livredor did a post on getting into Oxford, inspired by j4's original posting. It's almost a meme. So, here goes. Contains a picture of an 18 year old pw201, so cut for decency :-)

Portrait of the artist as a young man

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Wondering where to go

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Interview

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Churchill

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Summing up and application

For me, getting in to Cambridge was an illustration of what the very best of the UK's state school system can do for you. Hills Road was so good that I knew people who'd come there out of the private school livredor went to, their parents presumably calculating that there was no point paying for something they might get for free. I was also lucky in having parents who could help financially. This was in the era after grants, when you needed a loan to live on (I left in debt, but not as much as I would have otherwise).

I was aware of people there who matched the upper-class twit stereotype, but as a scientist in an out-of-town, brown-brick college, they didn't have much to do with me. I met a mix of people. I was lectured by some people I'd heard of. Most importantly, I found a niche outside of my college and subject, which is an important trick for staying sane (a couple of niches, in fact, the Christian Union and the dancers). Cambridge is huge and full of bright people, some a little shy or strange, trying to make a place where they fit. I am sure there are people who don't find a such a place, but from my experience, you'd have to try quite hard.

I can never quite work out whether the Grauniad is trolling for advertising clicks, a bit like those people who publish those "Linux sux, Microsoft rulez" articles in the hope of being picked up by Slashdot. The Dawkins blog linked to this piece on religion and secularism recently. One particularly choice quote:

"We are witnessing a social phenomenon that is about fundamentalism," says Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark. "Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England."

I mean, what? Writing a book or being rude about religion is apparently in some way equivalent to blowing up commuters. One of the Drink-soaked Trots has already delivered an excellent rebuttal (don't miss the discussion of what HL Mencken really said about religion). Dawkins also addresses the question of whether he deserves to be called a fundamentalist in The God Delusion. Unsurprisingly, he concludes that he doesn't, but his reasoning is that a fundamentalist is not merely someone who's a passionate advocate of a particular idea, but rather, someone who clings to that idea come what may. I'm not a fundamentalist, says Dawkins, because I'm very clear about what would change my mind (fossil rabbits in the precambrian, presumably). A fundamentalist is someone who will not change their mind and cannot change the subject.

But wait, there's more, this time from Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London:

"If you exile religious communities to the margins, then they will start to speak the words of fire among consenting adults, and the threat to public order and the public arena, I think, will grow and grow."

Stuart Jeffries's article says that the goal of secularists is the exclusion of religion and religious people from the public sphere. That's not the feeling I get from reading the latest slew of books cheering for atheism. Rather, I think secularists are tired of seeing the statements of the religious taken with more weight simply because they are religious. Or, as Bishop Chartres (and Azzim Tamimi, also quoted) remind us, because of what the religious might do if they don't get their way.

Another way of spotting the true fundamentalists is that they really don't like humour, as one particular privilege that fundamentalist religion likes to claim for itself is the right never to be offended. If any of you happen to be alumni of Clare College, and, having had a nice phone call from a current student, you are donating to the college via a standing order or similar, I urge you to cancel the order, and tell them why.

Edited: added the link to the rebuttal.

I've been listening to more of those CICCU talks.

Tues 13th Loving God, Broken World: Has God Lost Control?

Bloody theodicy, as some on my friends list might say. Simon Scott approaches the issue of suffering sensitively, as one who has experienced it himself (an illness 7 years ago, he says: I think I remember praying for him at church. I don't know what was wrong with him, but his description of makes it sound awful).

His points are familiar to anyone who's looked into Christian responses to the Problem of Evil. God created a good world, but human disobedience made it go wrong. God is absolved of blame for this, even natural disasters are somehow our fault (perhaps, like Mr Deity, God was worried it'd be too easy to believe in him otherwise). Perhaps intentionally, given Scott's audience, it's not clear whether he's advocating creationism. It's possible to read the Genesis story as applying to Everyman and Everywoman, but hard to see how that interpretation has the cosmological implications that Scott outlines: once the entire world was good, now it is fallen, even in the impersonal, non-human parts. I was a theistic evolutionist once, and it involved a lot of hand-waving.

So, the world has gone bad. But, says Scott, God will fix this (unfortunately, not for everyone, as some people will go to Hell). We might call that pie in the sky when you die and wish for a better world now, but we shouldn't. After all, if God were to judge sin now, where would he stop? The implication is, as usual, that everyone is guilty, and we'd better be careful when we wish for divine intervention, as we may get it.

This argument fails because it assumes that God's way of making the world better would be to obliterate everything that displeases him. I can think of more subtle ways of doing it than that. It's odd that God apparently can't.

Scott acknowledges that his explanation is incomplete, but implies it's best not worry why that is, just ensure that you aren't excluded from the perfect world which will be re-created at the end of time. He tells a parable of a cyclist hit by a bus (this is Cambridge, after all), and a passerby who gives a precise explanation of his body's pain response rather than helping him to a hospital. There's certainly a pragmatism to this, which echoes the Buddhist story of Malunkyaputta and the man shot by an arrow: it's pointless to tell someone who is suffering about eternal verities rather than how to end their suffering. That said, there's no suggestion in Malunkyaputta's story that the world is watched by someone who could intervene, but chooses not to. In the meantime, Christians had better not pass by on the other side, but God is at liberty to do so.

Wed 14th Jesus Asked, "Who do you say I am?" (Mark 8v29)
The Profit Motive in Religion

After a good start in which he advises Christians to read The God Delusion and atheists to read Alister McGrath, Phillip Jensen plays religion's trump card. You're all going to die, he says, and what are you going to do then?

We've all woken at 4 am and realised we shall one day die (unless that's just me and Larkin). Religion deals in the certainties we want when uncertainty is too terrible. Speaking of creationism, I often see Christians who pounce on any scientific uncertainty, eager to pull God out of the gap. This is a different degree of seriousness. We needn't face where we came from, but we must all face where we're going.

I'd call it a trick, except I don't doubt the sincerity of Jensen's pleas not to let worldly distractions keep us from eternal life. Still, again, how can they? Who would turn down such a thing, if they woke after their own death to find it on offer? The trick belongs to religions themselves, not consciously to their adherents. It is that we're told we must act before death, and each religion claims that their way is the way to get there, other ways being uncertain at worst and a broad road to hell at worst. Even if we wanted to take up Pascal's wager, where shall we place our stake? Again, it's odd that Jensen's God hasn't thought of universalism, but rather, insists on the eternal torture or final obliteration of everyone who bet wrong.

This year's CICCU convert-a-thon is called Cross Examined. Stalkerbook tells me it's happening this week. The talks are available online (as Windows Media files, alas, CICCU having made a pact with the Beast). They are given by Simon Scott, who used to preach at my old church (and who marnanel will no doubt remember for his habit of starting sermons with quotations from pop songs), and by Phillip Jensen, perhaps best known for his views on the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Never being one to pass up an opportunity like this, I listened to some of talks they've given so far. Here are some brief notes on what they said:

Wed 07th Faith and Reason: Does God Want Me to Lose My Mind?

Scott gives a lunchtime talk on whether Christianity is reasonable.

He talks of reasonable assumptions, but leaps from assuming that a chair will hold you or that CICCU won't poison you to the reasonableness of believing in supernatural stuff, bypassing considerations of the magnitude of Christianity's claims.

Many atheists do not assert that God definitely does not exist. Quotes Dawkins but either hasn't read or hasn't understood the point of The God Delusion, namely that it's about the balance of evidence.

Like many evangelicals, he asserts that there is sufficient evidence and that people don't believe because they don't want to, assuming bad faith on the part of anyone who has the temerity to disagree with him.

He defines the coming of Jesus as an events which is unique, so that we should not expect to see God again today. That's fair enough as far as it goes, but doesn't address why God isn't more obvious even if Jesus isn't still around. Alongside his admission that you can't see God today, he does say that there are intelligent people on both sides of the God debate, which seems to leave him open to the Argument from Reasonable Non-belief.

Thurs 08th Christianity: Intolerant, Arrogant . . . True?

Scott talks a lot of sense about the sort of cartoon relativism which only liberal arts academics seriously believe. It's not clear why he thinks this is an argument in favour of Christianity. I think it's the same sort of false dichotomy that Jensen also perpetrates (see below). Christianity or moral chaos! Choose now! Banzai!

Gently brings up the delicate subject of hell (evangelicals had more gumption in the good old days). Doesn't quite address why the God who we can trust not want to hurt us is also the danger we face. I've written about Hell before: go read that.

Mon 12th Jesus Asked, "Are you so dull?" (Mark 7v18) The Source of Immorality and Corruption Exposed

Jensen does the Total Depravity Roadshow: I'm not OK, you're not OK either.

False dichotomies all over the place: either accept that people are naturally good, or become a Christian. Accept moral chaos, or become a Christian.

Dawkins is, according to Jensen's quote, naive about human nature, but Pinker (another atheist) isn't. This is significant, somehow (unless all atheists agree, they're wrong?)

When we disagree with the Bible, we disagree with God, apparently.

Roy Hattersley's Grauniad article is his best point, but even this never actually addresses whether Christianity is true. Is it right to encourage people to believe it merely because it might make them better? Does it, in fact, make them better, I wonder? It probably gives them a certain kind of structure which is sadly lacking in many people today, it seems, but I bet if they became Humanists, Muslims or Buddhists, or merely had managed to get some sort of education from their parents or their school, they'd be nicer too.

Summary

Lots of contemporary relevance (Harry Potter is taking it a bit too far, I think). Reasonable explanation of what evangelicals think. It'll be interesting to see where Jensen goes with it, but neither of them are very good at saying why one should believe something. Perhaps the approved technique in evangelism these days is just to lay out your stall and hope it clicks with where someone is at the moment.

More soon, no doubt :-)

While casually browsing my website's logs for hits from people looking for CICCU, rocking backwards and forwards and crooning "Soon, my precious! Soon!", I noticed that some people from Facebook had been talking about the Losing my Religion page.

Coincidentally, Varsity recently interviewed one of the admins (PDF, look on page 7) of the Cambridge University mail server, hermes. The article mentioned Facebook, so I suppose it's where the hip kids hang out these days. The article's a bit odd. It's one of those "the young people always think they invented it" things: apparently, email began in 2003. That's more than just too late, for me, but I'm pretty sure that back in 1994 there was the joy of Pine and the anxiety of using finger to see whether New Hall girls had read their email (oh good, I seem to have navigated that sentence without saying "fingering"). There was none of this webmail nonsense. Things were starkly terminal based on the frontier of the Information Prairie, the bleached bones of our text lying on the dark surface of my wildly mixed metaphor. There was a greater awareness of the fragile underpinnings of it all, a rough justice needed to preserve order in our fledgling society: I got a sternly worded email from the man who became the author of Exim, telling me to stop pissing about sending myself mail from god@heaven. And we liked it.

So, Facebook. I joined. It seems to be a gentrified version of Myspace. There's the bit where you can leave people messages and look at the pictures of them looking pale and interesting, but the residents' committee has clamped down on the flashing purple text on a black background and the humourous cross-site scripting attacks. I didn't have the de rigeur photo of myself exhibiting Internet disease (warning: Encyclopedia Dramatica is rarely safe for anything, although there's nothing specifically worthy of summary dismissal on that page at the time of writing), so I just used the one off my website. I wandered around and laughed at the community called "FUCCU". It's all harmless fun I suppose. I've e-friended some of you on there, just cos: I'm not sure of the etiquette of friending on Facebook, so friend me back if you like, but don't do it just because I know where most of you live.

I never did find out what people were saying about the religion page, the referrals were people following links from private messages. I expect it was the CICCU people wondering when I will actually overtake their official site in Google's rankings. Soon, my precious, soon.

Anyone up for Isolatr? It's where the cool people aren't.

The Fabric of the Cosmos was given to me by one of the many ex-physicists at work. I'd previously read Greene's The Elegant Universe, and found it interesting but perhaps a bit long: I suspect that attempting to get a whole book out of explaining string theory without using mathematics might have been a bit ambitious.

The Fabric of the Cosmos is lovely to read. Greene takes a couple of questions as his theme: Are space and time a "thing", or merely about the relationship between things? Where does our perception of an "arrow of time" come from? He begins with Newton and Leibnitz and works forward through Special Relativity, General Relativity, quantum mechanics and modern attempts to unite the latter two, introducing concepts like entropy and inflation theory along the way.

Greene has a gift of explaining technical concepts clearly. Sometimes he chooses an appropriate analogy, but more often it's a straight explanation written with the clarity of someone who has a deep understanding of the subject themselves but still retains some idea of how hard it was to learn it. I learned some things which I'm pretty sure were new to me rather than things I knew and then forgot (for example, I don't think anyone ever explained that a flat, Ω=1, universe can either be spatially infinite or have toroidal topology).

Personal digression into "when I was at Cambridge" nonsense: My own, somewhat limited, success as a physicist relied mostly on my ability to do really evil calculus: given some likely looking equations, I'd just dive in and emerge, gasping, with the answer. My supervisors were always writing remarks like "more words, please!" on my work (oddly enough, these days my code is pretty well commented). Nevertheless, I did OK on the Cambridge course, which was basically about testing your ability to do this stuff really fast in an exam and to think on your feet in supervisions. This was fine until the later years when they started to ask questions which tested actual understanding, and I hit my head on stuff like the Feynman path integral like Asimov hitting calculus and realised I couldn't just do the maths anymore. I don't really have a physicist's intuition, but in my defence, I mostly didn't have people like Greene as lecturers (with some notable exceptions), but rather the "101 Great Moments in Calculus" sort. They almost certainly had the deep understanding, but they weren't so good with the the words either. I've no idea whether it's still like this, and it's probably my fault for not reading around the subject in the stupidly long vacations that Cambridge undergraduates get. Nevertheless, there should be more educators like Greene.

Greene also conveys something of the wonder and strangeness of the universe. Space is big, as someone once said, but it's also odd. Its constituents behave in ways which are so different from everyday objects that it's hard to believe these objects are built up of such stuff.

I was reminded again that the majority of the universe is so unlike Earth that it beggars belief that some people could believe it was all put here for our benefit ("He also made the stars", apparently) or that an entity who could create the whole thing would be concerned with the inhabitants of an insignificant little blue-green planet.

Rant over. Green writes engagingly. I'd recommend the book to people who want to know the secrets of the universe.

Continuing my theme, there was story a little while back about a quantum computer that can do calculations without actually running. I was annoyed that nobody in the popular science press seemed to get further with an explanation than "ooh! quantum! straaange!". Luckily Sean Carroll rides to the rescue, with an explanation involving puppies and lettuce. Great stuff.

After much prodding, LiveJournal has finally introduced tags, a way of categorising entries and of retrieving entries which have a particular tag. I've spent an entertaining hour going back through my old entries and tagging them. So, for example, you can see all my posts on religion or all the posts where I mention what I've been up to lately (I've nicked livredor's "quotidian" tag to describe my daily life). Hopefully they'll do something similar to Flickr and allow you to search other people's journals for particular tags, or get a feed which displays all posts with a particular tag.

Speaking of what I've been up to lately, I had an excellent time at S's Graduation Dinner the other night (although the name is a misnomer as they've not graduated yet). It was at St John's, who produced some of the best food I've had at a Cambridge college. My favourite photo is this one, as the Three Musketeers seem to be enjoying themselves.

Adam Kay and Suman Biswas, medics themselves, have joined to form Amateur Transplants, a beat combo. They are reminiscent of Flanders and Swann or Tom Lehrer, but with gratuitous use of the word "fuck". You might have heard their seminal London Underground a while back, but it turns out there's a whole album, entitled Fitness to Practice. Our favourites are Paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin and Snippets, for the excellent parodies of Coldplay's Yellow and Phil Collins's Against All Odds. Some MP3s are here, but sadly, physical copies of the entire album seem to have sold out. They should charge to download the remaining MP3s or something: it's for charidee.

S and I want to go on holiday somewhere scenic, not too hot during the summer (anything over the high 20s in Celsius is too hot, in my book), and not monumentally expensive. Any suggestions?

I stumbled across saltshakers on my Friends of Friends page and got into a debate about morality and various other things. Don't really want to be the sort of atheist who hangs out on Christian internet sites and harangues them (I have my own site for that, after all), but I couldn't resist this one.

I've also contributed in small part to a discussion involving cathedral_life on the ToothyCat Wiki, which seems to have replaced ucam.chat as the place where the Next Generation of Cambridge geeks hang out. The discussion starts off being about the Historical Jesus, moves on to talk about pigeonholing Christians, and ends up being about how many university CU members leave the faith after they leave university. Interesting stuff.

Intelligence from my logs, and from CDC's Special Circumstances operatives behind the enemy lines, shows a fair few CICCU people are finding the losing my religion article while out looking for CICCU information. Apart from cackling, stroking my white cat and polishing my monocle, I thought I'd say how I feel about this. I'm also linking to this from the article itself.

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It was board games night last night. Ended up playing Taj Mahal all evening. As it was the first time anyone had played, we spent some time setting it up and listening to Lise critique it for linguistic, historical and geographical accuracy. It was also necessary to go into the "Don't Mention the War" routine after we discovered that the German author of the game had provided a rule about precisely how to place the cards you're bidding with down on the table. Julie pipped me to the post in the end, with PaulB shockingly trailing both of us. Surely a sign of the emminent apocalypse. Unfortunately you get nothing for a close second, so my ranking won't improve.

Afterwards, we ended up listening to old CFD CDs. Apparently it stands for "Computerised For Dancing": all these years and I never knew. A whole generation of people learnt to dance to covers of pop music standards, produced by some chap with a MIDI machine putting in the requisite cheesy beats behind them (in strict tempo, of course). We resolved to have a retro General Dancing at the earliest available opportunity.

For quite naff music, it was surprisingly evocative. I largely avoid the danger of seeing university as a mythical golden age by reading the emails I wrote at the time. But I do have happy memories of cycling into town to quickstep to Walking on Sunshine , waltz to If You Don't Know Me By Now, and to chase girls from the women's colleges. In one of Adrian Plass's books, he talks about how for him, Heaven would be one eternal cricket match. For me, it'd be twirling round that hall. Those were the days. Things are different now: these days, I drive.