be to commit one of the most elementary of logical errors: post hoc ergo propter hoc — “thereafter, hence therefore” (or really, in this case, an even more embarrassing error: post hoc ergo causa huius –“thereafter, hence the cause thereof”). In the end, the most scientists of religion can do is to use biological metaphors to support (or, really, to illustrate) an essentially unfounded philosophical materialism.

I think this genuinely misunderstands an important part of selective processes, and that is the role of death. It is death or the repeated rounds of winnowing in a selective process which allow us to assume fitness for purpose in what survives. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is indeed a fallacy the first time something appears. But it is no longer a logical fallacy when something reappears over thousands of generations. When one sees, for example, strongly conserved gene sequences, there is no logical fallacy involved in assuming that they have been conserved because they serve some function.

I know I am ignoring the question of whether one can in fact observe this process in cultural evolution — though in practice no one entirely does: it would be surprising to find a contributor to First Things who did not believe that monogamous heterosexual families were more successful at raising children than the alternatives — but as a general statement about evolutionary theory, that particular criticism of Dennett fails entirely. Also, “thereafter, hence the cause thereof” my arse.