Climate Change Denial

I was at a conference for members of the Scientific and Medical network last weekend and very good it was too. But one session really had me worried. Professor Chris Clarke, author of Weaving the Cosmos, was talking to us about the need to connect science and spirituality in our living planet, the different ways of knowing the world, and the need for bringing back a harmony between our rational and emotional selves. In the one and a half hours of talk and dialogue he covered much of enormous interest and significance for the future of humanity, that I may come back to in more detail another time. But what was the cause of my concern?
Well apparently something like 50% of Americans are in total denial about climate change. And what is more, the percentage seems to be increasing as the science produces even better and more indisputable evidence. It seems that there are psychological dynamics at work here. We rely so much on technology and when we are told it has to change, we find this uncomfortable, unendurable, intolerable even, and think there has to be a way out, that science has it wrong, and we go into denial.
We in Britain are nearly as skeptical. A Times poll in 2009 found that only two in five Britons believed that this current and visible problem was largely man made. We really should take more notice of the evidence, including for example the report to world leaders by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) following its meeting in Paris at the start of 2007. This report concludes that it is very likely (and that means a 90% chance!) that the activities of man are responsible for the increased greenhouse gases and the resultant problems of climate change now being seen and predicted for the foreseeable future. As a consequence average temperatures are likely to rise by 4°C by the end of the century. This is the consensus of opinion from the combined efforts of more than 800 contributing authors and more than 450 lead authors, with more than 2500 scientific expert reviewers involved in the two-stage scientific and technical review process.
For the continuing cynics why not use an adaptation of Pascal’s Wager? Pascal reasoned that whether or not one believed in the existence of God, it was a safer bet and one had nothing to lose by supposing that He existed. So it is with the global warming debate. If we allow ourselves to become more spiritually aware, more sensitive to our finely balanced place in the world, more compassionate towards the plight of our brethren across the globe, more simple in our needs, more at peace with ourselves, more in tune with our own souls and the soil beneath our feet, then surely we are all enriched? We will certainly be happier, and we will be leaving a better world for those who come after us. What do we have to lose, climate change or not?
Of course there are bound to be some controversies and debates surrounding the details of the IPCC report and the scale of its significance. But much of our best scientific research effort continues to be directed towards gaining a fuller understanding of all the issues involved, and what actions we can take.
Please let's not ignore the evidence any longer.
And let's find a dialogue between the scientists and spirituality, between the rational and the emotional, combine the analytical with wisdom.
E F Schumacher said something along the lines of: "Man is now far too clever to survive without wisdom."
(The photo is of white hydrangeas at Loseley Park, Surrey, England) 

To be a Pilgrim or a Tourist

Are you a tourist or a pilgrim? Do you travel within the landscape of desire and greed, never fulfilled, seldom satisfied, always seeking something more? Or do you travel in a landscape of love, recognising the sacredness of the place you visit, the sacredness of the earth on which you tread, travelling as an earth pilgrim?

Pilgrims celebrate what they find with gratitude; they do not complain. Tourists find plenty to complain about: the bed not soft enough, the room not big enough, the food not good enough, the view not pretty enough. We all can recognise ourselves I am sure.

Last weekend I went to an excellent conference in London, “To be a Pilgrim or a Tourist,” organised by Resurgence. These were the opening comments from the editor of that wonderful publication, Satish Kumar, who introduced an excellent team of speakers for the day. We heard Rupert Sheldrake, Ursula King, and Peter Owen Jones, with poetry readings from Deborah Harrison and Martin Powell, and some lovely singing from Annemarie Borg accompanied on the piano by Gabriel Keen. Sadly Caroline Lucas Leader of the UK Green Party could not be there. Between them they gave us all plenty of food for thought.

Why, asked Satish, do we go on holiday? Why do we run away from ourselves and our homes and countryside, which is so beautiful; the autumnal colours are particularly spectacular this year. Why do we fly to far -flung places just to laze away time in some “paradise” that does not meet expectations, and contributing to the greenhouse gas emissions that are changing our climate?

That is all very well – and he has a good point to make. But…..

The previous day we had delivered harvest festival food goodies from our church to another church community in our diocese; in a very poor and run down part of the city. The traffic ground along at snail pace, the streets were dingy, no sign of greenery anywhere to relieve the landscape, apart from a few trees grimy and poisoned from being bathed in constant exhaust fumes.

I am no expert on eschatology, but as we drove through this gloomy and deprived suburban sprawl towards our destination it crossed my mind that God would be justified in weeping at what we have done to his beautiful creation, and I would not blame Him wanting to destroy such as this and start again. As Peter Owen Jones observed later in the day, we are travelling to get away from what we have created.

Satish lives in a very beautiful part of England and has all the wonders of nature on his doorstep. Not everyone is so privileged.

OK, so we want to get away on holiday but do we have to travel solely as tourists? Could we reintroduce the spirit of pilgrimage into our travel?

Yes we can and we should. Rupert Sheldrake, following on after Satish, gave us some ideas, and I’ll write about his thoughts in my next post …

The event was filmed with a view to showing it on the Resurgence website. As of time of writing this has not appeared, but the link takes you to the details of the conference and its speakers.

The photo is of the Priory Ruins at Walsingham, taken on my pilgrimage there earlier this year.

A New Emerging Scientific Worldview of God

Since yesterday's posting I have finished Kauffman's book, Reinventing the Sacred,and this is a copy of the review I have posted on Amazon:

Kauffman trained in philosophy and medicine, and now specialises in Bio-complexity and Informatics. In this sometimes provocative but enormously fascinating book, he sets out to demonstrate the inadequacy of reductionism alone in explaining our world, and offers ideas for a future evolution steered by us for a safer and better global place to live. He aims to address the schism between faith and reason, between science and arts, between reason and other sensibilities, in a new way; it is time, he writes, to “heal the split,” for the sake of our world.

He starts by dismissing the once widely held scientific view (not now so widely believed by the physicists it seems), that everything in the universe can be reduced to natural physical laws. He looks around him and perceives many things that whilst not contravening the laws of physics, nevertheless cannot be reduced to physics in this way, including the evolution of the biosphere, our world economy, our history and indeed life itself. And he carefully and thoroughly explains why.

Through such observations he maintains that we can break what he calls the “Galilean Spell,” which we have lived with since Galileo and Newton; the idea deeply rooted in our Western worldview since those great minds, that all that happens in our universe is governed by natural laws. He shows that we need more than this to explain many phenomena. Without rejecting reductionism entirely, he carefully and fully shows why it is inadequate to explain everything, as he describes a new emerging scientific world view, proposing that we are all members of a natural universe of “ceaseless creativity, in which life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness and the full richness of human action have emerged.” In physics, he says, there are only “happenings,” not “doings,” and in the natural physical laws there is no logical possibility of signs, interpretations, mistakes. Not only does he demonstrate that his concept of “ceaseless creativity” is possible, he also describes it as awesome, stunning and worthy of reverence, something we can all view as sacred. He explains why, from the evidence of the origins of life in the universe, we do not need a creator God. (But what about the origin of the universe itself?) Instead he calls for one global view of a common God as being the natural creativity itself in the universe. This is his reinvention of the sacred that he proposes.

Kauffman explains why he thinks his ideas based on a broader scientific world view may provide a shared religious and spiritual space for us all, within which he hopes we can heal what he describes as the four injuries of the modern world, these being the artificial division between the sciences and humanities, the need for more value and meaning in our lives, the need for spirituality for all, atheists, humanists, agnostics as well as those of faith, and finally the need for a global ethic.

Clearly this is controversial, provocative. As a Christian who believes in an Abrahamic God I obviously cannot agree with all he writes. But I do have respect for others’ beliefs, although I hope that the Creationists may be even partly persuaded by Kauffman’s reasoning that their beliefs cannot be so and that those without faith can see it is legitimate for them to experience spirituality.

I am not sure for whom this book has been written? It deserves a wide readership by the thoughtful and intelligent public but I did find much of the logic in many of his examples quite hard work to follow through, sometimes having to skim over to get to the conclusion – and I am a scientist! But I did find much of this book truly fascinating and absorbing, although I cannot do full justice to the sheer depth and breadth of Kauffman’s analyses in this short review.

I am always interested in any ideas put forward that may shed some light on how we may be able to heal this dangerously wounded world. Thus I was drawn to Kauffman’s work and in particular his vision that by harnessing our personal and collective responsibilities we have the wisdom, ability and knowledge to develop a new global ethics, and steer our evolution forwards through his proposed “reinvention” of the sacred. May it be so.

The End of Faith; Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.

I wrote on 31 July about Sam Harris' book, The End of Faith; Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. I have now finished it and find its conclusions unsatisfactory. Another time I will write a more detailed review but for today it is late and I am tired so I will just make one or two points!

I mentioned before how I disliked and questioned his assumption about the link between wars and religion. I also have to take issue with his basic assumption, made very early in the book, and perpetuated throughout, that the sacred texts are nothing but myth and should be dismissed as such in the same way as the Greek myths. "...most of the people in this world," he writes, believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book." ... "Whatever their imagined source," he goes on to say, "the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than ...those cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago; for there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas."
Continually trashing the Holy Bible as fairy tale does little to enhance his credibility, as he thereby ignores the vast theological and archeological knowledge underpinning its writings and its historical truths. I would recommend that he reads some of the many good books available on the subject. He could start with John Bartlett's The Bible; Faith and Evidence, A Critical Enquiry into the Nature of Biblical History.

Interestingly, Harris does understand the need for and existence of, a human spirituality, but he is adamant that this can and indeed must be developed without faith. He senses, he says, that the problem is hopeless, but that if parents and teachers in a single generation simply answered their children's questions honestly, there could be an utter revolution in our thinking, faith and religion would disappear in that generation and the world would be saved.

If that is the only way to save our world, as Harris seems to think, then I really believe the situation is hopeless. I really cannot believe that our faiths and our religions can be abolished so easily. They have a great deal more substance than Harris would like to think. And one cannot abolish deeply held beliefs so easily.

Instead I think we need to do all we can to foster true religious pluralism. The Dalai Lama in his book, Ancient Wisdom, Modern World (Ethics for the New Millennium), finds the idea of a world parliament of religions very appealing.

Harris suggests a world government - how else, he asks, "will a war between the USA and China become as unlikely as a war between Texas and Vermont?" But his vision is devoid of religion and it just will never work.

Climate Change and Global Warming

I don't know what triggered my mind to do this, but yesterday I googled my scientific paper that I wrote with my supervisor on, wait for it, The Surface Phosphatase Activity of Roots of Beech Mycorrhiza. I was amazed that something I wrote in 1973 (in my maiden name) was now floating around in cyberspace, and just a little flattered that quite a few scientists still see fit to cite it in their own works! This was after all my subject for my PhD thesis, and for a long time afterwards I felt disillusioned as to the usefulness of this work in the grand scheme of things!

Perhaps I should not have been so doubtful!

The lesson from this small exercise in narcissism is that science is an art! There is a misunderstanding prevalent among many in the general non scientific public that scientific experiments categorically prove something to be true or false. This in many cases is simply not so. Scientists devise experiments around hypotheses and conclusions are made around probabilities and relative weight of evidence one way or another.

All this is very relevant to the current debates on climate change.

A Times poll in 2009 found that only two in five Britons believed that this current and visible problem was largely man made. But those that still harbor any doubts that we are in any way responsible for climate change should heed the report to world leaders by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) following its meeting in Paris at the start of 2007. This report concludes that it is very likely (and that means a 90% chance!) that the activities of man are responsible for the increased greenhouse gases and the resultant problems of climate change now being seen and predicted for the foreseeable future. As a consequence average temperatures are likely to rise by 4°C by the end of the century. This is the consensus of opinion from the combined efforts of more than 800 contributing authors and more than 450 lead authors, with more than 2500 scientific expert reviewers involved in the two-stage scientific and technical review process. So what is there to doubt?

For the continuing cynics why not use an adaptation of Pascal’s Wager? Pascal reasoned that whether or not one believed in the existence of God, it was a safer bet and one had nothing to lose by supposing that He existed. So it is with the global warming debate. If we allow ourselves to become more spiritually aware, more sensitive to our finely balanced place in the world, more compassionate towards the plight of our brethren across the globe, more simple in our needs, more at peace with ourselves, more in tune with our own souls and the soul beneath our feet, then are we not alll enriched? We will certainly be happier, and we will be leaving a better world for those who come after us. What do we have to lose?

There are bound to be some controversies and debates surrounding the details of the IPCC report and the scale of its significance. Much of our best scientific research effort is being directed towards gaining a fuller understanding of all the issues involved, and what actions we can take.

We saw the distress that extreme weather can inflict in the 2005 devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Even those who cannot quite believe or accept the evidence for the part humankind may be playing in climate change cannot deny the extent of human suffering now seen on a global scale. This then becomes more than a debate on climate change. It becomes a matter of human compassion and justice. These injustices brew a potentially dangerous potion of civil unrest and worse. There is a social and moral imperative for us all to share everything, to watch out for each other, to work for global healing. I believe we can no longer ignore our global responsibilities.
These photos by the way are from the Nun's Valley in Madeira when there annual chestnut festival was washed out by the most extraordinary rain in November 2008. The capital Funchal of course suffered even more from freak weather in February 2010.

Reflections on Life, Love and the Soul

I am reading a super little book. It is by Peter Owen Jones, a rather wacky Church of England priest, who after presenting Around the World in 80 Faiths for TV, disappeared high up into the Sinai Desert in Egypt to live in isolation in a cave for a while, to pray, think and of necessity live extremely simply.
From his soul searching during this time he wrote several letters, letters to friends and family, to the Prime Minister, to Jesus and God, and even to Osama and these have been collected into a neat little volume, Letters From an Extreme Pilgrim - Reflections on Life, Love and the Soul, (although he makes clear that he wanted to call it Letters From the Moon, and refers to his cave and landscape as The Moon throughout.)
In these letters we see his own vulnerabilities and uncertainties, even his own tortured soul, as he grapples with understanding himself and rediscovering, even healing, that soul within the context of all his different relationships and within the context of this crazy world.
"God, I loved the desert," he writes in the Epilogue. "It allowed me to see what was broken - with all my hate, with all my love, my unknowing, my unbeing - and gave me the time to begin to mend." And in that mending and in his forthright and honest writing, I believe he can be a wounded healer for all of us who are honest enough with ourselves to know we need that healing of our own soul and spirit.