Tag Archives: Rowan Williams

Wearing a cross in the UK

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The British government is diligently fighting against the right of employees to wear a cross on the job. This all started with Nadia Eweida who was suspended by British Airways for wear a cross at work.

This is so absurd that even secular onlookers are aghast:

If I were Nadia Eweida, I would be starting to think that the whole world had gone completely mad. You remember Nadia, the mild-looking BA worker who found herself suspended because she wore a tiny little cross round her neck for work. Everyone took her side, back in 2006. The entire British press was convulsed with indignation. There were debates in the House of Commons.

Rowan Williams, however, exercised his uncanny knack for coming down on the wrong side of an issue by saying that wearing a cross:

had become something “which religious people make and hang on to” as a substitute for true faith.
He made his comments on the day it emerged that the Government is to argue in the European Court that Christians do not have the “right” to wear a cross as a visible manifestation of faith.

And people wonder why the Church of England is becoming irrelevant.

Rowan Williams and miracles: a response to John W Martens

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This is a reply to an article by John W Martens. For it to make sense, you should read his article first.

John,

Thank you for the response to my comments.

I attempted to post this reply to your article on your blog, but it seems that Blogger has a maximum of 4096 characters in the response box, so I have had to write my reply here. I didn’t want to do that since I thought it would create too much jumping around in the unlikely event that someone might want to read through the whole exchange.

I’ll start by returning to my suspicion that when Rowan Williams uses the word “miracle” he means something different to what I mean when I use it.

I am willing to go along with the plausibility of the idea that the transition from proto-humans to humans occurred when they became aware of a call from God. What eludes me is how this “call” could be anything other than supernatural.  If it was supernatural, it was outside nature and was an intervention in the normal processes of nature: it “tinkered” with nature. If it was not outside nature, yet still came from God, it means God himself is subject to his creation and its laws: he is a victim of its causal phenomena.

I’m not sure your saying:

“Williams is asking for us to see God as immanent and always present and always active in the processes of nature and being and not intervening from “the outside,” a trap into which I think David Jenkins falls.”

helps much in resolving that problem since God’s immanence and resulting activity in the processes of nature either has to be contained by nature and thus subject to it or not. If not, then it is still intervening from “the outside.”  From the confines of my “outside” trap, I would suggest that if you “den[y] the separation of God from nature” you teeter perilously close to a different trap: pantheism.

When Terry Nichols says “nature is not a closed system but an open system within a larger, divine context”, I think he is assisting my case, not yours. A system being “open”, implies that there is something outside the system which could influence it. When a door to my house opens, a breeze is likely to enter; if there is nothing outside my door – a vacuum – the reverse would happen. Either way, there has been intervention in my system. That is, unless Nichols wishes to render the same service for the word “open” as Williams seems to want to do for “miracle”: reduce it to unintelligibility.

Your use of the word “arbitrary” in relation to God’s action in the world puzzles me. Why would one assume that when God intervenes, it must be “arbitrary”? To say that implies action without thought – capricious as Rowan Williams puts it – a sort of divine flailing about. I presume you would admit that a human mind acts with a degree of free will in the universe? My intention in typing this sentence originates in an immaterial part of me – my mind or soul – and has physical results in the material world. If that is not arbitrary and capricious (I’m presuming on your generosity in granting me that it isn’t), why must God’s acting in the world be arbitrary and capricious? God is a person and, as such, must be able to act in the world to a much more sophisticated degree than the people who bear his image.

I would agree that “miracle” as defined by David Hume, a violation of the laws of nature, is something that Rowan Williams has an aversion to, but I would argue a few things: first that God’s acting in the universe does not necessarily violate the laws of nature any more than the acts of any immaterial free agents – human minds – do. The Hume objection only makes sense for an isolated or closed system: if the universe is not causally closed, the Hume definition doesn’t hold. Second, this type of objection is only relevant to a Newtonian view of the universe. Quantum Mechanics describes the universe as a system constrained by probabilities rather than laws. Bradley Monton (philosopher of religion and science) pointed out:

“I think that all miracles are pretty unproblematically compatible with the GWR [Ghiradi-Rimini-Weber] theory….. So for changing water into wine, it’s not a big deal – you’ve got a bunch of individual particles (electrons, protons etc.) that are composing the water, and they can all have GWR hits such that their positions are redistributed to the locations that would be appropriate for them to compose wine”.

That still would take God’s intervention, of course.

In conclusion then, I’ll repeat the definition of miracle that I made in one of my earlier comments: “an event in the external world brought about by the immediate agency or the simple volition of God.” I still think my saying that Rowan Williams’ remarks imply that he does not believe in miracles is justified on the grounds that he has redefined “miracle”: that is cheating. I would say the same for Christian thinkers who reason along the same lines.

Richard Dawkins forgets the full title of 'The Origin Of Species'

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Richard Dawkins is becoming an increasing embarrassment to his less strident atheist comrades. For my part, I am glad to see him doing his bit in inadvertently exposing the threadbare reasons for disbelieving in God’s existence.

It is purely speculation, of course, but I suspect that Richard Dawkins is now driving more people towards Christianity than Rowan Williams is away from it, so congratulations are in order.

From here:

Richard Dawkins has been labelled an “embarrassment to atheism” after clashing with a priest in a debate on BBC Radio 4.

The author of the God Delusion could not recall the full title of Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin Of Species’ during a discussion with Giles Fraser, Former Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, over a poll conducted for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (UK) which found that self-identified Christians didn’t go to Church, or read the bible.

Dawkins said an “astonishing number couldn’t identify the first book in the New Testament.” But his claim that this indicated self-identified Christians were “not really Christian at all” was challenged by Fraser, who said the poll asked “silly little questions” to “trip” people up.

Giles Fraser: Richard, if I said to you what is the full title of ‘The Origin Of Species’, I’m sure you could tell me that.

Richard Dawkins: Yes I could

Giles Fraser: Go on then.

Richard Dawkins: On The Origin Of Species.. Uh. With, Oh God. On The Origin Of Species. There is a sub title with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

Giles Fraser: You’re the high pope of Darwinism… If you asked people who believed in evolution that question and you came back and said 2% got it right, it would be terribly easy for me to go ‘they don’t believe it after all.’ It’s just not fair to ask people these questions. They self-identify as Christians and I think you should respect that.

Richard Dawkins to debate Rowan Williams

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The event is actually billed as a “Dialogue” – a mini-indaba, no doubt – and will take place on February 23rd at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. That’s the same venue where Dawkins didn’t debate William Lane Craig.

The fact that Dawkins has agreed to this “Dialogue” is a measure of his confidence that he will make mincemeat out of Rowan Williams.

Judging by this clip, I suspect his confidence is not entirely misplaced:

My favourite part of this exchange comes at the point where Rowan tries to explain miracles, specifically the Virgin Birth:

Rowan: Here you have a long history of preparation for the coming of God in a new way, here you have a particular life, that of Mary opening itself up to the action of God in a certain way and then there is an opening. Something comes through, something fresh happens which is not – if you like – a suspension of the laws of nature but nature itself opening up to its own depths – something coming through.

Dawkins: I’m not sure what that means.

Rowan:  It’s poetic language.

It sounds to me more like a description of a cosmic bowel movement than “poetic language.”

If the Church of England hates Capitalism so much, where does it get its money?

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While some of the Church of England’s income comes from donations, 15 percent (£160 million) comes from Church assets of £4.4 billion. Yes, that’s right, the anti-capitalist supporter of the 99%, the marginalised, the homeless, the occupiers and those who use St. Paul’s as a toilet are sitting on £4.4 billion. Well, not sitting exactly: the money is invested in the stock market and property markets where much maligned mavens of finance wheel and deal to earn the church 5.7%.

Naturally, the church has a policy on ethical investing, so it avoids such things as arms, pornography, gambling, alcohol and tobacco. That didn’t stop it investing in one of the UK’s more tawdry rags, the News of the World, though, or persuade it to withdraw its funds when the hacking scandal became public.

The church did withdraw funds from Caterpillar because Israel uses the bulldozers to “demolish Palestinian homes” and the Church always enjoys finding a new way to bash Israel.

The one thing the Church is not doing with its £4.4 billion is giving it away to those for whom it has such affection: the poor, marginalised, homeless and occupiers. It hasn’t even used any of the money to build a toilet for the occupiers.

It all makes what Rowan Williams has to say about capitalism sound even more hypocritically silly than his usual divagations.

Here is his most recent effort:

Rowan on rioting

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From here:

A minister hit out at the Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday for comparing City bankers to the rioters who tore apart Britain’s cities over the summer.

[….]

Dr Rowan Williams raised eyebrows on Sunday by saying the rioters were no worse than the bankers and that ‘bonds of trust’ had broken throughout society.

In his Christmas sermon, he said: ‘Whether it is an urban rioter mindlessly burning down a small shop that serves his community, or a speculator turning his back on the question of who bears the ultimate cost for his acquisitive adventures in the virtual reality of today’s financial world, the picture is of atoms spinning apart in the dark.’

There is one very minor difference that seems to have escaped Rowan Williams’ attention: for the moment, banking is legal whereas burning down someone else’s shop isn’t. This must be a concept too mundane to impinge on the atoms in Rowans’ brain ‘spinning apart in the dark.’

 

 

Richard Dawkins announces that he is a Cultural Anglican

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From here:

Merry Christmas! I mean it. All that “Happy Holiday Season” stuff, with “holiday” cards and “holiday” presents, is a tiresome import from the US, where it has long been fostered more by rival religions than by atheists. A cultural Anglican (whose family has been part of the Chipping Norton Set since 1727, as you’ll see if you look around you in the parish church), I recoil from secular carols such as “White Christmas”, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and the loathsome “Jingle Bells”, but I’m happy to sing real carols, and in the unlikely event that anyone wants me to read a lesson I’ll gladly oblige – only from the King James Version, of course.

Clearly, Dawkins is making a bid for the job of Archbishop of Canterbury when it falls vacant on Rowan’s retirement next year. It should be a good fit after he grows the requisite whiskers.

Turning the tables on Rowan Williams

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Rowan Williams, having bungled his job as leader of the Anglican communion, now confines most of his bon mots to setting the British government straight. David Cameron, taking his cue from the Archbishop of Canterbury has a few suggestions of his own:

David Cameron last night called on the Archbishop of Canterbury to lead a return to the ‘moral code’ of the Bible.

In a highly personal speech about faith, the Prime Minister accused Dr Rowan Williams of failing to speak ‘to the whole nation’ when he criticised Government austerity policies and expressed sympathy with the summer rioters.

Mr Cameron declared Britain ‘a Christian country’ and said politicians and churchmen should not be afraid to say so.

Will Rowan Williams, after being revived with smelling salts, respond by pointing out that declaring Britain a Christian country is not inclusive enough for the Church of England? Will he repeat his plea to adopt sharia law? Will he point out that, as a Druid, he is free of dogma and any fixed set of beliefs or practices and can’t understand all this “moral code” and “Bible” nonsense.

Or will he give his anti-capitalist inclinations full expression by joining the other dishevelled, bearded man in a Christmas protest at St. Paul’s?

Fred Hiltz goes to Lambeth to discuss the Anglican Covenant

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From here:

Over the next few hours, they discussed several matters, among them the Anglican Covenant and the educational guide posted last summer on the website of the Anglican Church of Canada. “Archbishop Williams had obviously read our material, and he seemed appreciative that Canada was giving the covenant a fair hearing,” says Feheley.

I had no idea that Paul Feheley had a sense of humour.