By Stephen Roberts

"There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.  People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken…” 

Be afraid, be very afraid….

From the blurb on an American publishers website:

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Be afraid, be very afraid….

What about this week’s religious news. Archbishop meets Pope. And what was the topic of conversation? The Pope’s scheme for Anglican clergy who do not like women priests or homosexuality to leave the CofE and become Catholics. A Catholic refuge for Anglican bigots.

Be afraid, be very afraid….

Advent, the waiting time, the dark time . We hope, but we do not know. Time for reflection. Time to face the reality of the world. The harsh realities of the world.

My day job is a professional sceptic. I am employed as a medical statistician, and a large component of this job is to be part of the critical evaluation of new ideas, tests and treatments. The statisticians role is often to be the one who says no. No you can’t say that. No there is no evidence for that. No that will make your evaluation invalid. I am part of the process which has become known as “evidence based medicine”. It is about being sceptical, demanding evidence that this wonder treatment actually does more good than harm. It is pessimistic. We are a sceptical bunch, suspicious of dramatic claims. We want to see the evidence, to see how the trials are conducted, to know it wasn’t a drug company fix or some quack’s fantasy.

One great thing about evidence-based medicine is that there is really only one criterion “Does it work”. It doesn’t matter how neat the theory is, or how clever the drug mechanism might be, if it doesn’t make patients better it may as well be Smarties – actually it would be better being Smarties as they at least taste quite nice and don’t have any side-effects. The nice theories and clever ideas have to face the harsh realities of the real world.

So we could, to take a religious example, think about prayer. We have thousands of years of theological reflection and millions of words about how the God we believe in answers our prayers and brings healing. But we can cut through that and test, say, whether praying for people before an operation makes them better. Actually better – fewer complications,  get home quicker. And it’s been done. Quite a few times. Here’s the best trial. Well first trials are expensive and need funding – the Templeton Foundation and (American) Baptist Memorial Health Foundation coughed up. So they took 1800 patients who were having heart bypass operations. They got some devout Christians who were prepared to pray for these patients before and through their operations. They randomly split them into 3 groups one group were prayed for and the others weren’t. Then they counted how many had complications following their operation. And what did they find? No difference. Praying for these patients didn’t help. Actually it was worse than that. I said there were 3 groups. One group was prayed for without them knowing – they did as badly as those who weren’t prayed for. The third group were prayed for and told about it – they had more complications – prayer made them worse. Now we could argue all day about whether this is a valid test of prayer, it isn’t how many of us would expect prayer to work, but before they started the trial those doing the praying were happy to take part and believed they would do good. The funders were organisations who one might think wanted to see prayer work and wouldn’t have funded a trial that they thought wasn’t going to work. It didn’t. That’s the way the world is. The harsh reality.

Just in case you are wondering, there have been a number of such trials, mostly pretty poorly conducted, but there is this wonderful organisation called the Cochrane Collaboration, which specialises in putting together all the results from multiple trials – so if there is a small effect which is too small to be seen in one study, you might be able to pick out something useful by putting together all the data from all the trials. Or if there are contradictory results you can work out some consensus answer. They have looked at all the trials and they find no effect, and recommend that there is no point in doing any more trials.

For lovers of irony there is another layer here. Given these sorts of results, there are now articles appearing in the medical ethics journals arguing that research into prayer is now unethical, as there is the clear potential to do harm and no indication that it does good. As someone who has a professional interest in research ethics and has recently been writing for a medical ethics journal, I think they are probably right. Prayer research is unethical!  There’s a thought to ponder upon. More importantly we need to recognise that it is possible for those with no faith to take a more ethical stance than those with faith.

Game set and match to the atheists on that one. But of course many of us here do not think prayer works in that way. We were brought up with the idea that prayer was about changing the pray-er not changing God. Or the “God has only our hands to do his will”. But these ideas don’t get talked about much. Or there is a very helpful line of thought running from the ideas popularised in my youth by John Robinson and “Honest to God” and many well and less well known theologians leading to a non-interventionist picture of God or as the retired American Bishop John Spong puts it  “a non-theistic God”. Some interesting ideas – but maybe for another day….

What I’m interested in today is the way in which we can use the same level of critical evaluation to look at things we might want to keep in the realm of “faith”. The same scepticism, real world testing, rationality. There has been thousands of years of very clever theological thought, deep rational thinking, developing our concepts of god from the bloodthirsty old testament tribal god of revenge through the god of the prophets with a thirst for justice, to the new testament god of love, through to ideas of a less supernatural god I’ve alluded to. But they all argue from within the tradition and within an agreed framework. The sceptics and atheists challenge us to start again from outside the tradition and ask us “does it really work?”, “does it really make sense?” It is a real challenge, and an invigorating one. Can we take this challenge seriously, learn from it and still call ourselves “Christian”. It’s a very real challenge for me personally as by day I am firmly in the rationalist, objective, evidence-based camp. It’s what I do and what I now am. Why should Sunday’s be different?

I’ve read quite a bit of stuff over the years from Christian writers talking about “Science and Religion”. People like John Polkinhorne – a proper research physicist and now theologian – people who talk a lot of sense about the science and its meaning but… but just when you think this is getting interesting there is the great “But” moment “But our tradition says God is…” “But we believe in a God who is…” and they veer off into the safety of the cathedral. Very frustrating! Whatever the starting point, the question always becomes “what does our belief in god tell us about the world of science”. The real challenge is to start from the world as it is and think about what that tells us about god.

Which is where I find the avowed, or implicit, atheists much more satisfying. They may not have the answers, but at least they ask the right questions. Rosie found a wonderful Web site which goes through all the arguments for the existence of god and dismisses them with pithy one-liners. Dawkins in “The God Delusion” tries to be more serious and goes through the traditional arguments with their obscure names: “the unmoved mover”, “the uncaused cause”, “the cosmological argument”, “the argument from degree”, “the teleological  argument”, “the ontological argument”… and behold none of them work. Well theologians have been telling us this for centuries. But the church doesn’t say so. We still pretend they do work.

Dawkins and his fellow travellers have great fun – if that’s the right word – pointing out all the evil that has been done in the name of religion. We have been watching Diarmaid MacCulloch’s History of Christianity – worth a look. And one thing that is quite clear is that Christianity has succeeded largely because it was good at winning wars and aligning itself with the –often repressive – state. By being prepared to adapt to the state and kill those who disagreed. Rosie was particularly horrified to discover the extent of the killing in the 30 year war – 30% of the population of parts of central Europe killed in the name of religion – “why didn’t they teach us that in history?” Pointing out a few Christian heroes does not answer that.

If we go back to the birth of my discipline, statistics. People started counting births and deaths. And they noticed that the number of births each year matched the number of deaths. Amazing! This must be the hand of God keeping everything in balance. How else could such a set of disparate events as people conceiving and dying – all separate individual happenings – how could they balance so nicely and keep the population stable unless someone was in control. We now understand all about probability and the laws of large numbers and have no need for a god to keep count for us. But what does that say about what or who god is? Does this very randomness not challenge our view of god? If the world is governed by chance, is there a place for an active, intervening, god? It’s a good question.

The atheists are right. They ask the right questions. We have to take what they say seriously. Their questions cut through the accumulated years of Christian theology and ask us to look at where we are now, what we are actually saying. Does what we say make sense? Is it consistent with the world as we now know it is? What they miss is the power of story, of tradition, of ritual. When they criticise our beliefs, many of us want to scream “but we don’t actually believe it like that” “we don’t take that literally” “its symbolic not real”. What we mean is we don’t mean what we say.  We can have a faith which takes the fact that we have created it seriously, that acknowledges our holy books as written by real people, that accepts the world actually is as science tells us.  Most of us, I think, have been brought up with that tradition. But we don’t say it very often. And we still sing the hymns and recite the prayers.  And most churches do not welcome such discussions, either because they actually do want to take these things literally, or because they don’t want to offend those who do. So the world never sees there are other ways of being Christian. I am right there are other ways aren’t I?

And this brings us back to where we are as a church as we think about our future in terms of ministry and direction. Can we create and maintain a space for those of us who question the traditional doctrines, those who question the concept of God or even whether we can use that word at all? We used to, I’m not sure we still do. Can we go beyond that and proclaim this questioning faith. Can we be a church that celebrates Darwin? – no that’s too  easy; can we be a church who celebrates rationality, even if it questions what we mean by words like “God” and “Salvation”?  Can we offer a space for those who want to explore beyond the traditional boundaries. Where we don’t have to wrap up things in religious language, but can actually say what we mean? And to those who doubt the traditions can we say, as the posters put it:  stop worrying and enjoy your life!

Taking the insights of the atheists seriously isn’t easy – its much easier to retreat into our own world of faith.  But it is somewhere I have to go, and I guess I’m not the only one – the alternative is to be one person during the working week and another on Sundays. But I am hopeful. But not of some great future revelation, but that the answers are here amongst us. That we can take the world as it is, the dubious history of our faith and still the stories of Jesus will inspire and enrich life. As Jesus said: the kingdom of god is amongst us. If only we have ears to hear.

So we move into Advent. A waiting time. A time of darkness – in this part of the world literally as well as metaphorically. A time to reflect on the world as it is. Bad as well as good. Some things make us afraid – and we should be afraid. Some things give us hope – and we should hope. And just maybe the advent hope is here now in the darkness and we just have to accept it. Stop worrying and enjoy life?

                                                                                                Stephen Roberts