Belief, truth and apologising for experts

@MartinShovel

In my normal fashion I was listening to BBC4's Today programme on my drive into work this morning and over the course of the 45mins I was in the car I listened to two interviews, on very different subjects, which in their own ways cut to the heart of the post-truth, expert-hating times in which we live.

The first was with Sir Simon Fraser, a former senior civil servant and colleague of Sir Ivan Rogers, the UK Ambassador to the EU whose resignation was announced this morning. The tone and broader context of the interview was established when at the outset Fraser caveated his description of Rogers as an expert with the phrase ‘if I can use the “expert” word’.

Towards the end of the interview Mishal Hussain asked the diplomat to comment on rumours that Whitehall wanted to replace the outgoing ambassador with someone ‘pro-Brexit’. Fraser responded, ‘I think when you appoint ambassadors you don’t appoint them for what they believe, you appoint them for what they know. [Believing in Brexit] is the role of the minister; the role of the ambassador is to give advice.’

Later in the same programme John Humphrys interviewed physicist Jon Butterworth in response to an item on the existence or otherwise of dark matter. (That I have no idea what dark matter is or why its existence or otherwise is important is of no consequence here!) Asked to back one of two mutually exclusive positions, Butterworth pointed out that, ‘physics will do its thing, whatever [physicists] think.’

Belief and knowledge. Objective and subjective reality. Fact and fiction. Truth and post-truth. Welcome to 2017.


You can listen to both interviews in full here (Sir Simon Fraser is at around 1 hr 9mins and Jon Butterworth around 1 hr 35mins.

A video extract from the Sir Simon Fraser interview (which includes the longer quote above) is here.

The Fall

Genesis 3:8-15

However you look at it, whether you believe in a literal Fall, a doctrine of original sin or original goodness, the fact is that we live in a broken world.

I know that I'm not great at facing up to my own sinfulness. I wander backwards and forwards along a kind of continuum between thinking I'm pretty much OK really and being convinced of my inability to make any kind of useful or meaningful contribution to the world. 

I don't have a problem seeing brokenness in the world, in my nation, in my community. There are times when I read or watch the news and feel almost physically overwhelmed by how awful things are and yet I rarely look at myself in the same way. Even when I'm taking communion, the one time in my protestant, non-conformist practice of church when I'm supposed to be proactively thinking about what a sinner I am, I have a tendency to wander off.

I suspect there are a few things at play here. The first is that I've grown up spiritually in a church context which emphasises grace - God giving us the things we don't deserve (to paraphrase Ishmael). The second is that I didn't 'become a Christian' and the older I get the more I wonder whether that means that I haven't fully grasped what I've been 'saved' from. The third is that I am a product of my society and my generation which have become all about what's right for me, finding myself, being true to who I am. And any Christian who tells you they're immune to that kind of thing is telling you porkies.

I had a conversation with a friend recently about the value of confession, in the Catholic sense. She couldn't see any merit in it, but I wonder whether for me confession might literally be good for the soul.

The problem with believing

I've been thinking a little bit about miracles today. Not, in fact, the whizz bang Christmas kind - the virgin birth, for example - but just the ordinary ones, if that's not a contradiction in terms!

I mean the kind that creep up unnoticed, that we only fully recognised with benefit of hindsight. I'm thinking of the conversations I have that I later realise would have been an impossibility a matter of weeks before, of circumstances that appear insurmountable which seem to resolve themselves without any effort on my part, the glimpses of hope which so easily pass us by.

But I find that thinking about miracles can quickly take me down a darker path. My problem is not that I don't believe that God can do miracles; my problem is that I'm certain that he can.

I know I'm not alone in struggling with the next logical step - the reality that while God could act, he rarely does. I struggle to take comfort from the story of Job, from his exchange with God in which he's bomdarded with rhetorical question after rhetorical question designed to leave him in no doubt as to God's sovereignty and omnipotence. In the last few years my biggest fights with God have come not as a result of doubting he exists, but precisely because I'm convinced he does.

Sometimes belief is far more painful than doubt.