Science, Christianity and the Will-to-good

By Ross Fardon

This book criticises religion in favour of reality, but instead of just criticising as many authors do, it develops a powerful common human ethic. The aim is to grow the truest, most beautiful, effective and joyous garden of reality on Earth. The book covers an immense range, so that there is space only to assert many convictions of a lifetime,

• Language: English
• Publisher: STAMPA GLOBAL
• Release date: Apr 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781951585617

Book preview

SCIENCE, CHRISTIANITY

AND THE

WILL-TO-GOOD

REVISED SECOND EDITION

Ross Fardon

There are two things about this book: The overall discussion of what matters to people and to civilization, something we are letting slip; and to make the case for a powerful universal basis for the highest ethics.

A caution:

Violent zeal for truth hath one hundred and one odds to be petulancy, ambition or pride.

Jonathan Swift.

Copyright © 2020 by Ross Fardon.

However, without further permission, parts of the book may be copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial use, so long as attributed, and wording and figures not altered, and amounting to less than 5,000 words in all.

In this book, scripture quotations are almost all from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The author thanks that Council for its policy of allowing free use of up to 500 verses, subject to conditions which this book meets.

PCIP catalogue

Rev. date: 2020

To learn about other books and essays by Ross Fardon, visit Rossfardonauthor.com. You may download essays free from that site.

Contents

1. Ockham’s Razor, And Non-Scientists

2. Blasphemy

3. Definitions And Discussion Of Terms

4. Where This Book Comes From

5. The World As It Is— Science, Origins Of Religion, History And Deism

6. The Bible

7. The Shocker-The Gospels

8. A Note On Charles Darwin, Hubble, Newman And Yearning

9. The Story Of Christendom

10. Summary Critique Of Biblical Christianity

11. The World Of Spirits

12. Elaborately Transformed Manufactures (Etm)

13. Curiosity, Fair Trade And Mercantilism

14. Science Does Not Ask The

Big Questions

15. God To Give Meaning, Support And Purpose

16. Jesuits, Theologians And Revelation

17. The Will-To-Good And Basis Of Global Ethics

18. The Credo—Mundane To Sublime

Appendix

Author Bio

This book is dedicated to my family and friends:-

People to whom this book is irrelevant, who just get on with life; scientists, Christians, atheists, agnostics, theists, spiritualists, Quakers whatever that is, Hindus. I have not been fortunate enough to know good Muslims or Buddhists well.

We differ about truth, the one thing we have in common is the will-to-good. Thank you.

I have a debt not only to the wonder and truth of science, especially geology, geography, biology, evolution and astronomy. There is an equal debt to history, anthropology, mythology, the wonder-worlds of the arts, and gardening.

Together, you have made life golden.

Jesus did not die for all the children of the world, but I write for them.

This is a book by a peasant for peasants, as well as for clever educated people. Bless you.

Joy to the world. Grace, blessings and peace.

These are not religious sentiments. They are human. Are you? If so, read on.

Many modern Christians have much that is beautiful about them. But the flower pots of life they present are full of virulent old weeds and fungus like those from a run-down nursery. The nice Christian vendors say, What weeds?

This book provides sadly-needed weeding and re-potting. Better, it looks towards a beautiful clean garden of life from an entirely different nursery, called reality.

Tables and Figures:

God of the Gaps

Bell Curve of Humanity

Biblical and Evolutionary View of Life on Earth

Intensities of Natural Phenomena

Usage of Resources

Biblical History

Gospels Critique

Matthew

Mark

Luke

John

Praise to the Holiest, and Psalm 23

Percentage of Humans Who Had Heard of Christian God

Biblical View of Bell Curve

The Bettertudes

Bell Curve of Humanity Again

Wealth Distribution

Three Ancient Christian Creeds

Recommended Reading

In the book I mention far more writers than I would wish, to counter Christians who call all critics shallow. Here are some useful books readily available.

John Gribbin: Science: A History 1543-2001. Also his Companion to the Cosmos, for its introduction and ninety-four-page tabulation of the history of science. Wiser than philosophers of science. It omits the great Islamic and Indian science. Laurence Krauss: A Universe From Nothing, and others.

Richard Dawkins’ Ancestor’s Tale, The Greatest Show on Earth, Climbing Mount Improbable, but his The God Delusion with Alister McGrath’s commentary.

A.C. Grayling: What is Good? and Toward the Light of Liberty, a Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights. He went off the rails with his The Good Book.

Alan Bullock: The Humanist Tradition in the West, except for the conclusions.

Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation and The Moral Landscape. Read on the Internet: Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian, 1929. It takes an hour. Also on the Internet, Epicurus about religion three hundred years before Jesus. He and those around him pose enduring fundamental questions that monotheists do not want to think about.

The Bible and Qur’an, about 787,000 and 170,000 words, are dense with ancient noise and repetition. Scan every tenth chapter one evening to get an idea. It is a true sample.

The Old Testament, a Very Short Introduction by Michael Coogan, is brief and true. The small Collins Atlas of Bible History.

Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman, and especially his God’s Problem on the contradictions of the Bible God regarding suffering. He is reverential, but harsher than this book. The greatest history of Christianity is by Diarmaid MacCulloch. But it is a huge task to read. The Jewish People; Their History and Their Religion by David J Goldberg and John D Raynor, to put Jesus’ teachings in their setting.

For the kindest and wisest in many ways, yet some of the most foolish of Christian writing, scan C.S. Lewis’s many books. I read them all and am astonished that modern Christian writers still admire such arrant falsity.

Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, and Gerard Helferich: Humboldt’s Cosmos, the summary of Alexander von Humboldt’s life, for reviews of the world at the beginning of modern times, to contrast with those of Bible and Christendom.

Philosophy as a genre is nearly impossible to read. Read Grayling’s summaries.

Other books by the author: See rossfardonauthor.com for books and essays

Autobiography: This Could be Your Future

ESSENTIAL Leadership and Management

ALL ARE PART OF A CIVILISATION PROJECT

1

Ockham’s Razor, And Non-Scientists

We Rely quite a bit in this book on Ockham’s Razor. It is a handy razor.

Ockham’s Razor is a principle from the notable William of the village of Ockham (or Occam, Ocham), in Surrey, from about 1288 to 1348. Ockham’s words have been interpreted to mean: That causes introduced to explain a thing should not be multiplied beyond necessity. It has been shortened: Accept the simplest sufficient explanation. Newton expressed it, "We are to admit no more causes of natural things, than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances." This is what makes so devastating Laplace’s comment to Napoleon, I have no need of that (God) hypothesis. Ockham said other important things about the source of truth, not discussed here.

Once upon a time, spirit entities were self-evidently the simplest sufficient explanation of much that happened in the world, big and small, as we discuss in Chap 5. Out of this belief arose all religions and the concoctions regarded as sacred scripture by the great religions of the world. Since then, truer sufficient solutions have been found by science for just about everything, and where science cannot say, we cannot know. See the chapter on The Big Questions.

In science, we do look again when any contrary evidence or reasoning arises, and go on until we establish the new simplest sufficient argument. The best examples are Darwinian evolution, and Einstein superseding Newton. It is interesting that the known Universe seems to follow one of the simplest of the many ways it could be according to the general theory of relativity.

The simplest sufficient explanation in science is not always simple in itself—relativity is beyond just about everyone. So the simplest case is an impressive argument only to brilliant mathematical physicists. Quantum theory is even more esoteric but amongst the most proven, that is, sufficient, of any physics. The biological sufficient explanations to evolution take the large books of Darwin and Gould and Dawkins in the public domain, and hundreds of others to explain such a complex thing. We have still to find sufficient explanations for much brain function, and improved instruments and data processing are the key to seeing into such intricate processes.

Applying Ockham’s Razor is no more than scientific method—in arguing for a thing, we rely on evidence, and make no assumptions unless required by evidence—to do so would be beyond necessity. If there were evidence for them, we would add the influence of spiritual entities, be they Gods or angels or devils, from Shiva to mimi spirits.

Religious believers explain complex things: God did it. But such statements say nothing. They do not explain how anything evolves or how anything works, which we still have to find out through science. Many daft implications arise from the God-cause hypotheses, including all sacred literature and the brilliant books of C.S. Lewis. It is only science that will show where current science fails, and improve on it.

One of the clearest evidences of the irrelevance of the God hypothesis is that as science progresses, the Razor removes un-necessary assumptions of God-roles. This God of the Gaps has diminished to tiny proportions, tending to zero, rapidly in historical terms. For the deist claim that God is necessary for the biggest things of all, like the universe or the human brain, see the chapter on the Big Questions.

This graph represents an astonishing and recent development in human thought.

The basis of this graph is unknown amongst the world’s poor, where all religions are still flourishing, and helping to preserve their ignorance, poverty and superstition.

The graph mirrors the growth of science and humanism that have transformed lucky peoples.

After about 1500 in the West, science showed the universe was like clockwork that did not need an intervening God. From Buffon and Diderot (1750s) to Darwin (1840s-70s), we learnt that everything is process more than clockwork, everything evolves, the Earth itself, and humans evolving from other animals to whom we are closely related—over eons of time. There was no Garden of Eden, or Fall or sin against any God, no basis for God’s judgement as perceived in Old and New Testaments. Humans are integral products of nature working away from the beginning of time, very, very long ago, not separate creations. As more and more processes on or beyond the Earth needed no God, in fact every process where we could get evidence, it became logical to ask if any process needed a God. God was only where we did not yet have evidence, the Almighty Evaporating God.

This God of the Gaps is not a noble thing. It is a God like bits of old putty that held ideas together long ago, before we demolished them to build a truer world view.

But God has been this YHWH or mighty Jehovah, whose name wise men trembled to utter, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, who shall reign for ever and ever, as The Messiah tells us. He went the way of Ozymandias more than putty. Shelley pictured the shattered vast statue of Ramses (Ozymandias) in the desert, all his glory long gone:

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Now this lesson has sunk in over a few centuries, to a fortunate minority of humans. However, the suddenness of this decline, in human instinctive terms, and the lack of education in Big Questions, explains the remnant pool of belief in an active God. Many people still stubbornly require a God to give meaning and to explain good and evil, and to feel good. They are godifying natural wonder. Hence the ethic of this book.

Not only have we a God of Nuthin’ Much, who exists beyond necessity. As always when a more complex cause than needed is postulated, related things go haywire. This book is to jump out of the great haywire ride that Biblical faith has been, into reality. We have had false reasons for natural phenomena and human behaviour, false paradoxes, ethics, guilt, judgement, slaughters, fears and hopes foisted on us.

No books are less like what any God’s revelation would be, than the Bible, Qur’an or Hindu or Buddhist scriptures. Regarding Judaism and Christianity, read Isaiah, Ezekiel, a gospel and The Revelation, for a window on weirdness.

The simplest application of the Razor is against Hindu gods or spirits, as I laugh with Hindus. I have the same reverence for nature and humanity they do. I just omit the beyond necessity gods and spirits, myths and rituals, and keep the wonder.

Likewise for that much-hyped spirit, the Holy Spirit of Christians. Think a moment, and he evaporates.

History and contemporary affairs demonstrate that it is an offence against the word holy to claim that God has guided the shambolic churches of Christendom, or the community of any other faith, through the Holy Spirit. Yet a God Who Loves the World is God of all the faiths, including Islam and Mormons, let alone the great Asian faiths. He should be guiding the world effectively. His ways would be obvious, so foolish is human governance for comparison. The Holy Spirit is the ultimate Tar Baby—ain’t doin’ nor sayin’ nuthin’, in a crying world.

In lauding science, I have been accused of leaving out the vast majority of people, who are not scientists. Perhaps four or five billion people have no interest in the science or the classical arts that I love, but they know reality. Poor people have a good grasp of the real world and of people, and love of both. The poor hard workers do not talk about what they love all the time, but they love the moods and nuances of humanity and nature about them.

In fact we are all amateur scientists. Anyone who tries to find out how things work, how anything came to be, who tries to understand the world, based on evidence, is engaging in science. And those are your practical people.

This book is in honour of my mother who had hardly any formal education, and had to use her brains and spirit instead. No-one loved this Earth more, with every fibre of her being. No-one helped those about her more, or with more good cheer. After a lifetime of meeting indigenous people, I sing of the grace and practical wisdom of poor people.

We have TV programmes on the living world, and space images, and know that the universe is wonderful beyond our ken. We peasants know that all things that happen in nature are just this Earth and universe acting as they always did. We belong. There are no natural laws made specifically for humans, sparrows or lilies of the field.

All of us ordinary people ought to take science and management very seriously, much more so than the religious and liberal arts writers do. The little summation of science in this book is for that purpose. Management as the will-to-good in action is treated in my other books.

Peasants know better than the great that the best things in life are love, laughter and friendship and the enjoyment of beauty and truth, and the will-to-good. Science has changed for the better our view of the world and of people, for everyone, not just for professionals. It has given us reality, over ignorance or concoction. It has multiplied the wonder of it all beyond any psalmist or Hindu seer or modern comparative religion expert.

At the end we spell out a set of simple beliefs that sustain the best a human can be, anywhere, not just in the fortunate nations, or among philosophers. They are for peasants above all. What matters, what must be done?

Even a tragic false cult like communism demonstrated that large numbers of ordinary people can be energised by non-religious belief. It was immensely instructive. Belief in a better life for us, our children and grandchildren, and demonstration of paths towards that goal, are enough to vitalise the lives of any decent person.

I sing of that noblest thing, fallible human beings. Without any God to help but with an insatiable curiosity for truth, they fought their way through the ignorant, questing, tentative X00,000 years, through the X0,000 years of religious beliefs, to better things and the blessings some of us enjoy. Genesis and great theologians condemned fundamental curiosity, which is as alive in ordinary people as in academia. And the poor had no-one looking out for them unless other people did.

Joy to the world, not just to the lucky highly educated ones.

2

Blasphemy

This is an optional chapter, needed by religious believers before reading on.

Blasphemy is defined as speaking irreverently or critically of God or sacred things.

Let us remind religious people that never has there been a revelation directly to humanity from any God, excepting claims from individuals or tiny groups of people that they spoke for God or from God, that they saw bright lights and angels or even God, or Jesus transformed. The question is whether we believe them.

So there is no such thing as blasphemy against any God, only against what people claim as sacred. It is disagreement between humans, nothing more.

If we had a wholesale revelation direct from any God, then if people disbelieved and scoffed, at last blasphemy against God would enter human experience. It would look silly, if we could see convincing extraordinary God revelations, or actual angels, in front of us. See my essay Sufi Taxi Driver.

Let us get on with disagreeing, as honestly as we can. I have goodwill towards Christians as for all people, but must be free to disagree.

This is a book of the soul, it sings of what humans can be without gods. The soul is a basket name for all of the heightened capacities for beauty, art, understanding, love and joy. It is not a separate living entity within us but our highest nature. It is claimed by religion, but was not invented by religion, owned by religion, or improved by religion, but the opposite: The soul predates religions and invented them as vast false steps for humanity, and can soar when religion dies.

My cause is to celebrate humanity and nature. It first has to be a cry of outrage against the Christian and Jewish God and Jesus (and Islam), the untruth of revealed religion that should be obvious now that science has revealed much of our world. It protests the diet of nonsense from popes, cardinals, bishops, theologians, any grab-bag of evangelists, local clergy, lay preachers and the media supporters of Christianity. Sigh.

First, I am taking nothing more than the Jewish position regarding Jesus. Why did God have to come and say to Jews who already believed in him, Now you must believe this man is God my son, when he had allegedly taught them for two thousand years that this was the ultimate blasphemy? They, taught by the prophets he had allegedly sent to them, said he was blaspheming.

Second, every one of the monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is blasphemous of the other. Christians and Muslims have been willing to kill the others in large numbers. I stick to disagreement and argument, not killing.

So to mainstream Christian or Jewish or Muslim readers, I greet you: Most of you deny all other Gods but yours, I deny them all, and differ from you by one.

Religious people regularly characterise a-theism as a negative, as though to escape from a swamp is a negative. No. It frees the soul to seek only the truth and the best.

Joy to the world.

3

Definitions And Discussion Of Terms

This chapter is pretty important for how we think about life on Earth. It is part of our war against baloney.

We are careful with terms and assertions, not insights of brilliance or scholarship followed by silly statements. Much of the futile debate between science, philosophy and religion is due to poor definition of terms. Many Christians define any good belief or action in the world, including humanism, as really Christian. Many define all strong belief as religion. They abort the discussion, and better, make discussion so woolly that it can never be resolved.

Firstly, we have the symbols above: Fire, air, earth and water, lilies of the field and a deadly amoeba, together to symbolise this Earth and life on it. This is reality. Over against them is an astounding thing, a Bible, a book that claims ultimate truth independently of all else we know about our planet.

In this book we spell Gods with a capital G for the mighty monotheistic God of Jew, Christian or Muslim, or for a designer-creater Almighty God. We use a small g for gods of polytheistic religions where gods can range from household deities up to great gods. Hindus believe in Gods and gods.

We spell our home Universe with a capital, while there are almost certainly other universes, and we use cosmos to refer to everything that there is.

We assume on evidence and inference that human consciousness developed over a few million years, intertwined with the instincts for survival that still drive us—the will-to-live, courage, endurance, sex, curiosity, power, greed, status, joy, fear, bonding/loyalty, fighting. Most of our distinct humanity including self-consciousness, wonder and yearning, derived more recently. We humans may be 100-300,000 years old, as a species, so we refer to human experience as being X00,000 years. The size of X does not matter here. Complex modern humanity is only perhaps X0,000 years old.

We define science as evidence-based knowledge and reasoning to systematise understanding of the world. It is honest overall. Part of that evidence is mathematics, and pure reasoning extends further and more rigorously in mathematics than anywhere else. But mathematics ultimately can be accepted as describing reality only where it is tested by evidence. The mathematics of string theory is internally consistent, but does it describe any real thing other than mathematical possibility?

It is a great truth that numerical reasoning, mathematics, progresses rigorously, while words are will-o-the-wisps that lead philosophy about like kites. Astoundingly, maths is truth, words are human. Even false words can be intricate and interesting and lead nowhere. I watch children flying philosophy in the parks. To be truer, the arts are to make beautiful and interesting kites, philosophy has the role of so complicating kites that they are jumbled heaps that scarcely fly. There are few women philosophers, a high tribute to women.

Facts are things that have been shown conclusively to be true by mathematics or repeated observation of the world or experiments, by methods described clearly for all sides to criticise. We must be alert to any sign that they are false in any way, as a path to better truth. Tiny facts alerted many that Newtonian physics was not the complete truth. The greatest early contrast is between the often daft Socrates and Aristotle, who thought without checking the facts, and the more scientific Greeks.

Truth is inherent not in our prior beliefs, or in obedience to ancient revelations but in the way any thing reacts with our instruments or our senses directly, and in inferences drawn from those reactions and that cannot yet be faulted. Anything beyond testing cannot be considered fact. It ranges from wishful thinking to hypothesis, depending on the care with which it is developed.

Assertion is not fact. In this book I make many assertions that can be checked only by thousands of pages of reading to assemble evidence. I take all the care I can.

Evidence is the array of facts that are used to develop or to test knowledge or reasoning. It is incumbent on us to consider all known relevant facts. To select only the evidence in favour of a prior conclusion (Socrates) is dishonest. We are in direct conflict with the debating ethos of the liberal arts world and the media and all ideologues. In the case of Socrates, who started so much wrong, his thinking without evidence was ridiculous, even in the light of common knowledge way back then. Read Plato’s brief Phaedo, on the last day of Socrates. Plato’s very uneven The Republic at least introduced many great issues. I could once struggle through it in Greek.

In human affairs, the most complex things known, most beliefs or assertions are not as sure as in other science. But human affairs should still be assessed scientifically. Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape is wonderful but amazingly divorced from human affairs, where most major decisions are now based on wide studies and reviews. They are the result of generalising, or balancing, dozens to millions of individual facts or anecdotes, like pointillist paintings. This is the way babies learn. Therefore one or two anecdotes affect the assertion only if critical in themselves or representative of a large field of evidence. All of the assertions in this book evaporate if enough contrary evidence is found. All assertions about the self-contradictory Bible are matters of preponderance. The Bible contradicts itself or the world on all significant matters. I make no assertion unless I have thought and read all I can about it, for a decade or many. That gives it a chance, not a guarantee.

If you can demolish a few aspects of a long book you do not demolish it all. As if changing a few strokes from pink to green demolishes a Seurat painting. It is debating technique, forgetting that we all live after the debate to think another day. It is easy to demolish some of Dawkins’ The God Delusion, much of Karen Armstrong’s and Alister McGrath’s writing, yet the rest may remain true.

Scientific knowledge may start with evidence and develop generalisations that mature from careful speculation or hypotheses to theories to laws, as evidence becomes more convincing. Or scientific knowledge may start with speculation, what may be, mathematical or otherwise, that is then tested by observation or experiment for validation. The Introduction to Gribbin’s Companion to the Cosmos is a classic discussion of the two ways. The theorising must finish with evidence before being regarded as true. It is philosophic speculation but scientific hypothesis that there are countless other universes beyond our observable one; the Big Bang is a theory with much evidence; it is a law that our planets revolve around the Sun in ellipses disturbed only by other small gravitational factors. Science resonates or iterates between evidence and theories, resulting in verification, modification or refutation. That is science. Simply, science asks all day every day what things are, how can any idea be tested to be true, and goes with the facts, for the sheer pleasure of finding truth. Science and its hard-working child, technological innovation, are the answer to the age-old cynicism that there is nothing new under the sun. Evolution, history, science and technology say there are new things under the Sun beyond numbering, and as to old things, we like Newton still stand on the shore of the great ocean of truth.

Mathematics and other evidence are repeatedly tested and extended with time, so that science is self-correcting and self-progressing. If some thing or someone is wrong, including me however unlikely that is, the sooner we find out the better.

The trouble is that word evidence, because the wackiest thinker is more convinced of his evidence than a scientist is of his. Scientists are the most skeptical and careful of evidence because it is their foundation and if you shake the foundation you shake the science and may build a better edifice. The fools are sure too readily.

In the preceding paragraphs, we immediately conflict with one vast field of philosophy and theology which deals with "ultimate reality. It asks, what if all that we can know by testing through our instruments via our senses and processed by our brain, is wrong? The answer is we don’t know and can’t know, not thousands of pages of waffle. Assertions apart from testable hypotheses, or maths, are useless. They have silly assertions like, I think therefore I am." To accept what we can know, and to see how futile it is to ask like a little child what we know if we can’t know, separates the scientist from the philosopher.

Not just Russell, but many people have said that apart from scientific knowledge there is no knowledge, but that assertion has fuzzy edges against instincts and the arts. It is also silly to push the concept of knowledge, as in I know that my Redeemer liveth when the next man says, I know I am Napoleon. Currently, 60 South Koreans believe they are God. There are more who know Jesus lives in their hearts, but there is no evidence, just a nice feeling.

You ask me how I know He lives—

He lives within my heart.

Apart from scientific knowledge, we are made human by instincts, dreams and feelings, love and dislikes, hope and sadness, yearning, curiosity, imagination and wonder, the world of letters, art, gardening, beauty, sport. They are not a bad set of assets so long as our actions in the real world, as against the wonderful worlds of dreams, art, love and laughter, are constrained by scientific knowledge. Ultimately, knowledge of the world leads us to the will-to-good, as we show. But metaphysics, speculation on ultimate truth, meaning or knowledge beyond science, is the best argument for music or sport or gardening, just about anything bar cannibalism, as better ways to spend our time.

Philosophy is well defined by the Oxford Dictionary: The pursuit of wisdom and the knowledge of things and their causes; the study of ultimate reality and general principles; a system of theories on the nature of things or the rules for life. Science is a sub-set of philosophy so defined, though science, understanding the world on the basis of evidence, goes back to animals long before humans. There is seamless gradation between the speculative end of science and philosophy. However, science, forsaken by Socrates because he wanted to understand the world faster than wait for evidence, has muscled philosophy aside.

Philosophy, since the growth of science, is relegated to thinking about things in areas that are not verifiable by observation or experiment or mathematics. Wordy waffle. However a deliberate and foolish other-worldliness has been a major theme in Western philosophy since Zeno, Socrates and Plato. They believed reality can be best achieved by thinking about it, not experiment or observation. They even believed with crazy hubris that ultimate truth about the world is within our own minds, to be drawn out—education. They also believed like Zeno that it is clever to falsify a situation by careful choice of inapplicable word pictures. So they remove a subject from rational thought as long as that mindset lasted—till today. I am happy to oppose my view of Zeno against that of Russell and some other great minds. The philosophical ponderings of great scientists from Descartes, Newton and Leibniz, Pascal, through Russell and Whitehead to Einstein are so useless.

With apologies to Grayling and other philosophers, I am hardly lacking brilliant people to agree with me in rejecting the whole genre of philosophy of ultimate reality and meaning. Philosophers have an easy job in rejecting each others’ facile philosophies. It is a shambles. We need only imagine every top scientist repudiating every other top scientist to see the difference between evidence-based real knowledge and unconstrained wordy opinion.

To speculate on matters beyond the means to test them, for example whether things are infinite or bounded, is useless except by searching for verifiable mathematics, or some evidence to bear on the problems. Do not wait up. We will re-convene each generation, so fast is progress in pushing the edges of the known.

We define religion as belief in non-material, usually unseen spirit entities that have a role in the creation and operation of the universe. As to one creator God, it is by definition beyond the words we can use to describe it, utterly transcendent. We can nominate attributes, for example love, or father-like, though Christian and Muslim theologians got into knots on these matters.

The spirits are beyond, not bound by, the known laws of energy, matter, time or space. The major sub-set, personal religion, believes that spiritual entities have a personal interest in, and take special action with, human beings. It is possible to be a believer in countless different ways, or an atheist (they don’t exist) or agnostic (I don’t know) with relation to all or just to personal spiritual beings.

This book discusses the beliefs and longings, but not the vast array of practices and arts that derive from religions.

We exclude the use of religion to define any driving motivation without belief in spirit beings, such as love of music, humanism or, Football is his religion. To label humanism as a form of religion because both involve commitments is to smother the distinction. By defining religion as any strong belief , we make the word redundant and waffle.

Humanism is defined as a world-view that seeks what is interesting and best for human beings, without reference to any spirit beings, or life before or after life in this world. It should be the will-to-good. The more Biblical, the more you are centred on the God and salvation nexus. There was a reaction against medieval theology, not just scholastic, brought on by the study of world and man in the Renaissance, inspired by Greece and Rome instead of the Bible. Christian scholars like Erasmus were important beginners in humanism, three hundred years before the term was used. But the distinction was increasingly clear in the Enlightenment. Humanism gradually civilised large numbers of Christians away from their great theologians.

I praise the Enlightenment much in this book. But it was a speckled hotch-potch of developing science and humanism for about 200 years from about 1550-1600. Humans trying to work out the world, in the early days of scientific breakout, independently of their entire heritage of Christianity, were prone to hubris, error and fantasies like perfectibility of humanity. Crazy. But they were on the right path, and we owe them much.

Ethics is a system of principles to promote the good of all—practical humanism on the individual and group scale. It grades into justice and statesmanship on the large scale, all practising the will-to-good. Many people see ethics as the last realm of philosophy but it is not so. Ethics has abstract content, as does all science. But after affirming the will-to-good and the Bettertudes later, ethics is applied science—practical scientific observation, experiment, and consideration of the myriad of issues that go to living and working together.

Spiritual is a tricky word. In addition to spirit beings independent of our known world (and an astounding universal concept discussed later), it applies to elevated beliefs and feelings of individuals. Many people have elevated and powerful feelings of elation, reverence, wonder, delight, the numinous, to do with love, beauty, truth, one-ness with other people or with the natural or spirit world. This is the spiritual side of our nature, the experience of the presence of things more wonderful than we can describe. It is the heart of religion. But I am deeply spiritual in these ways, so is Richard Dawkins, so are vast numbers of people. The wonder of the cosmos gets you. The problem is that so many people, religionists or philosophers, have taken these feelings as evidence of pure spiritual beings or pure undefiled Ideals up to almighty God, as sources of these finer feelings and instincts.

Of course many people believed that we also require one or many devils to account for the fascination for, or even the possession of, some people with evil. But that belief in devils is nowadays, among educated people, less prevalent than belief in God. We are getting there. It remains strong in primitive Vatican and Lambeth, and the evangelical sects.

They also want us to believe that our spiritual side, that can be called our "soul, is actually our real" person, inhabiting our body while the body lives, but living independently afterwards (and