Diogenes was disturbed. It wasn’t really because he had lost his wares. It was frustrating to know that his carefully crafted ornaments were floating down the river for anyone to pick up, but that was not what disturbed him mostly now. It was not even the fact that he was wet and cold from having capsized as he crossed the river, nor even really because he had nearly drowned. No it was not the nearly drowning that disturbed him so much as the questions that nearly drowning had forced into his mind.

“If I had drowned, what difference would it have made?”

“Hello Diogenes,” a cheerful friendly voice hailed.

“Oh, it’s you Socrates.”

“Why so glum, then my friend? And why so damp? Have you been swimming in your clothes like an absent minded philosopher?”

“This is no time for jokes Socrates. I almost drowned. But that’s not the worst of it. My life has no meaning!”

“Oh, surely you are being too dramatic? Will you add the skills of the player to those of the philosopher?”

“What does my life amount to? What have I achieved? What mark shall I leave upon this world?”

“But surely, you are a master craftsman? Have you not created many a work of beauty and significance?”

“Bah, Socrates. In a few hundred years all my works will be dust or buried in the ground or forgotten in some dark corner. What difference does that make?”

“Ah, let us play this game then my friend. But surely you have made a good living from your craft, have you not? That is something to be proud of.”

“What is a good living but food for the stomach that will only be eaten by worthless worms one day?”

“Well parried. But you have enjoyed your life, have you not? You have found joy and pleasure in your craft, and in spending the money you have made through it? You have lived a pleasant life without want and with much luxury. You life has been better than that of the mean and the poor. Surely that makes for satisfaction?”

“Nay Socrates, for when we die, what shall set me apart from the mean and the poor, when we both shall turn to dust alike? There is no satisfaction there for me.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Diogenes. But I shall have the better of this argument yet. For you are no average man, my friend. Do you forget the fame that your craft has brought you? Why, your name is trumpeted from Athens to the Bosporus! In the highest halls of power they seek your skill and praise your handiwork.”

“What will fame be to me, when I am feeding the worms in the ground? How shall it help me then? And how fleeting is the fame of this life. I tell you Socrates, not a hundred years hence, the very names ‘Socrates’ and ‘Diogenes’ shall have disappeared from the earth!”

“I see that you are in a black mood indeed! Well if fame brings you no joy, then what of your family and your friends? What of the many happy days you have spent together with them? Shall these count for nothing? And what of the legacy that you leave behind you: manly Alithenus and your delightful little flower Sophia? Has not your life meant something for those who have loved you, as indeed, have I?”

“Yes, yes, yes. I have loved, and you have loved, and they have loved. And then, all is worms; worms and dust. What difference does it make to the worms if they feast upon a man who was loved or one who was alone all his life? Both taste just as sweet!”

“I see that it is the giant Chronos who lies at the heart of your disquiet, Diogenes, with his servants the worms. Why then do you not leave behind you such an edifice that Chronos himself cannot harm it? The travellers tell us stories of the far land of the Nile, where there are structures that have stood for more lives of men than any can remember; huge mountains constructed at the command of the great Pharaohs at the cost of a hundred thousand lives, built with sweat and blood, filled with unimaginable treasure, and standing against the storms of the desert. No worms here, my friend! Would that sate your lust for meaning?”

“At last you tempt me with a morsel of at least a little attraction. Yet even as I ponder it, it dissolves away into nothing. For who remembers the great Pharaoh now who caused this wonder to be erected? Who cares for him? How is the world different for all his exertions, other than to provide an oddity, a novelty that men gaze upon once with awe, then soon forget in the mean struggle of their real lives? And who is to say that even this edifice shall stand forever? The storms of the desert eat away at it little by little. Though it take a thousand years, yet sooner or later it too shall become nothing but dust once more. Nothing in this world, not the most adamant of stones, not the most beautiful of ideas, shall last.”

“I have but one last trick to play in this game of skill, but it shall be my best! Come with me, and let us sail to the far ends of the earth, where it is said there lies an island of mysteries, and there drink of the potion of life everlasting! Then we shall cheat Chronos of his prey, and we shall cheat the worms of their meat. What if you should live on forever, dear Diogenes?”

“You tempt me with a mirage, Socrates! For if these few score of years have no meaning, how shall multiplying them add meaning to them? All you have done is to extend their pitiful agony forever, and have taken away the only escape from that agony. For even if feeding the worms with my body shows that my life has no meaning, at least when I am being devoured, I shall not know it, and the agony will be done. Would you take away that relief from your dearest friend, Socrates?”

 “Then my dear Diogenes, I have sad news for you. For it seems that the meaning you seek is not to be found in this world at all! But then we must choose between two evil choices; for either the meaning of our lives exists outside this world where we cannot go, or else there is no meaning at all, and our existence is the same as our absence! Why if that be so, then why not end the agony now, instead of waiting for slow, witless nature to take its course?”

“And now you see the reason for my glum mood, friend Socrates. Let us at least soothe our pain by sharing this emptiness together for a little while. Come, I have a better idea: let us go to visit our mutual friend Plato. He is the wisest man I know. If anyone has an answer to our conundrum, surely it shall be he!”

Many atheists feel uncomfortable because the Christians they talk to seem to be very subjective about their faith. It doesn’t feel like someone searching for the truth, but someone out to make a case. The difference is important. It’s like the difference between a doctor searching for the cure to a disease and a lawyer defending his client. The doctor has to pay attention to reality: this is not something you can fudge, for people’s lives are at stake. But the lawyer’s job is to advocate for his client; whether the client is really guilty or innocent is irrelevant and the lawyer just has to make the most convincing case he possibly can.

 So which of these two models best fits how a person should approach their faith? I think that there is room for both.

I believe one should start with, and always maintain as the default approach, the medical research strategy. Truth, for Truth’s sake, above all else.  This is never easy.

 For one thing, it is dangerous. What if the truth turns out different to what you have believed and cherished all your life? Given the growing sense of cynicism and scepticism in our world today, what if you woke up one day to find that God, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny all belong to the same club? What would happen to your life if it were so? What of all those structures in your life, the friendships, the habits of thought and behaviour, the principles and ideals that lend your life meaning and purpose? There is a lot at stake!

 For another thing, we are not built for objectivity first and foremost. We are hardwired for all kinds of bias; there is a whole literature out there on this endearing little trait of ours. Bias encourages us to love our families and our friends, to prefer safe foods to poisons, and make more effective use of our time, among many things. It allows us to deal with the bewildering inflow of information that batters our senses every day by filtering out what is unimportant to us and focussing on what is important.

 But when it comes to discussing your faith with someone who thinks differently, bias kicks in to make you ignore the valid things they say, and inflate the invalid things you yourself say into irrefutable truths (even if they’re silly).

 Atheists are by no means immune to this. New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, for all their protestations of ‘objectivity’, are perfect case studies in bias. When I first picked up Dawkins’ The God Delusion some years ago, it was with some trepidation. Here, after all, was a book that promised to open my eyes to how I have been kidding myself about the existence of God all these years. What if he was right?

 But the more I read, the more my reaction changed from trepidation to incredulity. Could thus guy be serious??? The logical and factual fallacies in the book alone would make any genuine lover of Truth cringe (and many sensible atheists I know do in fact cringe at Dawkins’ pronouncements), but the killer for me was that the book drips with bias. It is on every page, every sentence screams out, “I don’t want religion to be right, and I am not going to let the truth get in my way!”

 I would have no problem with this if Dawkins was honest enough with himself and with his readers to admit this bias from the start – fair enough. But I do have a problem with him presenting himself as an objective, fair thinker, surrounded with an aura of scientific respectability, presenting a balanced critique of Christianity. That, he certainly ain’t, and he loses my respect for thinking and presenting himself so. Compare these two quotes from the prefaces of two books that overlap in the topics they cover:

 “The dictionary supplied with Microsoft Word defines a delusion as ‘a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder’. The first part captures religious faith perfectly. As to whether it is a symptom of a psychiatric disorder, I am inclined to follow Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: ‘When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called Religion’.”

~Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion.

“This book is in no sense an impartial work of history. Perfect detachment is impossible for even the soberest of historians, since the writing of history is … necessarily an act of interpretation, which by its nature can never be wholly free of prejudice. But I am not really a historian, in any event, and I do not even aspire to detachment. In what follows, my prejudices are transparent and unreserved…”

~David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions.

 Can you spot the difference? Dawkins is so convinced that he is objective that he makes the claim that anyone who thinks otherwise must be pathologically deluded. Hart in response (hence the ‘Delusions’ in his book title) freely admits up front that this is his subjective and necessarily prejudiced opinion on things, leaving room for those who disagree with him to still be rational and sane. There are debaters of both types on both sides of the fence, both professional and amateur. Such is human nature. 

As the years have passed, I have become more firmly convinced that you can’t go wrong if you are genuinely searching for Truth. If our faith is true, then it should be able to stand up to any criticisms levelled against it. It should not need to be ‘protected’ from its critics. Sure, that involves quite a bit of detailed examination and consideration; things are rarely simple in this world. But in the end, when you have done all that is humanly possible to gather every fact and consider every argument, if Christianity is true, it should come out looking that way. And if it is not true, then why on earth would you want to believe it? Wouldn’t you rather know?

And that’s where the lawyer-defence strategy comes in. While the medical research strategy should be our core approach, a very useful and effective way of testing the truth of a position or belief is to make the best case you can for it, then hit it with everything you’ve got. Apparently, Soviet era scientists used to do just that. In the morning, they would gather for a meeting. One scientist would present his latest theory, and the rest would then spend hours attacking it in every way they could possibly think of (including personal attacks on the scientist presenting!) The presenter would have to do his best to defend his theory against all attacks. Things would often get quite heated. If the theory survived this gruelling session, it was considered a pretty good one and worthy of further development.

 That’s a bit of an extreme case, but it shows that lawyer style advocacy, in the right context, can actually be quite a helpful tool. However, used in the wrong way, it becomes mere pig-headedness and closed-mindedness. There is, after all, a time for everything under the sun … we just need to learn the right time to be pig-headed.

 On this dangerous road, I have so far had many ups and downs, periods of exultant faith together with some very dark nights of the soul filled with doubt. But the long term result has been a faith of which I never have to be ashamed. I never have to deal with that niggling worry that perhaps I am just elaborately deluding myself after all. So far as I have seen, Christianity has indeed come out on top, and stunningly so. First, I came to be convinced that Christian faith is a completely rational position to hold. Gradually, I have also come to find that the case for Christianity being the most persuasive position to hold is quite robust. Throw what you like at it, even Russian scientist style; it stands stronger than the alternatives – or has so far, for me, at least.

 That’s not to say that tomorrow I may not come upon something that will cast me back into doubt once more; such is the dangerous life of the seeker for Truth. But then Christianity is very honest about that. It never claims to be something you can know with absolute certainty: that’s why it’s called ‘faith’, that’s why Jesus continually asked people, ‘Do you believe in Me?’ Some said yes, others said, no. Christianity is faith, but so is non-belief, contrary to the protestations of many atheists. The difference is that the Christian knows and acknowledges that, while the atheist who denies it is missing an important truth.

 IMPORTANT - CHANGE OF VENUE:
“Why Christianity?” will not be held at St Joseph’s
Instead it will be held at
St Abanoub Youth Centre
49 Fourth Ave, Blacktown
All other details remain the same.

You’re only a Christian because you were born a Christian. If you were born a Muslim, you’d be a Muslim today. So why should you think your faith is the right one? It’s purely a matter of chance.

I have discussed that challenge with many people over the years. On the face of it, it sounds pretty convincing. But that’s only on the face of it. When we dig a little deeper, you might be surprised at just how strong the case for Christianity against that of all other religions.

Now there are some who will say that we shouldn’t even be considering a question like this, that it is dangerous and might weaken the faith of some, or that it is disrespectful or blasphemous to even think about such things. But I follow the principle that if Christianity is true, then you should be able to throw anything at it, absolutely anything at all, and it should be able to stand up to it. If it can’t, then I want to know, by gum! That is, if I really care about Truth; and Truth is the very thing that Jesus not only promised would set us free, but even used as His own title (“I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”).

But it turns out that those who worry need not do so. Christianity is unique in so many ways that it really does stand alone among all the religions of the world. I know that’s a politically incorrect thing to say nowadays, but I believe it is true.

Next Saturday, we hope to explore this topic in some depth. St Abanoub’s Church, Archangel Michael Church and the Coptic Apologetics Group are organising a day where we will examine the question: “Given that God exists, why should we believe that Christianity is the right faith in contrast with all the other faiths in the world?” Last year we had an Atheism Day where we looked at the arguments for and against the existence of God. The ‘Why Christianity’ Day is the logical follow up to that.

Just to whet your appetite, here are some of the reasons why I find Christianity to be quite worthy of the title, “The True Faith”. Each one is strongly supported by powerful evidence. Sure, some of the other religions may have one or two of the characteristics below, but none of them come even close to having the complete set – except Christianity …

• The founder of Christianity is universally respected for His wisdom and compassion, and lived a genuinely blameless life.
• The historical, textual and archaeological evidence for the reality of Christ as a Man who walked the earth and rose from the dead is unparalleled for the founder of any other religion.
• Christianity is the only religion that genuinely makes Love its central and essential theme. Sure you can twist other religions to try and somehow highlight love within their framework, but in Christianity, love is the cornerstone and foundation.
• None of the other great religions teach that all humans are equal. Christianity does. It may be single handedly responsible for changing human society in this way.
• Christianity offers the best explanations for the deep philosophical questions of life, and offers the best fit with the scientific knowledge of today.

If you will be in Sydney next Saturday and would like to flesh out these and many other ideas and engage in stimulating and completely open discussion about them, please come along next Saturday. No question is off limits (so long as you’re polite). You can find details on facebook.

Do you know what it is like to be a bat? 

I have been doing some reading on the tantalising question of what human consciousness is, and it has led me to some very strong arguments for the limitations of scientific explanations.

 The natural enemy of the Christian faith today is no longer paganism as it was in the Apostolic age, but naturalism: the idea that nothing exists except that which is physical, made of matter and energy. The naturalist therefore only accepts that which you can examine scientifically and objectively. Anything outside this definition is considered not to exist or be real. Thus of course, the very idea of a supernatural God is unacceptable to the naturalist.

 But human consciousness seems to pose an insoluble problem for the naturalist. In 1974 Serbian-American philosopher Thomas Nagel published a paper titled “What is it Like to be a Bat?” In it, he pointed out that no amount of objective, scientific knowledge can tell us what it feels like to be a bat. OK, maybe we can imagine flying like a bat, since we have our own similar experiences of flying in airplanes or floating under parachutes. But whereas we humans mostly experience the outside world through our sense of sight, bats mostly experience the outside world through a sense we do not possess: echolocation. They emit high pitched sound waves that bounce off their surroundings and they have specialised, highly sensitive sensors for picking up the reflected waves and creating a mental picture of the world around them. It’s a kind of natural sonar system.

 Because we have nothing remotely like this sense of echolocation, we simply cannot accurately imagine what it is like to experience the world in this way – what it is like to be a bat. And this brings up the problem for naturalism. According to naturalism, since everything is physical, we should be able to understand everything. And yet here is something – what it is like to be a bat – that no amount of mere information or explanation can teach us. It seems to lie outside the realm of physical sciences; it cannot be reduced to mere objective facts.

 “What’s the big deal?” I hear you asking. So we can’t pretend to be bats – so what? Well it turns out that this discovery applies to much more than bats. Especially, it applies to us. Physical, objective science seems to be totally incapable of accounting for what it is like to be a human being. There is something about the human experience that lies outside the whole realm of science. You might be able to map every single brain cell in your brain, describe how they work physically, how different bits are responsible for different jobs and even where exactly your memory of your dead pet dog Fido is stored. All this is physical, scientific explanation. But none of this will be able to explain why it feels like something to be you. That sense of being conscious, of knowing that you exist and experiencing all you experience cannot be explained by any amount of physical description and explanation.

 Another way of looking at this is to point out the distinction between the subjective and the objective. The subjective is what you experience every day, the things you describe in the first person: “I feel cold”; “I see a tree”; “I want to eat”. You experience all these things in a way that no one else can, because you are the only one who is able to experience them from your own unique perspective. No one else can get inside your head and experience them exactly as you experience them. They may experience similar things in their own heads, but they can never experience them from inside your head.

 “Hang on,” you ask, “don’t we all experience things the same way? We all see a green traffic light and know that we should go”. Well, can you be so sure about that? For example, how do you know that the colour you experience as green, the colour that produces a feeling of greenness in your mind, might not produce a feeling of redness in my mind? There is no way we could ever tell the difference. You have learned to go when you see a traffic light the produces greenness in your mind and you call it green. I have learned to go when I see a traffic light that produces redness in my mind, and I call it green. Our external behaviour is exactly the same, but our internal experience might be something quite different to each other. The subjective is directly available only to the person who experiences it directly and no one else, so it is impossible for us to know whether we really have the same experiences or not.

 The objective on the other hand, is something that does not depend on any particular point of view at all – it is exactly the same for all observers. So, Nagel gives the example that if an alien race came to earth, even if they knew nothing about our language or science, they could still completely understand what a rainbow is. All they need are objective, observable, measurable facts and explanations of the physical world, which are the same everywhere and for everyone, even aliens. Note, however, that even with a perfect physical understanding of what a rainbow is, they will still be utterly incapable of knowing what it is like for a human being to see a rainbow, just as we are utterly incapable of knowing what it is like for them to experience a rainbow with whatever alien senses they may have. That first person, subjective experience is something they can never know purely from the physical facts.

 So what does all this mean? Well it has some serious implications for the atheist who rejects belief in God on the basis that objective physical sciences are sufficient to explain everything there is. Remember that the naturalist says, “I don’t need God because everything in the universe can be explained using just the laws of nature without God.” Yet here is at least one thing that lies outside the ability of science to explain it. It seems to be something that is genuinely non-physical. You may call it whatever you wish: the mind, the psyche, the soul, the spirit, consciousness, sentience – but whatever you call it, it refuses to be accounted for by science. It seems to be hard evidence that there is indeed more in this world than things that are just made of matter and energy. And if there is at least one thing that is non-physical, then why shouldn’t there be more? The whole basis of naturalism is swept away, and with it, one of the chief arguments against the existence of God.

 All from a bat! Who’d have thought so?

Life today in a western society is very different to the life our parents and grandparents knew. As a result, our whole world view is quite different, and as such, I propose, our faith needs to also adapt to the new and ever changing circumstances.

 One important area where this applies is the relationship between faith and knowledge. Extremes often help to illustrate a point more conveniently: think of your ancestors of centuries ago, most likely living in rural village somewhere along the majestic Nile. Let us imagine Folla, your great, great, great grandmother. She has grown to be a young woman without the benefit of formal education, for very few Egyptians can afford a formal education, and the vast majority would not want it even if they could afford it. It would be a waste of time and would not in any way help in running the family farm. Thus she is blissfully unaware of any formal laws of nature, of anything but the most basic mathematics, she cannot read or write, so she has no access to books or newspapers, and the only history she knows is the local legends of her village and the stories she hears read out in Church from the Bible and the Synaxarion every Sunday. She does not understand what the priest prays in Church every Sunday, for he prays in Coptic while she only knows Arabic. Sunday School has not yet been introduced to Egypt and the priest has only slightly more education than her, so he does not give sermons or conduct Bible studies; in fact her chief source of religious knowledge is her mother, the kindly woman who would sit her on her lap when she was a young girl and tell her stories that she had heard from her mother before her.

 Folla’s faith is a very simple one. It is not based on outright reason so much as on trust. The people she loves and trusts in her life, her parents, her relatives, her priest, all agree about the faith they hold, so she holds it too, without questioning anything it. Not only is it backed by this authority (and no one in this society would ever dream of questioning authority), it makes sense of her world.

 Because this is the nature of Folla’s faith, she is blissfully unaware that the core of ancient Christian faith at its heart has been mingled with centuries of accretions and additions. For her, it is all one body of beliefs, all of equal importance. For her, it is equally important not to drag your feet inside the house (for that would bring bad luck) as to proclaim that Christ is risen at Easter time. So far as she knows, not dragging your feet was part of Christ’s teachings.

 Simple faith is a beautiful thing. In some ways, I wish I could have been Folla. Of course, the modern person would object that some of Folla’s faith is based on false premises, but this objection does not seem to me to be such a terrible thing. Even our most elaborate theology, our most impressive science, can never be more than our fuzzy guess at a reality that is far, far beyond our comprehension. There is absolutely no reason to think that we can ever gain a true and complete understanding of the nature of our reality in this life. As St Paul famously said, “For now, we see as in a mirror dimly, but then, face to face” (1 Corinthians 13). Isaiah gives this sobering evaluation, from the mouth of God Himself:  “ ‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,’ says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts’ ” (Isaiah 55:9). So in a sense, our best efforts are going to fall a long way short of the truth anyway, and the difference between the size of an ant and the size of a horse pales to insignificance when you compare both to the size of the planet upon which both live.

 However, I am certainly not advocating a return to ignorance! Today, we have been given the gift of knowledge, a gift that once received can never be returned. We cannot go back to being an ant, and the ways of an ant will no longer work for us – we must live as horses, like it or not.

 What does that mean? For one thing, it means that our faith can no longer be based solely on the authority of others. Today’s Folla, let’s call her Felicity to avoid confusion, is bombarded with conflicting viewpoints from many different authorities. She still has the Church telling her one thing, she probably has her parents who largely agree with Church but may differ on a few small points, then there are her school teachers and university lecturers who may not be Christian at all, and all those voices of authority in the media, experts and politicians and community leaders, many of whom are almost certainly not Christian.

 Felicity does not have the luxury of a being surrounded by a single unitary world view as Folla had. How is she to navigate this confusing maelstrom of ideas and beliefs? How is she to decide on her own world view?

 To expect her to simply accept what her family and priest say purely on faith is unrealistic. For one, she has been trained by the western education system to question everything and to think for herself. Even her parents were probably educated in a system where you mostly had to learn facts by rote to get through and creative thinking was squeezed out of them in the highly competitive race to succeed. But today’s young person in the west is trained to think and encouraged to think for themselves. If we come to Felicity now and ask her to suspend thinking for herself and just accept our authority, it will seem like a major step backwards, a step into ignorance and darkness.

 This is not the path to faith in the twenty first century. Reason is not the enemy of faith, but its helper. Our precious Coptic tradition teaches us that. We glory in the lofty achievements of the ancient Christian School of Alexandria, the centre of Christian learning and knowledge in the early centuries of Christianity. The most intelligent people in the world flocked to study at this school, where no discipline was off limits and natural science, astronomy and philosophy were firmly on the curriculum. Many of the ancient Fathers from this school display a remarkable mastery of the secular knowledge of the day, and use it to construct their arguments for their faith, arguments that were raised against the pagan philosophers who rejected the Christian faith. They took them on at their own game and won, in the process proving that reason too, is a gift from God, and completely compatible with faith.

 Felicity needs us, the Church, to return to that ancient tradition. If she is to sincerely believe, it will be a faith fortified with a hefty dose of reason. The alternative today is not a faith based only on trust, but no religious faith at all.

 How does the state of teaching in the Coptic Church measure up to this challenge at the moment? Well, there a lot of progress has happened over the past century, and especially in the last few decades. The re-establishment of the Theological College by Pope Cyril V around the turn of the twentieth century revolutionised the education of the priesthood and has led to today’s crop of highly educated, highly literate clergy. Figures such as the late Bishop Gregorius put knowledge and reason back on the agenda, even if they were not appreciated by everyone. The advent of books in English translated from the Arabic, especially by authors who are well in tune with the need for a reasonable basis for modern faith such as HH Pope Shenouda and HG Bishop Moussa have been of incalculable benefit to many young people growing up in the west. And most recently, vibrant discussions on the internet, such as those that run on www.tasbeha.org regularly, provide a forum for questions to be discussed and resolved.

 But there are still some areas that lag dangerously behind. Many Sunday Schools still follow curricula that do not address the real concerns of young Copts today. If you have ‘graduated’ from Sunday School, ask yourself this simple question: in thirteen years of teaching, how many times did you actually address the question of why we believe in God, why we believe in Christ as God incarnate, and in His resurrection? How well were we taught the arguments people have raised against these beliefs, and the reasons we reject them? When did you learn of the evidence for the accuracy of the Bible, of its agreement with other historical documents and archaeological discoveries, and of the evidence for the faithful transmission of its text down through the centuries? And how satisfying was the treatment of modern scientific issues such as evolution or the Big Bang Theory and how they relate to our Christian faith?

 It is wonderful to know the stories of the saints, the traditional staple of Sunday School lessons, but today, Felicity needs much more than that.  She needs to find satisfying answers to the many questions that will inevitably arise in her mind, and she needs a Church that provides a free environment for raising those questions without guilt or stigmatisation. She needs to be guided in how to harmonise her secular knowledge with her religious faith and use her mind as well as her heart to mould an all-encompassing faith for the Coptic Christian of the twenty first century. Can our Church provide that? I believe that nothing less than the future viability of the Coptic Church (and all Christian Churches) depends on the answer to that question.

 We have a lot of hard work ahead of us…

 Fr Ant

Or: “Did the Devil Really Make You Do It?”

 One of the (many) things I find very confusing in life is the question of Free Will. I have yet to find a satisfying explanation for how free will works. On what basis does a person make his or her choices? And if one’s choices are determined by those factors, where is the freedom? And yet, we experience this strange freedom that we cannot explain every day. When Samuel Johnson was challenged to defend the existence of free will, his answer was typically pithy yet profound: “I know I have free will, and there’s an end to the matter!”

 On a more practical level, we grapple with free will. In confessions, “I couldn’t help it Abouna,” is a phrase I have grown accustomed to hearing, usually followed by something like; “He forced me to swear at him!”

 “Hmmm” I will answer if I am in a sarcastic frame of mind, “so he reached into your mouth, grabbed your tongue, and forced it to produce a swear word?”

 The most common response I get is a stare that is usually reserved for inmates of mental hospitals. The question of my sanity notwithstanding, personal responsibility is a deeper issue than I once thought. How much of what we do is conscious choice and how much is ‘mechanical’? And if mechanical, then how are we to be held responsible for it?

 Perhaps you will understand my confusion a little better if you consider an example. We have an inbuilt reflex that causes us to pull away sharply if ever we feel a burning pain on our skin; you know, the reflex that makes you pull your hand away immediately you accidentally lean on a glowing hotplate. It would appear that the actual path taken by the signals in your nervous system does not go through the brain at all. Instead, the sensory nerves trigger an automatic response from the nerves that move the muscles by meeting them somewhere in the spinal cord. Your conscious brain only participates afterwards, after the action of pulling away has already been completed.

More confusing still is some research that has shown that our brains may sometimes make decisions some seconds before we are conscious of them. That’s right, your brain might be making decisions on its own. But what does that mean? If I am not my brain, then what am I? Are my mind and my brain two different things? And where does my spirit fit into all this?

The interpretation of these experiments is of course open to question. What the fMRI machine might be picking up is nothing more than the necessary machinary you use to make a conscious decision – a bit like watching the pieces of a car come together on a conveyor belt. It’s not fully a car until it pops out the end (eg it may not have wheels) yet it is recognisable as a ‘pre-car’. In the same way, the fMRI might be picking up ‘pre-decisions’.

 And yet, there are other things we do without really being in control of ourselves. Car drivers know the weird experience of driving on ‘autopilot’ – when you fall into a daydream while driving to the shops after work and come back to reality only to realise that the car seems to have taken you home instead all on its own! What has happened of course is that your brain and mind, in the absence of any conscious instructions to the contrary, just repeated the actions you normally perform every afternoon and drove you straight home. Are you responsible for this action? Should your wife get you in trouble for forgetting to pick up some bread?

 And how far does this unconscious action extend?

 Then again, does ‘unconscious’ really equal ‘not responsible’? The daydreaming autopilot driver did choose to daydream after all. Had he chosen to remain focused he would not have forgotten to pick up the bread.

I am reminded of the story of the monk who couldn’t resist having an egg during Lent fasting. Having smuggled the egg into his bare cell, he was faced with problem of how to cook it without arousing suspicion. So he struck upon the idea of roasting it over his prayer candle. When the abbot happened to pass by his cell and noticed something fishy going on, the startled monk exclaimed, “It wasn’t me, Father; the devil made me do it!” Suddenly, a demon appeared out of nowhere and exclaimed, “Oh no. I’m not to blame for this one. I would never have thought of that candle idea. He came up with it all by himself!”

 So perhaps there really is no excuse for not practicing self control? My suspicion is the matter is still far more complex than we have yet guessed. Thank God that He is the judge of men’s hearts and deeds and not us!

 Fr Ant

 Cloning is an issue that raises many complex moral and ethical issues. There is any number of opinions on many of these issues, but it has so far proven difficult for the honest Christian to find certain answers on many of them. I am not sure that I have definite answers, but I will simply share some thoughts on a few interesting questions. No doubt you might disagree with some of the things I write, but feel free to comment and tell me why.

 If a child is diagnosed with an abnormality in the womb, should that child be aborted?

 We must begin with what we believe about that child in the womb. If we believe that the child is a human being (as we do) then we must treat her the same way we would treat her after she was born. The question thus becomes: if a baby is born and has an abnormality, should we put her to death? I don’t think there are many rational people in the world today who would answer yes to that question.

 It is not for us to evaluate the worth of a person’s life. Who can say that because a child with Down’s Syndrome may never have the intellectual ability to become a brain surgeon, or the athletic ability to become an Olympian, their life is not worth living? A disabled person is just as capable of living a happy life as an able one. Judgements about whose life is worth living and whose life should be terminated should never, ever become the prerogative of humans.

Is it acceptable to use IVF to give a gay or lesbian couple their own child?

 This is a little more complicated. If we begin from the premise that the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a sin, then we must doubt the advisability of a family with two homosexual parents. But again, analogy may be enlightening. Would we say that a heterosexual couple where both partners are constantly having extramarital affairs should not be able to use IVF to have a child? Biblically speaking, both adultery and homosexuality are grave sins, and in both these cases, if there is no repentance, the sin will continue. And yet, I think that many Christians would see far less of a problem with the adulterous couple having a child than with the homosexual couple, something of a double standard, perhaps?

 Another aspect worth considering of course is the psychological welfare of the child. Research has proven time and again that children are most psychologically healthy and well balanced when they have the influence of both a male and a female parent in their life as they grow up. But there are many other situations where children grow up in these less than ideal conditions – a widow or widower for example, or in the case of divorce or of one of the partners having to be out of town for long periods of time with the armed forces, and so on. Would we deny IVF to such families? Perhaps we might.

 Really, the question behind this question is this: should we make moral values one of the criteria for deciding who gets to benefit from a medical therapy? I would think that in the vast majority of cases, the answer would be a resounding “no!” It would be criminal to deny a thief a life saving blood transfusion just because they are a thief, and might one day reoffend. Nor do we deprive women of cosmetic surgery on the grounds that they are excessively vain. We may have to face the fact that if we live in a secular society, the benefits of that society must be available to all its members without prejudice.

 Can we use stem cell technology to grow whole organs in the laboratory for transplant?

 Foetal stem cells involve the destruction of a full and living foetus, which is equal to murder in the Church’s view. But what about using adult stem cells which have nothing to do with a foetus at all, to grow a liver or a kidney in the laboratory for transplantation?

We already allow organ transplants (which are encouraged by the Church) and the use of artificial organs like artificial hearts, cochleae, etc, and even the implantation of animal organs like pig heart valves. Thus, it is hard to argue against creating completely compatible, natural organs that derive from the patient’s own stem cells, or even from a donor’s stem cells. I see no difference between growing your own liver and the process of a surgery patient donating his own blood a few months before the surgery and receiving it again as a transfusion during surgery.

 If you think the ethical questions raised by IVF are tough, you’ll be totally flummoxed by those raised by human cloning. Claims of human cloning have occurred sporadically since the turn of the 21^st century, yet none of them has been substantiated – with one exception. Dr Panayiotis Zavos, a Greek Cypriot immigrant to the USA, may soon go down in history as the person responsible for the first ever successful human clone. He has so far made a number of unsuccessful attempts, but with each one, the knowledge gained is bringing him and his team a little closer to success. I have included some links at the end of this blog for those who wish to learn more about him and his very controversial work.

Dr Zavos is an enigmatic figure who proves yet again just how much truth is stranger than fiction. He is a practicing Greek Orthodox Christian, and he puts forward arguments based on Bible verses in support of his work, even though most Christians would disagree with both the work and his interpretation of the Bible. Having been blocked by the laws of Western countries, he moved his work to Beirut in Lebanon where there are no laws to prevent human cloning, and he even met with the spiritual leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon to get his ‘blessing’ on the work of human cloning.

What sets his efforts apart from the other unsubstantiated claims of human cloning by secretive doctors and strange cults is that Dr Zavos has allowed independent journalists and a film crew to document his progress. A documentary was recently aired on pay TV and leaves no doubt that he is doing exactly what he says he is. This is not enough for others in the medical profession, though, who insist that Dr Zavos must open his work to the scrutiny of his peers, and accuse him of being after nothing more than fame and glory and a mountain of cash. Dr Zavos in turn responds that fame is not on his agenda, and that he is motivated mainly by the desire to help couples for whom every other avenue for having a child has failed them. His choice of candidates for his technique would certainly support this claim.

But we are not her to judge Dr Zavos, but to assess the process of cloning a human being. First we must turn to the ethical problems with the technique as it stands today.

One of the major objections raised against human cloning is that the procedure damages the genetic information in the cells, resulting in a very high rate of deformed individuals. Dolly, the famous sheep who broke open Pandora’s Box when she was cloned from a six year old sheep in 1997, took no less than 277 attempts before her creators got it right. Many of those were deformed sheep that did not survive. We may be willing to accept that attrition rate for sheep, but have we the right to do that to human beings? Thus, Dr Zavos is criticised for trying to do this far too early. Let us wait, his critics say, until we have improved the technique using animals. Once we have got it right, we can think about using it on humans, but to attempt it now on humans is criminal.

Then there is the risk of abuse. Earlier I compared human cloning to nuclear power, maintaining that both are technologies with tremendous potential for both good and evil. The horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was so terrifying that no one has used a nuclear weapon in anger ever since. And yet, we still live in fear for we cannot be certain that some rogue state will one day break this taboo, with dreadful consequences. Human cloning too has the potential for dreadful consequences. What do you think of the following potential scenarios:

-          A mother loses her 10 year old daughter in an accident. She saves a little of her daughter’s genetic material and has her cloned to ‘bring her back to life’ again.

-          A laboratory clones a number of human beings but only allows them to grow to about 30 cells, never implanting them in a womb. They remove cells whenever they grow to 30 cells and use the removed cells for research. If you consider life to begin at conception, is this any way to treat a human being?

-          A government decrees that the population needs to be ‘beautified’ or made smarter, and that henceforth, no natural children will be born, but only clones of the most beautiful or the most intelligent people.

-          A caste of human clones is genetically engineered to be a servant class with very low IQ but large muscle bulk and stamina. The company that produces them rents them out for $20,000 per year (plus food and board, but only the most basic needs, since they are bred not to complain).

-          Astronauts in weightless space have no need for legs – they use up energy and serve no purpose. Thus, NASA clones an astronaut race with no legs who can travel to far distant planets, happily living on spaceships for years with no legs.

-          A billionaire realises he is getting old. He secretly clones himself ten times and locks up the clones in a hidden complex underground beneath his mansion. They are given only the most basic of their needs – food and water and warmth. They are not educated, they never learn to speak or understand speech, they never see the outside world. When the billionaire’s heart or liver or kidneys start to give out, he simply kills one of the clones and, hey presto! Instant perfect genetic match for a donor!

-          Eventually, even the bank of identical organs can no longer keep the billionaire alive. His body is just too old. So he attempts a radically new procedure: he has his brain transplanted into the healthiest of the young clones, effectively giving himself another lifetime on the earth. If it succeeds, there may be no limit to how many times he may be able to jump into a new body, genetically, his own body.

Some of these scenarios are still science fiction, but some are possible today. The first one is the actual profile of one of Dr Zavos’ patients, and the second scenario is a reality right now in South Korea. The disturbing thing is that even the most fantastic of them may be a real possibility within the lifetime of people alive today.

Are we really mature enough as a human race to handle this kind of power? What will it do to the nature of our society, our families, and our relationships? If you cloned yourself, would the resultant human being be your brother or your son? What is the legal status of a clone? What inheritance rights would it enjoy over its donor? What are the psychological effects of being brought up by your genetic twin? How will the family unit be affected if cloning becomes widespread, and what effect will this have on society as a whole? We know that identical twins are more likely to suffer from heart disease and diabetes than non-identical twins: will there be increased health risks for clones? What about the danger of creating distinct classes in society based on genetics: what if we end up with a super race that considers all other humans their inferiors and servants? Are we willing to give up on the principle of the equality of all human beings?

The deepest of these questions lead us to ask perhaps the most basic question of all: what is it that makes a human being? Is it just the physical body, including its unique set of genes? Is it the experiences they go through in life, which have little to do with genes? And what about the unique spirit that God gives to each individual at conception: can it be transferred from one body to another as in the case of the brain transplant mentioned above? Is the spirit of a person linked to their genes, or their brain?

Should we clone human beings simply because we can? There are those who would say that human cloning is inevitable and it is foolish to think it can be stopped, as foolish as believing that one day all nations will destroy their nuclear weapons. If they are right, then we who are Christians need to come to grips with this bamboozling situation. Indeed, the whole world needs to, and fairly soon, too.

 In the last blog under this topic I will survey what various religions have said about human cloning and then bravely attempt to address some of these moral and ethical questions, and try to at least point the way to some possible answers.

Fr Ant

 ______________________________________

Links to info on Dr Zavos and his attempts to clone a human being:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panayiotis_Zavos

 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/fertility-expert-i-can-clone-a-human-being-1672095.html

 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-and-ethicists-unite-to-attack-doctors-clone-plan-1672701.html

 One of the major issues challenging our ethics in the 21^st century is the issue of human cloning. There are compelling parallels to the rise of nuclear energy 60 years ago. Whilst nuclear energy has given us a relatively clean source of incredible amounts of energy, and is even used in medicine to save lives, it also brought with it the ability to destroy the world as we know it. Would we have been better off if the power within the atom had never been unleashed?

Cloning today provides a stunningly similar set of ethical questions. Most people are happy with the idea of cloning plants or even animals if it will provide some benefit to humanity, but when it comes to considering cloning a human being, we run into a minefield of questions, for most of which we have yet to find satisfactory answers.

Nor is it a hypothetical question any more. At this very moment, as you read these words, there are serious efforts underway to produce the first living human clones, and they are getting closer and closer to succeeding.

Firstly, a few basic definitions. I am talking here about reproductive cloning, the production of a fully functioning living human being from the cell of another human. This is different to therapeutic cloning which only involves the production of groups of cells or even tissues from the cells of a human being. With reproductive cloning, the cloned individual is genetically identical to the donor, sort of an identical twin, except they might be born 30 years apart!

Now, we have had test tube babies (IVF) for a few decades. But IVF involves combining genetic material from two individuals to produce a baby, much the same as nature does. Even here, we find a multitude of ethical questions…

-          When does life begin?

-          Can we destroy unneeded embryos?

-          Is it right to implant an embryo in a surrogate mother?

-          If the husband is unable to provide viable sperm, is it acceptable to use sperm from a stranger? Could this be considered a form of adultery (although no actual adulterous relationship has occurred, the results are the same).

-          Is it acceptable to use IVF to give a gay or lesbian couple their own child?

The Coptic Church has a more developed position on these sorts of questions than it does about cloning, obviously because IVF has been around for a lot longer as a real world issue. We consider that life begins at conception, for that is the first moment at which the embryo has all the genetic information that makes her who she is. In a sense, the only difference between a fertilised egg and an adult human being is one of number, not nature. Both are individual human beings, but one has one cell, the other has trillions.

This answers the question of whether it is right to destroy unneeded embryos – no it isn’t, for that means killing a human being, one that is unable to defend itself too. With the issue of surrogacy we start entering muddy waters. There are many social and psychological pitfalls here, and most in the Church would say surrogacy is not an acceptable option. Certainly not for money. Others might say it is in a way an extension of the “wet nurse” that is even mentioned favourably in the Bible. Instead of another woman providing milk for a newborn baby, she is now providing a little bit more – sustenance and protection for the nine months before birth. Interestingly, there is an old Egyptian tradition that says that you cannot marry a person who has suckled from the same breast as you, for that is considered to have made you siblings. I wonder how that might apply to surrogate motherhood? Especially since breast pumps have made wet nurses obsolete these days.

Then of course there are extensions to IVF that haven’t yet happened, but are quite possible. Techniques are available today for finding out quite early whether an embryo has the genetic defects that lead to serious and sometimes life threatening hereditary diseases. Although the Church would not condone the fertilisation of a dozen embryos and then the destruction of those with the faulty gene, it can accept using genetic engineering to correct the problem in a gene and thus produce a healthy child instead of a sick one.

But imagine a donor catalogue where parents could choose the sperm or egg donor with the characteristics of their choice. Choose a famous concert pianist and get a child with musical genes! Genetic Engineering may open up the way to creating your own baby, much the way you create your own computer at a Dell website. Instead of choosing the specifications of your RAM and hard drive, you choose eye colour, height, physique and so on.

A brave new world indeed! Are we ready to cope with such power? Disturbing images of the Tower of Babel spring to mind. Do we have the right to “play God” in this way? Is there anything morally wrong with parents choosing the eye and hair colour of their children, or the inherent abilities they will have? Or were we meant to just accept whatever God gave us? How do the Christian concepts of humility and surrender to God’s will apply to these issues?

I will try to address these questions and raise some more regarding human cloning in coming blogs. In the meantime, your comments are most welcome.

 Fr Ant

Albert Einstein, like many scientists, trusted a result more if it looked simple: something many Mathematics students will relate to!

Is it better to see life in complex or simple terms? Should I delve deeply into things, seeking hidden meanings, or should I just accept things at face value?

 In my last post I looked at the argument in favour of complexity. Today, a look at the other side…

Simplicity plays a crucial role in the life of the true Christian. When our Lord gives us simple, direct commands, there is not a lot of wiggle room, nor should we be clever and try to find it. An example of this might be the central law of love in Christianity. We are enjoined to love our brothers and sisters in Christ, our neighbours, and even our enemies and those who persecute us: in simple terms, to love every human being in this world.

 You can get pretty complicated in addressing the question of how to apply this command, but basically, it boils down to something pretty straightforward: put away your ego, your fear, your dignity and your pride. See how God loves the unlovable, and strive to do the same. When the man asked Jesus “who is my neighbour?”, he was possibly trying to find a way out of loving someone he didn’t want to love by changing the definitions. This is resorting to complexity where it does not belong. This is why attackers of Christianity accuse Christians of being hypocritical. Richard Dawkins is convinced that when Christians say “love thy neighbour”, they mean only the neighbour who belongs to my tribe, my faith, my nationality. From where does he get this ridiculous concept? From Christians who play with the words for their own selfish ends.

 Simplicity makes life so much easier, so much more peaceful when we employ it in our dealings with one another. Consider the person who constantly doubts the motives of others, constantly taking offence at others’ words and actions, seeing insults where none are intended or snobbishness where none exists. This person lives in constant anxiety and discontentment. Compare him to one who takes the words and actions of others simply. When someone says, “I didn’t mean it”, he takes them at their word and thinks no more about it. If someone seems to ignore him, he takes no offence but rather anticipates that there is some other unknown reason for the apparent snub (he was tired, he was distracted, he has a tooth ache…) This person lives a life of peace and contentment. He is happy with others because he is happy within himself. A simple heart produces a simple eye, and a simple eye produces a simple heart.

 Last time we considered mandlebulbs where simple instructions produced incredibly complex and beautiful forms. But the opposite may be true as well. Sometimes very complicated beginnings boil down to a very simple ending. Consider the famous Theory of Relativity discovered by the famous Albert Einstein, a man who himself was in love with simplicity. Some pretty heavy maths takes a long and circuitous path to boil down to a stunningly simple equation in the end: e = mc².

 In his personal life, Einstein sought simplicity in ways that many would consider eccentric at best, downright insane at worst. For example, he drove his poor wife crazy by insisting upon taking up the scissors and cutting off the cuffs of his shirtsleeves. What purpose do the darn things serve? All they do is get dirty and force you to wash the whole shirt before the rest of it is in need of washing! For similar reasons, he apparently often dispensed with socks. To his mind, unnecessary distractions prevented him from focusing his time and energy on his real goals, his mathematical and physical investigations, so he took the logical course and simplified his life.

 Personally, I find much to admire in this approach. Gone are the days when I used to spend ages trying to match up my socks. Of course, they’re all black, but there is black and there is black. There are thicker winter materials and lighter summer ones. There are long, medium and short ones, with elastic and without, and then of course, there are all the stages of fading. You can tell I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. But one day it dawned upon me that this is such a waste of time. Black socks are black socks in the end, and who pays attention to your socks? Matching socks never got anyone into heaven, not so far as I know, anyway. So now I just take any two socks out of the washing basket and slip them on. Simplicity! It feels like being set free from prison! The prison was my own unnecessary perfectionism, vanity and small mindedness. Just don’t look too closely at my feet, next time we meet…

  So where does all that leave us? Should we be simple or complex in our approach to life? The answer, I think, is both. There is a time and place for complexity and another for simplicity. There are even times when we should use them together, as we use a hammer and nail together. To know which is to be applied requires wisdom and discernment: gifts that generally are won through hard experience, many mistakes and an open mind.

 “Be wise as serpents, innocent as doves”, said our Lord. And yes, it is possible to have both in the same person. I hope these modest reflections may have shed a little light on how this is possible.

 Fr Ant