a wonderful run this morning. 90 minutes or so. small roads, public footpaths, permissive footpaths, a park, a bridleway, a towpath, finishing with a swim in the river during which a dog ran off with one of my socks. it reminded me how deeply i missed public access land while living in boston, mass. (and how much i had taken it for granted while living here). i've just flicked through a couple of random uk ordnance survey maps and in the countryside it's almost impossible to find a square mile you can't cross using some kind of road or track or path. in new england great tracts of land were either inaccessible and could be viewed only from car windows if at all, large stretches of seashore were out of reach and despite the fact that massachusetts is a colander of lakes the public were allowed to swim freely only in walden pond, possibly to prevent thoreau's ghost rising up like jacob marley in the small hours of the morning and strangling state officials with its chains.

coincidentally, the other things I missed most were radio 4, proper muesli  and the (I now realise) quinitessentially british habit of bonding with one’s friends by insulting them.

an afterthought…

(see the previous entry ‘the case for god’)

karen armstrong would, i think, paraphrase the stand-off between religion and science something like this. religion is, or should be, a body of practises which help us articulate mystery, the fact there is something than nothing, our finitude, our suffering, our sense of wonder, our place in a universe which will is ultimately incomprehensible. science, on the other hand, is a set of practices which generates a contingent set of ideas (for scientific ideas are always contingent) which enable us to manipulate and understand the physical world. mythos on the one hand and logos on the other. two cultures which simply don’t intersect, except perhaps on the outer reaches of cosmology and particle physics.

this is right, i think, but it is all rather grandiose, an image best captured in stephen jay gould’s equally grandiose idea of non-overlapping magisteria. it is a picture which suggests that this boundary is something that can be seen only from a great height and spelled out using capital letters.

but if there really is a boundary this distinct it should surely be visible on the ground, when you’re making a cup of tea or taking a walk in the park. and it is.

science deals with the objective world. religion, on the other hand, deals with the subjective. to use the perennial philosophical chestnut, science can tell us a great deal about the colour red but almost nothing about our experience of seeing the colour red. the conundrum being that there is no way of telling whether, or how, my experience of the colour red is different from yours. There are philosophers and scientists who would dismiss the question as meaningless. indeed there are some (daniel dennett for example) who would say that our peculiarly personal and interior subjective experience of the colour red (or anything else) is simply an illusion, period.

science can tell us about this subjective experience only when it manifests itself in physical events (the behaviour of neurons, our descriptions of our subjective experience, the inability of some people to tell red from green…). however closely we examine the physical world we simply cannot find subjective experience. even if we know precisely what is happening in the brain, even if we find the exact neural correlative of a particular subjective experience, it still gets no real purchase on having that experience (if we look closely enough all we can see is the random bubbling of quantum activity which, if anything, makes the puzzle even greater). but having that experience is why the world exists for us. and the fact that you and i agree most of time that we’re both seeing red is what makes human civilisation possible. dennett may be right in saying that subjective experience is an illusion. but to dismiss something as an illusion simply dodges the biggest question of all.

religion, of course, is not the only way of articulating our subjective experience. writing and reading novels is another, as is composing and listening to music, as is making and looking at pictures. but there is a very definite border between what science can and can’t do. and the overwhelming success of science in flying us to new york and transplanting hearts and sending robots to mars has made us blind to this border. but you and i are sitting on that border right now.

every year the art room, an art therapy charity for kids in oxford, runs a fundraising auction of artwork. contributors are asked to do something artistic to a particular object. this year it was a sketchbook of handmade paper. 

http://www.theartroom.org.uk/index.html

crap cover, crap title, but a rather wonderful book (by karen armstrong. and I'm speaking as an atheist here. it's emphatically not (despite cover and title) a riposte to dawkins and hitchens (she agrees with many of their arguments). on the contrary it’s an attempt to reassert the primacy of the apophatic tradition in all the major world religions; religion not as an inert set of ideas to which believers subscribe, but as a set of communal practices (meditative, ceremonial…) which help us come to terms with our place in this profoundly and impenetrably mysterious (and therefore ‘sacred’) world, a world from which most of us feel alienated in one way or another.

here's a pivotal passage:

"The word translated 'faith' in the new testament is the greek 'pistis' (verbal form: 'pisteuo'), which means 'trust; loyalty; engagement; commitment'. jesus was not asking people to 'believe' in his divinity, because he was making no such-claim. He was asking for commitment. he wanted disciples who would engage with -his mission, give all they had to the poor, feed the hungry, refuse to be hampered by family ties, abandon their pride, lay aside their self-importance and sense of entitlement, live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and trust in the god who was their father... when the new testament was translated from greek into latin by st jerome (C.342-420), 'pistis' became 'fides' ('loyalty'). 'fides' had no verbal form, so for 'pisteuo', jerome used the Latin verb 'credo', a word that derived from 'cor do': 'i give my heart'. he did not think of using 'opinor' ('I hold an opinion'). when the bible was translated into english, 'credo' and 'pisteuo' became 'I believe' in the king james version (16ll). but the word 'belief' has since changed its meaning. In middle english, 'bileven' meant 'to prize; to value; to hold dear'. It was related to the german 'belieben' ('to love'), 'liebe' ('beloved') and the latin libido. So 'belief' originally meant 'loyalty to a person to whom one is bound in promise or duty'... during the late seventeenth century, however, as our concept of knowledge became more theoretical, the word 'belief' started to be used to describe an intellectual assent to a hypothetical- and often dubious - proposition. Scientists and philosophers were the first to use it in this sense, but in religious contexts the latin 'credere' and the english 'belief' both retained their original connotations well into the nineteenth century."