Richard Dawkins - right or wrong?

In the motion picture Casino Royale (off stage, during Jame's torture scene), Vesper pretty much faced the same "Prisoner's Dilemma" as Tosca did: to save James Bond's life (and possibly hers, at least for the moment), she made a deal with SPECTRE. She, too, attempted deception against SPECTRE (though it was a feckless attempt) and dared hope for happiness (if brief) with James. But all too soon, SPECTRE caught up with her and she knew she had to go through with her bargain, hoping they would spare her but knowing in her heart that she was heading to her death. What of that torture scene in which LeChifre offered Bond a deal to save Vesper (actually to kill her quickly and spare her the agony of torture) if Bond gave him the information he needed?...The concept of a "Prisoner's Dilemma" applies wherever there's a conflict between self-interest and the common good...where collective and individual interests are in conflict. Which way did James Bond go? How did he decide?


What's interesting is that in single encounters of the "Prisoner's Dilemma", the outcome is usually driven by selfishness and distrust. Players are usually encouraged to defect and deceive out of self-interest; just like Tosca and Vesper tried and failed to do. The outcome is entirely different when the game is played more than once. Game theorists found that frequent repetition of the encounter encouraged cooperation. With "the shadow of the future" held over each player, a new game emerged, "Tit-for-Tat", which relied on the consequence of reciprocity. In the system described by "Tit-for-Tat" the long-term reward of cooperation outweighs the short-term reward of defection. This is what Matt Ridley calls reciprocal altruism and apparently humans are particularly well suited to it, being gregarious and choosing to live in a society where repeated encounters among ourselves promotes cooperation. Reciprocity permeates our language and our lives: "dept, obligation, favour, bargain, contract, exhange, deal..." Simpler life forms also engage in reciprocal altruism, as Lynn Margulis pointed out in her discussions of endosymbiosis and evolution through cooperation.


In my book, "Darwin's Paradox", one of the characters, Gaia, brings up a grissly example of reciprocal altruism to demonstrate a point to Julie Crane, the main character. Gaia's story centres on vampire bats. These delightful creatures spend the day in hollow trees and at night in search of large animals whose blood they quietly sip from small cuts they've surreptitiously made. Bats don't usually return sated, many times failing to get their fill or in finding prey at all. However, when a bat does get a meal, it usually drinks more than it needs and the surplus is typically donated to another bat by generously regurgitating some blood. Why donate at all? Bats live for a long time and roost together;........ etc

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2020hindsight said:

Rafa
I'll reply to your post "later"
but in the meantime, here's a discussion he has with the local bishop - he has no problems with reasonable people. And he argues forcefully with the unreasonable ones - but does not use force.
His main concern I believe is with the bible belt in USA, where free-thinking agnostics, atheists etc are ostracized ... almost meet "underground" for fear of losing jobs etc. But I'll try to find some youtubes to that effect ( unless someone beats me to it).

Richard Dawkins and the Bishop of Oxford (2 of 4)

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1. Comment #33251 by roach on April 19, 2007 at 5:48 pm
This is an amazing discussion. It's a pleasure to watch.

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2. Comment #33357 by ajpb on April 20, 2007 at 12:08 am
This is without doubt the best video I have seen on this site yet.

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3. Comment #33388 by cetACEan on April 20, 2007 at 2:03 am
Bishop Harries confirmed me when I was 13 years old. Richard Dawkins helped me discover atheism in the Christmas lectures in 1991. I am very glad to see such a frank and polite debate on some of the issues around theology and religion. I think these two men set a good example for the rest of the debate. Recommended watching.

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David Marshall says:
As I've explained in previous forums, I'm presently writing a book refuting Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett. (I say that not to promote the book, which won't be out for a while, but to come clean on position.) I'm not a scientist, and only a fraction of the errors I found in this book (counting 160 on the first read; leaving the numbers in place below) had to do with science. I plan to excoriate Dawkins more for his absurd errors in other areas of knowledge in my response.

However, as professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, one would expect Dawkins to get his scientific facts right. He is a talented writer and imaginative writer, and in the past has proven ingenious at describing his views of evolution. It may be that I am mistaken, as an outsider to the field. But it seems to me a lot of his scientific claims here are "hot-house" arguments, claims that flourish only in a protected environment.

Here I'd like to expose eight of those arguments to a little "frost." If you think I'm the one who's mistaken, please point out my errors. I'll be obliged.

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Richard Dawkins is a learned mind of the highest order. In writing 'The God Delusion', he reduced his massive knowledge down to a lay level to make the concepts understandable to pretty much everyone. It is difficult to reduce high order knowledge to a lay level without introducing some inconsistency. The majority of your criticisms seem to leverage on that.

In one case, he used the word 'always'. Perhaps he should have said 'generally' or 'usually'.

In another case, he used a term allegedly coined by Michael Behe, yet he didn't specifically address Michael Behe's favorite examples. So what? I can argue against communism in China without ever directly addressing The Communist Manifesto. So what?

Parts of organs missing? Does the fossil record indicate that any creatures had eyes without optic nerves or wings without tendons? Have we found any such creatures? We can line up creatures with varying levels of eye development. These pretty neatly show how the eye can evolve.

No there doesn't seem to be any evidence for ID. The only evidence is the 'God of the Gaps' variety. A religious searcher looks for anything that isn't currently explainable and plants God's flag in it. Ignorance constitutes knowledge of God.

How easy was it for evolution to get started? Life promulgates life. We see this all around us. It seems likely that life would cling on, grow, and evolve. We find it everywhere on the planet, and adapted to every environment on the planet. We have trouble keeping life out of things that we would rather stay sterile. Life is down right invasive, aggressive, and very adaptable.

Hubert Yockey's math is gloomy. So what? I am absolutely certain the he guess the values of a large number of variables and would not have taken into account a good number of other variables. Hubert Yockey's math (in regard to the probability of life) is just as much a guess a Dawkins' numbers. I knew that Dawkins' math was wrong. There probably more planets than a billion billion. I believe it's more like trillions of trillions. Dawkins was just trying to demonstrate that life has many, many opportunities to arise. He's not claiming to have actually computed the likelyhood. The mathematician who claims to know the likelyhood is much more the fraud. There are too many unknowns to assert anything like accuracy.

The 'Big Crunch' model of the universe is no longer in vogue. Currently, it is believed that the universe is going to expand forever. The verdict isn't completely in, though. The rotation of the universe should have the galaxies moving apart faster than they seem to be. Some force must be acting to hold the galaxies in. Speculations about 'dark matter' abound. Hugh Ross' argument might, or might not be valid. Too much of the answer depends on the completely unknown properties of dark matter.

Sorry to disappoint you by being the first to respond to your query- but hey, you knew it would happen.

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2020hindsight said:

Further to recent discussion on another thread (of which this is latest at this point of time) :-

https://www.aussiestockforums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=255334&highlight=honesty#post255334

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Pat said:

2020 in the other thread you mentioned Dawkins logic.
I am trying to grasp exactly what it is?

Now I havent read any of his books. All I am familiar with is what is here on ASF.

Is he against the belief in god?
Or religion?
Or both?

I am confused because I haven't seen where he has provided a better altenative.

I guess I don't know what he could be right or wrong about?

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2020hindsight said:

PS MS&Trades
By that I would expect you to at least cut and paste the claim against him or his reasoning. Then we can analyse it.

i.e. Not just post a link to a massive website - with no detail - and say "QED".

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Pat said:

Is he against the belief in god? Or religion? Or both?
I am confused because I haven't seen where he has provided a better altenative.
I guess I don't know what he could be right or wrong about?

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I believe astrology misleads the public, denies scientific progress, and belittles our universe. There's a far richer way to look at the cosmos. ASTONOMY is a triumph of the human intellect. a real science constantly enriched by new evidence.

Forget about the astrologer's charts with their constellations and planets moving in and out of this house or that house. Go into a real observatory and look at the Milky Way or go out into the country on a moonless night - just lie on your back and gaze up at the stars. The heart stopping sight you'd see is a 100 billion stars spinning through an expanding universe at a million miles per day. The light from some of the closest stars started its journey at the time of the dinosaurs.

You are staring into a deep time machine.
And yet even as science unravels these natural wonders, our society is drawn to the slim pickings of supernatural belief.

Half the British population now say they believe in paranormal phenomena, Over 8 million of us have owned up to consulting psychic mediums, etc"

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6m0s :- the internet is revolutionising how we use information
wikipedia presents great opportunity and huge danger
paranoiac conspiracy theories circulate unchallenged
like the one that NASA faked the moon landings
which is a bit of a joke because the evidence is so strong
but how about the malicious and utterly unfounded rumour that 4000 Jews were tipped off by Israeli agents not to go to work in the World Trade Centre on 9/11. It's one of the nasty lies circulating as truth in the blog communities of racists and religious fundamentalists.

...whipping up scares and reinforcing their paranoia and delusions.

measles vaccination now not used in some countries due to misinformation - and e.g. 35,000 die per annum in Afghanistan as a result..

8m0s ... this is the world of private hunches and no respect for evidence. Reason has built the modern world, It is a precious but also a fragile thing . which can be eroded by apparently harmless irrationality.

We must favour verifiable evidence over private feeling , otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth.

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Dear Juliet,

Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are very far away? And how do we know that Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the sun?

The answer to these questions is "evidence." Sometimes evidence means actually seeing ( or hearing, feeling, smelling..... ) that something is true. Astronauts have travelled far enough from earth to see with their own eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The "evening star" looks like a bright twinkle in the sky, but with a telescope, you can see that it is a beautiful ball - the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing ( or hearing or feeling..... ) is called an observation.

Often, evidence isn't just an observation on its own, but observation always lies at the back of it. If there's been a murder, often nobody (except the murderer and the victim!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather together lots or other observations which may all point toward a particular suspect. If a person's fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched it. It doesn't prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it's joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realise that they fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.

Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe - often work like detectives. They make a guess ( called a hypothesis ) about what might be true. They then say to themselves: If that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveller, going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back where he started.
....
The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something , and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called "tradition," "authority," and "revelation."

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First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a discussion with about fifty children. These children were invited because they had been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or Sikhs. The man with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by "tradition." Their beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either. They said things like: "We Hindus believe so and so"; "We Muslims believe such and such"; "We Christians believe something else."

Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn't all be right. ....... Tradition means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus.
....
The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you make up a story that isn't true, handing it down over a number of centuries doesn't make it any truer!

.........
People who believe even slightly different things from each other go to war over their disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty good reasons - evidence - for believing what they believe. But actually, their different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions.

Let's talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn't die but was lifted bodily in to Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary did die like anybody else. These other religions don't talk about much and, unlike Roman Catholics, they don't call her the "Queen of Heaven." The tradition that Mary's body was lifted into Heaven is not an old one. The bible says nothing on how she died; in fact, the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn't invented until about six centuries after Jesus' time. At first, it was just made up, in the same way as any story like "Snow White" was made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed down over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the more people took it seriously. It finally was written down as and official Roman Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950, when I was the age you are now. But the story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first invented six hundred years after Mary's death. .

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Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing in it because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right just because he is the pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are the old men with beards called ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in this country are prepared to commit murder, purely because the ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.

When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told that they had to believe that Mary's body shot off to Heaven, what I mean is that in 1950, the pope told people that they had to believe it. That was it. The pope said it was true, so it had to be true! .

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The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called "revelation." If you had asked the pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary's body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been "revealed" to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling "revelation." It isn't only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots of religious people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing the things that they do believe. But is it a good reason?

Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You'd be very upset, and you'd probably say, "Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?" Now suppose I answered: "I don't actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just have a funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead." You'd be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you'd know that an inside "feeling" on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. ...

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I promised that I'd come back to tradition, and look at it in another way.
........
It's a pity, but it can't help being the case, that because children have to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right or wrong. Lots of what the grown-ups tell them is true and based on evidence, or at least sensible. But if some of it is false, silly, or even wicked, there is nothing to stop the children believing that, too. Now, when the children grow up, what do they do? Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children. So, once something gets itself strongly believed - even if it is completely untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first place - it can go on forever.

Could this be what has happened with religions ? Belief that there is a god or gods, belief in Heaven, ...., belief that prayers are answered, .... - not one of these beliefs is backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions of people believe them. Perhaps this because they were told to believe them when they were told to believe them when they were young enough to believe anything.

Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they were told different things when they were children. Muslim children are told different things from Christian children, and both grow up utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. Even within Christians, Roman Catholics believe different things from Church of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers , Mormons or Holy Rollers, and are all utterly covinced that they are right and the others are wrong.
.........
What can we do about all this ? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: "Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority, or revelation?" And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: "What kind of evidence is there for that?" And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

Your loving

Daddy

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Don't turn your back on science
An open letter from biologist Richard Dawkins to Prince Charles
Article in The Observer Sunday May 21, 2000

Your Royal Highness,

Your Reith lecture saddened me. I have deep sympathy for your aims, and admiration for your sincerity. But your hostility to science will not serve those aims; and your embracing of an ill-assorted jumble of mutually contradictory alternatives will lose you the respect that I think you deserve. I forget who it was who remarked: 'Of course we must be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.'

Let's look at some of the alternative philosophies which you seem to prefer over scientific reason. First, intuition, the heart's wisdom 'rustling like a breeze through the leaves'. Unfortunately, it depends whose intuition you choose. Where aims (if not methods) are concerned, your own intuitions coincide with mine. I wholeheartedly share your aim of long-term stewardship of our planet, with its diverse and complex biosphere.

But what about the instinctive wisdom in Saddam Hussein's black heart? What price the Wagnerian wind that rustled Hitler's twisted leaves? The Yorkshire Ripper heard religious voices in his head urging him to kill. How do we decide which intuitive inner voices to heed?

This, it is important to say, is not a dilemma that science can solve. My own passionate concern for world stewardship is as emotional as yours. But where I allow feelings to influence my aims, when it comes to deciding the best method of achieving them I'd rather think than feel. And thinking, here, means scientific thinking. No more effective method exists. If it did, science would incorporate it.

Next, Sir, I think you may have an exaggerated idea of the natural ness of 'traditional' or 'organic' agriculture. Agriculture has always been unnatural. Our species began to depart from our natural hunter-gatherer lifestyle as recently as 10,000 years ago - too short to measure on the evolutionary timescale.

Wheat, be it ever so wholemeal and stoneground, is not a natural food for Homo sapiens. Nor is milk, except for children. Almost every morsel of our food is genetically modified - admittedly by artificial selection not artificial mutation, but the end result is the same. A wheat grain is a genetically modified grass seed, just as a pekinese is a genetically modified wolf. Playing God? We've been playing God for centuries!

The large, anonymous crowds in which we now teem began with the agricultural revolution, and without agriculture we could survive in only a tiny fraction of our current numbers. Our high population is an agricultural (and technological and medical) artifact. It is far more unnatural than the population-limiting methods condemned as unnatural by the Pope. Like it or not, we are stuck with agriculture, and agriculture - all agriculture - is unnatural. We sold that pass 10,000 years ago.

Does that mean there's nothing to choose between different kinds of agriculture when it comes to sustainable planetary welfare? Certainly not. Some are much more damaging than others, but it's no use appealing to 'nature', or to 'instinct' in order to decide which ones. You have to study the evidence, soberly and reasonably - scientifically. Slashing and burning (incidentally, no agricultural system is closer to being 'traditional') destroys our ancient forests. Overgrazing (again, widely practised by 'traditional' cultures) causes soil erosion and turns fertile pasture into desert. Moving to our own modern tribe, monoculture, fed by powdered fertilisers and poisons, is bad for the future; indiscriminate use of antibiotics to promote livestock growth is worse.

Incidentally, one worrying aspect of the hysterical opposition to the possible risks from GM crops is that it diverts attention from definite dangers which are already well understood but largely ignored. The evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria is something that a Darwinian might have foreseen from the day antibiotics were discovered. Unfortunately the warning voices have been rather quiet, and now they are drowned by the baying cacophony: 'GM GM GM GM GM GM!'

Moreover if, as I expect, the dire prophecies of GM doom fail to materialise, the feeling of let-down may spill over into complacency about real risks. Has it occurred to you that our present GM brouhaha may be a terrible case of crying wolf?

Even if agriculture could be natural, and even if we could develop some sort of instinctive rapport with the ways of nature, would nature be a good role model? Here, we must think carefully. There really is a sense in which ecosystems are balanced and harmonious, with some of their constituent species becoming mutually dependent. This is one reason the corporate thuggery that is destroying the rainforests is so criminal.

On the other hand, we must beware of a very common misunderstanding of Darwinism. Tennyson was writing before Darwin but he got it right. Nature really is red in tooth and claw. Much as we might like to believe otherwise, natural selection, working within each species, does not favour long-term stewardship. It favours short-term gain. Loggers, whalers, and other profiteers who squander the future for present greed, are only doing what all wild creatures have done for three billion years.

No wonder T.H. Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, founded his ethics on a repudiation of Darwinism. Not a repudiation of Darwinism as science, of course, for you cannot repudiate truth. But the very fact that Darwinism is true makes it even more important for us to fight against the naturally selfish and exploitative tendencies of nature. We can do it. Probably no other species of animal or plant can. We can do it because our brains (admittedly given to us by natural selection for reasons of short-term Darwinian gain) are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences. Natural selection is like a robot that can only climb uphill, even if this leaves it stuck on top of a measly hillock. There is no mechanism for going downhill, for crossing the valley to the lower slopes of the high mountain on the other side. There is no natural foresight, no mechanism for warning that present selfish gains are leading to species extinction - and indeed, 99 per cent of all species that have ever lived are extinct.

The human brain, probably uniquely in the whole of evolutionary history, can see across the valley and can plot a course away from extinction and towards distant uplands. Long-term planning - and hence the very possibility of stewardship - is something utterly new on the planet, even alien. It exists only in human brains. The future is a new invention in evolution. It is precious. And fragile. We must use all our scientific artifice to protect it.

It may sound paradoxical, but if we want to sustain the planet into the future, the first thing we must do is stop taking advice from nature. Nature is a short-term Darwinian profiteer. Darwin himself said it: 'What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature.'

Of course that's bleak, but there's no law saying the truth has to be cheerful; no point shooting the messenger - science - and no sense in preferring an alternative world view just because it feels more comfortable. In any case, science isn't all bleak. Nor, by the way, is science an arrogant know-all. Any scientist worthy of the name will warm to your quotation from Socrates: 'Wisdom is knowing that you don't know.' What else drives us to find out?

What saddens me most, Sir, is how much you will be missing if you turn your back on science. I have tried to write about the poetic wonder of science myself, but may I take the liberty of presenting you with a book by another author? It is The Demon-Haunted World by the lamented Carl Sagan. I'd call your attention especially to the subtitle: Science as a Candle in the Dark .
• Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His latest book is 'Unweaving the Rainbow'

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It may sound paradoxical, but if we want to sustain the planet into the future, the first thing we must do is stop taking advice from nature. Nature is a short-term Darwinian profiteer. Darwin himself said it: 'What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature.'

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dawkins said:

Incidentally, one worrying aspect of the hysterical opposition to the possible risks from GM crops is that it diverts attention from definite dangers which are already well understood but largely ignored. The evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria is something that a Darwinian might have foreseen from the day antibiotics were discovered. Unfortunately the warning voices have been rather quiet, and now they are drowned by the baying cacophony: 'GM GM GM GM GM GM!'

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Vandana Shiva: Very, very seriously and I think we now have more than enough evidence that the idea that genetic engineering is an imperative because without it people will starve - it's not at all true. Organic production increases food production many fold. It sustains biodiversity, protects the Earth, and protects all farmers while bringing us good food. And I think it's time that at least 50 percent of the world's money was put into research on organic methods and improvement of indigenous methods rather than this blind investment only in genetic engineering whose hazards are known, whose counter productivity is now established and which increases monopoly controls which we can't afford.

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Prince Charles: Like millions of other people around the world I've been fascinated to hear five eminent speakers share with us their thoughts hopes and fears about sustainable development based on their own experience. All five of those contributions have been immensely thoughtful and challenging. There have been clear differences of opinion and of emphasis between the speakers but there have also been some important common themes, both implicit and explicit. One of those themes has been the suggestion that sustained development is a matter of enlightened self-interest. Two of the speakers used this phrase and I don't believe that the other three would dissent from it, and nor would I.

Self-interest is a powerful motivating force for all of us, and if we can somehow convince ourselves that sustainable development is in all our interests then we will have taken a valuable first step towards achieving it. But self-interest comes in many competing guises - not all of which I fear are likely to lead in the right direction for very long, nor to embrace the manifold needs of future generations. I am convinced we will need to dig rather deeper to find the inspiration, sense of urgency and moral purpose required to confront the hard choices which face us on the long road to sustainable development. So, although it seems to have become deeply unfashionable to talk about the spiritual dimension of our existence, that is what I propose to do.

The idea that there is a sacred trust between mankind and our Creator, under which we accept a duty of stewardship for the earth, has been an important feature of most religious and spiritual thought throughout the ages. Even those whose beliefs have not included the existence of a Creator have, nevertheless, adopted a similar position on moral and ethical grounds. It is only recently that this guiding principle has become smothered by almost impenetrable layers of scientific rationalism. I believe that if we are to achieve genuinely sustainable development we will first have to rediscover, or re-acknowledge a sense of the sacred in our dealings with the natural world, and with each other. If literally nothing is held sacred anymore - because it is considered synonymous with superstition or in some other way "irrational" - what is there to prevent us treating our entire world as some "great laboratory of life" with potentially disastrous long term consequences?

Fundamentally, an understanding of the sacred helps us to acknowledge that there are bounds of balance, order and harmony in the natural world which set limits to our ambitions, and define the parameters of sustainable development. In some cases nature's limits are well understood at the rational, scientific level. As a simple example, we know that trying to graze too many sheep on a hillside will, sooner or later, be counter productive for the sheep, the hillside, or both. More widely we understand that the overuse of insecticides or antibiotics leads to problems of resistance. And we are beginning to comprehend the full, awful consequences of pumping too much carbon dioxide into the earth's atmosphere. Yet the actions being taken to halt the damage known to be caused by exceeding nature's limits in these and other ways are insufficient to ensure a sustainable outcome. In other areas, such as the artificial and uncontained transfer of genes between species of plants and animals, the lack of hard, scientific evidence of harmful consequences is regarded in many quarters as sufficient reason to allow such developments to proceed.

The idea of taking a precautionary approach, in this and many other potentially damaging situations, receives overwhelming public support, but still faces a degree of official opposition, as if admitting the possibility of doubt was a sign of weakness or even of a wish to halt "progress". On the contrary, I believe it to be a sign of strength and of wisdom. It seems that when we do have scientific evidence that we are damaging our environment we aren't doing enough to put things right, and when we don't have that evidence we are prone to do nothing at all, regardless of the risks.

Part of the problem is the prevailing approach that seeks to reduce the natural world including ourselves to the level of nothing more than a mechanical process. For whilst the natural theologians of the 18th and 19th centuries like Thomas Morgan referred to the perfect unity, order, wisdom and design of the natural world, scientists like Bertrand Russell rejected this idea as rubbish. 'I think the universe' he wrote 'is all spots and jumps without unity and without continuity, without coherence or orderliness. Sir Julian Huxley wrote in "Creation a Modern Synthesis" - that modern science must rule out special creation or divine guidance.' But why?

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As Professor Alan Linton of Bristol University has written- 'evolution is a manmade theory to explain the origin and continuance of life on this planet without reference to a Creator.' It is because of our inability or refusal to accept the existence of a guiding hand that nature has come to be regarded as a system that can be engineered for our own convenience or as a nuisance to be evaded and manipulated, and in which anything that happens can be fixed by technology and human ingenuity. Fritz Schumacher recognised the inherent dangers in this approach when he said that 'there are two sciences - the science of manipulation and the science of understanding.'

In this technology driven age it is all too easy for us to forget that mankind is a part of nature and not apart from it. And that this is why we should seek to work with the grain of nature in everything we do, for the natural world is, as the economist Herman Daly puts it - 'the envelope that contains, sustains and provisions the economy, not the other way round.' So which argument do you think will win - the living world as one or the world made up of random parts, the product of mere chance, thereby providing the justification for any kind of development? This, to my mind, lies at the heart of what we call sustainable development. We need, therefore, to rediscover a reference for the natural world, irrespective of its usefulness to ourselves - to become more aware in Philip Sherrard's words of 'the relationship of interdependence, interpenetration and reciprocity between God, Man and Creation.'

Above all, we should show greater respect for the genius of nature's designs, rigorously tested and refined over millions of years. This means being careful to use science to understand how nature works, not to change what nature is, as we do when genetic manipulation seeks to transform a process of biological evolution into something altogether different. The idea that the different parts of the natural world are connected through an intricate system of checks and balances which we disturb at our peril is all too easily dismissed as no longer relevant.

So, in an age when we're told that science has all the answers, what chance is there for working with the grain of nature? As an example of working with the grain of nature, I happen to believe that if a fraction of the money currently being invested in developing genetically manipulated crops were applied to understanding and improving traditional systems of agriculture, which have stood the all- important test of time, the results would be remarkable. There is already plenty of evidence of just what can be achieved through applying more knowledge and fewer chemicals to diverse cropping systems. These are genuinely sustainable methods and they are far removed from the approaches based on monoculture which lend themselves to large- scale commercial exploitation, and which Vandana Shiva condemned so persuasively and so convincingly in her lecture. Our most eminent scientists accept that there is still a vast amount that we don't know about our world and the life forms that inhabit it. As Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, points out, it is complexity that makes things hard to understand, not size. In a comment which only an astronomer could make, he describes a butterfly as a more daunting intellectual challenge than the cosmos!

Others, like Rachel Carson, have eloquently reminded us that we don't know how to make a single blade of grass. And St. Matthew, in his wisdom, emphasised that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as the lilies of the field. Faced with such unknowns it is hard not to feel a sense of humility, wonder and awe about our place in the natural order. And to feel this at all stems from that inner heartfelt reason which sometimes despite ourselves is telling us that we are intimately bound up in the mysteries of life and that we don't have all the answers. Perhaps even that we don't have to have all the answers before knowing what we should do in certain circumstances. As Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, 'it is the heart that experiences God, not the reason.'

So do you not feel that, buried deep within each and every one of us, there is an instinctive, heart-felt awareness that provides -if we will allow it to- the most reliable guide as to whether or not our actions are really in the long term interests of our planet and all the life it supports? This awareness, this wisdom of the heart, maybe no more than a faint memory of a distant harmony, rustling like a breeze through the leaves, yet sufficient to remind us that the Earth is unique and that we have a duty to care for it. Wisdom, empathy and compassion have no place in the empirical world yet traditional wisdoms would ask "without them are we truly human?" And it would be a good question. It was Socrates who, when asked for his definition of wisdom, gave as his conclusion, "knowing that you don't know."

In suggesting that we will need to listen rather more to the common sense emanating from our hearts if we are to achieve sustainable development, I'm not suggesting that information gained through scientific investigation is anything other than essential. Far from it. But I believe that we need to restore the balance between the heartfelt reason of instinctive wisdom and the rational insights of scientific analysis. Neither, I believe, is much use on its own. So it is only by employing both the intuitive and the rational halves of our own nature - our hearts and our minds - that we will live up to the sacred trust that has been placed in us by our Creator, - or our "Sustainer", as ancient wisdom referred to the Creator. As Gro Harlem Brundtland has reminded us, sustainable development is not just about the natural world, but about people too. This applies whether we are looking at the vast numbers who lack sufficient food or access to clean water, but also those living in poverty and without work. While there is no doubt that globalisation has brought advantages, it brings dangers too. Without the humility and humanity expressed by Sir John Browne in his notion of the 'connected economy' - an economy which acknowledges the social and environmental context within which it operates - there is the risk that the poorest and the weakest will not only see very little benefit but, worse, they may find that their livelihoods and cultures have been lost.

So if we are serious about sustainable development then we must also remember that the lessons of history are particularly relevant when we start to look further ahead. Of course, in an age when it often seems that nothing can properly be regarded as important unless it can be described as "modern", it is highly dangerous to talk about the lessons of the past. And are those lessons ever taught or understood adequately in an age when to pass on a body of acquired knowledge of this kind is often considered prejudicial to "progress"? Of course our descendants will have scientific and technological expertise beyond our imagining, but will they have the insight or the self- control to use this wisely, having learnt both from our successes and our failures?

They won't, I believe, unless there are increased efforts to develop an approach to education which balances the rational with the intuitive. Without this truly sustainable development is doomed. It will merely become a hollow- sounding mantra that is repeated ad nauseam in order to make us all feel better. Surely, therefore, we need to look towards the creation of greater balance in the way we educate people so that the practical and intuitive wisdom of the past can be blended with the appropriate technology and knowledge of the present to produce the type of practitioner who is acutely aware of both the visible and invisible worlds that inform the entire cosmos. The future will need people who understand that sustainable development is not merely about a series of technical fixes, about redesigning humanity or re-engineering nature in an extension of globalised, industrialisation - but about a re-connection with nature and a profound understanding of the concepts of care that underpin long term stewardship.

Only by rediscovering the essential unity and order of the living and spiritual world - as in the case of organic agriculture or integrated medicine or in the way we build - and by bridging the destructive chasm between cynical secularism and the timelessness of traditional religion, will we avoid the disintegration of our overall environment. Above all, I don't want to see the day when we are rounded upon by our grandchildren and asked accusingly why we didn't listen more carefully to the wisdom of our hearts as well as to the rational analysis of our heads; why we didn't pay more attention to the preservation of bio-diversity and traditional communities or think more clearly about our role as stewards of creation? Taking a cautious approach or achieving balance in life is never as much fun as the alternatives, but that is what sustainable development is all about.

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wayneL said:

Emotive, cognitively biased and dissonant, and riddled with pot, kettle, black hypocrisy..

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Agnostic conciliation …… reaches ludicrous lengths in the following common piece of sloppy thinking. It goes roughly like this.
a) You can’t prove a negative (so far so good).
b) Science has no way to disprove the existence of existence of a supreme being (this is strictly true).
c) Therefore belief (or disbelief) in a supreme being is a matter of pure individual inclination, and they are therefore both equally deserving of respectful attention.
d) We hardly need spell out the reductio ad absurdum.
e) To borrow a point from Bertrand Russell, we must be equally agnostic about the theory that there is a china teapot in elliptical orbit around the sun. We can’t disprove it. But that doesn’t men that the theory that there is a teapot is on level terms with the theorythat there isn’t.
f) Now if it be retorted that there actually are reasons X, Y and Z for finding a supreme being more plausible than a celestial teapot, then X, Y and Z should be spelled out.
g) If legitimate they are proper scientific arguments which should be evaluated on their merits. But don’t protect them from scrutiny behind a screen of agnostic tolerance.
h) Otherwise let those who call themselves agnostic with respect to religion add that they are equally agnostic about orbiting teapots.
i) …..
j) We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in (Ball Thor, Apollo).
k) Some of us just go one god further

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Stephen Hawking’s “TheMind of God” no more indicates a belief in God than does “God knows!” (as a way of saying that I don’t). I suspect the same of Einstein’s picturesque invoking of the ‘Dear Lord’ to personify the laws of physics. Indeed Einstein himself was indignant at the suggestion: “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religion then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it’ From Albert Einstein, ‘The Human Side’, ed H. Dukas and B. Hoffman ( Princeton University Press, 1981). The lie is still being spread about, carried through the meme pool by the desperate desire so many people have to believe it – such was Einstein’s prestige.

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